Royal Family is a daily game where you have to position six chess pieces on a board so that none of the pieces attack each other and there’s only a single piece in each marked zone.…

My hunch is that existing LLMs make it easier to build a new programming language in a way that captures new developers. Most programming languages are similar enough to existing languages that y…

TIL: “Key man risk refers to the potential threat a company faces when a crucial employee, often a key executive or expert, is no longer available.” I think KDO has key person risk, altho…

Hello, Compadres. Here's issue #57 of Studio Notes™—quick bits delivered to you each Friday. 🐸 For their 70th anniversary, The Jim Henson Company is auctioning off hundred…

Using Codex CLI with gpt-oss:120b on an NVIDIA DGX Spark via Tailscale Inspired by a YouTube comment I wrote up how I run OpenAI's Codex CLI coding agent against the gpt-oss:120b model running i…

Game design is simple, actually Game design legend Raph Koster (Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies and many more) provides a deeply informative and delightfully illustrated "twelve-step program f…

You should write an agent Thomas Ptacek on the Fly blog: Agents are the most surprising programming experience I’ve had in my career. Not because I’m awed by the magnitude of their powers �…

Cole Escola (Oh, Mary!) is writing the screenplay for a Miss Piggy movie. Jennifer Lawrence & Emma Stone are producing. (Crossing my fingers for a Pigs in Space scene…)…

My trepidation extends to complex literature searches. I use LLMs as secondary librarians when I’m doing research. They reliably find primary sources (articles, papers, etc.) that I miss in my…

Kimi K2 Thinking Chinese AI lab Moonshot's Kimi K2 established itself as one of the largest open weight models - 1 trillion parameters - back in July. They've now released the Thinking version,…

Speaking of Daft Punk, did you know they released some new music recently? Ok well, that’s not quiiiite true, but in late September, Epic launched the Daft Punk Experience in Fortnite and I…

Read the book, Typographic Firsts You’d think that by 2025 I would be sick of anything addressing the “future” by now. Having lived from the 60s through 90s, visionary predictions of a pessimist…

At the start of the year, most people loosely following AI probably knew of 0 [Chinese] AI labs. Now, and towards wrapping up 2025, I’d say all of DeepSeek, Qwen, and Kimi are becoming househol…

Space Type Generator is “a kinetic type generator” that’s a hell of a lot of fun to mess with. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

Low Skilled Workers Are a Myth. “[Minimum wage jobs] are not low-skill. They simply require different skills, ones that not just anyone possesses.” 💬 Join…

In his most recent video, Evan Puschak takes a close look at Marlon Brando’s face and gestures in a scene from On the Waterfront to explain how Brando changed film forever. And this is w…

OREO! OREOOREO! RE! ORE! OREORE! OREOREOREOREORE! 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

I'm upgrading various plugins for compatibility with the new Datasette 1.0a20 alpha release and I decided to record a video of the process. This post accompanies that video with detailed addition…

Earth’s got a new moon! (Sort of.) “This asteroid is part of an elite cosmic club which acts like moons but aren’t.” If asteroid, why moon acting? 💬 J…

After completing another long solo walk, Craig Mod wrote about fullness: This is why I always say: Aim for fullness if you want happiness. If the creator itself came down from the sky at the…

Lego is considering making this fan-created Daft Punk set into an official set. YES PLEASE. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

I've been experimenting with a pattern for LLM usage recently that's working out really well: asynchronous code research tasks. Pick a research question, spin up an asynchronous coding agent and…

Australia has so much solar that it’s offering everyone free electricity. “The program would require electricity retailers to provide free electricity to everyone for at least three hours…

Apple Macbook Air M4s are on sale again, somehow even cheaper than over the summer. The 13-inch base model is $749 (25% off) while this 15-inch one is $1,149.00 (-18% off). There are other…

Open redirect endpoint in Datasette prior to 0.65.2 and 1.0a21 This GitHub security advisory covers two new releases of Datasette that I shipped today, both addressing the same open redirect iss…

Removing XSLT for a more secure browser Previously discussed back in August, it looks like it's now official: Chrome intends to deprecate and remove XSLT from the browser. [...] We intend to re…

Researchers created a roof paint (a “nano-engineered polymer coating”) “that not only reflects up to 97% of the sun’s rays, but also passively collects water”. And kept the interior…

Lego will be releasing a fan-created bowl of ramen as an official set. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

New book just out: The Cory Arcangel Hack. “This book explores three dominant arrangements in Arcangel’s work — the flow-break hack, the flow-remix hack, and the flow-parody hack…”…

There are some internet projects for which no one is clamoring, but when completed produce a masterpiece of creativity. This Rollercoaster Tycoon video tying the tracks to Defying Gravity (fr…

Speaking of new stamps, these Bruce Lee stamps are pretty great too: Tags: Bruce Lee · stamps · USPS 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

The US Postal Service released a sneak peek at some of the stamps they’re going to release in 2026. Among them are these lowrider stamps: Five models grace the stamps: a blue 1946 Chevro…

Thing I was not expecting: a 4-star review of Predator: Badlands from Matt Zoller Seitz; he calls it “an exceptional sci-fi action thriller with memorable characters, beautiful and terrifyi…

France enshrines need for consent into rape law in wake of Gisèle Pelicot case. The bill states that consent must be “free and informed, specific, prior and revocable”.…

Edith Zimmerman: How I Broke My Drinking Habit. “How do you fill your time after deciding to get sober?” See also an extended convo on the How to Be a Better Human podcast.…

I don’t even know what this is — classical pop? surrealist orchestral? — but it goes hard and is kind of fantastic. Wow. A few comments from YouTube: This is the most insane lead sin…

I'm worried that they put co-pilot in Excel because Excel is the beast that drives our entire economy and do you know who has tamed that beast? Brenda. Who is Brenda? She is a mid-level employee…

America’s Dumbest Billionaires Fail to Stop Zohran Mamdani. “…a bunch of rich guys who have been comically out of touch with normal people for many decades, and more recently have blowt…

Decision Desk HQ calls the NYC mayoral race for Zohran Mamdani. (Eric Adams: 0.3% of the vote. Worst mayor ever.)…

Code execution with MCP: Building more efficient agents When I wrote about Claude Skills I mentioned that I don't use MCP at all any more when working with coding agents - I find CLI utilities a…

“Stone Simulator is a meditative idle game where you live as a rock enduring endless seasons and absurd events. Survive storms, unlock quirky achievements, and observe a serene, ever-changi…

Datasette 1.0a20 is out with the biggest breaking API change on the road to 1.0, improving how Datasette's permissions system works by migrating permission logic to SQL running in SQLite. This re…

Pebbling: sending little links and memes to the people that you love. Derived from the behavior of gentoo penguins, who “pick up pebbles in their beak and carry them to their partners or po…

Papers is a 3-minute animated short film made by Yoshinao Satoh from what must be thousands of newspaper scans. The animation set to Different Trains by Steve Reich & Kronos Quartet. I love…

Conde Nast is watering down Teen Vogue by folding it into the Vogue website. “Management plans to lay off six of our members, most of whom are BIPOC women or trans…” Teen Vogue’s poli…

“Originally released in 1982, the Vectrex was a truly unique console, featuring its own built-in vector display and colorful screen overlays. Forty-three years after its creation, this icon…

MCP Colors: Systematically deal with prompt injection risk Tim Kellogg proposes a neat way to think about prompt injection, especially with respect to MCP tools. Classify every tool with a color…

Thanks to Great Wave Today, I was able to see an original woodblock print of Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa at the Creative Museum here in Tokyo. My first time seeing an original IRL…

Version control for your data: Automerge is a local-first sync engine for multiplayer apps that works offline, prevents conflicts, and runs fast. Interesting project, possibly for mini personal projec…

Every time an engineer evaluates a language that isn’t “theirs,” their brain is literally working against them. They’re not just analyzing technical trade offs, they’re contemplating a…

The fetch()ening After several years of stable htmx 2.0 and a promise to never release a backwards-incompatible htmx 3 Carson Gross is technically keeping that promise... by skipping to htmx 4 i…

Dear PEP 810 authors. The Steering Council is happy to unanimously accept "PEP 810, Explicit lazy imports". Congratulations! We appreciate the way you were able to build on and improve the previo…

I began at the end. The Chōishi-michi pilgrimage route is an amazing 12-mile trail that winds its way up through the forest from the Jison-in temple in the town of Kudoyama in the valley t…

The case against pgvector I wasn't keen on the title of this piece but the content is great: Alex Jacobs talks through lessons learned trying to run the popular pgvector PostgreSQL vector indexi…

From NY Times reporter Anna Kodé (whose “intersection of culture and real estate” reporting I’ve been enjoying lately), a short video on the increasingly hostile architecture of NYC.…

Reading something the other day triggered a core memory of something that happened when I was a year younger than Benjamin is now. Two mothers brought their babies (both around two-years-old at the t…

Bud Smith built a desk for his truck so he could write during breaks in his work as a mechanic and welder. “Now that I had my Truck Desk, that vehicle was my very own rolling cubicle.”…

Interleaved thinking is essential for LLM agents: it means alternating between explicit reasoning and tool use, while carrying that reasoning forward between steps.This process significantly enha…

“Glowing sperm helps to reveal secrets of mosquito sex.” And what are those secrets you might ask? “Female mosquitoes are actually in charge during sex.” Good for her.…

Courtesy of login.jp (“archiving the Japanese experience through music”), a jazz jungle mix by Takuya Nakamura, played in a Japanese rice field to celebrate the importance of rice in Ja…

Yessss. I noticed that a 4K remaster of Princess Mononoke was playing in some IMAX theaters here in Japan last week, and now the movie is opening wider, with showings w/ English subtitles. So…

Two interesting new papers regarding LLM security and prompt injection came to my attention this weekend. Agents Rule of Two: A Practical Approach to AI Agent Security The first is Agents Rule of…

PyCon US 2026 call for proposals is now open PyCon US is coming to the US west coast! 2026 and 2027 will both be held in Long Beach, California - the 2026 conference is set for May 13th-19th nex…

My son learned to bicycle today. I didn’t learn until I was six, and he’s just shy of 5 1/4, so I have no reason to have been as disappointed/exasperated as I was. He’s been able to move around…