Lynn Cherny
@arnicas
Into creative ML/AI, NLP, data science and digital humanities, narrative, infovis, games, sf & f. Consultant, ds in Residence at Google Arts & Culture. (Lyon, FR) Newsletter arnicas.substack.com.
Map from Le Monde of active European fires - look at Malta and Northern Africa egad
40 mins from me is a municipal campground on a hill, in trees, that is 5 degrees cooler and has a little bar/restaurant. it's always quiet, i think it's a very well kept secret.
OMG this french found fonts/letter-shapes site vernacular.fr/ — via Matt Muir's Web Curios. I'm in love and also why am I not camping in the french countryside rn, what is wrong with me
hmm, this is really something from the new Kimi - a new web design winner that's an open model.
While my quota lives, try my little telephone game set at an international cocktail party, using Google's cloud translation api - too much fun with Fable :) Audio recommended. Boy, translation has gotten really good, it's much harder to mess it up! try it at www.ghostweather.com/apps/cocktai...
I wasn’t aware of the subtleties of specific model performance at document analysis per arena votes. arena.ai/leaderboard/...
are you in the weights? Hilarious and fascinating including the mess ups intheweights.com
Wiki Spy from Neal.fun. That’s some solid image work - relevant to my interests - image search neal.fun/wiki-spy/?q=...
OpenRouter just launched a research oriented model “fusion” api, where you consult multiple models and get a synthesis. Turns out it’s pretty nifty for narrative summarization. Slow, but good at detecting and merging.
Ideogram 4 open model gave me an owl in the manuscript art and I didn’t even ask for it. Great text replication.
Terrific infovis site of the price of baguettes in France, via @mattmuir.bsky.social webcurios lebaguetteindex.fr#accueil
AND: Leonora Carrington exhibition at Musee Luxembourg is *outstanding*. Large show including watercolors from her at 15 🤯, interview where she talks in 3 langs, and solid focus on esotericism.
There’s also a pretty unbelievable Hilm af Klint exhibit at the Grand Palais (which also has late Matisse) - i had no idea how large and extensive her work was. Huge canvases.
BnF exhibition Cartes Imaginaires in Paris is really something - if you like sea monsters on old maps, and literary maps, don’t miss.
It’s hot in Paris, it was a long workday, but I was given a piscine de rosé
The Pudding on similes (in my nl narrative section this month) - pudding.cool/2026/05/simi...
maybe i need to write a how-to from Heathrow because it’s shockingly easy. I’m in a riverside pub hotel with a view:
Pub crawling Thames-side pubs while reading a ghost story, superb evening
If I’m getting the latest release of ChatGPT image (2), it doesn’t really have much knowledge behind it.
The Gemini app is fantastic for the kinds of travel research I regularly want - it has access to google maps, can make a mini map of results, and also can get google hotels data. It knows things about transport lines. So useful.
I tested out Seedance on Fal, spent too much, and ended up with a bunch of Veo + tons of good Nano Banana image edits to make this little fictionalized (based on true events) story of me and my drone at the Pont du Gard.
Miss Golden Gate Claude? Steer by anything at labs.ramp.com here’s alchemy -