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A new book from Dan Rimada, with photos by Gulce Kilkis, is slated for release in November.

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 ‘Bodega Cats of New York’ Advocates for the City’s Beloved Feline Shopkeepers appeared first on Colossal.

Hey folks. I just wanted to hop in here quickly to let a cat out of a bag: I am in the midst of moving. Not going to get into the wheres, whys, and hows right now; there’s a bigger post coming at some point about all of that. I’m excited and anxious about the transition (it’s a pretty big one), but it’s been taking up a lot of time, energy, and bandwidth that I would usually be putting into KDO.

The move is happening in early Sept, and I’m probably going to be taking some time off between now and then (timing tbd) to get everything packed & organized, spend time with family & friends before I go, and generally not run myself completely into the ground. Thanks for your patience & understanding; I’m excited to get back to focusing on the site in mid-Sept. ✌️

Tags: Jason Kottke · kottke.org

Paul Thurrott: We didn’t need more evidence that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 compute platform is superior to anything in the x86 world. But here it is, regardless: The HP OmniBook Ultra 14 is yet another nearly-perfect laptop running Windows 11 on Arm, an ideal combination ...

This is an old list but still interesting: the 12 most linguistically influential American movies since 1980. If you were compiling a list of linguistically influential movies since 2000, what would be on it?

There’s an old adage that you should never bring a knife to a gunfight. My take on OpenAI’s response yesterday was expressing incredulity that OpenAI was bringing, like, a box of chocolates to the gunfight. Apple is trying to kill io, and OpenAI’s public response is basically “We love you guys, can’t we just be friends?”

This thread on Hacker News though points out that their response doesn’t even explain what they’re responding to. There’s no context. They just assume the reader is up to date on the lawsuit Apple filed. If you didn’t know anything about the suit and started with this post, it would make no sense at all. I’ve heard from friends there that the OpenAI culture is “too online”, and this might be the best proof of it.

Link: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49164649

Tressie McMillan Cottom’s reading list for fighting back against Big Tech. “Put simply, there is too much money, some of it too untraceable, giving a small group of unelected people too much power over the people.”

Emily Wilson takes another crack at a critique of Nolan’s “visually stunning, emotionally empty” Odyssey. “Verbally, we are told that people matter; visually, we are shown that they do not.”

Surfing Alaska’s Turnagain Arm (home to a twice-daily tidal bore wave) can be fun (10-foot waves you can ride for miles) but also dangerous: “You need a Plan B, a Plan C and a Plan D because no one is coming to rescue you.”

Wiesenfeld delves into the power of visibility and imagination.

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 Enigmatic Narratives Unfold in Aron Wiesenfeld’s Dreamy Oil Paintings appeared first on Colossal.

"Sixty years after the Cultural Revolution began, a writer looks back to her childhood in Beijing during its peak, and the banned books that sustained her through the tumult."

Brad Ryan has traveled to all 63 U.S National Parks. But he’s not done it alone. He traveled with his grandmother, who was in her mid-80s when they first started. Now, he’s got a book out all about it titled Grandma Joy and Me: A Journey of Healing One National Park at A Time. 

Plus, we’d like to hear from you. Tell us your stories about visiting the U.S National Parks. Which ones have you been to? Which ones are you looking forward to? Did everything go as planned? Did anything surprising happen? Tell us all about it. Give us a call at 315-992-7902 and leave a message with your story and your name. You can also record a voice memo and email it to us at Hello@AtlasObscura.com. 

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I released LLM 0.32 this morning, the most significant new version of LLM since the initial launch of the project. The new version includes support for visible reasoning traces, server-side provider tools, redesigned content-addressable SQLite logs, new models, and new featu...

Release: llm 0.32

See my detailed blog post about this release.

Tags: llm

Release: condense-json 1.1

After shipping condense-json 1.0 I started integrating it into LLM, and found there were some desirable new features already:

• Replacements object can now include values other than strings. These will be identified and used as structural replacements by condense_json() and uncondense_json(). #8
• Objects can be used as the basis for merge operations. condense_json() will identify if there are objects that are a close match and will store instructions for keys to update or delete. uncondense_json() can then apply these merges.

I also added some round-trip tests using the Hypothesis property-based Python testing library.

Tags: json

I released LLM 0.32 this morning, the most significant new version of LLM since the initial launch of the project. The new version includes support for visible reasoning traces, server-side provider tools, redesigned content-addressable SQLite logs, new models, and new featu...

OpenAI published an unbylined blog post overnight, responding in public — but not yet in court — to Apple’s new motion for a preliminary injunction. It’s an unusual move to respond to a high-stakes legal filing with a blog post, but OpenAI is an unusual company. A few snippe...

In recent years, science has been learning more and more about how central the role of inflammation is to our health. “The paradox that often makes treating chronic inflammation so difficult: It can be vital and harmful at the same time.”

Release: llm-anthropic 0.26 Includes new features enabled by LLM 0.32: New models: claude-fable-5, claude-sonnet-5, and claude-opus-5. #75, #76 Added server-side tools for WebSearch, WebFetch, CodeExecution, and AnthropicMCP, available through LLM's -T interface o...

Huh, here’s the trailer for a new director’s cut (of sorts) of the second X-Files movie (called I Want to Believe, orig. released in 2008) that, per Wikipedia, “will restore horror elements that were previously removed”.