Half in the Bag: 2026 Mid-year Catch-up (part 1)

Ik kan niet in woorden uitdrukken hoe hard ik houd van RedLetterMedia. Hun babbel over ouder worden en youtubers en alles — hit me right in the feels, yo.

Coding a brick tower

Inigo Quilez doet shaders. Ik stop alles en kijk. Punt.

Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can’t Show You – Ryan Moulton's Articles

There are colors that I want to show you, but I can’t. They exist in the real world. You probably saw some of them today, but I can’t show them to you on a screen. A digital photograph can’t capture them, and your screen can’t display them. No game you’ve ever played has contained them. Unless you have specialized equipment, they are entirely absent from the digital world. Most of them are cyans. On screens we live a life starved of cyans. It is shocking when you see one in person. They seem unfamiliar and intense in an otherworldly way. I want you to experience that, but again, I can’t show them to you. Instead, I have to show you how to find them in the real world.

Bigger models are not the way

The biggest models in the world clearly score the highest on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. Yet, Z.ai’s newest, GLM-5.2 (753B parameters, roughly 40B active), comes within just 4 points of GPT-5.5 and 9 points of Fable 5. Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 are proprietary and estimated to be in the 1-2T parameter range conservatively. If an open weight (MIT licensed) LLM can come so close to a closed weight model estimated to be 1.5 to 2 times bigger, it is clear that actual intelligence has plateaued significantly.

Wordle’s Hard Mode Is Actually Easier, 730 Million Games Show – The New York Times

David Epstein, author of “Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better,” said in an interview that in any area of life, “when options are really large” there’s a tendency to “back out of a decision or make a poor one.”

Previewing GPT-5.6 Sol: a next-generation model | OpenAI

We're beginning a limited preview of the GPT‑5.6 series: Sol, our flagship model; Terra, a balanced model for everyday work; and Luna, a fast and affordable model. Terra has competitive performance to GPT‑5.5 while being 2x cheaper and Luna brings strong capability at our lowest cost.

Political bias in AI · Where the AI models stand | Trakkr

We ask every major AI model the same charged questions about politics, economics, speech and society, many times over, with web search turned off. Each one shows up as a cloud: the full range of where it landed across every run. The result is a map of how the models actually lean, read from the model itself and not from what it pulls off the web.

Data Viz Color Palette Generator (for Charts & Dashboards)

Use the palette chooser to create a series of colors that are visually equidistant. This is useful for many data visualizations, like pie charts, grouped bar charts, and maps.

OpenUI – The Open Standard for Generative UI

An open source toolkit to make your AI agents respond with your UI.

ui, AI

Newly described Australian ballista spider builds a spring-loaded snare to catch a single ant species

An international team of researchers has discovered a remarkable new spider species in the rainforest of North Queensland that spins an ingenious and powerful spring-actuated snare to catch a single species of ant—one ant at a time—in what they describe as "the ultimate specialization."