Sign up

Colossal Valid
Text • Grace Ebert

Pattern and Bold, Saturated Color Commingle in Ben Sledsens’ Rhythmic Paintings

Pattern and Bold, Saturated Color Commingle in Ben Sledsens’ Rhythmic PaintingsWhile bold in color, Ben Sledsens' oil-and-acrylic paintings are quiet and intimate.

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 Pattern and Bold, Saturated Color Commingle in Ben Sledsens’ Rhythmic Paintings appeared first on Colossal.

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

The Load-Bearing Vocabulary of Claude

louisabraham.github.io/load-bearing/

Fun (but depressing?) data analysis project from Louis Abraham, showing how repetitive Claude is in the words it chooses when submitting GitHub pull requests. Abraham, in the project’s readme: GitHub pull request descriptions, grouped by the words they are written with r...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Elizabeth Warren’s Incoherent Outrage Regarding Apple’s Tariff Refund

warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/warren-pushes-giant-corporations-to-give-billions-in-tariff-refunds-back-to-consumers/

Speaking of tariff refunds, here’s an official statement from Senator Elizabeth Warren from a few weeks ago: U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote to Target, Apple, Amazon, Nike, Motorola, Walmart, and Energizer pushing these companies — each of which have or are...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Panic Is Refunding Tariff Fees to Playdate Buyers

gamedeveloper.com/business/playdate-maker-is-refunding-tariff-fees-to-customers

Nicole Carpenter and Diego Argüello, reporting for Game Developer: “There was a specific window of time this year where we charged tariffs to customers,” Panic co-founder Cabel Sasser explained in an e-mail to Game Developer confirming the news. “We tried absorbing the c...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Ads in Apple Maps Have Now Launched

9to5mac.com/2026/08/25/apple-maps-launches-ads-on-iphone-heres-whats-new/

Ryan Christoffel, 9to5Mac: Apple confirmed to 9to5Mac that the ads rollout in Maps began in the last few days. And it will continue ramping in the weeks ahead to all users. There are two places you’ll find ads in the Maps app: Before searching: Suggested Places in the...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

‘How Europe Is Killing Makers and Micro-Entrepreneurs’

lectronz.com/u/lectronz/articles/how-europe-is-killing-makers-and-micro-entrepreneurs

Alain Pannetrat, founder of Lectronz: Lectronz is a marketplace for open-source hardware makers and DIY electronics. Most of our sellers are not factories or well-funded start-ups. They are engineers, independent designers, and hardware enthusiasts working from spare roo...

Simone Giertz Updates instantly via WebSub
Video

We tried the number game

Accidental Tech Podcast
Audio

706: No One Is Getting a Good Deal Tonight

Pre-show: Marco’s casement windows Screen clips Screen clips, installed (white prototypes for visibility) TPU for AMS 🗣️ New Member’s Special: ATP Movie Club: Nausicaä and the Valley of the Wind Follow-up: macOS 27 UI tweaks Redesigned stoplights in β6 Video St...

kottke.org Valid
Text • Jason Kottke

Emptying the Tabs…

Ok, we’re gonna go a little old school today. I’m talking the late 1990s and early 2000s, back before permalinks (sorry), RSS, and social media turned blog posts & tweets into their own little discrete units packaged to be easily passed around and things were less homoge...

Dan’s Polaroids
Text

26.08.2026

A girl and a woman walking hand in hand through a narrow Italian street.
Wandering around

Colossal Valid
Text • Kate Mothes

‘Handmade Utopia’ Relishes the Architecture of California’s Back-to-the-Land Movement

‘Handmade Utopia’ Relishes the Architecture of California’s Back-to-the-Land MovementThe new book by David Jacob Kramer, with photos by Michael Schmelling, represents a counterculture that, though changed, is still alive and well.

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 ‘Handmade Utopia’ Relishes the Architecture of California’s Back-to-the-Land Movement appeared first on Colossal.

Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell Updates instantly via WebSub
Video

Dust Is Not What You Think

Dust is everywhere, but it's not what most people think. Some of it can make you sick, some of it helps rain forests survive, and a tiny fraction is older than Earth itself. #kurzgesagt #inanutshell #kurzgesagt_inanutshell #learnwithshorts #science #dust #microbiology S...

Longreads Valid
Text • Seyward Darby

The Seniors Against Senior Housing

"America’s elders need more places to live, but even in liberal enclaves that recognize the problem, developers are facing the fiercest foes of all: America’s elders."

Longreads Valid
Text • Cheri Lucas Rowlands

You Can Never Go Home Again. But You Can Spend a Lifetime Trying

'My father designed two of the houses I grew up in. Then he died. I’m still untangling where his taste ends and mine begins."

Longreads Valid
Text • Lisa Whittington-Hill

Ladies of the ’80s

L-R Joan Jett, Whitney Houston, Madonna, and Grace Jones.
How Madonna, Grace Jones, Joan Jett, Whitney Houston, and their contemporaries broke the stodgy musical mold of the '60s and '70s to inspire generations of women to pick up an instrument and learn to play music.

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

The Dolly Parton Song We Can All Look Forward To

We will always love Dolly Parton, who installed a “dreambox” time capsule at her amusement park. In it, there’s a secret song that no one will hear until the legendary artist turns 100. Dolly Parton died this week at age 80, sparking a global outpouring of grief and tributes. 

 


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

Qwen3.8-Flash-Next

Qwen3.8-Flash-Next

Another open weights model from Qwen. This one is "a multimodal MoE model that also serves as an early preview of the architecture used in Qwen4".

It's pretty big: 125B tokens, but only 6B active which means it gets a pretty big performance boost.

I've been trying it out on a DGX Spark using these Unsloth quantized models. I'm still exploring the model - so far I've tried the 72.5GB UD-IQ1_S one (producing these pelicans) and the 78.9GB UD-Q2_K_XL (producing these).

My favorite so far was this xhigh reasoning effort one from UD-Q2_K_XL:

Flat vector illustration: a white pelican with an orange beak and orange legs rides a red bicycle along a sandy path, a wicker basket on the handlebars holding a blue fish, with green rolling hills, a small tree and bushes, white clouds and a bright yellow sun in a blue sky behind it

Via Hacker News

Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, qwen, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, ai-in-china, nvidia-spark

Rick Beato Updates instantly via WebSub
Video

Remembering an American Icon: Dolly Parton (1946-2026)

Yesterday the world lost an American icon, humanitarian, singer, songwriter, philanthropist, and beautiful human being, Dolly Parton (1946 -2026). Here are some of my favorite memories of her.

Simone Giertz Updates instantly via WebSub
Video

What I love about inventing

@scientificamerican

xkcd.com Valid
Text

Trade

"You legs may have a comparative advantage at running, but we arms have a competitive advantage at swinging hammers, so unless you accept that we're the dominant limbs and stop hogging the oxygen, that running advantage won't be around for long."