We should all be using dependency cooldowns William Woodruff gives a name to a sensible strategy for managing dependencies while reducing the chances of a surprise supply chain attack: dependenc…

...so many things I was taught to rely upon — jobs, industries, institutions, milestones, even seasons — feel like they’re being upended in front of me. Wh…

I love Jon Hicks’ new side project, Stars of the Lid Forever. It’s unofficial, but surviving member Adam Wiltzie gave Jon his blessing, and even provided some un…

It was a shock to learn that Mani had died suddenly. I’ll be forever grateful that my teens aligned with the rise of The Stone Roses in 1988–90, when the future was…

The band Stars of the Lid should be familiar to anyone who's read the Hicks.design Journal or listened to Troika. The ambient duo have featured on this podcast more than any artist, from the very firs…

Hello there, Type & Design Friends. Here's issue #59 of Studio Notes™—quick bits delivered to you each Friday. 📽️ I'm loving the behind-the-scenes look at…

I enjoy the subtle animations by Pablo Delcan in this music video for singer and songwriter Gabriel Garzón-Montano.…

Hot on the heels of Tuesday's Gemini 3 Pro release, today it's Nano Banana Pro, also known as Gemini 3 Pro Image. I've had a few days of preview access and this is an astonishingly capable image…

I’m headed out on an unexpected trip this afternoon, to attend the funeral of Dr. Steve Feller, who was my advisor in college and to whom I owe a great deal. I talked about Doc, as all hi…

Goro Obata went to the woods because he wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if he could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when he came to di…

Yep, I’d totally use this.…

I am completely smitten with these embroideries by Irena Saputa. (via Chris)…

“The logic of algorithms tends to repeat what “works,” but art opens up what is possible. Not everything has to be immediate or predictable. Defend slowness when it serves a purpose, silence…

Stigler’s law of eponymy: “No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.” Stigler’s law is itself an example of Stigler’s law. 💬 J…

Previously, when malware developers wanted to go and monetize their exploits, they would do exactly one thing: encrypt every file on a person's computer and request a ransome to decrypt the files…

Building more with GPT-5.1-Codex-Max Hot on the heels of yesterday's Gemini 3 Pro release comes a new model from OpenAI called GPT-5.1-Codex-Max. (Remember when GPT-5 was meant to bring in a new…

I sent out my weekly-ish Substack newsletter this morning and took the opportunity to record a YouTube video demonstrating my process and describing the different components that make it work. Th…

As part of the fascist war on “woke”, tens of thousands of books have been pulled from the shelves of libraries around the country over the past few years. On the front line are the natio…

NASA’s Perseverance rover scooped up a rock that might prove there was life on Mars. But the planned return of that sample to Earth is endangered by the Trump regime.…

Iowa City Made Its Buses Free. Traffic Cleared, and So Did the Air. “The transit system is one of the greatest tools communities have to combat climate change and reduce emission. You can m…

“Geothermal is underdeveloped, and its upfront costs can be high, but it’s always on and, once it’s set up, it is cheap and enduring.” Why the Time Has Finally Come for Geothermal Ene…

Rainy Day Jazz Vinyl Set. “Plenty of ballads, blues and heart-warming songs from Jazz artists across the ages for a cold, and rainy Sunday afternoon.” 💬 J…

Two reasons why XKCD’s What If? series is so compelling: Even when an answer seems straightforward, the devil is in the details. And with respect to the details, Munroe does his due dil…

CDC officials confirm that the US is two months away from measles being considered endemic for the first time since 2000. “Elimination status is lost if the virus spreads continuously for 1…

The Saudification of America Is Under Way. “Jamal Khashoggi’s plight and murder was a warning sign for the US, of the impending loss of freedom and censorship that would sweep the country…

Cloudflare's network began experiencing significant failures to deliver core network traffic [...] triggered by a change to one of our database systems' permissions which caused the database to o…

llm-gemini 0.27 New release of my LLM plugin for Google's Gemini models: Support for nested schemas in Pydantic, thanks Bill Pugh. #107 Now tests against Python 3.14. Support for YouTube URLs…

Dark chocolate is very serious business. That’s why this ad for Bournville dark chocolate, which takes aim at dark chocolate snobbery, is so funny. This one is so intense. It comes with…

Read the book, Typographic Firsts Dumb Ways to Die began as an Australian rail safety campaign back in 2012. I heard the viral jingle recently, and it got me to thinking about a particular kind of p…

Inspired by this conversation on Hacker News I decided to upgrade MacWhisper to try out NVIDIA Parakeet and the new Automatic Speaker Recognition feature. It appears to work really well! Here's t…

Edward O. Wilson in 2009: “The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and…

The Strange Afterlife of Hilma af Klint, Painting’s Posthumous Star. “As af Klint’s fame has grown, so have the questions — about what she believed, whom she worked with, and who shou…

Google Antigravity Google's other major release today to accompany Gemini 3 Pro. At first glance Antigravity is yet another VS Code fork Cursor clone - it's a desktop application you install tha…

The Fascinating History of Tarot Card Decks: From the Renaissance to the Modern Day. The V&A does an unboxing of a half dozen tarot card decks from the last 500 years.…

In an interview lasting for more than an hour, classicist Mary Beard shares her knowledge & experience about how the picture of Rome we might have in our heads, inherited from Hollywood mov…

Three years ago, we were impressed that a machine could write a poem about otters. Less than 1,000 days later, I am debating statistical methodology with an agent that built its own research envi…

Google released Gemini 3 Pro today. Here's the announcement from Sundar Pichai, Demis Hassabis, and Koray Kavukcuoglu, their developer blog announcement from Logan Kilpatrick, the Gemini 3 Pro Mo…

Raccoons Are Showing Early Signs of Domestication. “City-dwelling raccoons seem to be evolving a shorter snout — a telltale feature of our pets and other domesticated animals.”…

A Japanese experimental music group called Open Reel Ensemble plays reel-to-reel tape recorders from the 70s & 80s as musical instruments (give it a sec to get going): Brilliant! A YouTube…

The winners of the LIT Lighting Design Awards, encompassing the best work in lighting architecture, product design (lamps, etc.), concerts, healthcare, streets, and many more categories.…

A Beloved Clothing Store Closed. A Customer Bought All 4,500 Items. “Ms. Szuflita said she had nearly broken even purely on the numbers. There’s also value in the still unfolding adventur…

Fantastic and useful little design touch on this website that sells lighting (toggle the switch in the upper right corner). 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.or…

As part of a city-wide urban greening program, Taipei turned an abandoned football stadium into a community garden. Here’s an overview of the terraced garden that’s taken over Zhongshan…

The fate of “small” open source Nolan Lawson asks if LLM assistance means that the category of tiny open source libraries like his own blob-util is destined to fade away. Why take on additio…

How Mira Nair Built the World That Made Zohran Mamdani. “Zohran has been marinated in love, not just from us, his parents, but from intergenerational family life. He’s so secure in knowin…

Stress in pre-modern times was a “biological superpower” that helped humans hunt for food and survive in harsh environments and situations. But our bodies can’t easily tell the differ…

How to Photograph an Active Volcano Without Getting Vaporized. “It’s dangerous and completely mesmerizing. Everyone edges closer even though your brain’s screaming don’t. It’s pure…

From Vann R. Newkirk II, a editor & journalist who hosts the Floodlines podcast (about Hurricane Katrina), a long piece about the climate chaos that’s taking hold in the US: What Climate Ch…

Clint Smith recently talked to students around the country about the “complexities and contradictions” of US history (including slavery) and found they were receptive to it. “Doesn’t…

Kevin Kelly shares some essential apps & services for independent travel in China. “A good rule of thumb is to download your apps outside of China before you leave, because most are behind…

Getting started with TestCafe for fast, location-sensitive UI testing.The best testing setups don’t draw attention to themselves. They just work quietly and without issue, everywhere. For glob…

From MinuteEarth, a quick tour of all the different kinds of cats in the world, extinct, wild, and domesticated, and how they are related to each other. Some interesting facts I learned: T…

They’re making a live-action Legend of Zelda movie? 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

The Sagrada Família has become the tallest church in the world, after workers placed the first part of a cross at the top of its central tower. The Barcelona church will top 564 feet when th…

A digital atlas of the Roman Empire’s entire road network (180,000+ miles). “The data creation is a collaborative ongoing project edited by a scholarly community.”…

Skydiver & musician Gabriel Brown and astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy teamed up to capture these incredible photos of Brown transiting the Sun while skydiving. You can see a video of th…

Joseph Lerner, 1950, ★★★★ Relentlessly grimy from start to (almost) finish, teeming with hardboiled lowlifes of every flavor, and plenty of location shooting that makes for a grea…

Like many of you, my days are dominated by notifications. Emails from project management systems, source control systems, calendar invitations, ticket updates, and message about messages on other plat…

With AI now, we are able to write new programs that we could never hope to write by hand before. We do it by specifying objectives (e.g. classification accuracy, reward functions), and we search…