“We’re in a golden age of comedy now where everyone can say exactly what they want, free of the fear of censorship, except by the government. Donald Trump has made comedy legal again!”…

Qwen3-Coder: Agentic Coding in the World It turns out that as I was typing up my notes on Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct-2507 the Qwen team were unleashing something much bigger: Today, we’re annou…

Health Insurers Are Hiking Premiums as Their Profits Balloon. “The US’s six largest health insurers reported massive profits last year, doling out billions on stock buybacks and dividends…

Qwen/Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct-2507 Significant new model release from Qwen, published yesterday without much fanfare. (Update: probably because they were cooking the much larger Qwen3-Coder-480B…

Ozzy Osborne died today at the age of 76. His farewell concert a few weeks ago was the highest-grossing charity concert of all time, raising more than $200 million.…

Subliminal Learning: Language Models Transmit Behavioral Traits via Hidden Signals in Data This new alignment paper from Anthropic wins my prize for best illustrative figure so far this year:…

Our contribution to a global environmental standard for AI Mistral have released environmental impact numbers for their largest model, Mistral Large 2, in more detail than I have seen from any o…

Follow Architectural Digest as they head behind the scenes at the offices of NPR Music to see how the now-iconic Tiny Desk Concerts come together. My favorite bits are the callouts of all t…

Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite is now stable and generally available The last remaining member of the Gemini 2.5 trio joins Pro and Flash in General Availability today. Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite is the cheap…

Teaser trailer for Pixar’s next film, Hoppers. “We put this 🧠 into this 🦫.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

I stumbled across this July 2019 article by Arthur C. Brooks about professional decline and it gave me lots to think about: Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think.…

Since 2004, new editions of the Choose Your Own Adventure books have included branching diagrams of all of the possible paths through the books. 💬 Join the di…

Some madman/genius put cut, copy, and paste into Doom. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

I love the look of this black & white animated video made by Anthony Dickenson from thousands of hand-painted frames for Rival Consoles’ song Soft Gradient Beckons. Stick around after the…

Programmer Przemysław Dębiak recently defeated an advanced OpenAI model in a coding competition. “The contest echoes the American folk tale of John Henry, the steel-driving man who raced…

Anil Dash on seeing Wu-Tang Clan in 2000, the last time all nine members of the Wu-Tang Clan appeared together on one stage together. “At the time of the performance, [O.D.B.] had been on t…

Today (July 22) will be the second-shortest day since 1973. “The difference will be just 1.34 milliseconds less than the standard 24 hours.” (Also, the Earth is spinning faster and we don…

Textual v4.0.0: The Streaming Release Will McGugan may no longer be running a commercial company around Textual, but that hasn't stopped his progress on the open source project. He recently rele…

It's not an intuitive process and requires a few speciality commands to work, so it made sense that I write up the process so I can duck myself later on.…

tidwall/pogocache New project from Josh Baker, author of the excellent tg C geospatial libarry (covered previously) and various other interesting projects: Pogocache is fast caching software bu…

XKCD mapped the most observed plant and animal for all 50 US states as reported by iNaturalist users. I had no idea bumble bees were such a popularly observed animal — the common eastern…

A look at 40 years of Rembrandt self-portraits. “Rembrandt documented his face as it aged through time, from the fresh-faced playfulness of youth to his careworn old age.” He did about 10…

A few weeks ago, a pair of icebergs drifted close to Innaarsuit, Greenland. Photographer Dennis Lehtonen captured the visit — you can see the photos on Instagram or in the Arctic galler…

Gregor Formanek is likely the very last SS guard of a concentration camp to be charged by German prosecutors. “Did he enjoy the power he had? Did he care? Did he find it boring? Did it make…

Advanced version of Gemini with Deep Think officially achieves gold-medal standard at the International Mathematical Olympiad OpenAI beat them to the punch in terms of publicity by publishing th…

In Florida, flooding is a huge cause of death and destruction from hurricanes. This video looks at how a town called Babcock Ranch was designed to withstand hurricane flooding through some…

“The Alamo announced Friday a whimsical and nostalgic new addition to its growing collection: the original, screen-used stunt bike from the beloved 1985 film Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure.” R…

Localization testing isn’t just about getting the language right—it’s about delivering the right experience for every user, wherever they are. This includes pricing, layout behavi…

My recent session with a field recording expert was truly ear-opening. If you’re curious how Greenwich sounds through shotgun mics, hydrophones, e…

Catherine Lacey’s The Möbius Book is both a memoir and a novel, does not have a beginning or an end, and is “readable from either side”. 💬 Join the dis…

I had the biggest honor to review and write the foreword for the 5th edition of Jennifer Robbins’ book, Learning Web Design. The foreword itself explains why it’s such a huge honor, so here it is…

An AI tool that gets gold on the IMO is obviously immensely impressive. Does it mean math is “solved”? Is an AI-generated proof of the Riemann hypothesis clearly on the horizon? Obviously not…

I am totally smitten with the intricate drawings of Japanese artist Shunshun. It’s worth clicking through to see them in detail. Here’s a look at his process: You can follo…

“Terrible night’s sleep? Here’s how to make it through the day…” Maybe hold off on caffeine, limit carbs + easy energy, “snack” your exercise, get out in the sun, nap (but not t…

A remake of The Thomas Crown Affair with Michael B. Jordan, Danai Gurira, Kenneth Branagh, and Lily Gladstone? Yeah, I’m into that. 💬 Join the discussion on…

I finally made it to the V&A East Storehouse this weekend, to see my icons in use. Anyone who was there on Saturday will have seen a rather emotional middle aged man taking more photos of wayfindi…

The more I work on API standards, the more I realise how few teams understand that they can adopt the standards and, without breaking any contract, adapt them to make a strong interface for their own…

Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 (an update) Salvatore Sanfilippo describes his current AI-assisted development workflow. He's all-in on LLMs for code review, exploratory prototyping, pair…

Honestly not sure what I thought of the book… I'm unsure how I got this on my to-read list. I think I was looking for funny books from the last few years. I didn't laugh once reading this book thoug…

Every day someone becomes a programmer because they figured out how to make ChatGPT build something. Lucky for us: in many of those cases the AI picks Python. We should treat this as an opportuni…

There’s a bigger opportunity in computer science and programming (academically conveyed or self-taught) now than ever before, by far, in my opinion. The move to AI is like replacing shovels wit…

OpenAI's gold medal performance on the International Math Olympiad This feels notable to me. OpenAI research scientist Alexander Wei: I’m excited to share that our latest @OpenAI experim…

A few months ago I added a tool to my blog for bulk-applying tags to old content. It works as an extension to my existing search interface, letting me run searches and then quickly apply a tag to…

So one of my favorite things to do is give my coding agents more and more permissions and freedom, just to see how far I can push their productivity without going too far off the rails. It's a de…

One analyst recently speculated (via Ed Conard) that, based on Nvidia's latest datacenter sales figures, AI capex may be ~2% of US GDP in 2025, given a standard multiplier. [...] Capital expendit…

CBS cancelled the Late Show with Stephen Colbert just days after he criticized the $16 million bribe the network paid to Trump. Here’s why “Colbert’s cancellation is a dark warning”.…

Fascism For First Time Founders. “Let’s have a little chat about why embracing fascism is probably the worst possible business strategy for anyone actually trying to build something innov…

How to run an LLM on your laptop I talked to Grace Huckins for this piece from MIT Technology Review on running local models. Apparently she enjoyed my dystopian backup plan! Simon Willison has…

“The extreme sports pioneer Felix Baumgartner, famed for a record-breaking 2012 skydive from the edge of space, has died in a paragliding accident.” 💬 Joi…

Next year, “the average person who buys Affordable Care Act insurance will be paying 75% more for their premium” because of “the expiration of enhanced premium tax credits in the ACA ma…