A short video that explains *a lot* about the modern world & conservatism. “They also want to feel normal. They want to walk around and see that most other people have made the same choice…

One of my favorite end-of-year lists is Tom Whitwell’s annual record of 52 things he’s learned in the past year. Some favorites of mine from the 2025 installment: 4. You can unlock the…

Photographing the Microscopic: Winners of Nikon Small World 2025. “Overall Winner: A rice weevil perched on a grain of rice.” 💬 Join the discussion on kot…

More than half of the teens surveyed believe journalists regularly engage in unethical behaviors like making up details or quotes in stories, paying sources, taking visual images out of context o…

Adding to an “overwhelming body of evidence”, a recent study showed that “suicidality scores dropped significantly an average of two years and up to five years after [trans youth] recei…

The Atlantic hurricane season has come to a close and Google’s DeepMind AI-based hurricane model performed really well in predicting track and intensity of storms.…

In 2010, Randall Munroe’s fiancée (now wife) was diagnosed with cancer. Every once in awhile, he updates his audience at XKCD on how that’s going. The most recent missive: Fifteen Years.…

YouTube embeds fail with a 153 error I just fixed this bug on my blog. I was getting an annoying "Error 153: Video player configuration error" on some of the YouTube video embeds (like this one)…

David Lynch, 2017, ★★★★ I’ve always been amazed Twin Peaks ever made it to air on network television in 1990, and its 2017 return upped the ante on that amazement considerably,…

I am increasingly worried about AI in the video game space in general. [...] I'm not sure that the CEOs and the people making the decisions at these sorts of companies understand the difference b…

It's ChatGPT's third birthday today. It's fun looking back at Sam Altman's low key announcement thread from November 30th 2022: today we launched ChatGPT. try talking with it here: chat.openai.…

The most annoying problem is that the [GitHub] frontend barely works without JavaScript, so we cannot open issues, pull requests, source code or CI logs in Dillo itself, despite them being mostly…

Added to the film diary:Kansas City ConfidentialPhil Karlson, 1952, ★★★★White HeatRaoul Walsh, 1949, ★★★★ Tagged: November 2025 Reply via email…

Being a fan is all about bringing the enthusiasm. It’s being a champion of possibility. It’s believing in someone. And it’s contagious. When you’re around someone who is super excited about so…

We rendered over 1 million of the web’s top homepages. This is the result. Zoom, pan and click to explore – like Google Maps. Source: One Million Screenshots…

A few months ago, I had the privilege of being interviewed on the Design Systems Collective by Shane P Williams. This interview captures a lot of my current thinking about design systems, our design t…

Japanese researchers turned to “experimental archaeology” to study how ancient humans navigated powerful ocean currents and migrated offshore. Scientists Retrace 30,000-Year-Old Ocean Voyage, in a…

My signed copy of Iroha Ni Kompeito. I never expected to see Akiko Yano play live, let alone meet her and get an album signed. In case you don’t know, she’s “the J…

Context plumbing Matt Webb coins the term context plumbing to describe the kind of engineering needed to feed agents the right context at the right time: Context appears at disparate sources, b…

Large language models (LLMs) can be useful tools, but they are not good at creating entirely new Wikipedia articles. Large language models should not be used to generate new Wikipedia articles fr…

In June 2025 Sam Altman claimed about ChatGPT that "the average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours". In March 2020 George Kamiya of the International Energy Agency estimated that "streaming a Netfl…

Context: back in March 2025 I decided to put aside my scepticism and try AI driven development for the day. I appreciate that in 8 months, the AI landscape, particularly around agentic software dev ha…

Bluesky Thread Viewer thread by @simonwillison.net I've been having a lot of fun hacking on my Bluesky Thread Viewer JavaScript tool with Claude Code recently. Here it renders a thread (complete…

On tour for the 35th anniversary of Home Alone, Macaulay Culkin said his kids love the movie, but don’t know he’s Kevin. They’re only three and four years old, so this makes sense, but…

Rebecca Solnit: A Year on From Trump’s Victory, Resistance Is Everywhere. “There has, in fact, been a tremendous amount and variety of resistance and opposition and it’s mattered tremen…

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 don’t know if it’s because some new responsibilities are taking me out of the house more than usual, or because humanity’s current ugly streak makes everything else look more beauti…

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…

Akiva Schaffer, 2025, ★★★ This undoubtedly would have fared better in a packed theater than it did with me watching it alone at home, but I was pleasantly surprised it made me laugh…

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…