Anthropic: A postmortem of three recent issues Anthropic had a very bad month in terms of model reliability: Between August and early September, three infrastructure bugs intermittently degrade…

The “Debate Me Bro” Grift: How Trolls Weaponized The Marketplace Of Ideas. “The fundamental issue with “debate me bro” culture [is] that it creates a false equivalence between good-…

In July it was the International Math Olympiad (OpenAI, Gemini), today it's the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). Once again, both OpenAI and Gemini competed with models that a…

How Agates Form, Why Minnesota Lakes Have So Many, & Where To Look For Them. I was always excited as a kid to go find agates at the lake (typically Lake Superior), but I didn’t know a) how…

Today I’m sharing a quick-and-dirty script to take an OpenAPI description, spin up a docs server locally, and copy the URL into your clipboard. I also use a bit of glob expansion in my script to…

Inspired by a question over at Cup of Jo, what are the five things that are essential in your kitchen? Mine lean black & tan: balsamic vinegar, soy sauce, parmesan, olive oil, mayonnaise. (Ho…

These are some of my favorite portrait illustrations from Sofia Bonati. In her art you’ll find female portraits that invite you into a dreamlike world where the woman and her surroun…

The Climate Change Paradox. “Earth’s climate is chaotic and volatile. Climate change is simple and predictable. How can both be true?” Complexity & chaos theory are so interesting.…

On the latest wave of AI/LLM tools. “It is a transition from working with a co-intelligence to working with a wizard. Magic gets done, but we don’t always know what to do with the results…

Here’s a thing I didn’t know existed until the other day: credit-card sized trackers that you put into your wallet (or bag) that can be located with Apple Find My. Some come with long-l…

“Trump told voters that they could indulge their resentments and still walk away richer and more prosperous. But they can’t. To embrace nativism in a global, connected economic world is t…

Early next year, Sesame Street is making hundreds of full episodes available on YouTube. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

Seeing David Byrne last night for the first-ever performance of Who Is The Sky was one of the best and most impactful concerts/experiences of my life.…

Remember the collection of classic airline logos I linked to a few years ago? The folks at 08 Left have taken some of those old logos and put them on hats, t-shirts, and hoodies.…

New from Neal Agarwal: a series of increasingly ridiculous and difficult captchas. I burst out laughing at the vegetables one. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke…

Scandal rocks international stone skipping contest. “The would-be cheaters admitted to the scheme by a show of hands and apologized for their misdeeds after the judges raised their suspicio…

“Style lessons from Robert Redford, one of the most stylish men in the last century.” Derek Guy: “The 1970s is often written off as the ‘decade that taste forgot.’ But Redford shows…

Announcing the 2025 PSF Board Election Results! I'm happy to share that I've been re-elected for second term on the board of directors of the Python Software Foundation. Jannis Leidel was also…

Christian Marclay debuted his 24-hour film The Clock 15 years ago. The film is made up of thousands of clips from movies and TV shows that show timepieces or otherwise make reference to the t…

A McSweeney’s list that’s not that funny: How to Tell the Difference Between a Lone Wolf and a Coordinated Effort by the Radical Left.…

Ta-Nehisi Coates: ‘Charlie Kirk, Redeemed: A Political Class Finds Its Lost Cause’. “By ignoring the rhetoric and actions of the Turning Point USA founder, pundits and politicians are s…

How Climate Scientists Saw the Future Before It Arrived. “‘The goal of climate modeling is really to build a fake version of the Earth,’ a coarse-grained copy of the planet that’s str…

A gem of a find by The Public Domain Review of a collection from the Rijksmuseum: photographs of plaster models of the Moon’s surface that were made from observations of the Moon through…

Photographer Upends His Whole Life to Chase Auroras Around the Arctic. “Prior to moving to Lapland, I had never owned a camera and I almost never took photographs. However, just watching th…

From the Weird History YouTube channel, an epic undertaking: telling the (US-centric) cultural history of the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s in just (just!) 16 hours. This is like a mega ult…

Fun logic puzzle game called Clues by Sam. “Your goal is to figure out who is criminal and who is innocent.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

Aaron Moles, Adam Ganzer, Alex Kavutskiy, Andy Signore, Ariel Gardner, and 54 more, 2014, ★★★★ One of the best random laughs I’ve had in the last few years was at a “Remember…

Rob Reiner, 2025, ★½ I remember getting MGM’s This Is Spinal Tap DVD when it was released in 2000 and being giddy at all the special features. The deleted scenes were longer than the…

Ok, I think I have to move back to NYC (at least for Sept.) because this Big & Loud series sounds amaaaazing: films like Lawrence of Arabia, Close Encounters, 2001, Interstellar, Dunkirk, Mat…

In this video, Vox’s Estelle Caswell and Martin Conner break down how rappers construct their rhymes and how it’s changed and evolved since rap’s early days. As someone who doesn’t…

Your Zodiac Sign Is 2,000 Years Out of Date. “Over millennia, our view of the stars has shifted, because of Earth’s wobble. It may be time to rethink your sign.” (I actually wrote about…

Reviews of the best mp3 players you can buy in 2025. “MP3 players — or digital audio players, as they should more accurately be called — are seeing a small resurgence…”…

I thought I had an verbal agreement with them, that “Varnish Cache” was the FOSS project and “Varnish Software” was the commercial entitity, but the current position of Varnish Software�…

I am with my current hosting partner since 1999 when they still had the name One-2-One. I usually was happy with them and they even sponsor two of my…

Why AI Narrators Will Never Be Able to Tell a Real Human Story. “Narrating audiobooks today is the closest thing to that primal art form. One person, one voice, spinning a tale for another.…

Artist and poet Marcus Merritt draws objects from films — the TV above is from E.T. and the payphone is from Terminator 2. I very much dig the spare illustration style here. (via waxy)…

Hosting a WebSite on a Disposable Vape. “Recently, disposable vapes have gotten more advanced”; some have USB-C and rechargeable batteries. 💬 Join the dis…

GPT‑5-Codex and upgrades to Codex OpenAI half-released a new model today: GPT‑5-Codex, a fine-tuned GPT-5 variant explicitly designed for their various AI-assisted programming tools. Update:…

Dataguessr. “This game is inspired by the work of Gapminder and Our World in Data. It uses data to give you a better understanding of the state of the world.”…

TypePad is closing down at the end of the month and Phil Gyford has shared the process for downloading a TypePad blog (so that you can turn it into “a pretty self-contained ‘static HTML�…

This is not some AI-generated to-study-to jazz video; it’s a guy who really likes jazz playing a bunch of records from his extensive collection. over the years i’ve built a small but r…

Defiant nuns flee care home for their abandoned convent in the Alps. “‘Before I die in that old people’s home, I would rather go to a meadow and enter eternity that way,’ said Sister…

loadmo.re a collection of unconventional and fun mobile web pages. For example, I found Busy Simulator. Totally made me smile. Make sure to follow them on Instagram.…

The level of excitement I feel when I get a call from Be My Eyes and can help a blind person with whatever they need help with, is indescribable. This is the version of the internet I want to revel in…

Feeling more protective than ever of where my attention goes. Brick is currently helping me stay off “the apps”. Feeling disappointed about the state of the internet these days, those damn…

Former Washington Post opinion columnist Karen Attiah this morning on Bluesky: “I’ve been fired from the Washington Post in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk shooting.” Until the Post�…

Here's an interesting example of models incrementally improving over time: I am finding that today's leading models are competent at writing prompts for themselves and each other. A year ago I wa…

Added to the film diary:NashvilleRobert Altman, 1975, ★★★★ Tagged: September 2025 Reply via email…

Matt Creed, 2024, ★★ A pretty surface-level look at abstract painter Mary Heilmann, generally more interested in how many cool artists she hung out with and galleries she worked with…

I’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with Spirits Creative on a few projects, and they surprised me by creating an absolutely phenomenal intro animation for my podcast, Wake Up Excited!…