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Just quickly reupping this post to remind you things might be slower than usual around here for the next few weeks…moving crunch time is here. (I’ll still be posting though…it’s nice to sit down and flow state through some links occasionally.)

I complained last week that starting with an update last month, the list of apps I’m testing in Apple’s TestFlight app has been sorted alphabetically, rather than by recency. Whatever is going on with this sort order, it isn’t affecting everyone. John Siracusa, amongst many ...

Meat proxy (noun): “A person who forwards AI-generated text, code, or other output without reading, understanding, or validating it. The person acts only as a relay between the AI system and the intended recipient.”

Ebola outbreaks can be contained, but ending them is another story. Conflict, fragile healthcare systems, and limited access to vaccines give the virus new chances to spread. Stopping one outbreak helps prevent the next. #kurzgesagt #inanutshell #kurzgesagt_inanutshell #lea...

The Dallas-based artist draws on her background in product design and illustration.

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 Nosheen Iqbal Translates Islamic Ornament into Meticulous Wood-and-Thread Patterns appeared first on Colossal.

Why Are Rivers So Mathematical? “Any stream, from the littlest brook to the mightiest river, has a length that’s proportional to its drainage area raised to the power of 0.6.”

Opinion columnist Karen Attiah won her arbitration against the Washington Post. They are ordered to reinstate her and pay full back pay. The Post fired her almost a year ago for her remarks in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder.

Your executable is a SQLite database Farid Zakaria describes a neat Linux pattern for creating a SQLite database file that can be directly used as an executable binary. The trick sets the SQLite file format's 4-byte application ID (68 bytes into the file) to SELF, standing f...

"The power grid relies on thousands of aging, hand-built transformers. If enough fail, the blackout could last years."

Carleton Gajdusek won the Nobel Prize for his work on a disease in Papua New Guinea. But his biggest experiment was on the children he took from the field to the US—many of whom he sexually molested, with the knowledge and, in some cases, approval of his professional peers and colleagues: In his journals and […]

A new dream and effort has arisen to re-envision Hogan's Alley, a predominantly Black community in Vancouver.

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Anthropic’s best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive A few interesting numbers in this FT story gathered from "people with knowledge of the matter": Anthropic's "annualized revenue" for July is up to $65bn - it was $47bn in May, and I collected more ...

Prior to Fable, it felt silly to waste too much time improving your coding harness or context strategies. A new model would arrive at the same price (or cheaper!) and paper over most of your problems.

But then Fable landed. It was (and still is!) incredible. But the cost was so high and Opus was good enough (as was 5.6, K3, and even GLM) for most of the code we needed.

So we started to think about what work went where.

— Drew Breunig, Fable & The End of the Free Lunch

Tags: drew-breunig, anthropic, claude, llm-pricing, ai, llms, generative-ai, claude-mythos-fable

John Moltz, in his weekly members-only column for Six Colors (no gift links, but Moltz’s column is worth the subscription in and of itself): This week Anthropic announced that in order to identify AI from human-generated content it would be watermarking all text it gener...

And this was a debug session from hell, enormously helped by an AI doing much of the grunt-work.

I'd like to call it my tireless helper, but the AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it.

I suspect those things have been trained by people who may not be quite as stubborn as I am.

But while the AI was ready to give up several times, it did keep adding debug code and analyzing it faithfully when I pushed. So credit where credit is due and I let the AI write the commit message above.

— Linus Torvalds, drm/xe: Don't hand out the flat CCS storage as usable VRAM

Tags: linus-torvalds, linux, generative-ai, ai-assisted-programming, ai, llms

Through vivid sculptural paintings, Estefania Ajcip peers in on the fractures families face when split apart.

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 Estefania Ajcip’s Sculptural Paintings Unite the Memories of a Separated Family appeared first on Colossal.

Release: llm 0.33 My highlights from this release: Upgraded to the OpenAI Python library 3.x and switched the HTTP client dependency from httpx to httpx2. #1608, #1631 I shipped a quick 0.32.1 fix for this yesterday, but this is the more comprehensive fix. ll...