I've worked out why I don't get much value out of LLMs. The hardest and most time-consuming parts of my job involve distinguishing between ideas that are correct, and ideas that are pla…

Everything Google's Python team were responsible for In a questionable strategic move, Google laid off the majority of their internal Python team a few days ago. Someone on Hacker News aske…

Set up link checking on your docs-as-code projects. This post explains the key design decisions you'll need to take, and shows some sample code for implementing with GitHub actions. Continue reading &…

It's very fast to build something that's 90% of a solution. The problem is that the last 10% of building something is usually the hard part which really matters, and with a black box at…

This is a nice thing to end the week on: Yo-Yo Ma playing “Bach’s Prélude from Suite No. 2, amidst the melting permafrost on Lower Tanana Dene lands in Fairbanks, Alaska.” He was bro…

Yesss, Run Lola Run is returning to theaters for its 25th anniversary. A 4K digital restoration will start showing on June 7. I loved this movie — saw it in the theater when it came out but…

The first episode of the podcast featuring astrophysicist Katie Mack explaining the universe to John Green is up! It’s about the first two minutes of the universe. “We are not just made o…

Adam Roberts and his partner dined at Noma (aka “The Best Restaurant in the World”) and he was thwarted by some pre-meal queasiness & the challenging cuisine. “You don’t seem like you…

The Man Who Killed Google Search, i.e. how “growth-hungry managerial types” from Google’s ad business chased out the old search team “to make Google worse to make the company more mon…

If you’re auditioning for your job every day, and you’re auditioning against every other brilliant employee there, and you know that at the end of the year, 6% of you are going to get cut no…

This is great: a 25-minute interview with legendary animator Chuck Jones as he sits and draws some of his iconic characters (Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck). He told this anecdote about…

Feedbin has custom email addresses now so you can use a unique email address for each newsletter and not worry about a spam leak.…

Christopher Slayton built a bunch of iconic cosmic structures in Minecraft, including the Sun, the Pillars of Creation, galaxies, a supermassive black hole, and galaxies.…

An experimental data sonification of what a “decentralized, digitized, decarbonized electricity grid” would sound like. “Should we be dramatic, Hans-Zimmer-style ‘bahhhhhhhhnnnnn’ s…

Absolutely essential reading and viewing on how to produce captions with valuable real world examples of how to completely mess it up (and a lot of social posted videos do the bad mess version). As so…

Sounds like The Onion has been rescued from an agonizing death by private equity by an acquisition by people who actually care about it. “The Onion is just an institution. It should be pres…

Food Delivery Leak Unmasks Russian Security Agents This story is from April 2022 but I realize now I never linked to it. Yandex Food, a popular food delivery service in Russia, suffered a major…

…By the artist Skevoulla Gordon. (Prints are available, too, and she’s a good follow on Instagram!) Tags: art · bluebells · flowers · Skevoulla Gordon �…

The other day, the novelist Robin Sloan mentioned in his newsletter that he really liked the Financial Times. It seems everyone’s talking up the Financial Times lately, so I went and follow…

Here is a pleasantly painful trailer for a new movie from the filmmaker Joanna Arnow. It opens this Friday, April 26, at IFC and Lincoln Center in NYC. I don’t know if I’m going to watc…

Oh my gosh — this video about making the teeny-tiny sweaters seen in the movie Coraline! Says artist Althea Crome: I think knitters are often fascinated by the fact that I use such tiny n…

“I have no training for this work. I got the job by bringing in my posters to be framed … and asking the frame shop guy—my boss—if he needed an assistant.” I loved this essay about…

Hello! Here are a few more journal comics from last December, these are a bit cheerier than the ones from last week. Tags: comics 💬 Join the discussion on…

I love this: The Pudding ran an online experiment where they started with a shape (like a straight line or circle) and asked people to trace, as best they could, the tracing of the person bef…

Kelly Hayes: the double standards of conservatism (i.e. “there must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind…”) are about hierarchy (or caste, if you will). “They are outl…

On May 13th and 14th, I organise my annual stop of beyond tellerrand in Düsseldorf. If you are from Düsseldorf or arrive in Düsseldorf before you…

The Biden administration is imposing new regulations on coal burning power plants. “Taken together, the regulations could deliver a death blow in the United States to coal, the fuel that……

The only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down— Alex Jason, via Adam Savage…

As someone who is interested in birds but doesn’t know a whole lot about them, this new animated video series from Will Rose is right up my alley. What Bird Is That? is a beginners guide…

How teens benefit from having the choice to read “disturbing” books. They reported being more empathetic, thoughtful, happier, and better readers. I read a lot of “age-inappropriate”…

A Message from the Chancellor on the Recent Student Protest. “But this recent protest is different. These students will never inspire change. Fifty years from now, we will definitely not pr…

Just a few notes and linky-poos to end the week (technically it's Thursday, but Leigh and I are off to Madrid for the weekend!): Votre Saucisse est trés plastique There's a new episode of One Footer…

I’ve been at OpenAI for almost a year now. In that time, I’ve trained a lot of generative models. [...] It’s becoming awfully clear to me that these models are truly approximating their dat…

Blogmarks that use markdown I needed to attach a correction to an older blogmark (my 20-year old name for short-form links with commentary on my blog) today - but the commentary field has always…

No, Most Books Don't Sell Only a Dozen Copies I linked to a story the other day about book sales claiming "90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a do…

Snowflake Arctic Cookbook Today's big model release was Snowflake Arctic, an enormous 480B model with a 128×3.66B MoE (Mixture of Experts) architecture. It's Apache 2 licensed and Snowflake sta…

Dirk Hesse collects photos of creatives – and who isn’t creative – for his website “Le Bureau”. Mine was recently published and I wanted to…

What does it mean to “be a serious person”? I don’t know if I am one. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

Is the periodic table yummy? Well, it depends on the element. But if you’ve ever wondered if a little taste of xenon or iridium would do you any harm, this periodic table is for you. See…

“What would you consider as the most recognizable bitmap fonts in tech history?” Atari font, Chicago, Commodore 64 font, Minecraft font, London Underground digital marquee font, etc.…

The novelist R.O. Kwon: The Parents Who Regret Having Children. “It’s possible to have strong, lasting regrets about a life choice while ferociously loving — and caring for — the frui…

Steve Mould’s videos are always entertaining and informative but this one is also a little bit mind-blowing. If you build a circular trough with just the right dimensions and fill it with…

A Day in Tokyo: A 1968 Film Captures a City Reborn 23 Years After Its Destruction. “Bullet trains, high-speed expressways, and color television broadcasts were spreading throughout the land…

When I said “Send a text message to Julian Chokkattu,” who’s a friend and fellow AI Pin reviewer over at Wired, I thought I’d be asked what I wanted to tell him. Instead, the device simpl…

Oh, these old Japanese train tickets, sourced from this collector, are wonderful. So much design inspiration. You can find more at Present and Correct. See also Vintage Wee…

Two men swapped at birth – one Indigenous, one white – finally get apology. “To have the core understanding of who you are — and who your parents were and who your siblings were — t…

openelm/README-pretraining.md Apple released something big three hours ago, and I’m still trying to get my head around exactly what it is. The parent project is called CoreNet, described as �…

A bad survey won’t tell you it’s bad. It’s actually really hard to find out that a bad survey is bad — or to tell whether you have written a good or bad set of questions. Bad code will ha…

Designer/creative Connell McCarthy: “I got married and over-engineered everything.” He obviously designed everything — invites, website (using AWS!), signage — but also made custom ca…

In Bend, you can’t miss the illustration work of Megan Marie Myers. It’s absolutely everywhere. There are murals. There are calendars for sale everywhere. Prints are hung up at coffeeshops…

In the spirit of recommending things I truly love, I wanted to highlight the pottery of Northern California artist Naja Tepe. I’ve ordered from her twice now, and her work is fabulous. I…

Okay, here’s a toy car for actually cleaning floors. You load it up with paper towels and set the kids loose. It’s probably not something I need, but the reviews are strangely compelling.…

We [Bluesky] took a somewhat novel approach of giving every user their own SQLite database. By removing the Postgres dependency, we made it possible to run a ‘PDS in a box’ [Personal Data Ser…

Music for Programming, a collection of “the most compelling music for sustained concentration”. I love the interface. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org…

microsoft/Phi-3-mini-4k-instruct-gguf Microsoft’s Phi-3 LLM is out and it’s really impressive. This 4,000 token context GGUF model is just a 2.2GB (for the Q4 version) and ran on my Mac usin…

Fascinated by this “WTF Notebook” post because 1) it’s a really good listening/note-taking idea for new team members 2) applied for weirdly Machiavellian ends, e.g. wanting ppl to think…

Ok mountain bike nerds, I need your advice. Here’s my situation: I’ve been riding for 3.5 years now on a Kona Honzo hardtail (which I really love) and am pondering a full-suspension bik…

Llama 3 landed on Thursday. I ended up updating a whole bunch of different plugins to work with it, described in Options for accessing Llama 3 from the terminal using LLM. I also wrote up the tal…

Scientists have repurposed a 50-year-old drug to revolutionize bone marrow transplants. “Today, agonizing searches for a matched donor are largely a thing of the past” and “the drug cut…

Happy to announce that thanks to folks buying The Process Tee, we’ve donated a total of more than $4,700 to the National Network of Abortion Funds to aid them in their goal of “abortion a…

Sharks: “the scary triangles of the sea”. (What are the scary triangles of other places?) 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

The NY Times Style Magazine recently published an entire issue dedicated to “what it means start an artistic life”. I have only scratched the surface of this multi-article package, but I…

Why earthquakes on the East Coast are felt farther away than ones on the West Coast. It’s the age of the rock and the faults. 💬 Join the discussion on kottk…