Sign up

Rick Beato Updates instantly via WebSub
Video

The State Of Music In 2026...A Rant

Simple Scale Tricks I Use All the Time: A 30 Minute Guitar Lesson

In today's livestream I talk about the state of music as I see it and where it might be headed.

Check out the Labor Day Complete Bundle here: https://rickbeato.com/s/labor-day-1

Rick Beato Updates instantly via WebSub
Video

Simple Scale Tricks I Use All the Time: A 30 Minute Guitar Lesson

Talking about what's new

In today's livestream I show you a number of simple scale tricks to make your solos sound better.

🎸 THE PROFESSIONAL GUITAR COLLECTION — $67 (reg. $379)

Three complete courses:
1. Quick Lessons Pro
2. The Arpeggio Masterclass
3. The Scale Matrix

Every scale, arpeggio, and concept mapped across the entire neck. $379 worth of courses for $67 — that's less than the price of any one course, and the lowest price this collection has ever been.

Sale ends Wednesday, August 19th at 11:59pm ET.

Get it here: https://guitarscales.co/s/pgc

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

★ Anthropic’s ‘Watermark’ Text Adulteration in Claude Is a Perversion of Writing

When I wrote this week about Anthropic’s announcement that all Claude models, worldwide, would soon begin “watermarking” everything they generate, including text, to comply with this EU regulation, we were left to speculate how this was going to work, because Anthropic offer...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

The Information Profiles Cami Clark — Dario Amodei’s Wife, Ivanka Trump’s Friend, One-Time Would-Be Pornographer, and Anthropic’s ‘First Lady’

theinformation.com/articles/anthropics-first-lady-took-winding-road-top?rc=jfy0lk

Cory Weinberg, Jemima McEvoy, Jessica E. Lessin, and Stephanie Palazzolo, writing for the paywalled-without-gift-links The Information: As Amodei has hopscotched the globe to preach about the potential and risks of AI — from New Delhi to Davos to Sun Valley — Clark has a...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

‘Anthropic’s Weak Watermarks Appease a Weak Law’

blog.j11y.io/2026-08-12_Anthropics-weak-watermarks-appease-a-weak-law/

James Padolsey, on the Claude-text-watermarking-to-comply-with-an-EU-regulation imbroglio: The same thought that led to this law could have applied to calculators at the time of their inception, had their outputs revealed themselves through artefacts. Thankfully, a sum b...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Trump Administration ‘Not in Favor’ of Apple Using Chinese RAM

wsj.com/tech/apple-china-memory-chip-plan-57773a83?st=vfe1SA

The Wall Street Journal (gift link): To help alleviate the supply crunch, Apple is looking to Chinese manufacturers. “The Trump administration is not in favor of that,” Lutnick said in an interview after touring an Apple manufacturing facility in Houston. There have to ...

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
Text

Quoting Dario Amodei

I do agree that the public has a negative view of AI (and that this is a big problem), but I don’t think it is primarily caused by me or any other AI leader warning about AI’s risks.  I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust.  I think that ordinary people don’...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

XCancel — An Unofficial Twitter/X Mirror

xcancel.com/about

XCancel: XCancel is an instance of Nitter. Nitter is a free and open source alternative Twitter front-end focused on privacy and performance. The source is available on GitHub at https://github.com/zedeus/nitter [...] Using an instance of Nitter (hosted on a VPS for ex...

Dan’s Polaroids
Text

15.08.2026

Me in the mirror of an elevator.
Snap in an elevator

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
Text

CORS Chat

Tool: CORS Chat

I built this today (with GPT-5.6-Sol xhigh) to help test Qwen 3.8 27B running in LM Studio on both my M5 MacBook Pro and an NVIDIA DGX Spark.

It provides a web UI for exercising an OpenAI-Responses-compatible chat endpoint. I've tried it against LM Studio with the --cors option and OpenRouter, and both work fine.

Conversations are persisted in the browser and can be exported as copy-pasted JSON. One fun detail is that it notices SVG images that are being generated and progressively renders them in the chat while the tokens are still streaming in.

Alt text generated by Qwen-3.8 27B: Screenshot of the CORS Chat web interface. The left sidebar lists three saved conversations, with "render an svg of five intersecting squares" selected. The main panel shows a chat with the qwen3.8‑27b model: the user asked "render an svg of five intersecting squares. don't overthink this," followed by the model's reasoning trace describing the design (five semi‑transparent squares rotated around a common center on a dark background). Below is an SVG preview pane displaying five overlapping, semi‑transparent colored squares—pink, blue, green, yellow, and purple—with white outlines, rotated at different angles to form a starburst pattern on a dark navy background. Top controls include endpoint/model selectors and a "New chat" button; the bottom has a message input and a "Send" button.

Tags: svg, ai, generative-ai, llms, cors, openrouter, lm-studio

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Drata

drata.com/daring

My thanks to Drata for sponsoring last week at DF. Their message is short and sweet: Leverage autonomous AI agents to automate compliance, manage internal and third-party risk, and continuously prove your security posture.

Link: drata.com/daring

FeedCity Supports Webmention Valid
Text

Podcast progress is now synced

If you listen to podcasts, the episode progress is now synced across your devices. Which means that you can now continue listening on any device and have it pick up where you last paused - no matter the computer you’re using.

The remaining time will now also be shown in the top right corner of each player.

(Previously, progress was only stored separately per device.)

FeedCity Supports Webmention Valid
Text

I deployed a few fixes and improvements around caching - especially in regards to the “bookmark”, “like”, and “share” buttons. Those were not always showing the accurate states. Now they should.

Daniel Pietzsch Verified Updates instantly via WebSub Supports Webmention Valid
Text

🎬 Z-O-M-B-I-E-S 4: Dawn of the Vampires

letterboxd.com/danielpietzsch/film/z-o-m-b-i-e-s-4-dawn-of-the-vampires/

Movie poster for “Z-O-M-B-I-E-S 4: Dawn of the Vampires”.

Well, that was not too bad. The songs were decent. But, yeah, it’s a kids movie. With bright kitschy images.

Daniel Pietzsch Verified Updates instantly via WebSub Supports Webmention Valid
Text

🎬 Backrooms

letterboxd.com/danielpietzsch/film/backrooms-2026/

Movie poster for “Backrooms”.

I really liked those Backrooms and the atmosphere and eeriness of it all; and the found footage, too. That is the first two thirds. Then the movie shifts and it’s like a new storyline in a TV series; where you’d also need another episode to resolve this. Hm…

Dan’s Polaroids
Text

14.08.2026

The river Rhine in sunshine. More riverbed than river is seen. And two folding chairs stand by the water edge.
Two chairs by the river edge. That edge should be where the grass is.

The Atlas Obscura Podcast Updates instantly via WebSub
Audio • SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura

Tell Us Your Intergenerational Travel Stories

We wanna hear from you! Tell us about your intergenerational travel stories. Who did you go with?  Where did you go? What did you learn about traveling with this person of a different age? How did the trip go? What are some stories you brought back? We want to hear it all. 

Give us a call at 315-992-7902 and leave a message telling us your name and story. Our mailbox will cut you off after three minutes so please call again if you get disconnected. Or better yet, you can record a voice memo and email it to us at hello@atlasobscura.com. 


Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
Text

Northern Gannet

Northern Gannet

Northern Gannet, in Pillar Point Harbor, CA, US

This is Morris.

Morris is a local celebrity: the only known Northern Gannet (Morus bassanus) in the entire Pacific Ocean.

He showed up in the Farallon Islands off the coast of San Francisco 14 years ago. He has since made Pillar Point harbor his home, where he's quite easy to spot: the only white bird with a yellow head, usually hanging out with the smaller black Brandt’s cormorants near the harbor sign visible from the end of the commercial pier.

Tags: photography, wildlife, half-moon-bay

xkcd.com Valid
Text

Accretionary Arc

The late Triassic rifting was caused by a dinosaur trying to use the control panel to escape a predator, but it was eaten before the continent could fully separate.

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
Text

Don't classify. Hallucinate!

Don't classify. Hallucinate! I still have quite a bit of older content on my blog that I never got round to tagging. My blog has 1,856 tags - likely too many to feed to an LLM in one go and say "which of these tags match the following content". Doug Turnbull has a neat solut...