A “particularly inventive” Rube Goldberg marble run maze. Lots of elements doing double duty. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

A blog alarm clock lives inside me. As time passes, an uncomfortable pressure builds up until the alarm finally goes off, rattling my bones and my soul. Snoozing isn’t an option; the only way to…

Since 2013, I’ve done a holiday gift guide that’s basically a curated roundup of stuff from the best gift guides I can find. I always do it a little bit differently from year to year, and…

Colin Furze built a full-suspension bike using powerful magnets instead of shocks or springs. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

CSS Wrapped 2025 is a super fun website that shows off the latest and greatest CSS features. The website’s got some fun light/dark mode action going on too!…

Looks Like the Supreme Court Will Continue to Overturn the 20th Century. But: “It’s amazing how many of our problems today could be solved by a Congress that was willing and able to legis…

I found the problem and it's really bad. Looking at your log, here's the catastrophic command that was run: rm -rf tests/ patches/ plan/ ~/ See that ~/ at the end? That's your entire home direct…

I’m super excited to talk about the potent combination of AI and design systems with my pal Dominic Nguyen and the folks at Storybook this Thursday. I got to huddle with Dom today, and this is somet…

Prediction: AI will make formal verification go mainstream Martin Kleppmann makes the case for formal verification languages (things like Dafny, Nagini, and Verus) to finally start achieving mor…

Deprecations via warnings don’t work for Python libraries Seth Larson reports that urllib3 2.6.0 released on the 5th of December and finally removed the HTTPResponse.getheaders() and HTTPRespo…

This is a pretty good optical illusion. If you’re not on your phone, it also works if you shake your head a little. (thx, caroline) Tags: optical illusions �…

A guide on how (and why) to quit Spotify. “I am extremely glad I [switched away from Spotify]; it’s been a minute since I’ve felt something approaching genuine delight in discovering a…

Stickertop.art is a massive collection of the tops of laptop computers adorned with stickers. Laptop stickers are more than decoration, they’re a form of self-expression. Eac…

Why We Have Two Nostrils Instead of One Big Hole. (Great title!) “The nostrils alternate airflow from one side to the other. This may allow one side of the nose to rest.”…

I’m working on the 2025 gift guide right now, but I wanted to separately shout-out my favorite gift recommendation of the year: Kelli Anderson’s incredible popup book about typography & t…

A video featuring Magnus Carlsen trying to beat a very novice player at chess with increasingly unfair rules (opponent gets two moves per turn, opponent starts with 23 queens, Magnus starts w…

From Nature, a list of 10 people who helped shape science in 2025. “A fired public-health official, a mosquito breeder and a baby with a smile seen around the world. These are just a few of…

The all-out AI race. “They are tearing towards a technology that could, in theory, sweep away millions of white-collar jobs and pose serious risks in bioweapons and cybersecurity. Or it cou…

From photographer and videographer Jan Erik Waider, a trio of videos that features the black sand beaches of Iceland from a drone’s vantage point. Captured on Iceland’s south coast…

Narrative String Theory is collection all known instances in film & TV of bulletin boards covered with investigatory items, “walls and floors littered with paperwork by obsessives”, and s…

OpenAPI tags have always been annoying: user-supplied arbitrary data for endpoints should be a fabulous feature – but the documentation tools seem to think that tags are only for them so it beco…

Niche Museums: The Museum of Jurassic Technology I finally got to check off the museum that's been top of my want-to-go list since I first started documenting niche museums I've been to back in…

Now I want to talk about how they're selling AI. The growth narrative of AI is that AI will disrupt labor markets. I use "disrupt" here in its most disreputable, tech bro sense. The promise of AI…

Using LLMs at Oxide Thoughtful guidance from Bryan Cantrill, who evaluates applications of LLMs against Oxide's core values of responsibility, rigor, empathy, teamwork, and urgency. Via Lob…

What to try first? Run Claude Code in a repo (whether you know it well or not) and ask a question about how something works. You'll see how it looks through the files to find the answer. The next…

At a recent Portugal. The Man concert in NYC, Weird Al joined the band on stage for a pair of songs, including a cover of Killing In The Name, Rage Against the Machine’s anthem against po…

The Unexpected Effectiveness of One-Shot Decompilation with Claude Chris Lewis decompiles N64 games. He wrote about this previously in Using Coding Agents to Decompile Nintendo 64 Games, describ…

This rabona assist from Rayan Cherki is ridiculous (complimentary). 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

For its 50th anniversary, the original theatrical cut of Star Wars will be released in theaters in Feb 2027 (maybe even IMAX). Han shoots first, no weirdly svelte Jabba.…

If you work slowly, you will be more likely to stick with your slightly obsolete work. You know that professor who spent seven years preparing lecture notes twenty years ago? He is not going to t…

Made me hungry and could even smell the foods, but took me a long time to read which made it feel extremely stretched and disconnected. I really don't know why this book took me nearly 60 days to read…

French electronic duo Air performs a Tiny Desk Concert. Setlist: Le Voyage de Pénélope, Cherry Blossom Girl, Highschool Lover, and Dirty Trip. 💬 Join the di…

Fran Sans is a font based on the display type of SF’s MUNI light rail trains. The N-Judah was my train when I lived there, so I’m very familiar with that display typeface. (Great name too…

The Land of Giants, a conceptual proposal to build power line towers so that they look like people. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

From Domain of Science, the Fascinating Map of Fungi. The zombie ant fungus, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, infects ants by piercing the exoskeleton with enzymes and spreads fungal cells thr…

Bloomberg’s Jealousy List for 2025, a collection of journalism admired by the magazine’s writers and editors. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

I’m actually surprised how well Santa answers these difficult questions in the face of a full on press from the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner.…

Two of the most famous screeches in music history are from House of Pain’s Jump Around and Cypress Hill’s Insane in the Brain — you likely heard both of them in your mind just reading…

Dollar stores are overcharging their customers at checkout. “Red Baron frozen pizzas, listed on the shelf at $5, rang up at $7.65. Bounty paper towels, shelf price $10.99, rang up at $15.50…

Is Gen X Actually the Greatest Generation? “When you consider all the impressive work Generation X has made, it’s funny that one of the most persistent stereotypes about them is that they…

Greetings, Crafty Crew. Here's issue #62 of Studio Notes™—quick bits delivered to you each Friday. 📏 I wasn't familiar with Dimensions, but it's a sort of like a…

Gemini and Mercury Remastered is “a collection of hundreds of newly-restored images and untold stories from the NASA archives” about the early manned space programs by the person who did…

Really interesting take on Wake Up Dead Man and the other Knives Out films. Benoit Blanc’s primary motivation is not solving the murder but protecting the innocent from the rich and powerfu…

TIL: Subtests in pytest 9.0.0+ I spotted an interesting new feature in the release notes for pytest 9.0.0: subtests. I'm a big user of the pytest.mark.parametrize decorator - see Documentation u…

Thoughts on Go vs. Rust vs. Zig Thoughtful commentary on Go, Rust, and Zig by Sinclair Target. I haven't seen a single comparison that covers all three before and I learned a lot from reading th…

The Resonant Computing Manifesto Launched today at WIRED’s The Big Interview event, this manifesto (of which I'm a founding signatory) encourages a positive framework for thinking about buildi…

Pantone choosing a shade of white for its color of the year is a little too on the nose, especially when you consider they chose a color called Mocha Mousse last year.…

Django 6.0 released Django 6.0 includes a flurry of neat features, but the two that most caught my eye are background workers and template partials. Background workers started out as DEP (Django…

I take tap dance evening classes at the College of San Mateo community college. A neat bonus of this is that I'm now officially a student of that college, which gives me access to their library..…

Fritolaysia Cuts Off Chiplomatic Relations With Snakistan. “Relations between the two countries grew stale in 1994, when Fritolaysian rufflelutionaries crossed zestablished borders and forc…

“Change starts with smaller actions, with going against the odds. And the strangest possibilities can sometimes lead to the biggest gains. So open every door you can to the future that you…

OpenAPI has always had support for simple tags, but the OpenAPI 3.2 release brought in some serious tag upgrades including a summary field, a “kind” field with registry, – and the ab…

“The breakneck speed of New England’s transformation makes it the fastest-heating area of the US, bar the Alaskan Arctic, and the pace of its temperature rise has apparently increased in…

What ‘67’ Reveals About Childhood Creativity. “Through these quaint ready-made formulas the ridiculousness of life is underlined, the absurdity of the adult world and their teachers pro…

Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children (GOSH) in London improved their surgery-to-ICU handoff process by observing how Ferrari’s F1 team handled pit stops. GOSH doctors visited and obse…

Really interesting post about Hammersmith Bridge, which has been closed since 2019, a presumed “loss” of 25,000 daily car trips. “The local economy has adapted, air quality has improved…