To celebrate the 250th anniversary of our great nation, The Onion has produced a Ken Burns-esque film called Birth of a Nation (“the only movie ever named this”).
250 years ago, a group of illiterate men would gather in these hallowed halls to scribble down what historians can now only assume were words. Words that would one day be assigned meaning. Words and pictures. Pictures mostly. That would serve as the founding principles for a grand new experiment that would forever change the course of human history. An experiment that would produce a monstrosity so powerful it would soon be known to the whole world by just one name. America.
In 1937, the NYT ran a piece about the last living son of a Revolutionary War soldier. “Many times Constant said his father spoke of meeting George Washington…” The Great Span in action.
Colossal
• Kate Mothes
Maddux often stacks the bunches of folds several feet high, mirroring human proportions.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Vibrant Folded Canvases Form Garment-Like Sculptures by Susan Maddux appeared first on Colossal.
Release: sqlite-utils 4.0rc3
I hoped to release sqlite-utils 4.0 stable this weekend, but as I worked through the backlog of issues and PRs with a combination of Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.5 the changelog since rc2 kept getting bigger.
The biggest new feature is support for introspecting and creating compound foreign keys - a feature that involves a subtle breaking change to table.foreign_keys and hence needed to land for the 4.0 stable release.
sqlite-utils also now follows SQLite's convention for case insensitive column names, which turned out to touch a bunch of different places at once.
Tags: projects, sqlite, sqlite-utils, annotated-release-notes, gpt, claude-mythos-fable
The Atlas Obscura Podcast
• SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura
Monterrey, Mexico is known for its mountains, its industry, and its close connection to the US. But Monterrey was also home to one of the first private radio stations, run by a man who would become known as the father of Mexican radio: Constantino de Tarnava. Historian Sonia Robles talks about early Mexican radio stations in the 1920s and 30s - the big ‘border blasters’ run by US outlaws, and the Mexican stations that were serving their local communities and Mexican immigrants in the US.
This episode is part of our ongoing coverage of the soccer world championship. In each episode, we take you beyond the stadium, and to a nearby wonder that’s off the beaten track.
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In today's livestream: a big announcement I've been working on for a long time, plus what's coming up with the channel.
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A $199 program, yours for $49 during launch week. Ends Sunday, July 26th at midnight ET.
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Hey all. It’s Sunday afternoon of a holiday weekend and the weather is glorious here, so what better (worse) time to unleash a new feature on KDO? I’ve been working on a new wysiwyg comment editor for the past few days and it’s finally ready to go. Asking you folks to deal with HTML while leaving a comment was always a bit of a kludge, but now you can include links, blockquoted text, lists, and bold/italic text formatting in your comments and know exactly what it’s going to look like before posting.
You can try it out by sharing something worthwhile you’ve seen, heard, or learned recently. Feedback and bug reports welcome!!
Tags: kottke.org
Colossal
• Kate Mothes
"Creating isn't something we do (in Spain), it's something we are," the artist says. "And I come from that; I carry it in my body."
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Women Sport Puffer Coats in Bold Baroque Portraits by Nieves González appeared first on Colossal.
Mars For The Rest of Us
• Maciej Cegłowski
Programming note: I’m delighted to announce that this newsletter now has over 1,000 subscribers!
Building a World Map with only 500 bytes
Iwo Kadziela (assisted by Codex) figured out a way to generate a credible ASCII world map using 445 bytes of data:
The key trick is to use deflate compression, which is then wired together using this neat snippet of JavaScript. I didn't know you could use fetch() with data: URIs like this:
fetch('data:;base64,1ZpLsgIxCEXnrM...==').then(
r => r.body.pipeThrough(new DecompressionStream('deflate-raw'))
).then(
s => new Response(s).text()
).then(
t => b.innerHTML = '<pre style=font-size:.65vw>' + t
)
Via Hacker News
Tags: ascii-art, javascript
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
daringfireball.net/2018/12/electron_and_the_decline_of_native_apps
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
flexibits.com/blog/2026/06/double-booked-never-heard-of-it-meet-calendar-mirroring-in-fantastical/