FeedCity

This video from Practical Engineering was very illuminating to me, a naive person who thought there were only three types of electrical outlets used in the US — the two-prong, the three-prong, and the 240V — and not the real number, which is more than 35 types of electrical outlets! Oh and “two-prong”? Not that plug’s actual name! (via unsung)

Tags: electricity · engineering · video

Japanese book rave. A club in Tokyo spread carpets on the dance floor, played ambient music, and invited daytime clubgoers to chill out and read. Would 100% frequent a bookstore/cafe that did this regularly.

Knight conceived of 'Exhale' as a way to explore the nuances of color and "the emotional experience of looking."

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 Jonathan Knight’s Meditative Series ‘Exhale’ Invites Us to Slow Down and Practice Noticing appeared first on Colossal.

Weball allows you to roll up websites into a Katamari ball. You can even roll up KDO. This is too much fun. See also Destroy Any Website.

"Nature writing after everyone stopped paying attention."

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In this episode, I sit down with The National's Aaron Dessner. We talk about his unique musical background, friendly competition with his bandmate and twin brother Bryce, and his prolific collaborations; from indie artists like Bon Iver and Sufjan Stevens, to Pop stars like ...

It might be that this text-only quiz game from 1993 is the most challenging F1 video game of all time. Here are a couple of the 23 questions from Gerhard Berger’s Formula 1 Quiz: 3. Which team was the best in the 80’s? Statistically, it’s McLaren, but that’s not a correct ...

Everyone is very concerned about being respectable, so I’m going to be the goofball who raises worst-case possibilities. I think there is a 1% chance we live in Minicrypt, and a 15% chance we functionally lose confidence in our existing public-key encryption algorithms. [...]

The problem here is that the speed of AI producing surprises, and the speed of human beings replacing standards (even with the very best AI assistance) are just orders of magnitude different. You only recover from a surprise like this if you do the preparation in advance.

— Matthew Green, on Twitter. I looked it up and Minicrypt is Russell Impagliazzo’s hypothetical world in which public-key encryption is impossible.

Tags: ai-security-research, matthew-green, cryptography, standards, llms, ai, generative-ai

Guo's paintings in 'Temple II,' opening next week at Hollis Taggart, explore memory, presence, and loss.

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 Symmetry Meets the Sacred in Shuling Guo’s Dreamy, Diffused Paintings appeared first on Colossal.

I just went down a rabbit hole of incense seals. So cool.

Font scaling support on mobile devices has been added. If you use iOS'/iPadOS' system wide font scaling (“Dynamic Type”) or Android’s equivalent, FeedCity will now honour these settings and scale its pages accordingly.

(On iOS, this raises the default font size from 16px to 17px, which I currently do not “correct”. So type is slightly larger by default. Currently, I have kept it like this. I don’t know, if it’ll stay larger.)

I shipped a new feature for my blog today: the Newsletters page, which offers an index of all of the newsletters I've sent out, both my free weekly Substack and my monthly sponsors-only updates. I built the feature almost entirely using my voice, chatting away to my laptop w...

Bill McKibben: I’m Exhausted. You’re Demoralized. We Weren’t Built for a World Like This. The human nervous system wasn’t designed for the polycrisis. “Among all the other dangers these developments represent, they’re simply wearing us out.”

In less than four years, mathematician Steve Strogatz watched AI go from flailing at basic arithmetic to solving problems that baffle the world’s best mathematicians. In September of 2026, Open AI announced it had solved a Millennium Prize Problem, one of math’s highest achi...

Last week, I received a nice comment about my little 35mm Focal Length
Equivalents site (short: FLE). And that was enough motivation to improve
the site. I still had - and still have - ideas to improve the site, and so
I spent some hours to make it a little better.

Stories on the color orange, the data center rush, a local hero, the AI labour takeover, and a boy dinner subreddit.

On Fridays this October, we're surfacing strange, incredible, sometimes haunted and sometimes spooky places. This episode takes us back to1976, when a television crew filming an episode of the show “The Six Million Dollar Man” descended on a rundown funhouse in Long Beach, California. While filming, they accidentally broke the arm off a wax dummy. Except...it wasn't a wax dummy. It was a real body. The body of a notorious train robber from the early 1900s, named Elmer McCurdy. Check out the Atlas entry for Elmer McCurdy’s grave.  

For more information on Elmer, we recommend Mark Svenvold’s book “Elmer McCurdy: The Misadventures in Life and Afterlife of an American Outlaw.” 

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Release: ttok 1.0

I released ttok 0.4, ran uv tool upgrade ttok, piped a file into the new version... and realized that it was defaulting to the GPT-4 tokenizer when it should very clearly default to GPT-5/GPT-6 instead!

I figured switching the default was a reasonable excuse to finally ship a 1.0.

OpenAI haven't actually confirmed that GPT-6 uses the same tokenizer as the GPT-5 family yet - there's an angry issue about it - but I found this commit by William Liu which reports on an experiment he ran confirming that the tokenizers are likely the same:

All seven GPT models (5.5, 5.6 Sol/Terra/Luna, 6 Astra/Sol/Luna) report 44,794 tokens and match each other on every one of the 31 fixtures. GPT-6 introduces no input-count change on this corpus.

Tags: projects, ai, openai, generative-ai, llms, tokenization

Explanation: Stickney Crater, the largest crater on the martian moon Phobos, is named for Chloe Angeline Stickney Hall, mathematician and wife of astronomer Asaph Hall. Asaph Hall discovered both the Red Planet's moons in 1877. Over 9 kilometers across, Stickney is nearly ha...