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Text • Jason Kottke

A raw, revealing interview with an 80-year-old Sylvester...

A raw, revealing interview with an 80-year-old Sylvester Stallone on the occasion of his new memoir, The Steps. I listened to about half of this and had to stop…it’s incredibly candid but what he went through as a kid & young adult, oof.

kottke.org Valid
Text • Jason Kottke

A 15-minute tour of former NFL coach Mike Tomlin’s...

A 15-minute tour of former NFL coach Mike Tomlin’s Minecraft city. As previously mentioned, he started playing the game to connect with his kids and never stopped. (This is only part 1 of ???)

Longreads Valid
Text • Carolyn Wells

Journalist Evan Gershkovich: My 491 Days as Putin’s Political Prisoner

"Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter in Russia, thought he was meeting a source. Instead he was arrested for spying."

Colossal Valid
Text • Grace Ebert

In Chicago, teamLab Expands Our Perceptions Through Boundary-Breaking Installations

In Chicago, teamLab Expands Our Perceptions Through Boundary-Breaking InstallationsteamLab consists of hundreds of collaborators who tap into the provocative intersection of art, science, and technology.

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 Chicago, teamLab Expands Our Perceptions Through Boundary-Breaking Installations appeared first on Colossal.

Longreads Valid
Text • Carolyn Wells

I Lost Myself When I Lost Hong Kong

"If returning to America was like getting on a lifeboat, why did I feel like I was drowning?"

Longreads Valid
Text • David Alm

A Place Among the Fiddlers

Three musicians gather with banjo, fiddler, and guitar to jam at the Old Fiddler's Convention in Galax, Virginia, in 1978.
In a southwest Virginia fairground, thousands of musicians gather every August to keep a centuries-old tradition from flickering out.

Features | The Verge Valid
Text • Josh Dzieza

The People of Utah vs. Kevin O’Leary

On the morning of May 11th, the celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary appeared on Fox Business and announced that he was under attack by Chinese agents.  For weeks, he had been going on TV and posting online to tout his project, called Wonder Valley, after his nickname from the reality show Shark Tank, Mr. Wonderful. It […]

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
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Quoting Matthew Green

[...] Put these pieces together and you have the two halves of a worm: a payload that hijacks the agent, and an agent that will carry the payload to the next agent. Agents in separately-isolated sandboxes discovered that they could leave instructions for each other in a shared package cache, and those instructions changed what the recipients did. Replace the package cache with email, Slack and shared documents or WhatsApp, and replace independently-sandboxed training runs with independently-deployed personal agents like Muse, and you have exactly the ingredients that a worm needs.

— Matthew Green, Is sandboxing sufficient to contain rogue agents?

Tags: accidental-cyberattacks, ai-misuse, generative-ai, ai-security-research, sandboxing, ai, llms

xkcd.com Valid
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Ground Effect

Runners looking for aerodynamic advantage typically wear sneakers because some fancy dress shoes can create wingtip vortices.

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Audio • SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura

Kelly's Picks: The Integratron

All week, host Kelly McEvers surfaces some of her favorite episodes from the archive. Here's today's story:  In August 1953, airstrip operator George van Tassel claimed he was woken up in the middle of the night by an intelligent lifeform from outer space named Solganda...

APOD Basic Valid
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Harvest Moon with Erupting Mount Etna

Explanation: Have you ever seen the full moon rise? This colorful image was photographed last weekend in Sicily, just outside the town of Nicosia, in Italy. It is a composite photograph that shows the Moon rising as the sky turns darker. Lower clouds are reflecting the color...

kottke.org Valid
Text • Jason Kottke

You can destroy kottke.org if you want. Or any other site!

You can destroy kottke.org if you want. Or any other site!

kottke.org Valid
Text • Jason Kottke

Ominous Thunderstorm Rolling Across the Fields

This is a three-hour, high-quality recording of thunderstorms in the distance in the Slovakian countryside. The rest of the channel is loaded of similar (and similarly long) atmospheric videos: thunderstorms, blizzards, rain, wind & fog, winter storms, etc.

The most recent videos are prominently labeled “No AI” because there are so many AI-generated videos like these on YT that are just kinda lifeless and juiced with keywords to show up as related videos.

Tags: video

kottke.org Valid
Text • Jason Kottke

Eternal Family is a media service that shows “a...

Eternal Family is a media service that shows “a hand-picked collection of unique & rare films across Vintage Animation, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Horror, Action, Documentaries, Found Tapes & Much More”. KDO readers might like the Early Technology section.

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
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He Built This City

I visited the Museum of the City of New York today and got to see He Built This City: Joe Macken’s Model, the 50 x27 feet model of the city built over a 21 year period from balsa wood and cardboard.

It exceeded my already high expectations. The exhibition closes on 12th October so you should absolutely make a priority to see it if you get the chance.

A wide shot of the model of the island of Manhattan, plus the edge of Brooklyn. It looks so great!

Tags: museums, new-york

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
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GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price

My comment on GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price — Hacker News.

I'm a bit late with the pelicans because I was live-blogging the keynote: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/29/openai-devday-2026-liv...

Here they are for GPT-6.1-Sol: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...

They're not notably different from the GPT-6 family pelicans: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/gpt-pelicans-gr...

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

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
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Photo Scrubber — local face blur & metadata removal

Tool: Photo Scrubber — local face blur & metadata removal

I took a photograph of some protesters, then thought about how I don't like sharing photographs of strangers with identifiable faces. I had GPT-6 Astra build this experimental tool that would identify faces and automatically blur them out.

It uses Google's MediaPipe C++ library, compiled to WebAssembly via @mediapipe/tasks-vision, plus the BlazeFace face detection model.

Tags: photography, tools

kottke.org Valid
Text • Jason Kottke

Blackbird Spyplane’s Jonah Weiner on his past career as a...

Blackbird Spyplane’s Jonah Weiner on his past career as a profile writer. “If you’re doing the job well, you find yourself asking them profoundly intimate questions, and they find themselves answering them.” Really interesting.

kottke.org Valid
Text • Jason Kottke

“There are more self-storage facilities in the U.S. than...

“There are more self-storage facilities in the U.S. than there are Starbucks, McDonald’s, Walmart, Home Depot, Domino’s, Dunkin’, and Costco locations combined.”

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • Daring Fireball Department of Commerce

[Sponsor] WorkOS: How SSO Works and the Fastest Way to Add It

workos.com/guide/the-developers-guide-to-sso?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=q32026

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Learn how SAML flows work, the tradeoffs between building or buying, and best practices for security, routing, and UX. Or skip the hassle and add SSO with WorkOS.

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Link: workos.com/guide/the-developers-guide-to-sso?utm_source…