Python 3.14 This year's major Python version, Python 3.14, just made its first stable release! As usual the what's new in Python 3.14 document is the best place to get familiar with the new rele…

Google released a new Gemini 2.5 Computer Use model today, specially designed to help operate a GUI interface by interacting with visible elements using a virtual mouse and keyboard. I tried the…

The trailer for Downey Wrote That, a documentary about long-time SNL writer Jim Downey. “Most of what makes us laugh is something that’s true, just you’ve never heard it put that way be…

“Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.” ― bell hooks…

The first new edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary in 22 years contains a bunch of new words & phrases: cold brew, petrichor, doomscroll, adulting, beast mode, farm-to-table,…

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Ken Coleman (@kencoleman)…

The Onion made a movie about Jeffrey Epstein and they’re airing it for free on YouTube. Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedophile airs Thursday, Oct 9 at 7pm ET.…

Bob Ross paintings to be auctioned to support public TV stations after federal funding cuts. What stage of anti-democratic capitalism is this? *paints huge, angry clouds*…

I thought this piece from Isaac Butler examining how Daniel Day-Lewis goes about his acting work was really interesting. I have always been haunted in some way by Day-Lewis. He is clearly am…

“Connection is not a transaction; it’s a vibrational field we can tap into on a daily basis in the most mundane of circumstances.” – Esther Perel…

Everything Is Becoming a Bank. “Most major corporations — from airlines to social media platforms — now aspire to become unregulated banks. Bankification today accounts for the highest…

“The world’s wind and solar farms have generated more electricity than coal plants for the first time this year, marking a turning point for the global power system.”…

For quite some I wanted to write a small static image gallery so I can share my pictures with friends and family. Of course there are a gazillion tools like this, but, well, sometimes I just want…

In 1969, Fred Rogers appeared before the Senate to argue against cutting federal funding for public broadcasting. During his testimony, Rogers recited a song from his show, What Do You Do w…

Qualcomm buys open-source electronics firm Arduino. “Qualcomm said Arduino ‘will retain its independent brand, tools and mission.’” I wonder how long that independence will last……

I missed that NIN’s Tron:Ares soundtrack came out a couple of weeks ago. Listening this morning to catch up! 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

I feel like vibe coding is pretty well established now as covering the fast, loose and irresponsible way of building software with AI - entirely prompt-driven, and with no attention paid to how t…

Adam Stoddard recently found common cause with the enthusiastic craftsmanship of lowrider culture, and I found myself nodding along vigorously: The thing is, this particular brand of “functional…

Upcoming exhibition from the MFA in Boston: “‘Faces in the Crowd: Street Photography’ explores the evolving techniques photographers have used to record the human experience as it has p…

Prompt-Brush 1.0 is a project by graphic designer Pablo Delcan that satirizes and challenges the growing field of AI-generated art. In a project he dubbed “the first non-AI generative art model,…

Read the book, Typographic Firsts Blackletter typefaces elicit many contradictory emotions depending, of course, on the context in which they are used and the manner in which they are composed. Someti…

Damien Leone, 2022, ★½ In “Homie the Clown,” a fan-favorite Simpsons episode, Homer Simpson goes to clown college. The lessons he receives in baggy pants, balloon animals, and tiny…

Deloitte to pay money back to Albanese government after using AI in $440,000 report Ouch: Deloitte will provide a partial refund to the federal government over a $440,000 report that contained…

I've settled on agents as meaning "LLMs calling tools in a loop to achieve a goal" but OpenAI continue to muddy the waters with much more vague definitions. Swyx spotted this one in the press pac…

gpt-image-1-mini OpenAI released a new image model today: gpt-image-1-mini, which they describe as "A smaller image generation model that’s 80% less expensive than the large model." They relea…

The Mainstream Media Is Catastrophically Failing To Meet The Moment. “Mainstream media has become so terrified of appearing biased that they’ve abandoned their basic responsibility to cle…

The Taco Bell 50k Ultramarathon was run in Denver over the weekend. Competitors must eat at 9 out of 10 Taco Bells along the route. “By the 4th stop, all entrants must have consumed at leas…

I missed this from a couple of months ago: Inside the World of “The Great British Bake Off”. “No show does so much to hide its true nature: namely, that it is a competition people despe…

GPT-5 pro Here's OpenAI's model documentation for their GPT-5 pro model, released to their API today at their DevDay event. It has similar base characteristics to GPT-5: both share a September 3…

In a 2014 preface for his 1978 book The Ohlone Way, a description of how the indigenous peoples of California’s Bay Area lived before Europeans arrived, Malcolm Margolin shared a list of wh…

“Mary Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work shedding light on how the immune system spares healthy cells, creating opening…

Last year, Gretchen Rubin wrote a widely circulated piece about trading the “empty nest” metaphor for something that “emphasizes possibility”: the open door. I somehow hadn’t read i…

I'm at OpenAI DevDay in Fort Mason, San Francisco today. As I did last year, I'm going to be live blogging the announcements from the kenote. Unlike last year, this year there's a livestream. Di…

How to Write in Cuneiform, the Oldest Writing System in the World. “Cuneiform consists of three components — upright, horizontal and diagonal — made by pressing the edge of a reed stylu…

I believed that giving users such a simple way to navigate the internet would unlock creativity and collaboration on a global scale. If you could put anything on it, then after a while, it would…

In his latest video essay, Thomas Flight praises the comfort film and shares some examples (The Big Lebowski, Perfect Days, Mon Oncle, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Moonrise Kingdom) from a fe…

Tim Berners-Lee: “I gave the world wide web away for free because I thought that it would only work if it worked for everyone. Today, I believe that to be truer than ever.”…

Oh I don’t know, the appearance of two perfectly overlapping fiery rings in the sky doesn’t seem like a good omen to me, even at low frequencies. 💬 Join t…

Last week, the island of Cebu in The Philippines was hit with a powerful 6.9 magnitude earthquake. We were on a call with our friend and colleague, Nicole, when the earthquake happened and she had to…

We Are Not Fascists, and If You Call Us Fascists, We Will Arrest You. “There is nothing funny about calling me or Donald Trump a fascist, and if you do, we will ship you to Guantanamo.”…

Two of my public Datasette instances - for my TILs and my blog's backup mirror - were getting hammered with misbehaving bot traffic today. Scaling them up to more Fly instances got them running a…

Look at this super-fun microsite Jason Santa Maria designed for DJR’s super-fun font, Megazoid! 🔗 Go to this link Tagged: October 2025, design, links, David Jonathan Ross,…

I'd recommend anyone who wants to understand the emergence of AI and OpenAI in particular to read this book. I do struggle reading non-fiction, and this book was no different. It took me nearly 2 mont…

Niels Leenheer goes through a detailed setup on how to take a single HDMI to projection into a mini event setup with holding screens. The technical detail is superb too, specifically considering power…

There’s some great thinking about color systems, tokens, and the relationship between brand and product in this article: When Color Meets Constraints: A Guide to Brand–Product Collaboration…

For a while now I've been hearing from engineers who run multiple coding agents at once - firing up several Claude Code or Codex CLI instances at the same time, sometimes in the same repo, someti…

Added to the film diary:One Battle After AnotherPaul Thomas Anderson, 2025, ★★★★PFS at the Bourse, Philadelphia, PA Tagged: October 2025 Reply via email…

Let the LLM Write the Prompts: An Intro to DSPy in Compound Al Pipelines I've had trouble getting my head around DSPy in the past. This half hour talk by Drew Breunig at the recent Databricks Da…

Keeping Up Appearances star Patricia Routledge dies at 96. I loved that show — almost every time I’m driving and see a herd of cows in a nearby field, I shrill, “Mind the cows, Richard!…

This post is part of a series Tagged: October 2025, personal, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA Reply via email…

Damien Leone, 2016, ★ Another practical effects showreel barely disguised as a movie featuring the maniacal killer Art the Clown, a try-hard whose yearning to be a horror icon is as pla…

Watch as Paul Davids plays 80 of rock’s most iconic guitar intros, including ones from Robert Johnson, Chuck Berry, The Kinks, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Black Sabbath, ZZ Top, Joan Jett, AC/DC…

Name A 28-Year-Old. “The data tells us that 3,880,894 children were born in the year 1997, and yet we can find no trace of them in popular culture.” 💬 Joi…

I think I’m gonna read Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence next, inspired by Evan Puschak’s recent video. Just downloaded the free ebook from Standard Ebooks.…

Harvard Library’s collection of Soviet and post-Soviet lapel pins. Sputnik, Aeroflot, the 1980 Olympics, Tolstoy…collect your favorites! 💬 Join the discus…

Swift Justice is a short documentary that, perhaps for the first time, takes viewers inside a rural Afghan courtroom operated by the Taliban, whose arbiters decide cases using Sharia law. […

Life Is More Than an Engineering Problem, an interview with Ted Chiang from earlier this year. “I don’t believe it’s meaningful to say that something is better art absent any context of…

The 25 Most Influential Magazine Covers of All Time, including, of course, Ali on the cover of Esquire as Saint Sebastian. See also all the nominated covers. �…

Instead of hiding rips and tears, the visible mending movement turns them into art. “Born from the Japanese art of sashiko, visible mending enables crafters to eschew fast fashion and make…

Litestream v0.5.0 is Here I've been running Litestream to backup SQLite databases in production for a couple of years now without incident. The new version has been a long time coming - Ben John…

In a five part series called “emoji-nation”, Ukrainian Nastya Ptichek mixes the work of well-known painters with graphical elements of new media. In the second part of the series, the wor…

When Kittens Came to My Prison, I Had Not Petted One in 15 Years. “All those hard cases doing hard time melt like butter on a summer sidewalk when they visit the felines, feed them, watch t…

Hello, Superb Folks. Here's issue #52 of Studio Notes™—quick bits delivered to you each Friday. A whole year of weekly dispatches! Thanks so much for reading and sticking with me he…