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What Climate Science Can Tell Us About the Lost World That Inspired The Odyssey. “A new climate study suggests that centuries of repeated severe drought added to the pressures on that collapsing world.”

Following up from last week, when I asked: When you lease an iPhone through Apple Upgrade, you need a cellular account on one of the big three U.S. carriers: AT&T, T-Mobile, or Verizon. That kind of stinks, and I’m not quite sure I understand why. You’re leasing the ...

Ulysses S. Grant, in 1875:

Where the citizen is sovereign and the official the servant, where no power is exercised except by the will of the people, it is important that the sovereign — the people — should possess intelligence.

The free school is the promoter of that intelligence which is to preserve us as a free nation. If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s, but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition, and ignorance on the other.

Not sure if the 2020s count as “the near future”, but holy hell is that a spot-on synopsis of our current moment.

Link: snopes.com/fact-check/grant-next-civil-war/

This is fun: BoxSquad. Limbs & borders are all draggable.

“A Los Angeles Costco parking lot [has] become a hotspot for skaters over 40. Its long, low curb lets us keep doing tricks on safer, lower-risk terrain […] Curbs represent the twilight of skateboarding, the end being closer than the beginning.” Lovely.

Set up a nightly cron job that executes the prompt: fetch upstream changes to the <software> and rebase all local changes on top of upstream. Check that the software works as intended and replace the current version.

— David Crawshaw, Devtools must be open source

Tags: prompt-engineering, coding-agents, generative-ai, ai, llms, open-source

"I like my work to be open to interpretation," Iwaszkiewicz says. "There's a lot of humor in it, a sense of playfulness, and I never take the world too seriously."

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 Inspired by Fauna, Form Meets Function in Hilarious Pieces by Ceramika Matylda appeared first on Colossal.

Bobby Allyn, reporting for NPR: Trump Media & Technology Group is now shopping to traders and investors a premium version of Truth Social delivering early access to the feeds of high-profile users, including the president. Starting Saturday, for a fee of up to $100,0...

This 17-minute interview about the Odyssey with Christopher Nolan conducted by philosophy doctoral student Zhong Shu is one of the better ones I’ve seen.

The first two questions are:

1. Do you consider yourself a bard for a civilization at dusk?
2. Have you Christianized The Odyssey?

And nary a comment or question about filming in IMAX.

Tags: Christopher Nolan · film school · interviews · movies · The Odyssey · video · Zhong Shu

Google Earth stupidly launched an AI image-gen feature with no guardrails then put it on pause after a huge outcry. “Tonight I typed just one sentence into Google Earth and put refugees near the Mexican border. Then I planted a nuclear plant in Iran.”

On July 25, a mammoth iceberg literally made waves as it flipped over in Disko Bay off the coast of Ilulissat.

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 Watch a Monumental Iceberg in Greenland Do a Somersault appeared first on Colossal.

The Listening Museum: “36 mechanical keyboards and switches, curated and sound-mapped. From IBM Model M (1985) to Topre to thocky modern customs. Click any card, type on your real keyboard, hear it as if it were on your desk.”

"Across the world, the Iran war is reshaping everyday life."

"How a team of sleuths reportedly tracked down the Brad Pitt impersonators who cyber-scammed a middle-aged Frenchwoman out of her life’s savings."

Today, we're visiting the World Erotic Art Museum in Miami, a place that shattered the line between fine art and our deeply held taboos.

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Release: condense-json 1.0 I'm trying to get braver at releasing 1.0 versions. This little library is a year and a half old now - I've applied some sensible and non-disruptive fixes and shipped the big 1.0 for it. Here's an example of what it can do, lifted from the ...

Boris Cherny, head of Claude Code at Anthropic, was interviewed by Diana Hu on stage at Y Combinator’s Startup School 2026 last week. Starting around 20:30 in the video, he briefly discussed directing Claude to perform difficult tasks: Cherny: I think the skill nowadays ...

My thanks to Agent Fone for sponsoring last week at DF. Agent Fone is a crazily ambitious new smartphone that doesn’t merely ship with a built-in AI assistant. Instead, the entire concept is that it enables you to create custom software, right on the phone itself. Ideas for new apps that you’ve had in your notes for years. Weird little app ideas that only you would want. Describe your idea, answer a few questions, and Agent Fone builds an app, or widget, and it’s on your home screen. They’re looking for 50 people and small teams to sell the first 50 hardware units to. If you’re interested, check out their website for all the information you need, and broader description of the platform.

Link: fail.xyz/phone/