Folks, I can’t even today. I gotta tap out. I hope to be back with you tomorrow. Tags: kottke.org · video…

First look at the modern attr() Chrome 133 (released February 25th 2025) was the first browser to ship support for the advanced CSS attr() function (MDN), which lets attr() be used to compose va…

smartfunc Vincent D. Warmerdam built this ingenious wrapper around my LLM Python library which lets you build LLM wrapper functions using a decorator and a docstring: from smartfunc import backe…

Minimal CSS-only blurry image placeholders Absolutely brilliant piece of CSS ingenuity by Lean Rada, who describes a way to implement blurry placeholder images using just CSS, with syntax like t…

I started using Claude and Claude Code a bit in my regular workflow. I’ll skip the suspense and just say that the tool is way more capable than I would ever have expected. The way I can use it…

M. Gessen: Unmarked Vans. Secret Lists. Public Denunciations. Our Police State Has Arrived. “The United States has become a secret-police state. Trust me, I’ve seen it before.”…

Nature poll of 1600 US scientists: 75% are considering leaving the country, “many said they were looking for jobs in Europe and Canada” or “anywhere that supports science”.…

Clickens! Judge paintings of chickens based on characteristics like persistence, altruism, petulance, clairvoyance, and friendliness. 💬 Join the discussion on…

Lots of great comments from students, parents, and faculty in “The End of College Life?” thread about how they’re thinking about the changes to higher education in the US under the Trum…

Timothy Snyder: “The American imperialism directed towards Denmark and Canada is not just morally wrong. It is strategically disastrous.”…

An E-Bike Transformed My Family’s Life. “I felt connected to our neighborhood in a way I hadn’t ever experienced.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org…

Margaret Sullivan on “the need for straight talk right now. Enough with soft-pedaling from the media. Clarity! Courage! The truth!”…

Composite primary keys in Django Django 5.2 is out today and a big new feature is composite primary keys, which can now be defined like this: class Release(models.Model): pk = models.Composi…

This ProPublica story about ICE deportation flights, with intel from flight attendants who work them, is horrific. “Don’t talk to the detainees. Don’t feed them. Don’t make eye contac…

Oh man, rest in peace to Val Kilmer. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

“Watch the moment when Cory Booker ended his more than 25-hour long Senate speech.”…

On April 5th, a group of prominent national organizations (including 50501, Indivisible, Hands Off, MoveOn, and Women’s March) and many local organizations are all coming together for a d…

A two-part online training event on the Fundamentals of Organizing. It kicked off tonight at 5:30pm ET and part 2 is on April 8.…

The record for the longest individual speech in the Senate belongs to segregationist Strom Thurmond. He spoke for 24 hours & 18 minutes in a racist and futile attempt to prevent the Civil Rig…

Mercator Extreme is a fun tool that you can use to choose any point on Earth as the pole and then view the resulting ultra-distorted Mercator map. 💬 Join the…

With a headline like this, how can you resist? On the Best (Worst) Best Man Speech Ever (at My Super Mario-Themed Wedding). “After he finished his speech, he received applause and cheers fr…

“A fragile 13th century manuscript fragment, hidden in plain sight as the binding of a 16th-century archival register, has been discovered in Cambridge and revealed to contain rare medieval…

No One Is Safe From America’s Abusive Immigration Authorities Anymore. “Immigration agents are increasingly using the full statutory powers that they always had, choosing to detain, abuse…

Historian Heather Cox Richardson says that Facebook is removing her posts. Her two most recent posts, both critical of the Trump regime, are not on the platform anymore.…

From Aubrey Hirsch, It Could Be Much, Much Worse, an illustrated guide to what health care and insurance was like in the US before the ACA. You can also find this guide on Instagram.…

Of Course Trump Will Tank the Economy. It’s What Republicans Do. “They screw up the economy. Later down the line, Democrats get elected and have to fix everything.”…

Half Stack Data Science: Programming with AI, with Simon Willison I participated in this wide-ranging 50 minute conversation with David Asboth and Shaun McGirr. Topics we covered included applic…

In this 10-minute video, John Lithgow reads each of the lessons from Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (Bookshop). Number two: defend institutions.…

Tressie McMillan Cottom: AI is mid tech for mid tasks. “The use cases for artificial intelligence across every domain of work and life have started to get silly really fast.”…

There’s some fantastic UI inspiration on Fancy Components. I can already here the grumblings around practicality, accessibility, React, etc, but let’s park all that for a bit and just enjoy some…

Pydantic Evals Brand new package from David Montague and the Pydantic AI team which directly tackles what I consider to be the single hardest problem in AI engineering: building evals to determi…

Senator Cory Booker is holding the floor of the Senate and says he “will speak for as long as I’m physically able to lift the voices of Americans who are being harmed and not being heard…

We’re planning to release a very capable open language model in the coming months, our first since GPT-2. [...] As models improve, there is more and more demand to run them everywhere. Through…

If you need a distraction: 368 Chickens. Line up the chickens to rescue them. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

debug-gym New paper and code from Microsoft Research that experiments with giving LLMs access to the Python debugger. They found that the best models could indeed improve their results by runnin…

The United States Disappeared Tracker is “tracking persons politically arrested, detained, or disappeared by the Trump regime since March 9, 2025”.…

The view from Europe, courtesy of Zeit Online: Thanks America, That’ll Be All. “Now that lunacy has installed itself in Washington for the next four years, the time has finally come for E…

With the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and, especially, again in 2024, the adjacent possible of American society has shifted dramatically. For the Washington Post, Philip Bump asked a numb…

White House Correspondents’ Dinner Scraps Host In Favor Of Terrified Silence. “While we respect the legacy of a presidential roast, if you so much as cough, you will be forcibly removed.�…

A thread from Berkeley political science professor Omar Wasow about how protests are effective actually. Cites research about the Women’s March, BLM protests, the Muslim ban protests, etc.…

I have one kid entering college this fall and one a few years away, so I’ve been thinking (with fury and sadness) about the effect that Trump’s authoritarian regime is having on American…

DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Code Base in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse. This will not work — ok, actually it will totally work to achieve the long-time conservative goal of gut…

Roxane Gay and Debbie Millman are buying The Rumpus. “They are committed to staying true to the magazine’s core mission of publishing both emerging and established risk-taking writers and…

“The federal government isn’t just pressuring universities over speech — it’s literally disappearing students for their political expression. If you support actual free speech, now is…

From the Center for Third World Organizing, an Organizing 101 bootcamp, “a multi-day day intro to organizing training designed for organizers, activists and community leaders”.…

Geri and I have made several trips to the Bonavista Peninsula whilst visiting her home province. It’s probably my favourite area of Newfoundland, with its wild coastli…

My advice about using AI is simple: use AI as an assistant, not an expert, and use it judiciously. Some people will object, “but AI can be wrong!” Yes, and so can the internet in general, but…

I have spent the last three days in London. To meet a few friends, but mainly to attend State of the Browser. While I have been there, I took a few p…