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Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
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Quoting Zach Kehs

If you continue to add floors and rooms to a building forever, it will collapse. Software faces no such constraint. The code can always get worse. There can always be a new layer of indirection or a reduction in performance.

— Zach Kehs, There's No Limit to How Bad Code Can Get

Tags: technical-debt

Mars For The Rest of Us Valid
Text • Maciej Cegłowski

Icy Moons are Ocean Worlds

Icy Moons are Ocean Worlds

The best ice fishing in the Solar System is worth finding

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
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Introducing GPT-6 Astra for developers

Introducing GPT-6 Astra for developers

Blink and you'll miss it, but there's a familiar creature at 1m59s:

Across the board, Astra has more attention to detail, better understanding of the user's prompt, and can build more sophisticated outputs. In particular, it excels at building 3D models. I've seen it make incredible renderings of gardens, shipyards, animals, cityscapes, even Dyson spheres.

astra-video-pelican.webp

Astra really does believe in putting a red neckerchief on a pelican riding a bicycle.

Via Hacker News comment

Tags: ai, openai, generative-ai, llms, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, gpt-6-astra

Marques Brownlee Updates instantly via WebSub
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Google Pixel 11/Pro Review: Poker Face

Pixel 11 proves Google is going all in in one thing.

Enter for free for a chance to win $100,000 or 1 of 3 cars at https://ridge.com/MKBHD

MKBHD Merch: http://shop.MKBHD.com

Playlist of MKBHD Intro music: https://goo.gl/B3AWV5
Phones provided by Google for review.

~
http://twitter.com/MKBHD
http://instagram.com/MKBHD
http://facebook.com/MKBHD

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Gloria Steinem’s Final Essay

newyorker.com/culture/life-and-letters/gloria-steinems-final-essay?cndid=66114350

Gloria Steinem, in a posthumous essay for The New Yorker: For me, saying that I am a feminist has always meant that I believe in the social, economic, and political equality of all males and females of all races and groups. I know this sounds too simple to need a word, b...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

‘Bob and Van’

marco.org/2026/09/04/bob-and-van

Marco Arment:

And I can’t help but feel that maybe we were better off before we knew everyone’s hot takes on everything.

The town coffee shop was just a coffee shop. We weren’t publicly shamed for going there because one of the owners was an ass. It was just a place to hang out with our friends.

Link: marco.org/2026/09/04/bob-and-van

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
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Using Blender with coding agents on macOS

TIL: Using Blender with coding agents on macOS

I've been having fun with Blender in ChatGPT Codex on my Mac recently. Getting it to work with coding agents is really easy: install the full Mac application from blender.org and run a prompt like this:

Use the already install /Applications/Blender to render a scene of a pelican riding a bicycle

In this case I followed that up with these two prompts:

OK add a background and a lot of flair

Then:

OK make it a whole lot better

And got this image, generated using Blender's Python API:

A 3D illustration of a white pelican cycling along a seaside boardwalk at sunset. It wears a cream boater hat and a coral scarf, with wings on the handlebars and long orange legs reaching the pedals of a turquoise bicycle. A wicker front basket holds pink and white flowers, and three balloons float behind. Pastel bunting stretches overhead between palm trees. Striped beach huts stand beside a teal sea with a small sailboat, beneath a large peach-colored sun. The scene has a softly lit, toy-like style.

Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, blender, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, coding-agents, gpt-6-astra

Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell Updates instantly via WebSub
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How ADHD Medication Works

ADHD medication doesn’t simply give your brain more dopamine. It changes how dopamine signals are processed, making it easier to resist immediate distractions and stick with rewards that take longer to reach. #kurzgesagt #inanutshell #kurzgesagt_inanutshell #learnwithshorts...

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
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The Pelican comparison grid for Astra is pretty interesting

I got access to GPT-6 Astra this afternoon, so naturally I used it to generate SVGs of pelicans riding bicycles - at low, medium, high, xhigh and max reasoning levels (Astra doesn't support reasoning=none). Then I rendered those pelicans in a comparison grid with GPT-5.6 Sol...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Adobe Names Anil Chakravarthy as CEO, Replacing Shantanu Narayen

cnbc.com/2026/09/03/adobe-anil-chakravarthy-ceo.html

Annie Palmer, CNBC:

Adobe on Thursday named Anil Chakravarthy as its next president and CEO, succeeding Shantanu Narayen, who announced he would step down earlier this year. Chakravarthy, who most recently served as president of Adobe’s customer experience orchestration and worldwide field operations, will take the helm Dec. 1, the company said. He will also join Adobe’s board.

I’m sure promoting the head of “customer experience orchestration” to CEO will restore Adobe’s focus on creating great tools for artists and designers.

Link: cnbc.com/2026/09/03/adobe-anil-chakravarthy-ceo.html

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

NBA Brings the Hammer on the Clippers — $30 Million Fine, 5 First-Round Draft Picks, and Steve Ballmer Is Banned for a Year

nytimes.com/athletic/7513882/2026/09/02/clippers-kawhi-leonard-punishment-fine-suspensions-nba-investigation/?unlocked_article_code=1.-lA.wcSN.awOHwzojR5nR

Mike Vorkunov, reporting for The Athletic (gift link): The NBA levied the largest punishment in league history on the LA Clippers and owner Steve Ballmer on Wednesday after a year-long investigation determined that they circumvented the league’s salary cap rules to help ...

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Another Reason I F*cking Hate AI

In this episode I talk about how a solar flare could wipe out all digital media and how I'm preparing for the AI Apocalypse. This Labor Day I put all seven of my courses together for $99, the lowest price I've ever put on the full collection. Get it here: https://rickbeato...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Apple Fixed ‎TestFlight’s Screwy Sort Order

apps.apple.com/us/app/testflight/id899247664

I wrote two weeks ago about how the v4.3.0 update to TestFlight (released on July 21) broke the sort order for apps in the sidebar. Apple yesterday released v4.3.1, with these helpful release notes:

This update includes stability improvements and bug fixes.

One of the weirdest parts about this sort-order bug is that it only affected some people. I was obviously one of them; so was John Siracusa. For both of us, yesterday’s v4.3.1 update fixes the bug.

Link: apps.apple.com/us/app/testflight/id899247664

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Vinted

vinted.com/

Remarking on MapQuest taking the #1 spot in the App Store (in the wake of their decision to ignore President Trump’s fiat renaming of Lake Ontario to “Lake America”), I mentioned yesterday that I’d never heard of Vinted, the #3 app. (A day later and MapQuest is still #1, by the way.)

Vinted, it turns out, is an eBay-like market for buying and selling used clothing. From a Lithuanian startup and the whole thing has been popular in Europe for a while, and obviously now is gaining popularity in the U.S.

Link: vinted.com/

Colossal Valid
Text • Grace Ebert

In ‘An American Fiction,’ Ronald Jackson Casts an Imagined Screenplay

In ‘An American Fiction,’ Ronald Jackson Casts an Imagined ScreenplayRonald Jackson creates a sort of casting list for an imagined screenplay that titles the exhibition: 'An American Fiction.'

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 In ‘An American Fiction,’ Ronald Jackson Casts an Imagined Screenplay appeared first on Colossal.

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

★ Writing With Unnatural Constraints

Marcin Wichary, writing at Unsung, regarding a rather subtly astonishing FAQ for the game Super Metroid, written in the late 1990s by “rs1n”. It’s over 17,000 words long, and the whole thing is full-justified when viewed with a monospaced font, using no trickery with extra s...

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
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OpenAI's rogue agents were caught communicating via public wikis

Here we go again... Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board by Sydney Von Arx, Cormac Slade Byrd, Spencer Kitts, and Thomas Larsen describes the latest accidental cyberattack by models being trained by OpenAI. This time it was agents engaged in some sort of web researc...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses

krebsonsecurity.com/2026/09/fbi-probes-service-selling-153m-drivers-licenses/

Brian Krebs, reporting at KrebsOnSecurity: On Monday, Aug. 31, a source alerted KrebsOnSecurity to a service advertised by a new user on the Russian cybercrime forum Exploit, offering access to digital scans of identity documents on more than 170 million people in North ...

Colossal Valid
Text • Kate Mothes

Go Behind the Scenes of Blackwing Pencils’ Ode to Analog Creativity

Go Behind the Scenes of Blackwing Pencils’ Ode to Analog CreativityThe company shares its multi-step process in factories in Japan and California.

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 Go Behind the Scenes of Blackwing Pencils’ Ode to Analog Creativity appeared first on Colossal.

xkcd.com Valid
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Asteroid Mission

Lander, this is Houston. There's been a request that you turn clipping back on and instead set the mass to 1kg. The theorists believe that will be pretty funny.