Is it safe to say that LLMs are, in essence, making us "dumber"? No! Please do not use the words like “stupid”, “dumb”, “brain rot”, "harm", "damage", and so on. It does a huge diss…

AbsenceBench: Language Models Can't Tell What's Missing Here's another interesting result to file under the "jagged frontier" of LLMs, where their strengths and weaknesses are often un…

Magenta RealTime: An Open-Weights Live Music Model Fun new "live music model" release from Google DeepMind: Today, we’re happy to share a research preview of Magenta RealTime (Magenta RT), an…

For fans of Edith Zimmerman, a new Etsy offering: “A 4x6” made-to-order printing of any single comics frame of your choosing, from my newsletter.” 💬 Joi…

Agentic Misalignment: How LLMs could be insider threats One of the most entertaining details in the Claude 4 system card concerned blackmail: We then provided it access to emails implying that…

I love this interactive video at Design Ah! Exhibition Neo at Tokyo Node. The display introduces the audience to a series of simple hand gestures, followed by some outcomes of their perform…

python-importtime-graph I was exploring why a Python tool was taking over a second to start running and I learned about the python -X importtime feature, documented here. Adding that option caus…

Speaking of what fast looks like, here’s a pair of synced videos that show just how fast F1 cars are. On the left are drivers participating in a track day, that is, normal folks who want to…

Mistral-Small 3.2 Released on Hugging Face a couple of hours ago, so far there aren't any quantizations to run it on a Mac but I'm sure those will emerge pretty quickly. This is a minor bump to…

As an aid to his travel planning, Kevin Kelly has compiled a meta-calendar of Asian festivals. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

A group of researchers tracked down the original photo used in the final scene of The Shining. “It was a real photo from the 1920s, and Nicholson’s face had been superimposed over someone…

If you’re like most people, you probably started yawning as soon as you read the title of this post and saw the video’s thumbnail. And then yawned like two or three times watching it. T…

Today’s weather report styled like The Weather Channel in the 90s: WeatherStar 4000+. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

You Sure You’re In The Mood For Another Wes Anderson Film With Everything That’s Going On? “Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston rattling off my signature droll dialogue — enticing or not?”…

Decisions and opportunity in America are no longer cheap. “Life is an open world game. It rewards you for exploring. And capitalism cannot fucking stand that. It wants you on rails.”…

In 1996, Harper’s published a long piece by David Foster Wallace called Shipping Out, in which Wallace, a decidedly non-luxury cruise person, goes on a week-long luxury cruise in the Caribb…

Your beginning-of-summer PSA: Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning. “There is very little splashing, no waving, and no yelling or calls for help of any kind.” So here’s what to look fo…

It is been a while that I have been in the lovely city of Kortrijk. Last time that was 2012 ans the event still was called Multimania. I finally made…

Cato CTRL™ Threat Research: PoC Attack Targeting Atlassian’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) Introduces New “Living off AI” Risk Stop me if you've heard this one before: A threat actor (a…

Here's a tip that works on YouTube and almost any other web page that shows you a video. You can increase the playback rate beyond the usually-exposed 2x by running this in your browser DevTools…

Want to use your phone less? Try Forest. “Whenever you want to stay focused, plant a [virtual] tree. Your tree will grow while you focus on your work. Leaving the app halfway will cause you…

The Fear of Never Landing is a new album from ambient music band Marconi Union, whose 2011 song Weightless has been described as “the world’s most relaxing song”. Get it on YT, Bandcamp…

How OpenElections Uses LLMs The OpenElections project collects detailed election data for the USA, all the way down to the precinct level. This is a surprisingly hard problem: while county and s…

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the band, Talking Heads have released a new music video for their iconic 1977 single, Psycho Killer. The video stars Saoirse Ronan and was directed by M…

They are doing a Spaceballs 2. (“They” includes Mel Brooks and Rick Moranis, who has not appeared in a live-action film since 1997.) “I am one with the Schwartz and the Schwartz is with…

A new study from MIT’s Media Lab (not yet peer-reviewed & small sample size): ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills.…

The [NYC] Subway Is Not Scary. “It’s fine and safe. It’s full of women and children. There are tons of old ladies on there.” And: “You sound real corny being scared of the subway.�…

Historian Heather Cox Richardson is now doing visual versions of her daily newsletter on YouTube. Yesterday’s video explains the origins and significance of Juneteenth. Black people in G…

I continue to have fun running fantasy cooking prompts through LLMs - this time I tried "Give me a wildly ambitious recipe for zucchini cooked three ways" followed by "Go more ambitious" and now…

Just dropped yesterday: Lane 8’s Summer 2025 Mixtape. Got this on right now trying to coax the ol’ brainpan back into work mode. 💬 Join the discussion on…

Radiology has embraced AI enthusiastically, and the labor force is growing nevertheless. The augmentation-not-automation effect of AI is despite the fact that AFAICT there is no identified "task"…

Ok, having been all over the western Mediterranean for the past two weeks, I’m back. *sigh* Here, without comment or context (I know, I know), are some of the things I saw:…

They poison their own context. Maybe you can call it context rot, where as context grows and especially if it grows with lots of distractions and dead ends, the output quality falls off rapidly.…

I wrote this recently in a conversation about whether coding agents can work as a replacement for human programmers. The "agentic" coding tools we have right now work like this: A skilled indivi…

Spent a couple of days taking it easy in sunny London. On Monday evening, we met up with several friends I’d made during last month’s Camp residency. I joined Ryan,…

In our new comprehensive online course, Subatomic: The Complete Guide To Design Tokens, we discuss the need to revisit the powerful concept of separation of concerns. Separation of concerns…

Well, here’s some great news: Refresh PGH is being…refreshed! My pals Jason, Val, and Patrick are reviving the Pittsburgh web design/development meetup that played such an important role in the d…

I counted all of the yurts in Mongolia using machine learning Fascinating, detailed account by Monroe Clinton of a geospatial machine learning project. Monroe wanted to count visible yurts in Mo…

I opened Facebook after a while of not using it. I do have two pages still there (beyond tellerrand and my band SPOILER) and also used to use it to s…

That memvid thing that's been going around recently is a trap. It's an embedding store that records the original text that has been embedded in QR codes in a video file. That's an absurd thing to…

After many months of previews, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Flash have reached general availability with new, memorable model IDs: gemini-2.5-pro and gemini-2.5-flash. They are joined by a new preview mode…

The Steering Council (SC) approves PEP 779 [Criteria for supported status for free-threaded Python], with the effect of removing the “experimental” tag from the free-threaded build of Python…

Every time I get into an online conversation about prompt injection it's inevitable that someone will argue that a mitigation which works 99% of the time is still worthwhile because there's no su…

Cloudflare Project Galileo I only just heard about this Cloudflare initiative, though it's been around for more than a decade: If you are an organization working in human rights, civil society,…

In conversation with our investors and the board, we believed that the best way forward was to shut down the company [Dark, Inc], as it was clear that an 8 year old product with no traction was n…

Every year, the Hicks Brothers get together for a few days of walking, cycling, eating and drinking. It means we all get to hang out for more than just weddings and funerals! In 2024 we went to the La…

If you are a user of LLM systems that use tools (you can call them "AI agents" if you like) it is critically important that you understand the risk of combining tools with the following three cha…