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…

“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…

To Grow, We Must Forget… but Now AI Remembers Everything. “What if human forgetting is not a bug, but a feature? And what happens when we build machines that don’t forget, but are now h…

This is a charming short film on how a Foley artist would sound design a day in an ordinary life. Running hands through spaghetti noodles stands in for hair washing, a spray bottle sounds l…

Matthew Rhys & Netflix are plotting an adaptation of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker. The consensus is that The Power Broker is unadaptable. But, the consensus also was that a 50-billion-pag…

How MacKenzie Scott is giving away her billions. “Once you begin to see Scott as [Toni] Morrison’s mentee — rather than as a certain Amazon founder’s ex-wife — you can’t unsee it.…

An irresistible video title: Army of Crabs Protect Spy Robot From Stingray. “A 4-meter stingray can eat 50 crabs a day.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.o…

“Ugh, this kid is so sweaty!” my son exclaimed as he came under attack in some game he was playing. This was a few years ago; my ears perked up and I asked him what he meant. He explained…

How to Fix a Typewriter and Your Life. “It’s like Zen. There are times when it is just very relaxing to be standing in front of the machine and slowly cleaning it, tweaking the adjustment…

Intertapes is a collection of found cassette tapes — some contain music and others voice memos. Each entry includes images of the tape, a description/track listing, and the actual audio (…

“If new proposals detailed in an FDA memo are put into place, experts told me it would mean the end of annual flu shots. And end of most vaccines for pregnant people. And maybe the end of u…

Since the beginning of the project in 2023 and the private beta days of Ghostty, I've repeatedly expressed my intention that Ghostty legally become a non-profit. [...] I want to squelch any possi…

I love the remix of Radiohead’s Everything In Its Right Place in the midst of Kelly Lee Owens’ Boiler Room set (~33:50 mark). Had me chair dancing this AM! �…

The painting above was made in 1945 by self-taught artist Janet Sobel; it’s called Milky Way. Sobel was a Ukrainian-born artist who was a pioneer in abstract expressionist art and in drip…

The best telescopes for astrophotography. Boy, if I needed an expensive new hobby, this might be the one at the top of the list. 💬 Join the discussion on kott…

What’s the best way to lift people out of poverty? “Cash giving programs believe the people experiencing poverty best understand what they need to escape it.”…

A much-touted 4K remaster of Mad Men recently premiered on HBO Max and they forgot to apply digital effects to scenes in some of the episodes so you can see crew in the background, etc.…

TIL: Dependency groups and uv run I wrote up the new pattern I'm using for my various Python project repos to make them as easy to hack on with uv as possible. The trick is to use a PEP 735 depe…

Read the book, Typographic Firsts In my past Font of the Month columns, I admitted to extreme fixation for ‘stencilism’ and avaricious hoarding of stencil type and lettering specimens. The…

I've written about Advent of Code in the past, but that was 5 years ago, so this warrants a new post, and there's an extra opportunity, I think.…

For most of human history, around 50% of children used to die before they reached the end of puberty. In 2020, that number is 4.3%. It’s 0.3% in countries like Japan & Norway. This drama…

Very Good Music Fun Facts from Go Jeff Go including: “Hall and Oates never referred to themselves as “Hall and Oates.” All their records say Daryl Hall and John Oates. Also, there is a…

Level Devil. This game is hilarious and diabolical. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

Retrospekt refurbs and sells retro technology (VHS tapes, cassette players, instant cameras, typewriters, iPods). 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

In a letter to the Times of London, Dr. Michael Baum tells how a line in Arcadia by Tom Stoppard sparked an idea which resulted in adjuvant systemic chemotherapy, a therapy Baum helped pionee…

Anthropic acquires Bun Anthropic just acquired the company behind the Bun JavaScript runtime, which they adopted for Claude Code back in July. Their announcement includes an impressive revenue u…

I’m in Charge at This Hertz Location, and Buddy, You’re Not Getting a Car Today. “Tell me, honestly, when you reserved a rental car through Hertz, you thought… what? That we were goin…

In just a few days (Dec 5), the entirety of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill duology will be released in theaters as one four-hour-long film. Here’s the trailer: Quentin Tarantino’s KIL…

Introducing Mistral 3 Four new models from Mistral today: three in their "Ministral" smaller model series (14B, 8B, and 3B) and a new Mistral Large 3 MoE model with 675B parameters, 41B active.…

A list of 25 Things to Say to Your Children, including “You can do hard things. I’ve seen you do them before and you can do them again.”; “I’m proud of you.”; and “It’s so bra…

Paul Ford on normalized AI & what happens when bubbles burst. “When the bubble is big, every idea feels like a billion-dollar idea. I yearn for cheap ideas from strangers.”…

There are a few artists where you hear their name and “Tiny Desk” together and you think, well, that’s going to be great. David Byrne is one of those and his performance does not disa…

Claude 4.5 Opus' Soul Document Richard Weiss managed to get Claude 4.5 Opus to spit out this 14,000 token document which Claude called the "Soul overview". Richard says: While extracting C…

DeepSeek-V3.2 Two new open weight (MIT licensed) models from DeepSeek today: DeepSeek-V3.2 and DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale, both 690GB, 685B parameters. Here's the PDF tech report. DeepSeek-V3.2 is D…

100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025. The big end-of-year lists mostly feature books from big publishers; this list aims to spread the attention to smaller publishers.…

Keene, NH has been replacing their stop-lighted intersections with roundabouts, resulting in big reductions in pollution, accidents & injuries, and costs. “Slowly moving is better than wait…

I am not generally a fan of rom-coms so I didn’t think I was going to post Evan Puschak’s newest video, but he’s so good at them. Puschak argues that rom-coms are compelling because t…

I Was Stabbed in the Back With a Real Knife While Performing Julius Caesar. “I realised what had happened while acting out my character’s death, and thinking: I have to lie here until the…

I just send out the November edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access a copy here. In the newsletter this month: Th…

On next-gen GLP-1 drugs. “A mere decade ago, obesity drugs powerful enough for people to routinely drop double-digit percentages of their body weight were unheard-of. Today, there are two,…

A short video that explains *a lot* about the modern world & conservatism. “They also want to feel normal. They want to walk around and see that most other people have made the same choice…

One of my favorite end-of-year lists is Tom Whitwell’s annual record of 52 things he’s learned in the past year. Some favorites of mine from the 2025 installment: 4. You can unlock the…

Photographing the Microscopic: Winners of Nikon Small World 2025. “Overall Winner: A rice weevil perched on a grain of rice.” 💬 Join the discussion on kot…

More than half of the teens surveyed believe journalists regularly engage in unethical behaviors like making up details or quotes in stories, paying sources, taking visual images out of context o…

Adding to an “overwhelming body of evidence”, a recent study showed that “suicidality scores dropped significantly an average of two years and up to five years after [trans youth] recei…

The Atlantic hurricane season has come to a close and Google’s DeepMind AI-based hurricane model performed really well in predicting track and intensity of storms.…

In 2010, Randall Munroe’s fiancée (now wife) was diagnosed with cancer. Every once in awhile, he updates his audience at XKCD on how that’s going. The most recent missive: Fifteen Years.…

YouTube embeds fail with a 153 error I just fixed this bug on my blog. I was getting an annoying "Error 153: Video player configuration error" on some of the YouTube video embeds (like this one)…

David Lynch, 2017, ★★★★ I’ve always been amazed Twin Peaks ever made it to air on network television in 1990, and its 2017 return, perhaps David Lynch’s most unfiltered vision…

I am increasingly worried about AI in the video game space in general. [...] I'm not sure that the CEOs and the people making the decisions at these sorts of companies understand the difference b…

It's ChatGPT's third birthday today. It's fun looking back at Sam Altman's low key announcement thread from November 30th 2022: today we launched ChatGPT. try talking with it here: chat.openai.…