A judge chastised vandals of a Paddington Bear statue: “His famous label attached to his duffle coat says ‘please look after this bear’. On the night of the 2nd of March 2025, your acti…

Long waits, waves of calls, website crashes: Social Security is breaking down. A deep-dive into the Trump administration’s gutting of Social Security (a long-time conservative goal).…

In this episode of This American Life from a few weeks ago, Masha Gessen read an excerpt from their book Surviving Autocracy about the particular kind of lie used by autocrats like Putin and…

What the Press Got Wrong About Hitler. This “comical figure” was regularly ridiculed in the German & international press right up until he became chancellor. It did very little to sway hi…

Oscar-winning Palestinian director Hamdan Ballal (No Man’s Land) was attacked by a group of 15 armed Israeli settlers and then arrested by the Israeli army. “They let the settlers attack…

The expanding size of American cars over the past few decades is increasing congestion by reducing the vehicle capacity of roadways. SUVs are longer, require more braking distance, and driver…

A recent study found that Black Lives Matter protests had a “significant and decisive impact” on the 2020 election. “This represents one of the most consequential impacts of a social mo…

Today we’re excited to launch ARC-AGI-2 to challenge the new frontier. ARC-AGI-2 is even harder for AI (in particular, AI reasoning systems), while maintaining the same relative ease for humans…

shot-scraper 1.8 I've added a new feature to shot-scraper that makes it easier to share scripts for other people to use with the shot-scraper javascript command. shot-scraper javascript lets you…

microsoft/playwright-mcp The Playwright team at Microsoft have released an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server wrapping Playwright, and it's pretty fascinating. They implemented it on top of the…

Qwen2.5-VL-32B: Smarter and Lighter The second big open weight LLM release from China today - the first being DeepSeek v3-0324. Qwen's previous vision model was Qwen2.5 VL, released in January i…

For some reason, Warner Bros. has uploaded 41 of its movies to YouTube that are free to watch. Among them, Waiting for Guffman, The Accidental Tourist, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Richard Li…

Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America by Elie Mystal “reimagines what our legal system, and society at large, could look like if we could move past legislation plagued by racis…

The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans. “I had very strong doubts that this text group was real, because I could not believe that the national-security leadership of…

Ikea Australia posted an ad referencing Severance — “for work that is mysterious and important” — which features an MDR cluster of four desks. 💬 Join…

I really liked this thread from independent bookseller Charlotte Moore-Lambert; it starts: being an indie bookseller in the helltimes has felt both very stable and very stabilizing, and part…

Archaeologists have found 1.5-million-year-old bone tools in Tanzania. “This finding has pushed back systematic bone tool production by more than a million years and challenges previous ass…

deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3-0324 Chinese AI lab DeepSeek just released the latest version of their enormous DeepSeek v3 model, baking the release date into the name DeepSeek-V3-0324. The license is…

A.R. Moxon: It’s best to understand that fascists see hypocrisy as a virtue. It’s how they signal that the things they are doing to people were never meant to be equally applied. It’s…

Utrecht’s fish doorbell is up and running again to help spawning fish navigate the city’s canals. “If you see a fish, press the doorbell. This alerts the lock operator to open the lock.…

“A string of high-profile arrests and detentions of travellers is likely to cause a major downturn in tourism to the US, with latest figures already showing a serious drop-off.”…

Senator Schumer Votes to Let the Big Wooden Horse into Troy. “Yes, there’s danger in opening our gates to this statue. But there’s also danger in keeping it out… the danger of eroding…

Semantic Diffusion I learned about this term today while complaining about how the definition of "vibe coding" is already being distorted to mean "any time an LLM writes code" as opposed to the…

Next.js and the corrupt middleware: the authorizing artifact Good, detailed write-up of the Next.js vulnerability CVE-2025-29927 by Allam Rachid, one of the researchers who identified the issue.…

If you’re new to tech, taking [career] advice on what works for someone with a 20-year career is likely to be about as effective as taking career advice from a stockbroker or firefighter or nur…

simonw/ollama-models-atom-feed I setup a GitHub Actions + GitHub Pages Atom feed of scraped recent models data from the Ollama latest models page - Ollama remains one of the easiest ways to run…

It certainly wasn't today. It was some time ago, but I wanted to mark this in my blog as a reminder that once, long ago, piracy was, well, stealing. That's all changed now.…

Using paint in water to simulate clouds or smoke, Rudy Willingham created these magical scenes of characters from Severance (Instagram). Willingham also created this cool animated zoetro…

An analysis of pop music’s greatest two-hit wonders. “Pop stars are remembered because they are very famous. One-hit wonders are remembered for the opposite. Two-hit wonders are stuck in…

The "think" tool: Enabling Claude to stop and think in complex tool use situations Fascinating new prompt engineering trick from Anthropic. They use their standard tool calling mechanism to defi…

What the hell? Saturn now has a total of 274 moons. That’s so many that they may have to relax the naming conventions because there aren’t enough Norse deities to cover them all.…

A great behind-the-scenes look at the work and process of artist Amy Sherald in these two videos from Art21. In her studio in New Jersey, artist Amy Sherald paints portraits that tell a…

In seeking information on how 21st century humans lived, future archaeologists will rely on fossils of soda cans, chicken bones, clothes, and concrete. Oh and, “wherever those future civili…

The MFA in Boston is putting on an exhibition this spring and summer called Van Gogh: The Roulin Family Portraits. Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) once wrote, “What I’m most passionate…

From Teen Vogue, a profile of Vivian Jenna Wilson. “She barely thinks about her father [Elon Musk]. ‘I’m not giving anyone that space in my mind. The only thing that gets to live free i…

Anthropic Trust Center: Brave Search added as a subprocessor Yesterday I was trying to figure out if Anthropic has rolled their own search index for Claude's new web search feature or if they we…

There’s a letter at the end of this post that’s very much worth the read, but I have to explain some context first because otherwise it won’t make any sense. So: The Trump regime has b…

Severance has been renewed for a third season. “Stiller said ‘the plan is not’ to have fans wait three years for the next season’s release.” 💬 Join…

Here’s Geoff Graham on our new Open Up show: There are a lot of feelings in tech. We feel a certain way about our jobs. We feel certain ways about certain web development techniques. We feel…

20 YEARS AGO TODAY, Melissa and I started dating. I’m 40, which means that I’ve now spent more of my life with Melissa than without. This will be true for the rest of our lives, and I will love e…

Hello, Magnificent Subscribers. Here's issue #24 of Studio Notes—quick bits delivered to you each Friday. 🍚 Here's this week's Rice Tip™: Elevate your plain, white rice by shaking some Everyth…

More online showings of Eno coming up (March 27-30). “You must be watching on the date and time specified for each livestream. There is no delayed viewing. These versions of the film will n…

The editor in chief at Science: I Was Diagnosed With Autism at 53. I Know Why Rates Are Rising. “The rise in diagnoses is the result of greater awareness, better identification (especially…

What is the opposite of fascism? Living freely, colorfully, openly. Humanizing. Connecting with others. Gathering. Hoping. Following your dreams. Communing. Nurturing. Refusing despair. Laugh…

OpenAI announced several new audio-related API features today, for both text-to-speech and speech-to-text. They're very promising new models, but they appear to suffer from the ever-present risk…

Coco 2? Pixar will produce a sequel to Coco, set to come out in 2029. It joins Incredibles 3 and Toy Story 5 in development at the studio. 💬 Join the discussi…

Some great thoughts here from Scott Berkun: It’s good to buy books even if you don’t end up reading them. Why? 1. It supports authors who made something that interests you 2. It signals to publish…

My friend Eva Lin Douglass wrote a beautiful children’s book: The Light in You.  Deep within you is a very special spark. It’s a Light you are born with that never goes dark. If there’s a mess…

Claude can now search the web Claude 3.7 Sonnet on the paid plan now has a web search tool that can be turned on as a global setting. This was sorely needed. ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok all had thi…

New issue of The HTML Review, “an annual journal of literature made to exist on the web”. Love the TOC interface — the web can still be fun! 💬 Join the…

Writing for the New York Review (archive), Sally Rooney profiles “genius” snooker player Ronnie O’Sullivan. But much of the piece is spent on the mystery of how O’Sullivan and other a…

Here’s the trailer for Shopping for Superman, a crowdfunded documentary on the 50-year history of local comic book stores — as well as their shaky future. Shopping for Superman, guides…