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I ran across this post on Instagram by Bobby in Space (who posts about design and the psychology of place) and wanted to pull it onto the actual internet. Here are some snippets of his “5 hills I will die on as someone who studies the psychology of place”. I don’t think thes...

Teaser trailer for season three of The Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power. Maybe this isn’t the best show in the world, but I have been enjoying it. I thought s02 was better than s01 so at least the trajectory is promising.

Anthropic tells investors quarterly revenue up nearly 50% to $16.8bn ahead of IPO The phrase "told investors" appears four times in this FT article, which reports on Anthropic's day of hosting investors on Wednesday. Lots of details in here from "people with knowledge of the...

"We are, moment by moment, doing less sensing, navigating, remembering, walking, choosing, and attending."

Tiny Little Office is “an office suite with no accounts and no server that holds your work. Every document lives in the address of its page… Copy the link and you have copied the document.” Includes a word processor, spreadsheet, calculator, etc.

By studying fire scars in ancient wood, many scientists have become convinced that Indigenous people transformed North America long before European colonizers arrived. M.R. O’Connor spends time with dendrochronologists, who study tree rings, and other experts to understand what they’re learning: Anthropologist Omer Stewart, who began documenting Native American burning practices in the nineteen-thirties . […]

Among a collection’s many skulls, a grieving son learns how to live in a world that keeps going.

Explanation: The city lights outshine the stars in the City That Never Sleeps. Who would have thought that the Milky Way could be visible in this sky? This image was taken with a filter that blocks most visible light, capturing instead only light in the near-infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum (with lower energy than visible light). The astrophotographer's clever setup blocks most of the light pollution from the city: old incandescent light bulbs and some neon lights are still bright in the near-infrared, but fluorescent and LED light bulbs are not. Of course, stars are also bright in the near-infrared! This image is a reminder that we all live under the same sky, and astronomy allows all of us to learn more about humanity's place in the Cosmos.

Tomorrow's picture: Chasing the ISS

Today we're powering up our metal detectors and keeping a very close eye on the surface of the earth as we set out in the hunt for meteorites with Steve Arnold, who’s been in the game for more than three decades. If you want to learn more, check out Steve’s website, and read this profile of the meteorite hunting community.

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Tool: Tree Appreciator

Another game experiment with Claude. This one used the default Claude iPhone app (chat mode, not Claude Code mode) where I prompted Claude Opus 5.5 Max with:

Build a three js game called "Tree appreciator" - it shows you two algorithmically generated trees and the game mechanics is about appreciating the differences between them. Think hard about how to make sure it is both fun and beautiful.

Somewhat embarrassingly given my recent talk, I've found that telling Opus 5.5 "make sure it is fun" works uncomfortably well. In this case Claude crunched for 3 hours and 7 minutes before retuning a cosy little spot-the-difference game with music and animation and achievements that's quite compelling to play.

Tags: game-design, javascript, ai, generative-ai, llms, claude, vibe-coding, three-js

From a 2014 article on The Dark Power of Fraternities by Caitlin Flanagan, this is one hell of an opening paragraph: One warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West...

Now on view in Austin, the Haas Brothers' mid-career retrospective plunges visitors into their fantasy world.

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 Welcome to the ‘Uncanny Valley,’ the Haas Brothers’ Fantastic and Cheeky Universe appeared first on Colossal.

30 years ago, DJ Shadow released his debut album, Entroducing… and it changed my life. I listened to it so much. And when I first started Song Exploder, he was on my list of dream guests. And then 10 years ago, that dream came true, and I got to make an episode with him in honor of the 20th anniversary of the album. Well, now it’s the 30th anniversary, and DJ Shadow is on tour this fall, celebrating it with a set that just focuses on songs from Endtroducing… And, there’s a special edition of the album on vinyl. So, in the spirit of all that, I wanted to go back to this episode of Song Exploder from back in 2016. 

For more info, visit songexploder.net/dj-shadow.

Login looks simple until you’re building password resets, email verification, MFA, social providers, session management, and the enterprise SSO your first big customer asked for last week.

AuthKit lets you:

• Offer SSO, MFA, passkeys, passwords, email codes, and social sign-in
• Add and remove users automatically with SCIM provisioning
• Track who did what with audit logs

Try AuthKit →

Link: workos.com/?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=newsletter…

The Department of Justice, yesterday: An employee of OpenAI has been arrested for and charged with using or endeavoring to use an electronic, mechanical, or other device to intercept oral communications. Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, a national of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,...

It’s time to de-privatize the US government. “The problem is not just that privatization is often inefficient because it adds a nontransparent layer of profiteering on top of government functions. The problem is that government loses basic capacity.”

Q: “An AI tool with all your passwords or a bear in the woods?” Signal president Meredith Whittaker: “Look, I know social media wants this. I know you guys want this little clip. But what the fuck? What the fuck?? Both are bad!”

See 'Radiant Geometries: Vectors of Knowledge from the Indigenous Americas' at the Moody Center for the Arts in Houston.

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 ‘Radiant Geometries’ Illuminates Teachings and Technologies in the Indigenous Americas appeared first on Colossal.

Here are some photos I’ve taken during my time in Tokyo so far. I’ve been posting new stuff more or less daily to Instagram. Somehow I’m already about halfway through my stay. Somehow these images both capture and don’t even come close to capturing my experience here. That kinda place, I guess. Tags: Japan · Jason Kottke · photography