Atul Gawande of Harvard’s School of Public Health: The Trump regime’s destruction of USAID “has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children”.…

A long profile of comics legend Alan Moore. “For the first time in his 45-year career, Alan Moore is alone on the page.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.o…

Hello E-Commerce-Email-Wading Friends. Here's issue #60 of Studio Notes™—quick bits delivered to you each Friday. I realize you're getting emails from every single company you&…

I’m still working on the KDO gift guide for this year. In the meantime, here’s the 2024 edition, which has aged well and includes these popular Japanese nail clippers.…

“Australia is on course to meet a target of eliminating cervical cancer by 2035, which, if achieved, will make it the first country to do so.” This is due in large part to their HPV vacci…

Our Black Friday sale starts now! It will run now through Friday, December 5th. Level up your design systems game and save with our biggest sale of the year: MEGA BUNDLE: save 45% & get all course…

A browser extension for avoiding AI slop.  Download it for Chrome or Firefox. This is a search tool that will only return content created before ChatGPT’s first public release on November 30, 2022.…

To evaluate the model’s capability in processing long-context inputs, we construct a video “Needle-in- a-Haystack” evaluation on Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B-Instruct. In this task, a semantically sa…

It’s been a really tough year for many of us, the citizens of the world. But on this day of thanksgiving in the US, I wanted to ask you all: what are you thankful for today? I’m thankful…

deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-Math-V2 New on Hugging Face, a specialist mathematical reasoning LLM from DeepSeek. This is their entry in the space previously dominated by proprietary models from OpenAI a…

Perhaps inspired by All Streets, Ben Fry’s map of all the streets in the US, Nelson Minar built a US map out of all the rivers in the country. Minar put all the data and files he used…

“Art is valuable precisely because it is not easy to create. We are interested in art, in any and all of its forms, because humans made it. That’s the very thing that makes it interesting…

If Quantum Computing Is Solving “Impossible” Questions, How Do We Know They’re Right? “In order to validate quantum computers, methods are needed to compare theory and result without…

This is the trailer for an HBO documentary called Thoughts and Prayers about “the impact of the $3 billion active shooter preparedness industry on schools and communities across America”.…

In a London increasingly dominated by rideshare services, some drivers are still opting to study for years for The Knowledge, “the grueling examination that requires applicants to essential…

21st-Century Culture Has Hit a Wall. “We — creators and audiences alike — have to make an effort to encourage bold new forms of culture. Even failures and half steps will be more intere…

TL;DR: our Black Friday sale starts this Friday November 28th and runs through Friday December 5th. We’ll be offering two deals: A MEGA BUNDLE with all of our courses for $1000 and a Subatomic + At…

I got to talk with Seth Casana on the Wake Up Excited! podcast. I’d love it if you check it out and consider subscribing to the show! At first glance, Seth Casana is a very unassuming, normal…

Konnichiwa! I’m back from Japan and finally getting over my jetlag, which took much longer than I expected. Here’s a list of all the things I’ve been reading, watching, listening to, an…

I talked with CL Kao and Dori Wilson for an episode of their new Data Renegades podcast titled Data Journalism Unleashed with Simon Willison. I fed the transcript into Claude Opus 4.5 to extract…

Chindōgu is the Japanese practice of inventing things that are not exactly useful but neither are they useless; they’re more unuseless, a term coined by chindōgu’s originator Kenji Kawa…

Google Antigravity Exfiltrates Data PromptArmor demonstrate a concerning prompt injection chain in Google's new Antigravity IDE: In this attack chain, we illustrate that a poisoned web source (…

My Car Is Becoming a Brick. “Cars used to be entirely mechanical objects” but now “certain models are destined to age their way out of compatibility with the latest software” (like sm…

To Explore Violence Against Women, She Drugs Herself Onstage. “It’s an attempt to explore whether performance can give form to the disorganizing experience of trauma, its gaps and obsessi…

What’s the difference between an artist and a creator? “An artist is a self-directed artistic expressor” vs. “a creator is a self-directed market expressor”. (Wondering where I fit…

Constant-time support lands in LLVM: Protecting cryptographic code at the compiler level Substantial LLVM contribution from Trail of Bits. Timing attacks against cryptography algorithms are a gn…

Vanity Fair sat down with Harrison Ford and asked him to identify which of his lines he’d said in which movie, mostly as a way of getting him to talk about his career. A few observations:…

Small Japanese Pickup Truck Shows Bigger is Definitely Not Better. “Kei trucks are city-sized, not highway-sized.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

America’s Polarization Has Become the World’s Side Hustle. “Social media monetization programs have incentivized this effort and are almost entirely to blame.” Team USA just scoring o…

Requiem for Early Blogging. “I still look for people with early blogger energy, though — people willing to make an effort to understand the world and engage in a way that isn’t a perfor…

From one of the best seats in the entire arena, I watched my favourite band for the fourth time. Within minutes, I knew this would be my all-time fa…

llm-anthropic 0.23 New plugin release adding support for Claude Opus 4.5, including the new thinking_effort option: llm install -U llm-anthropic llm -m claude-opus-4.5 -o thinking_effort low 'mu…

LLM SVG Generation Benchmark Here's a delightful project by Tom Gally, inspired by my pelican SVG benchmark. He asked Claude to help create more prompts of the form Generate an SVG of [A] [doing…

If the person is unnecessarily rude, mean, or insulting to Claude, Claude doesn't need to apologize and can insist on kindness and dignity from the person it’s talking with. Even if someone is…

The Surprising Benefits of Giving Up. A recent meta-analysis reveals that “adjusting our goals in response to stress or challenges, rather than grinding on, is often ‘a more appropriate a…

A thread of “feel good” YouTube channels to watch. E.g.: “CinemaTherapy. Two former college roommates (one a filmmaker, the other a therapist) analyze movies.”…

I’ve posted about Korean artist Lee Hyun-Joung’s swirling and swooping work before, but I recently saw one of her pieces in person and decided to feature some of her most recent…

Lots to like about Variety’s list of 100 Best Comedy Movies of All Time, but Coming to America at #46 and no Trading Places at all make me question the list’s credibility.…

Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5 this morning, which they call "best model in the world for coding, agents, and computer use". This is their attempt to retake the crown for best coding model af…

How the Elite Behave When No One Is Watching: Inside the Epstein Emails. They reveal “a power elite practiced at disregarding pain” who have “learned to look away from so much other abu…

sqlite-utils 3.39 I got a report of a bug in sqlite-utils concerning plugin installation - if you installed the package using uv tool install further attempts to install plugins with sqlite-util…

So I’ve been watching Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus on Apple TV and this review from Inkoo Kang resonated with me (emphasis mine): Millions of offscreen casualties asi…

APIs can seem simple. A request. A response. A status code. Then you realize those responses change depending on where the request comes from.A travel app’s pricing endpoint might return euros…

“The Little Movie That Couldn’t”: ‘Mallrats’ Turns 30. I can’t remember if I was one of the few that saw this in the theater, but I loved this movie on VHS/DVD. Haven’t seen it…

“Today, the only naked bodies that many Americans will likely ever see are their own, a partner’s, or those on a screen. Gone are our unvarnished points of physical comparison — the ord…

We’ve talked before about how some people can picture things in their heads quite vividly and others can’t at all. The latter group has a condition called aphantasia. As soon as I clos…

Activists are role-playing ICE raids in games like Fortnite & GTA to teach people what to do IRL situations. “Many people may not have seen an interaction with ICE yet, it’s a way to get…

I released a new alpha version of sqlite-utils last night - the 128th release of that package since I started building it back in 2018. sqlite-utils is two things in one package: a Python library…

We’re thrilled to announce our new online course: AI & Design Systems! You can preorder the course now for $500. Generative AI is here, it’s increasingly powerful, and…it can make a hug…

The World Lost the Climate Gamble. Now It Faces a Dangerous New Reality. “We are heading into ‘overshoot’ within the next few years. The world is going to become more turbulent and more…

The Bad UX World Cup 2025. “Build a date picker with bad UX (the worse, the better).” The winning entry used a Tinder-like interface to swipe your desired days, months, and years.…

The Philadelphia Animation Ensemble, Jennifer Levonian, Alex Salvitti, Greta Motter, Jack Gray, and 86 more My unexcused absence from social media kept me from finding out about the first-ever Ph…

"Good engineering management" is a fad Will Larson argues that the technology industry's idea of what makes a good engineering manager changes over time based on industry realities. ZIRP hypergr…