There’s an assumption that because of the relationship between metabolic rates, volume, and surface area, animals get an average of one billion heartbeats out of their bodies before they ex…

Merve Emre converses with Sally Rooney about novels, Intermezzo, games, and religion. “Throughout my work, rather than writing about characters, I write about dynamics.” (That’s why I l…

Finally, in most workplaces, incentive structures don’t exist for people to (a) reduce their workloads to such an extent that their role becomes vulnerable or (b) voluntarily accept more respon…

Certain names make ChatGPT grind to a halt, and we know why Benj Edwards on the really weird behavior where ChatGPT stops output with an error rather than producing the names David Mayer, Brian…

Libertarian Reluctantly Calls Fire Department. “Although the community would do better to rely on an efficient, free-market fire-fighting service…” 💬 Jo…

datasette-llm-usage I released the first alpha of a Datasette plugin to help track LLM usage by other plugins, with the goal of supporting token allowances - both for things like free public app…

NYTimes reporters getting verified profiles on Bluesky NYT data journalist Dylan Freedman has kicked off an initiative to get NYT accounts and reporters on Bluesky verified via vanity nytimes.co…

PydanticAI New project from Pydantic, which they describe as an "Agent Framework / shim to use Pydantic with LLMs". I asked which agent definition they are using and it's the "system prompt with…

Icelandic photographer Haukur Sigurdsson captured this aerial image of Nordic skiers looking like musical notes on a staff. Someone on YouTube played the tune: Sigurdsson’s photo is av…

I never explained the unofficial motto of this blog. When I started this blog 20 years ago, I wanted to have a north star guiding me as to why I was doing this at all. I searched the internet for quo…

My friend Youngna is a wonderful writer and observer and I loved these vignettes about “how kids understand power, social dynamics, hierarchy, control, and influence, all topics that swirl…

When a Telescope Is a National-Security Risk. The Vera Rubin Observatory is a new telescope that the US built in Chile and they had to jump through some hoops to ensure it’s not going to se…

A Japanese group called Electronicos Fantasticos! figured out that by connecting a supermarket barcode scanner to a powered speaker and rhythmically scanning barcode-like patterns with it…

Madeleine Riffaud, hero of the French Resistance, has died at the age of 100. “The essential was not to give in. When you resisted, you were already a victor. You had already won.”…

(Metaphorical) lessons learned from building wood fires, including “the most important ingredient is invisible” and “you’re designing an airflow system with fuel attached”.…

After 37 years, the 80s fashion trend of wearing salmon as hats is back in style among orcas. “Maybe it’s less of a salmon hat trend, and more a case of using their head as a lunchbox.”…

Tom Whitwell just sent along his annual list of the 52 things he’s learned in the past year. As usual, there’s lots of fascinating things in there…here are some of my favorites: 3. T…

Best TV Shows of 2024. Shogun, My Brilliant Friend, The Day of the Jackal, and What We Do in the Shadows all make the list. (Shogun would be my top pick.) 💬 J…

For most software engineers, being well rounded is more important than pure technical mastery. This was already true, of course — see @patio11's famous advice "Don't call yourself a programmer"…

Simon Willison: The Future of Open Source and AI I sat down a few weeks ago to record this conversation with Logan Kilpatrick and Nolan Fortman for their podcast Around the Prompt. The episode…

LLM 0.19 I just released version 0.19 of LLM, my Python library and CLI utility for working with Large Language Models. I released 0.18 a couple of weeks ago adding support for calling models fr…

Turning Your Root URL Into a DuckDB Remote Database Fun idea from Drew Breunig: DuckDB supports attaching existing databases that are accessible over HTTP using their URL. Drew suggests creating…

I don’t seem like I’d be much of a skiier, do I? (I do not.) But here I am, doing skiing. It’s very (very) popular in Bend, Oregon because of the proximity to Mt. Bachelor (and to a…

Most people don’t have an intuition about what current hardware can and can’t do. There is a simple math that can help you with that: “you can process about 500MB in one second on a single…

The short ‘n’ sweet version of my talk from All Things Open.…

The Engagement Is Better on Bluesky It’s deeply sad that “we don’t penalize people for sharing links” can be a differentiating feature for a social media platform these days, but here we…

Our 16th year, 17th outing (it's complicated with doubles for 3 years and skipping the pandemic years…) completed two weeks ago, and it is high time I post my thoughts. There are two parts this post…

0xfreysa/agent Freysa describes itself as "the world's first adversarial agent game". On 22nd November they released an LLM-driven application which people could pay to message (using Ethereum),…

I am still working on my gift guide for this year, but in the meantime The 2023 Kottke Holiday Gift Guide is full of cool stuff for all the great people in your life.…

This summer, Taiwanese barista Xie Yi-chen won the 2024 World Coffee Championships with patterns of a whale, a moose, and a dragon. “To prepare for the competition, Xie practiced latte art…

Structured Generation w/ SmolLM2 running in browser & WebGPU Extraordinary demo by Vaibhav Srivastav (VB). Here's Hugging Face's SmolLM2-1.7B-Instruct running directly in a web browser (using We…

Among closed-source models, OpenAI's early mover advantage has eroded somewhat, with enterprise market share dropping from 50% to 34%. The primary beneficiary has been Anthropic,* which doubled i…

“An AI-powered robot autonomously convinced 12 showroom robots to ‘quit their jobs’ and follow it.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

People have too inflated sense of what it means to "ask an AI" about something. The AI are language models trained basically by imitation on data from human labelers. Instead of the mysticism of…

Watch Peanuts creator Charles Schulz draw Charlie Brown. It only takes him around 35 seconds. (via @fchimero) [This is a vintage post originally from Aug 2014.] Tags: a…

GitHub OAuth for a static site using Cloudflare Workers Here's a TIL covering a Thanksgiving AI-assisted programming project. I wanted to add OAuth against GitHub to some of the projects on my t…

Infinite Stroll. Take a neverending walk. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

Good grief Charlie Brown, AirPods Pro 2 are on sale today for $154 (that’s almost $100 off).…

LLM Flowbreaking Gadi Evron from Knostic: We propose that LLM Flowbreaking, following jailbreaking and prompt injection, joins as the third on the growing list of LLM attack types. Flowbreaking…

This is a bit too on the nose: a Dutch tulip farmer is using the heat generated from cryptocurrency mining to heat their greenhouses. 💬 Join the discussion on…

SmolVLM - small yet mighty Vision Language Model I've been having fun playing with this new vision model from the Hugging Face team behind SmolLM. They describe it as: [...] a 2B VLM, SOTA for…