In 2002, Aardman Animations produced a series of short episodes called Wallace & Gromit’s Cracking Contraptions. In each episode, Wallace unveils a new invention, which Gromit then has to d…

“The embrace of the unitary executive theory by both the president and the [Supreme Court] has given us the worst of all worlds: an ultrapowerful presidency without an actual president at t…

In 2025, Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) emerged as the de facto new major stage to add to this mix. By training LLMs against automatically verifiable rewards across a numbe…

On reading Proust vs experiencing the world intermediated by screens (even when you’re not on one). “Your attention is, on a foundational level, all you have. This is why it feels worse t…

If you want to see the future of clean energy, you have to go to China. They have flying 2-seater taxis, lunch delivery drones, robots that can swap your empty EV battery in 3 minutes, bullet…

Inkblot Books via the Public Domain Review. These pre-date use of the inkblot in the Rorschach test. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

“The Global Village Construction Set is a modular, DIY, low-cost, high-performance platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to bui…

Sam Rose explains how LLMs work with a visual essay Sam Rose is one of my favorite authors of explorable interactive explanations - here's his previous collection. Sam joined ngrok in September…

Using thousands of photos taken by NASA astronauts Butch Wilmor and Don Pettit earlier this year from the International Space Station, Seán Doran made this incredible timelapse called Ligh…

A report from one of the competitors in a parallel parking championship. “You’ve got to get uncomfortably close. Those bumpers are called bumpers for a reason.”…

For this year’s office party (the two of us going for a posh meal), we returned to London’s Session Arts Club, having loved our lunch there in spring. We consumed lo…

Savory Rice Krispies treats? “Savory chicken fat and fried onions push Rice Krispies Treats into gloriously salty-sweet territory.” 💬 Join the discussion…

Happy Friday, Folks. Here's issue #63 of Studio Notes™—quick bits delivered to you each Friday. ✍️ This website is marketing-y as heck, but I have to imagine I'…

In 2023, seismologists detected a “global hum” originating in Greenland that lasted for 9 days. A rockslide triggered a 200m-high tsunami that sloshed back & forth in a fjord every 90 sec…

Introducing GPT-5.2-Codex The latest in OpenAI's Codex family of models (not the same thing as their Codex CLI or Codex Cloud coding agent tools). GPT‑5.2-Codex is a version of GPT‑5.2⁠ f…

Read the book, Typographic Firsts How quickly a year passes. Our Must-Have Fonts for 2025 list was our most popular ever, but our must-have fonts for 2026 list aims to set the bar even higher. Findi…

They have to be able to talk about us without us. What this phrase means, in its simplest form, is that you have to tell a story so clear, so concise, so memorable and evocative that people can repeat…

Agent Skills Anthropic have turned their skills mechanism into an "open standard", which I guess means it lives in an independent agentskills/agentskills GitHub repository now? I wouldn't be sur…

swift-justhtml First there was Emil Stenström's JustHTML in Python, then my justjshtml in JavaScript, then Anil Madhavapeddy's html5rw in OCaml, and now Kyle Howells has built a vibespiled depe…

For years now, the people have wanted only one thing: for Daniel Craig’s chicken-fried detective Benoit Blanc to feature in a Muppet movie (with Craig as the only human). Earlier this year,…

Prepare to lose a few hours to these: Andy Baio’s top 10 free browser games of 2025. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

Just dropped: Lane 8’s Winter 2025 Mixtape. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

Anthropic installed an AI-powered vending machine in the WSJ office. The LLM, named Claudius, was responsible for autonomously purchasing inventory from wholesalers, setting prices, trackin…

“Docs said I’d never walk, but I ran a marathon.” Logan Knowles was born with cerebral palsy. This fall, he ran & completed the NYC marathon, his body fighting him the whole way. What a…

Making your own amaro at home. “…so long as the plants are edible and the flavors appeal, a variety of contrasting and complementary elements will ultimately result in something complex a…

“The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.” – Seneca…

Entirely Too Many Thoughts About Wake Up Dead Man. An excellent, long & close read of Wake Up Dead Man, particularly its focus on “religion, faith, and grace”.…

Imagine playing fridge poetry with the world. Enter playhtml.fun/fridge.…

“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” ― E.B. White…

visualrambling.space is a personal project by Damar, someone who loves to learn about different topics and rambling about them visually. What a delight. (via namedotcom)…

Earlier this week, Vanity Fair published a two-part story about the Trump regime’s “inner circle”, including extensive interviews with his chief of staff, who was openly critical of t…

A group of journalism students was able to track probable Russian spy drones launched from cargo ships to surveil European military bases. They even flew a drone of their own over one of the…

In all of the debates about the value of AI-assistance in software development there's one depressing anecdote that I keep on seeing: the junior engineer, empowered by some class of LLM tool, who…

18,970 ↑ Scrobbles 6,701 ↓ Tracks 1,655 ↓ Albums 1,275 ↑ Artists 93 ↑ Albums Bought 14 ↓ Gigs 18 – Books read Album of the year This has felt like a particularly good yea…

Inside PostHog: How SSRF, a ClickHouse SQL Escaping 0day, and Default PostgreSQL Credentials Formed an RCE Chain Mehmet Ince describes a very elegant chain of attacks against the PostHog analyti…

We’re getting down to the wire for gifts to be shipped in time for Xmas. Take a look at the 2025 Kottke Holiday Gift Guide if you still need to shop for your fam & friends.…

AoAH Day 15: Porting a complete HTML5 parser and browser test suite Anil Madhavapeddy is running an Advent of Agentic Humps this year, building a new useful OCaml library every day for most of D…

It continues to be a busy December, if not quite as busy as last year. Today's big news is Gemini 3 Flash, the latest in Google's "Flash" line of faster and less expensive models. Google are emph…

“On January 1, 2026, thousands of copyrighted works from 1930 enter the US public domain, along with sound recordings from 1925.” Includes Betty Boop, Blondie & Dagwood, and works by Will…

Arthur Ganson is a kinetic sculptor who builds “Rube Goldberg machines with existential themes”. One of his works is called Machine with Concrete, which demonstrates the magic of gear r…

Chef Saves 78-Year-Old Man’s Life After He Stopped Showing Up for His Daily Dinners at Local Restaurant. “Mr. Hicks don’t miss no days. I knew, then, something was wrong.”…

[Trailer] The Muppet Show is returning! It’s a one-time event, hosted by Sabrina Carpenter, to celebrate the show’s 50th anniversary. “It’s time to play the music, it’s time to ligh…

Nature magazine has chosen its favorite science images of the year. I’ve featured a few of these on the site already — Skydiving the Sun, red sprites in the New Zealand sky — so I picke…

Astronomy Picture of the Day for Dec 12: a red fox beneath a swirling aurora. “In a Finnish myth, when an arctic fox runs so fast that its bushy tail brushes the mountains, flaming sparks a…

The Devil You Know is an 8-part podcast series from the CBC and Sarah Marshall (host of You’re Wrong About…) about the Satanic Panic. “These thousands of alleged Satanists were nowhere…

In a recent bombshell piece for the New Yorker (archive), Rachel Aviv explored the personal journals of the celebrated neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks. What she found was shocking: he had…

The Most Scathing Book Reviews of 2025. “Historians will study how bad this book is. English teachers will hold this book aloft at their students to remind them that literally anyone can wr…

Planning to Visit the US? Take It From This American Citizen – Don’t. “If I were a tourist, though, I’d pick a less totalitarian place to travel.”…

Matt Webb reports on going to algoraves. “There are special browser-based programming languages like strudel where you type code to define the beats and the sound, like mod synth in code, a…

Ever since Stars of the Lid Forever went live last month, I've been getting a nice batch of new show recordings. I've finally got through processing them all, and I’ve just published 8 new shows, br…

firefox parser/html/java/README.txt TIL (or TIR - Today I was Reminded) that the HTML5 Parser used by Firefox is maintained as Java code (commit history here) and converted to C++ using a custom…

Ragú Unveils Sensory Deprivation Marinara Tank. “The detoxifying marinara is slowly simmered to the exact temperature of the user’s body, allowing the mind to drift freely into a meditat…

The new ChatGPT Images is here OpenAI shipped an update to their ChatGPT Images feature - the feature that gained them 100 million new users in a week when they first launched it back in March,…

s3-credentials 0.17 New release of my s3-credentials CLI tool for managing credentials needed to access just one S3 bucket. Here are the release notes in full: New commands get-bucket-policy a…

ty: An extremely fast Python type checker and LSP The team at Astral have been working on this for quite a long time, and are finally releasing the first beta. They have some big performance cl…

Over his storied career, Steven Spielberg has made only four studio films about aliens: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, ET, War of the Worlds, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the C…

Poe the Poet I was looking for a way to specify additional commands in my pyproject.toml file to execute using uv. There's an enormous issue thread on this in the uv issue tracker (300+ comments…

Seven Voting Laws Every Blue State Should Enact Right Now. “1. Enact a statutory right to vote for every eligible citizen. This may surprise you, but there is no general federal constitutio…

The Hit Hollywood Didn’t Want. “Sinners is a threat to a business model built only on regurgitation, on endless return trips to Jurassic World, on more Toy Stories and feature-length toy…

If we were all Japanese pond frogs, we’d have nothing to fear from murder hornets. “When I watched the recorded videos in slow motion, the frogs were clearly stung multiple times yet show…

Hmm, I really don’t know about this one: an animated adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm as a sort of Ice Age-ish comedy adventure? One commenter on YouTube says, “This movie is…

I had the opportunity to participate in a discussion with my pals at Storybook to show off the powerful formula of Design Systems + AI (we’ve been using the abbreviation “DS+AI” as “AI+DS”…

“The Trump administration’s vision for the United States is one of a white Christian nation. And the path to accomplish it is through the exclusion and removal of all who do not fit that…

A roundup of the words/phrases of the year for 2025, including “rage bait”, “vibe coding”, “Mar-a-Lago face”, “chaos”, “performative male”, and “Kavanaugh stop”.…

Born Poor (PBS/Frontline) is a documentary filmed across 14 years about three kids in the US as they grow into young adults while “dealing with an economy where they face more obstacles t…

Oh, so we're seeing other people now? Fantastic. Let's see what the "competition" has to offer. I'm looking at these notes on manifest.json and content.js. The suggestion to remove scripting perm…

I’ve been watching junior developers use AI coding assistants well. Not vibe coding—not accepting whatever the AI spits out. Augmented coding: using AI to accelerate learning while maintainin…

I wrote about JustHTML yesterday - Emil Stenström's project to build a new standards compliant HTML5 parser in pure Python code using coding agents running against the comprehensive html5lib-tes…

America Is an Unserious Country Filled With Unserious People. “We’ll tolerate this just like we tolerate everything else. Because this is who we are, collectively, as a country.”…

‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.…

2025 Word of the Year: Slop Slop lost to "brain rot" for Oxford Word of the Year 2024 but it's finally made it this year thanks to Merriam-Webster! Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen…

Alan Sepinwall wrote a lovely remembrance of Rob Reiner and his career. “A legend. No doubt about it.” Reiner and his wife Michele Singer were found dead at their home in LA yesterday. Wh…

MY WIFE GRADUATED AND GOT HER MASTERS IN MENTAL HEALTH COUNSELING AND ART THERAPY! I am so massively proud of her! Melissa has busted her ass and has demonstrated superhuman levels of grit and…