Using voice mode on Claude Mobile Apps Anthropic are rolling out voice mode for the Claude apps at the moment. Sadly I don't have access yet - I'm looking forward to this a lot, I frequently use…

David Lynch’s estate auction, including cameras, clothes, books, memorabilia, megaphones, scripts, vinyl, furniture, coffee makers & grinders, art supplies, musical instruments, etc.…

If you can stop gawping at Alaska’s gorgeous scenery long enough, you can witness drone footage of a whole lot of salmon migrating upstream from Lake Iliamna1 to spawn. (via digg) Lake I…

I like this song (Lifelike’s So Electric) and I like this video (footage of Olivia Newton John in the movie Xanadu set to Lifelike’s So Electric). 💬 Join…

Two interesting things about the rock paper scissors game: 1. scissors were actually invented before paper, and 2. an early Japanese variant was frog slug snake (frog beats slug, slug beats s…

A supercut of every point scored by Kobe Bryant in his 81-point game in 2006. He only had 26 at the half and his team needed the points…they were losing until just before the 4th quarter.…

The Criterion Collection is releasing a new boxset of Wes Anderson films, The Wes Anderson Archive: Ten Films, Twenty-Five Years. Wes Anderson’s first ten features represent twenty-five…

The actor Patrick Stewart exists in the Star Trek universe and “Jean-Luc Picard is aware of him” and other little-known Star Trek facts. 💬 Join the discus…

28 slightly rude notes on writing. “Most writing is bad because it’s missing a motive. It feels dead because it hasn’t found its reason to live.” 💬 Jo…

Grammar movies: Apostrophes Now, Rebel Without a Clause, Gerund Brockovich, Alien vs Predicator, Indicative Jones and the Last Clause, Silence of the iambs, etc.…

I was interviewed by News Nation's Natasha Zouves about the very complicated topic of how we should think about AI in terms of threatening our jobs and careers. I previously talked with Natasha t…

“All three of the country’s largest carriers (American Airlines, United Airlines, and Delta) are penalizing solo travelers with higher ticket prices than you can book when traveling with…

ESA’s Proba-3 is planning on creating an artificial eclipse to study the sun’s corona. The two halves of the solar probe recently achieved “millimetre precision” while flying autonomo…

Caine is nine years old, lives in LA, and built his own arcade out of cardboard boxes in the back of his father’s auto parts store. You’ve go to watch until at least 3:10 when he expla…

Don’t mind me, I’m just watching old episodes of The Great Space Coaster on YouTube (Does anyone else remember this show? I watched it as a kid along with 3-2-1 Contact, Captain Kangaroo,…

Saying Bye to Glitch Pirijan, co-creator of Glitch - who stopped working on it six years ago, so has the benefit of distance: Here lies Glitch, a place on the web you could go to write up a web…

In this video, a writer named Hannah shares an experiment her Intro to Psychology professor ran on her class. Here’s a transcript: It’s 11 years ago, I’m in a massive university Intr…

The 100 best sports moments of the 21st century (so far). Hmm. That’s all I’m going to say about this list. Hmm. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

Re: SpaceX rockets that keep exploding: You Can’t Make an Omelette Without Exploding Several Billion Dollars Worth of Eggs. “Look, things explode. It’s just part of nature. Cybertrucks…

Alexandra Petri has some advice for the 2025 Harvard grad who will become ludicrously rich: “After the cataclysmic Event happens that unravels society and sends me scurrying to my luxury bu…

Among a number of things I’ve read online that I think about all the time is David Roberts’ 2020 piece for Vox about shifting baselines. Humans often don’t remember what we’ve lost…

Testing localization isn’t just a backend tweak. it affects product quality across markets. Done right, it improves test coverage and reduces bugs.  But it’s not as simple as switching regions in…

Pediatrician Dr. Annie Andrews is running against Lindsey Graham for one of South Carolina’s Senate seats. Based on the commercial launching her campaign, I kinda want to move to SC just so…

Harvard student: “I shall fight Secretary of Education Linda E. McMahon in a televised cage match, the winner of which gets $2.7 billion in federal grants and the power to uphold or destroy…

New apt acronym for America’s lamest president: TACO, which stands for Trump Always Chickens Out. He should be hounded about his perpetual lack of spine…this is the sort of thing that rea…

The curse of Toumaï: an ancient skull, a disputed femur and a bitter feud over humanity’s origins. “‘This piece,’ he warned, holding it before her: ‘You forget you ever saw it.’�…

I'll be sending out my first curated monthly highlights newsletter tomorrow, only to $10/month and up sponsors. Sign up now if you want to pay me to send you less! My weekly-ish newsletter remain…

llm-github-models 0.15 Anthony Shaw's llm-github-models plugin just got an upgrade: it now supports LLM 0.26 tool use for a subset of the models hosted on the GitHub Models API, contributed by C…

llm-tools-exa When I shipped LLM 0.26 yesterday one of the things I was most excited about was seeing what new tool plugins people would build for it. Dan Turkel's llm-tools-exa is one of the fi…

llm-mistral 0.14 I added tool-support to my plugin for accessing the Mistral API from LLM today, plus support for Mistral's new Codestral Embed embedding model. An interesting challenge here is…

I wonder if one of the reasons I'm finding LLMs so much more useful for coding than a lot of people that I see in online discussions is that effectively all of the code I work on has automated te…

This rings true: “Elon Musk is less like Tony Stark and more like Michael Scott.” The future he’s selling us is Stark Industries but what we’re getting is Dunder Mifflin.…

Happy 20th anniversary to Swissmiss, Tina Roth Eisenberg’s design/creativity/positivity blog. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

Born in 1790 just a few months after George Washington took office, John Tyler was America’s 10th president, serving from 1841-1845. Harrison Ruffin Tyler, Tyler’s last living grandson, d…

A recent study: “Ibn al-Shatir was the first astronomer to have successfully challenged the Ptolemaic cosmological system of planets revolving around Earth and corrected the theory’s inac…

Top 25 Premier League goals of 2024-25 season. I like a good screamer from outside the box as much as anyone, but where are the good team goals? Were there any?…

Codestral Embed Brand new embedding model from Mistral, specifically trained for code. Mistral claim that: Codestral Embed significantly outperforms leading code embedders in the market today:…

Resourceful: “Shooting down a $100,000 Russian drone with an air-defense missile might cost hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. Shooting it down with a shotgun from a light p…

Here's a quick demo of the kind of casual things I use LLMs for on a daily basis. I just found out that Perplexity offer their Deep Research feature via their API, through a model called Sonar De…

Hank Green believes how grocery stores are organized is broken. (True.) His solution is to take inspiration from libraries and organize the shelves of every grocery store in the entire worl…

This a great piece about the challenges many are facing in participating in activism. “Nothing will feel like enough because everything we know and love is at stake.”…

You can play Doom in this NY Times article about how you can run Doom almost anywhere (in a PDF, on an iPod, on a pregnancy test, on a treadmill, etc.) “Doom was developed in a really uniqu…

llm-llama-server 0.2 Here's a second option for using LLM's new tool support against local models (the first was via llm-ollama). It turns out the llama.cpp ecosystem has pretty robust OpenAI-co…

At Amazon, Some Coders Say Their Jobs Have Begun to Resemble Warehouse Work I got a couple of quotes in this NYTimes story about internal resistance to Amazon's policy to encourage employees to…

A Disillusioned Urban Planning Glossary. “NIMBY – Stands for ‘Not in My Backyard.’ From the Old English nimm bæc yarde, meaning ‘no change shall occur within sightline of my bird f…

This looks really interesting: Rogue One recut and rescored in the style of a three-episode Andor arc that moves “its energy from emulating the jaunty, swashbuckling [original trilogy] to m…

LLM 0.26 is out with the biggest new feature since I started the project: support for tools. You can now use the LLM CLI tool - and Python library - to grant LLMs from OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini a…

We’re witnessing the reversal of Reconstruction. “ICE raids are the new night rides. Detention centers are the new plantations. The trauma, the terror, the family separations — they’r…

I love this gorgeous woodblock print from Hasui Kawase, View of Azalea Garden from Mt. Fuji. Hasui was a significant influence on Studio Ghibli & Hayao Miyazaki. After all, the influence o…

It usually takes weeks to climb Mt Everest due to altitude acclimation. A group of British climbers did it in less than a week by inhaling xenon gas, which allegedly helps acclimatize people…

The Who Cares Era. “At a time where the government’s uncaring boot is pressing down on all of our necks, the best way to fight back is to care. Care loudly. Tell others. Get going.”…

European airlines are redirecting flights from American cities to destinations like Canada, Mexico, and Brazil as “more passengers [opt] for destinations that offer smoother entry, better s…

These are owls in towels. That’s it, that’s the post. Nothing in the animal kingdom emotes better than an owl. (thx, david) Tags: birds 💬 Join the…

“Fascism sets in EXACTLY like this. Days go by. Nothing improves. The people wait with bated breath for SOMETHING or SOMEONE to help…”…

Build AI agents with the Mistral Agents API Big upgrade to Mistral's API this morning: they've announced a new "Agents API". Mistral have been using the term "agents" for a while now. Here's how…

Some photos, videos, and observations from a visit to a West Virginian snake handling church. “Chris Wolford, their pastor, handles snakes, drinks strychnine, brushes fire across his face a…

The Crafters of Andor. Anil Dash has compiled the DVD extras for Andor, an expertly crafted action drama about fighting fascism that also happens to be a Star Wars series.…

20 years ago today I started this blog, with this quote. That was Tina v1.0; No kids, single, hadn’t started any businesses yet. This blog opened doors. Forever grateful. I have been a bit quiet…

GitHub MCP Exploited: Accessing private repositories via MCP GitHub's official MCP server grants LLMs a whole host of new abilities, including being able to read and issues in repositories the u…

CSS Minecraft Incredible project by Benjamin Aster: There is no JavaScript on this page. All the logic is made 100% with pure HTML & CSS. For the best performance, please close other tabs and r…

I enjoyed the replies to this question: People who are bilingual in English and another language, what’s a word that exists in your other language that you are surprised doesn’t exist in English?…

I watched Conclave a few days ago and this speech on certainty stuck with me. “Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. If there was only certainty and…

“Hopefulness is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion.” – Nick Cave…

Luis von Ahn on LinkedIn Last month's Duolingo memo about becoming an "AI-first" company has seen significant backlash, particularly on TikTok. I've had trouble figuring out how much of this is…

A reminder.…

Greetings peoples of the internets! Back in Troika #48, I was banging on about a genre that I had called ‘Ambient Americana’, and I’ve since discovered that there is an established name for it.…