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“Widely regarded as the most complicated board game ever made, The Campaign for North Africa tries to simulate WW2’s North African theater in as granular fashion as possible…” 1500 hours to finish the game — that’s 1h20m every day for 3 years.

New vocabulary term: “soft secession”.

There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text Sophie Alpert shares her "internal policy on acceptable use of AI writing by engineers". It's a short read (supporting its own recommendations) and really good. If you chose to have LLMs help massage your writing...

Good sentence: “The market’s most lavish rewards do not go to its most productive participants, but rather, to those participants who have the good fortune to emerge from the luckiest of orifices.”

Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs A vanity domain name (stolen-thoughts.com) for a neat paper: Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google return encrypted chain-of-thought blocks to clients that can be replayed across sessions, users, and models. We take a trace produc...

Firms close up shop amid a continued crypto winter, a Trump venture ditches its crypto plans, and the Clarity Act fails to reach a vote before August recess

The Economist (‘twas a gift link, but alas, I guess gift views have been used up — here’s an archive link in case the gift link is vexing you): You can discover AI’s hallmarks by comparing the writing of man and machine. To do this you need a baseline that is distinctive...

Alex Micek:

In the future, I will feel angry if my car strands me on the side of the road.
I will feel angry if the motor brushes fail expectedly.
I will feel angry if it leaks water.

By contrast, I don’t feel anger when the car tricks me into seeing an advertisement. Instead, I feel a deep, smothering, let-down at the promise of futurism. Bottomless despair is probably inappropriate; a symptom of the misanthropy I should grow out of. But. In the meantime, I feel helpless, discouraged, deeply sad.

Such a good take. I should not let 19 years pass again between linking to his writing.

Link: tumbledry.org/2026/08/07/idrive_ads

This didn’t occur to me but should have — BMW paid Sony to place BMWs throughout the new Spider-Man: Brand New Day movie. They’re not just in the movie but part of the story. So it’s probably the case not that Sony paid BMW to put Spider-Man animations in the dashboards of every late model BMW on the road, but that BMW offered to do it as part of the promotional deal they paid Sony. So BMW probably paid Sony for something that ultimately infuriated a bunch of BMW’s own customers. Geniuses.

Link: press.bmwgroup.com/global/article/detail/T0459622EN/bmw…

Two weeks ago Zuckerberg published a 1,000-word essay, “The AI Future Is for Everyone”. This week he published an expanded 6,500-word version of the essay on Meta’s website. Somehow it almost says nothing more than the original. This tidbit, however, struck me as notable: ...

Sungho Bae's uncanny sculptures aremade of a vibrant, fleshy patchwork that resembles organs, tissue, muscle, and more.

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 Stuffed Animals and Found Objects Reconfigure in Sungho Bae’s Uncanny Sculptures appeared first on Colossal.

Chance Miller returns to the show. Topics include iOS 27’s progress over summer, live baseball in Vision Pro, the RAM crisis, Apple’s trade secret lawsuit against OpenAI and io, and the EU/DMA situation.

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Link: daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2026/08/10/ep-454

Andrew Sharp, writing at Sharp Text last month after Netflix’s earnings, asking “Is Netflix Washed Now?”: I offer this observation as a swirl of heightened anxiety surrounds the company, so let me clarify one thing up front: I’m not predicting imminent doom. Netflix cont...

Anthropic support page: Anthropic has signed the EU AI Act’s Article 50(2) Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-Generated Content, as a provider of both generative AI models and generative AI systems. This article describes how we’re planning to put those commitments i...

"We currently have around five million artworks indexed, and strive to eventually index all museum art in the world," the creators say.

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 Discover Millions of Artworks from Thousands of Museums with This Huge Art Search Engine appeared first on Colossal.

“Your brain is a gambling addict that bets on reality. It doesn’t wait for information. It guesses what should happen and adjusts when surprised. Most bets win. But when they don’t, you run into walls.”

"Very few Oakland establishments open before noon. Club 2101 in Dimond is one of them. For patrons, it’s a second home."

"40 notes on Rob Reiner and Stand By Me."