Watching OpenAI's new o3 model guess where a photo was taken is one of those moments where decades of science fiction suddenly come to life. It's a cross between the Enhance Button and Omniscient…

Last September I posted a series of long ranty comments on Lobste.rs about the latest instance of the immortal conspiracy theory (here it goes again) about apps spying on you through your microph…

The Courage to Be Decent. “What matters is that acts we once took for granted as virtuous, routine, and safe — telling the truth, representing those oppressed by the state, … basic jour…

The $20,000 American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, and no touchscreen. “It’s a machine designed to be extremely basic, extremely customizable, and extremely affordable.�…

“If the Trump administration can get away with violating the Constitution because it knows the courts will be too slow to prevent it, then those constitutional rights simply no longer exist…

I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice and received the GPLv3 license Fun story from Mendhak who noticed that the GPLv2 license used to include this in the footer: You should have r…

For his most recent video, Beau Miles (who you might remember from his “Mile an Hour” Marathon or Four-Day Commute to Work Via Kayak) returned to a pair of places (both outdoor camps) w…

“In the 1980s and 1990s, PC Connection built its brand on a campaign starring folksy small-town critters. They’ll still charm your socks off.” 💬 Join th…

A few months ago, I wrote about Pee-wee as Himself, a two-part HBO documentary about the life and career of Pee-wee Herman (Paul Reubens) that had then just premiered at Sundance. Now we’…

Randall Munroe notes that the typical path to getting a Ph.D. at an American college or university has changed somewhat in the past few months. In the alt-text for the image, he notes: “R…

I’m increasingly grateful for work, but the last few months have been tough. Projects came thick and fast, overlapping with each other and a bombardment of life obstac…

As part of their Smithsonian purge, the Trump regime is dismantling and removing the Woolworth’s lunch counter (a key artifact of the Civil Rights Movement) from the NMAAHC and returning ot…

Fun fact: there's no rule that says you can't create a new blog today and backfill (and backdate) it with your writing from other platforms or sources, even going back many years. I'd love to see…

Earlier this week, Aaron found this clip featuring a set of twins who were eyewitnesses to an accident and who also speak mostly in unison. This short clip reveals more about the Powers si…

I had no idea Logan was lousy with snowy owls. “Known as the ‘owl man of Logan airport’, the raptor researcher has caught and released into the wild more than 900 snowy owls that decide…

Hmmm! Ken Burns & Lynn Novick are doing a 6-hour series on LBJ & the Great Society (to air in 2028). LBJ “voted against every civil rights bill during his tenure as congressman, then spearh…

The new Djrum album, Under Tangled Silence, is another captivating concoction of mind-boggling multi-genre club percussion scaffolding beautiful piano, harp and cello in…

Hey there, Creative Creatures. Here's issue #29 of Studio Notes—quick bits delivered to you each Friday. 🧑‍🌾 I watch a lot of YouTube boating and sailing channels, and long ago had ask…

Introducing Datasette for Newsrooms We're introducing a new product suite today called Datasette for Newsrooms - a bundled collection of Datasette Cloud features built specifically for investiga…

OpenAI: Introducing our latest image generation model in the API The astonishing native image generation capability of GPT-4o - a feature which continues to not have an obvious name - is now ava…

I used part three (here's parts one and two) of Dave Guarino's series on evaluating how well LLMs can answer questions about SNAP (aka food stamps) as an excuse to explore Promptfoo, an LLM eval…

Tina on the transformative power of enthusiasm When I was eight, I made a big, hand-drawn poster that said, “Do you want to join my fan club?” and put it up in the small Swiss town where I grew up…

Baby Steps is a forthcoming walking simulator game from the makers of QWOP (a ridiculously hard sprinting game) in which you walk around an open world. 💬 Join…

The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s 2019 sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, is getting a Hulu TV series of its own. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

Whose Streets? Our Streets! is an exhibition of photos of protests in NYC taken from 1980 to 2000 by dozens of photographers. New York’s streets were turbulent in the 1980s and 1990s…

Diane, I wrote a lecture by talking about it Matt Webb dictates notes on into his Apple Watch while out running (using the new-to-me Whisper Memos app), then runs the transcript through Claude t…

In today's example of how Google's AI overviews are the worst form of AI-assisted search (previously, hallucinating Encanto 2), it turns out you can type in any made-up phrase you like and tag "m…

Boston’s MFA had been working on transferring their Benin Bronzes back to their land of origin. But instead, the wealthy donor of the bronzes is taking them back and the gallery will close.…

Filmed at 780 fps with a Phantom Flex from the back of a moving SUV, James Nares’ Street depicts people walking New York streets in super slow motion. The film runs 60 minutes (depicting…

Trump Wants You to Think Resistance Is Futile. It Is Not. “There was no deal you could cut to save your Cloud City. You could either submit or resist. It is in the last two months that we h…

“Monarch Waystations are places that provide resources necessary for [monarch butterflies] to produce successive generations and sustain their migration.” Over 50,000 waystations (w/ milk…

Timothy Ryback on Hitler’s Terrible Tariffs. “By seeking to ‘liberate’ Germans from a globalized world order, the Nazi government sent the national economy careening backwards.” Hmm…

Trump ‘Alarmists’ Were Right. We Should Say So. “Put simply: It is that bad. Liberal democracy is in danger. Fascism is a reasonable term for what we’re fighting.”…

Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves From the Tyranny of the Automobile. “From the hosts of The War on Cars podcast, a searing indictment of how cars ruin everything, and what we can do to fi…

llm-fragment-symbex I released a new LLM fragment loader plugin that builds on top of my Symbex project. Symbex is a CLI tool I wrote that can run against a folder full of Python code and output…

I fixed our ten-year-old “Lady” Gaggia Classic. Two weeks without espresso was two weeks too long during the most intense work period of the last few years. I’ve o…

Despite being rusty with coding (I don't code every day these days): since starting to use Windsurf / Cursor with the recent increasingly capable models: I am SO back to being as fast in coding a…

An underestimated challenge in making productive use of LLMs is that it can feel like cheating. One trick I've found that helps is to make sure that I am putting in way more text than the LLM is…

How I’d Fix Atlanta. “In each of these essays, a citizen of Georgia’s capital argues for one way we could make our city better.” 💬 Join the discussion…

4x3 is a Connections-like game invented by Hank Green where you sort 9 words into 4 categories. Crucially, “one special word belongs to all 4 categories”. �…

Ryan Coogler’s next project is an X-Files reboot. “We’re going to try to make something really great, bro, and make something for the real ‘X-Files’ fans and maybe find some new one…

This is a visualization created on the screen of an oscilloscope by a musical piece: Primer is an introduction to oscilloscope music, a genre and art form where vector visuals are formed b…

Tool libraries offer community members access to “power washers, hammers, drills, cameras, lawn mowers, pet carriers, grills” and such to help with project. “There are no tariffs on sha…

I was against using AI for programming for a LONG time. It never felt effective. But with the latest models + tools, it finally feels like a real performance boost If you’re still holding out,…

Say the Words: American Concentration Camp. “What is happening now is not a deviation. It is an expansion. The tools were always there. The tools were always sharpened on Black bodies. They…

ClickHouse gets lazier (and faster): Introducing lazy materialization Tom Schreiber describe's the latest optimization in ClickHouse, and in the process explores a whole bunch of interesting cha…

Out today from chef, humanitarian, and activist José Andrés: Change the Recipe: Because You Can’t Build a Better World Without Breaking Some Eggs. 💬 Join…

Abusing DuckDB-WASM by making SQL draw 3D graphics (Sort Of) Brilliant hack by Patrick Trainer who got an ASCII-art Doom clone running in the browser using convoluted SQL queries running against…

Columbia Canceled My Course on Race and Media. I’m Going to Teach It Anyway. “This is not a time for media literacy or historical knowledge to be held hostage by institutions bending the…

Sherrilyn Ifill on those who got it wrong about Trump and the Republicans: If you have a public platform & spent years calming everyone down, telling us Trump was not a danger, was not racis…

A5 A5 is a new "global, equal-area, millimeter-accurate geospatial index" by Felix Palmer: It is the pentagonal equivalent of other DGGSs, like S2 or H3, but with higher accuracy and lower dist…

Trump Pretends He’s a Dictator — and the Credulous Media Too Often Nods Along. “It’s the media’s responsibility not to leave the public with a false impression.”…

Clint Smith visits the National Museum of African American History and Culture after Trump’s EO concerning “improper ideology” at the Smithsonian museums. “The real story of America i…

I am not shy to give interviews, but most of the times someone asks me for an interview I wonder if anyone actually is interested in the stuff I am d…

Working Through the Fear of Being Seen Heartfelt piece by Ashley Willis about the challenge of overcoming self-doubt in publishing online: Part of that is knowing who might read it. A lot of th…

“Chrysalis is a literary magazine by trans youth, for trans youth (created with a little help from trans adults).” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

The world’s political and economic systems can all unite over one central tenet: your mum does the washing. Libertarianism: Your mum does the washing. You believe you did the washing. E…

“This debate is entirely obsolete. To what extent is the constitutional order still in effect? If we must ask, we are fully in a crisis situation; once we don’t have to ask anymore, the c…

OpenAI o3 and o4-mini System Card I'm surprised to see a combined System Card for o3 and o4-mini in the same document - I'd expect to see these covered separately. The opening paragraph calls ou…

On Friday, Heather Cox Richardson spoke at an event marking the 250th anniversary of the lighting of the lanterns at Boston’s Old North Church. The lantern lighting — “one if by land, t…

Decentralizing Schemes Tim Bray discusses the challenges faced by decentralized Mastodon in that shared URLs to posts don't take into account people accessing Mastodon via their own instances, w…

Larry David: My Dinner With Adolf. “We need to talk to the other side — even if it has invaded and annexed other countries and committed unspeakable crimes against humanity.”…

After an old, unreleased song (and accompanying video) called Anxiety went viral on TikTok a couple of months back, Doechii released it as a single last month. And now it’s got a shiny ne…

A collection of movie mistakes, including a recently solved one from Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. “Movies are handmade, and just like any other art form, sometimes the seams that hold mo…

A depth comparison of shipwrecks around the world, from the Mary Rose (~40 feet deep) to the WWII warship USS Johnston (~21,200 feet) and everything in-between (Andrea Doria, German u-boats,…

For the past two and a half years the feature I've most wanted from LLMs is the ability to take on search-based research tasks on my behalf. We saw the first glimpses of this back in early 2023,…