Colossal
• Kate Mothes
Forthcoming from MW Editions, the book features nearly 100 photographs from the last 25 years.
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 Cryptic Photos by Susan kae Grant Plumb the World of Dreams in ‘Night Journey’ appeared first on Colossal.
Longreads
• Kimon de Greef
The Atlas Obscura Podcast
• SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura
We meet the robot saints – sculptures made of wood and wire, of cams and pulleys during medieval times – that might just help us understand this new AI age we all find ourselves living in.
LEARN MORE about these inventions by reading City University of New York Professor Christopher Swift’s 2015 paper about these automated figures.
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Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
New app from Brett Terpstra:
TerminalWidget lets you send output from commands, scripts, APIs, and Shortcuts directly to widgets across macOS, iOS, and iPadOS with rich formatting, progress bars, sparklines, and image support. It is available as a universal app on the App Store for $19.99.
I don’t know what I’m going to use this for, but I know I want to use it.
Link: terminalwidget.app/
Gas Town was intended to be reusable, but I only ever wound up using it to build itself. Gas Town fell apart at the seams with Opus 4.7. Up through 4.6 it was working brilliantly. With 4.7 we saw the introduction of the "just two more things" tic, which prevented Opus from ever converging on being ready to do real work—it always wanted to fiddle with Gas Town itself. The Opus tic never went away, so Gas Town effectively burned down. It had other problems, too, but 4.7 was the final straw.
— Steve Yegge, The Shape of Things to Come
Tags: steve-yegge, coding-agents, generative-ai, ai, llms
Gas Town was intended to be reusable, but I only ever wound up using it to build itself. Gas Town fell apart at the seams with Opus 4.7. Up through 4.6 it was working brilliantly. With 4.7 we saw the introduction of the "just two more things" tic, which prevented Opus from ever converging on being ready to do real work—it always wanted to fiddle with Gas Town itself. The Opus tic never went away, so Gas Town effectively burned down. It had other problems, too, but 4.7 was the final straw.
— Steve Yegge, The Shape of Things to Come
Tags: steve-yegge, coding-agents, generative-ai, ai, llms
By all means, prompt AI. But don't just relay the output. Read it, understand it, validate it, and then write a response in your own words (a decent certificate that you've done the prior steps). Making that effort is value you can add.
Via Lobste.rs
Tags: definitions, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-misuse
Daring Fireball
• Daring Fireball Department of Commerce
workos.com/blog/mcp-vs-rest?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=q32026
REST serves the developers building against your API. MCP serves the agents now trying to use it. Most teams treat these as competing standards and have to pick one.
They’re not rivals, they’re layers: most MCP servers just call REST internally to do the real work. The best ones don’t convert every endpoint into a tool, they design around what the agent’s trying to accomplish.
Shipping that server also means shipping OAuth 2.1 with scoped tokens. WorkOS AuthKit already speaks that spec, so you skip building an auth provider on top.
Link: workos.com/blog/mcp-vs-rest?utm_source=daringfireball&utm…
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
macrumors.com/2026/08/03/apple-john-ternus-hiring-retired-vp/
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
theinformation.com/articles/apple-icloud-policy-fueled-employee-leaks-ahead-openai-suit?rc=jfy0lk
Bill and Kyle take a trip to Okinawa after winning the All Valley Tournament to revisit 1986’s ‘The Karate Kid Part II,’ starring Ralph Macchio and Pat Morita.
Producers: Craig Horlbeck, Chia Hao Tat, Eduardo Ocampo, and Matt Pevic
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Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
“Long live Hyrule jazz!” The Z Suites is “a modern jazz reinterpretation of the music from The Legend of Zelda”.
Longreads
• Brendan Fitzgerald
"Flock’s array of license-plate cameras was built to fight crime. But at least 50 law enforcement officers were charged with or accused of misusing it and other systems."
How Podcasts Ruined America. This is an odd claim and article. No mention of the clear precursors to right-wing podcasts (talk radio, blogs, Twitter) and the general shift towards less accountability for public speech, esp. by conservatives. 🤔
So, I don’t know what kind of nerd you are, but my brand of nerdiness dovetails neatly with this video about the origins of some of the most common symbols on your keyboard: #, @, &, §, *, ¶, †, and ‡, as well as ☞.
The “and” symbol or ampersand does not look like a word, but it is one. In fact, it is a full one. It is the Latin word for “and”: “et”. The Romans themselves used this. How do we know? Because we have this: the earliest known example of it, graffitied onto a wall in the doomed Roman city of Pompeii.
Colossal
• Kate Mothes
Known for their monumental murals, which span entire public squares, rooftops, playing fields, and more, Ella & Pitr bring eccentric joy to urban spaces. The artists often represent people from historically marginalized groups, including refugees and the elderly. Sometimes laughing, other times sleeping or passing the time in quietude, these giant figures curl around fountainsContinue reading "Monumental Joyful Murals by Ella & Pitr Fill Urban Rooftops and Fields"
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 Monumental Joyful Murals by Ella & Pitr Fill Urban Rooftops and Fields appeared first on Colossal.
