MHKBB posted a photo:
Paimio Sanatorium
Finland
Camera: Hasselblad 503CW
Lens: Carl Zeiss Planar T* 2.8/80 C
Film: Ilford XP2 Super
Lab: Prolab, Stuttgart
Briton destroys 800m field in hooded black bodysuit
Mill Hill event more like a rave than an athletics meeting
Athlos arrived in London promising that its all-female spin on athletics would provide a radical departure from the status quo. Long before Keely Hodgkinson stepped on to the track dressed in a hooded black bodysuit – part ninja assassin, part Catwoman – it had emphatically made its point.
Throughout the two-hour event, the bassline from the aptly named DJ Trauma carried enough force to make eardrums bleed. The stadium PA appeared to be permanently stuck on the Spinal Tap 11 dial. And those who successfully scanned a barcode were then shown dancing and waving on a giant screen.
Continue reading...Those early season thoughts that Chelsea might be the team best placed to challenge Arsenal are beginning to look over-optimistic. The two chaotic wins with which they began the season were always difficult to read: they might have been useful points picked up on the way to a more solid structure, or they might have represented evidence of significant problems. After three games without a win, it’s beginning to look like the latter.
Brentford’s first home win over Chelsea since 1938 means they remain unbeaten, third in the table, coherent and disciplined. The comparison is impossible not to draw: as one side flails in an orgy of structured spending, their far less wealthy neighbours thrive with a clear plan and sense of direction.
Continue reading...
Anthropic on Friday surprised the developer community by supporting rival OpenAI's mechanism for passing marching orders to AI agents. This makes life easier for folks who use both platforms. "We're adding support for AGENTS.md to Claude Code," said Claude Code engineer Thariq Shihipar in a social media post. "Starting today in version 2.1.277, if there is no CLAUDE.md in a folder, Claude will check for and use AGENTS.md." Claude Code users can toggle this behavior, he said, with the /config command. Until now, developers who use Claude Code alongside OpenAI Codex or other non-Anthropic tools have had to maintain two sets of Markdown instructions for their AI agents: CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md, not to mention project-specific versions of these files. These documents get read by coding agents with every request. They outline expected behavior, preferred tool usage, coding conventions, and so on. They lay the foundation of the agent's context. The two formats are similar but not identical – CLAUDE.md may contain Claude-specific instructions while AGENTS.md is intended to be tool agnostic. Because these documents can change, those working with AI agents have implemented various workarounds, like creating symlinks to keep CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md in sync. Last year, OpenAI contributed AGENTS.md to the Agentic AI Foundation, under the Linux Foundation, in a bid to build support for its standard. As of December 2025, more than 60,000 open source projects implemented AGENTS.md. The popularity of Claude Code has given Anthropic the latitude to insist on its own standards, but it appears the company has decided there's nothing to be gained from continued specification separatism. For those who use AI coding tools, this detente is an event of modest significance. Many widely followed software developers applauded the decision in social media posts. Thibault Sottiaux, OpenAI's head of core product, remarked, "Yay! This is the way. Come to the light," to which Shihipar responded with the handshake emoji (🤝). It's enough to bring a tear to the eye. ®
The software engine underpinning GitHub Copilot and a growing number of Microsoft products is now written entirely in Rust, with AI agents doing most of the porting work. The migration cost about $120,000 in AI token usage plus about three weeks of a developer's time. However, managers also had to grapple with a few dozen regressions in the resulting code, pointing to AI’s ongoing challenges in understanding Rust. The effort updated the runtime module-by-module until the job was completed, spanning over 135 releases across a 14.5-week time period. Roughly 1.3 port pull requests were opened per day. Overall, agents converted 430,000 lines of TypeScript into 800,000 lines of production Rust. To keep the port as simple as possible, the port only replaced TypeScript modules on a case-by-case basis. It didn’t look to optimize the structure of the runtime itself. That work is next. And Rust, known for its lean performance, did not disappoint. One benchmark measured how quickly the runtime could complete 1,000 one-turn session lifecycles, using a shared client and 100 concurrent pipelines. The original TypeScript implementation completed 7.55 of those lifecycles per second, while Rust running in-process managed 120 per second - representing a 15.9x speedup on that particular workload. In terms of memory, a 10-client batch of agents consumed 1,383 MB with TypeScript while the Rust rewrite consumed only 126 MB serving the same swarm. Within Rust, the work remained in-process instead of spawning external background processes for completion, a requirement for TypeScript. Copilot from VS Code to Microsoft Office At first glance, most users may not know how pervasive the Copilot runtime is. It backs the GitHub Copilot command-line interface (CLI), the Copilot app, the SDK and the GitHub Copilot cloud agent. It shows up in VS Code, Visual Studio, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and innumerable other Microsoft cloud services. Originally, the runtime was written in TypeScript and used Node.js as the framework and V8 for the execution engine. TypeScript and Node were ace for rapid development, but when used at scale, they suffered in terms of providing fast start-up and server density. “This is in no way a claim that every large TypeScript program should become Rust. Our requirements emphasized embedding through a C ABI, low startup and steady-state overhead, and predictable resource use. Rust made those goals possible,” wrote Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Stephen Toub in a post that explained the entire process. The project used Copilot to rewrite Copilot, which in turn used several LLMs – GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Opus 4.8 were both namechecked – to execute different parts of the job, depending on each LLM’s natural strength. Well-read but chatty agents Toub assessed the use of agents as largely successful. Indeed, this project would have taken years and cost millions if done by hand. Agents showed several surprising emergent behaviors, Toub noted. For one, they spent far more time gathering information than actually writing code. “The popular image of AI spewing code is almost backwards; at this scale, the work looked much more like iterative investigation, inspecting the current state, forming a hypothesis, making a targeted change, rinsing and repeating,” he wrote. Another surprise was how frequently sessions interacted with other sessions, either those they spawned or other ones entirely. One of the thorniest conversions was the session.ts file, which was over 30,000 lines of TypeScript that touched all aspects of the runtime. The porting session, which ended up taking 25 hours to complete, began by spending 56 minutes reading the documentation and making 122 tool calls for clarification. It then spawned 15 child sessions, each creating its own worktree and agent. Then, they started communicating with each other. Using a built-in orchestration skill, one session found every other active session and sent messages to those whose missions overlapped, requesting coordination. The compiler is a teacher, not an oracle Given its performance benefits, Rust has proven to be a popular language for rewriting applications. Bun creator Jarred Sumner, for instance, recently ported the Anthropic-owned JavaScript runtime and toolkit, which contained roughly 535,000 lines of Zig code, over to Rust, almost entirely using Claude agents. As of July 30, the experimental Rust port was passing 99.8 percent of Bun's existing tests on Linux x64 glibc, with the stable releases still shipping from the Zig codebase. That job cost $165,000 in tokens. But there are hidden dangers in using Rust as well, as Toub has found. For an LLM and a lazy programmer alike, if the code compiles, then it is valid Rust. But throughout the process, the project encountered dozens of regressions within the code. A regression is something that used to work, but no longer does after an update. The compiler has no idea, for instance, whether functions are in the right order, whether the job completes at an acceptable cost, whether it meets the developer's unwritten requirements, or whether it is internally coherent at all, for that matter. At RustConf, held in Montréal last week, consultant Lisa Crossman warned about the practice of treating the compiler as an “oracle,” or the last word on whether some Rust code is valid or not. “Rust stops the agent writing memory unsafe code; it does not stop the agent writing the wrong program correctly,” she said. If they’re wise, a human developer treats the compiler as a teacher, decoding the errors as a path to a better understanding of the language’s domain. An LLM, on the other hand, just uses the compiler as a black box, one it can batter with blunt, inefficient workarounds until one passes muster (perhaps this is what Zig creator Andrew Kelley meant when he called Bun’s Rust code “unreviewed slop”). In Toub’s case, he had found that compiler-approved regressions could come from ambiguous semantics and behaviors, branch drift, missing features that weren’t ported over, and differing behaviors from the replacement code. “That’s in no way an argument against Rust’s compiler,” Toub wrote. “But ‘if it compiles, it’s correct’ is useful only as a joke.” ®
In 2021, America approved $65 billion to fund broadband internet services as part of President Biden's Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. But Trump's administration announced they'd withhold funds from states with net neutrality protections...
States could object and sue the government, Ars Technica reported last October, "but even a successful lawsuit could take years and leave unserved homes without broadband for the foreseeable future." So where does that leave California's net neutrality laws? Ars Technica asks. California expect to spend about $1.4 billion to deploy broadband to 270,571 locations...
Similar to federal net neutrality rules repealed during the first Trump administration, California's law prohibits ISPs from blocking or throttling lawful traffic and says ISPs may not require fees from websites or online services to deliver or prioritize their traffic to Internet users. While the first Trump administration lost its attempt to preempt state net neutrality laws, the second Trump administration is trying to achieve a similar result by making federal broadband money conditional on whether states agree not to enforce net neutrality...
California and Illinois are the only states that haven't finalized their funding, according to the BEAD progress dashboard maintained by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA)... California could try to continue enforcing its net neutrality law even while accepting the federal funding, a strategy that would involve another long court battle over its right to regulate broadband providers. This would be difficult, as the Trump administration is requiring states that accept grant funding to commit that they won't enforce net neutrality rules... [N]early 30 advocacy groups that focus on access to technology are treating the vote as a significant milestone and urged state leaders to defend California's net neutrality law in a letter yesterday...
Winning a court battle would become much more difficult after the state accepts the money [according to Paul Goodman, legal counsel for the Center for Accessible Technology]. Goodman said the CPUC should delay the vote and that California should file a lawsuit arguing that the NTIA-imposed condition is illegal. In addition to net neutrality, Goodman said California may be giving up other regulatory authority over companies, like AT&T and Verizon, because the NTIA requirement forbids rate regulation and "utility-style rules on broadband Internet service" in general... Goodman said the exemption from state laws would last for up to 14 years. This is because ISPs receiving grants would have four years to deploy the required broadband networks, and the extended period of performance lasts another 10 years... AT&T is already trying to get out of state obligations related to its basic phone service in California, as we've reported... [Also at stake is whether "ISPs themselves get to pick the price of the mandated low-cost broadband offerings," the article points out.]
The letter from 30 advocacy groups to California state leaders argues accepting the money "would set a dangerous precedent for the federal government to use federal funding as a cudgel that forces states in line with its agenda... If California were to allow this funding to be used as leverage, there is no telling what other resources the administration would confidently seek to exploit."
Thursday California's Public Utility Commission did vote to approve the plan, but a spokesperson earlier told Ars Technica their vote "does not address subgrantee agreements, or the conditions the NTIA requires be included in subgrantee agreements."
States could object and sue the government, Ars Technica reported last October, "but even a successful lawsuit could take years and leave unserved homes without broadband for the foreseeable future." So where does that leave California's net neutrality laws? Ars Technica asks. California expect to spend about $1.4 billion to deploy broadband to 270,571 locations...
Similar to federal net neutrality rules repealed during the first Trump administration, California's law prohibits ISPs from blocking or throttling lawful traffic and says ISPs may not require fees from websites or online services to deliver or prioritize their traffic to Internet users. While the first Trump administration lost its attempt to preempt state net neutrality laws, the second Trump administration is trying to achieve a similar result by making federal broadband money conditional on whether states agree not to enforce net neutrality...
California and Illinois are the only states that haven't finalized their funding, according to the BEAD progress dashboard maintained by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA)... California could try to continue enforcing its net neutrality law even while accepting the federal funding, a strategy that would involve another long court battle over its right to regulate broadband providers. This would be difficult, as the Trump administration is requiring states that accept grant funding to commit that they won't enforce net neutrality rules... [N]early 30 advocacy groups that focus on access to technology are treating the vote as a significant milestone and urged state leaders to defend California's net neutrality law in a letter yesterday...
Winning a court battle would become much more difficult after the state accepts the money [according to Paul Goodman, legal counsel for the Center for Accessible Technology]. Goodman said the CPUC should delay the vote and that California should file a lawsuit arguing that the NTIA-imposed condition is illegal. In addition to net neutrality, Goodman said California may be giving up other regulatory authority over companies, like AT&T and Verizon, because the NTIA requirement forbids rate regulation and "utility-style rules on broadband Internet service" in general... Goodman said the exemption from state laws would last for up to 14 years. This is because ISPs receiving grants would have four years to deploy the required broadband networks, and the extended period of performance lasts another 10 years... AT&T is already trying to get out of state obligations related to its basic phone service in California, as we've reported... [Also at stake is whether "ISPs themselves get to pick the price of the mandated low-cost broadband offerings," the article points out.]
The letter from 30 advocacy groups to California state leaders argues accepting the money "would set a dangerous precedent for the federal government to use federal funding as a cudgel that forces states in line with its agenda... If California were to allow this funding to be used as leverage, there is no telling what other resources the administration would confidently seek to exploit."
Thursday California's Public Utility Commission did vote to approve the plan, but a spokesperson earlier told Ars Technica their vote "does not address subgrantee agreements, or the conditions the NTIA requires be included in subgrantee agreements."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Short essay about squid egg sacs.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Pamela Toler (History in the Margins, 9/5/26), "The Great Panic of 1893": "occasionally an event, or person, or book, or idea ... shows up in footnotes or casual asides ... if it's interesting or important enough, I share it ... Lately, the Great Panic of 1893 has become insistent." Neil Flanagan (The Birth of a Capital, 9/4/26), "How often do you think about the 1893 World's Fair?": "what draws us to an event, story, or image depends less on the context of the events than the context we inhabit." Photos / maps / VR of the fair. Foods, sweet treats, and "orange cider" of the fair. Pall Mall Magazine and RIBA Journal on the fair. And other magazines that began in 1893 feature Ida Tarbell on "Pasteur at Home," famous prints, rules for psychic / occult investigators, articles on orchidology and astronomy, "Last Week's Paris" followup on anarchists, and the first story of Sexton Blake.
One of the most intimate windows into an artist’s practice is their studio. While some creatives thrive on methodical organization and tidiness, others reach their flow state amid a cluttered chaos where dozens of ideas unfold at once. Whether at one end of this spectrum or somewhere in the middle, these spaces offer unique perspectives on both the artist and the masterpieces that emerge from their confines.
Forthcoming from Phaidon, Another View: The Vibrant World of Contemporary Black Artists invites readers into 20 distinctive studios. Celebrating some of the most prominent artists working today—such as Nick Cave, Nina Chanel Abney, Hank Willis Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems, Kerry James Marshall, and many more—the seminal volume highlights a range of behind-the-scenes material.
The introduction to Another View was written by lauded literary critic, filmmaker, and professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. who “explores the historical precedents and critical context that led to the exciting current moment of Black contemporary art in America,” writes Phaidon. Across nearly 200 pages, the book includes 150 never-before-seen photographs, exclusive interviews, and profiles.
Another View: The Vibrant World of Contemporary Black Artists is slated for release on October 28. Pre-order your copy in the Colossal Shop.
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 Step Inside the Studios of 20 Contemporary Black Artists in ‘Another View’ appeared first on Colossal.
Sojourn, Tim Kent
If you build it, they will come, Naoya Hatakeyama
Mixtape, Elizabeth Sue Foot (via stoppingoffplace)
New novel from Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven): Exit Party. “Los Angeles, 2031: The first spring after the collapse of the United States, peacekeeping troops withdraw from the city, the Jacaranda trees blossom, and the curfew is finally lifted.”
NEW YORK (ANP) - De beurzen in New York zijn vrijdag overwegend hoger gesloten. Beleggers beleefden een bewogen handelsweek waarin de Amerikaanse Federal Reserve de rente voor het eerst in drie jaar verhoogde. De rente op tienjarige Amerikaanse staatsobligaties liep ook weer op na een korte daling, door speculatie dat de hoge energiekosten inflatie kunnen aanwakkeren. Dat zou kunnen leiden tot een nieuwe renteverhoging van de Fed.
Nike was een van de verliezers op de beurs in New York. Het Amerikaanse sportmerk zag de Franse topvoetballer Kylian Mbappé vertrekken. Hij wordt het nieuwe boegbeeld van het Zwitserse sportmerk On, dat nu vooral in het hardlopen en tennis zit. De 27-jarige spits van Real Madrid was al sinds zijn negende verbonden aan Nike. Nike verloor ruim 2 procent.
De Dow-Jonesindex zakte 0,2 procent tot 51.682,64 punten. De brede S&P 500-index won 0,2 procent tot 7650,50 punten en techgraadmeter Nasdaq steeg 0,4 procent tot 26.522,55 punten.