FeedCity

The purpose of DNS is to spread scams

Terence Eden shares some daunting statistics in support of his take that "the Domain Name System's purpose seems to be a vector for criminals to run scams on people at a terrifyingly high rate".

On this Interisle report (via Andrew Campling), Terence says:

It says 85 million new registrations of gTLDs were made in 2025. Of those 8.5 million were added to blocklists by May 2025. It reckons that a 10% abuse rate is the likely floor for these numbers and it's probably closer to 20%. One in five newly registered domains with a gTLD are scams. That's a bloody crisis.

I had no idea. Apparently ICANN have been discussing this problem for years.

Tags: dns, scams, terence-eden

That’s not a movie for me. I really did not care about anything or anyone in this. The story is boring and it’s all pretty pointless. While some images are great, the dream-like sequences border on ugly. Then it has some short funny scenes weirdly inserted. The end At the Gates of Hel is just disappointing. I’m sorry.

Absolut wahnsinniges Buch über das und aus dem Bewusstsein einer Irren. Aber einer intelligenten Irren.

Ewige Gedankenabschweifungen und Erzählungen u.A. über die Leute, die sie kennt oder glaubt zu kennen.

Sehr lustig, aber auch etwas tragisch. Super unterhaltsam geschrieben. Nicht lang. Empfehlung! Man sollte allerdings vielleicht nicht zu zart besaitet sein.

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

The best ice fishing in the Solar System is worth finding

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 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

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
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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...

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

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:

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

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...

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...

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

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 ...

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...

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

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/

Ronald 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.