• The Tokenizer Playground Simon Willison

    The Tokenizer Playground I built a tool like this a while ago, but this one is much better: it provides an interface for experimenting with tokenizers from a wide range of model architectures, in…

    Yesterday · 20:18
  • Christopher Nolan tells Stephen Colbert he has “no guilt about being a... Jason Kottke

    Christopher Nolan tells Stephen Colbert he has “no guilt about being a fan of the Fast & Furious franchise. A tremendous action franchise. I watch those movies all the time. I love them.”…

    Yesterday · 14:02
  • Waffle House’s Magic Marker System Jason Kottke

    I thought for sure that I’d previously written about the secret jelly packet & pickle-based system that chefs at the Waffle House use to “store” all of the orders that come in for foo…

    Yesterday · 13:16
  • 900 Sites, 125 million accounts, 1 vulnerability Simon Willison

    900 Sites, 125 million accounts, 1 vulnerability Google's Firebase development platform encourages building applications (mobile an web) which talk directly to the underlying data store, rea…

    Yesterday · 12:53
  • Quoting Geoffrey Litt Simon Willison

    It's hard to overstate the value of LLM support when coding for fun in an unfamiliar language. [...] This example is totally trivial in hindsight, but might have taken me a couple mins to fi…

    Yesterday · 12:16
  • This is a perfect New Yorker Talk of the Town piece: now-divorced... Jason Kottke

    This is a perfect New Yorker Talk of the Town piece: now-divorced celebs holding a joint thrift sale of their stuff. The sale was advertised on Vogue’s website, was sponsored by an energy d…

    Yesterday · 12:09
  • Stile Antico, “Byrd: Mass for Four Voices - V. Agnus Dei” Jason Kottke

    Several years ago, I heard a performance from the group above while driving. I made a note of their name on my phone — Stile Antico — and later bought tickets to a concert they were hav…

    Yesterday · 11:29
  • “I was fully in the first time, but the second time, even... Jason Kottke

    “I was fully in the first time, but the second time, even after getting divorced, it was like, OK, I am all in.” These stories about couples remarrying felt very romantic to me! 💬…

    Yesterday · 10:46
  • Movie Posters Perfected. “A live, cloud-based library of over 3,500 curated movie... Jason Kottke

    Movie Posters Perfected. “A live, cloud-based library of over 3,500 curated movie posters you can stream to your digital display.” Includes a DIY digital display guide. 💬 Join the…

    Yesterday · 10:03
  • The 15 Greatest Documentaries Jason Kottke

    A thoughtful video essay from The Cinema Cartography about 15 of film’s greatest documentaries, including The Thin Blue Line, Grizzly Man, The Act of Killing, Shoah, Hoop Dreams, and OJ:…

    Yesterday · 09:13
  • Charlie Jane Anders on why she stopped loving Captain Kirk. “Kirk is... Jason Kottke

    Charlie Jane Anders on why she stopped loving Captain Kirk. “Kirk is obsessed with maintaining his dominance over his crew, in a way that’s very much of its time but also a product of the…

    Yesterday · 08:33
  • Electronic Sound review Simon Collison

    This year’s been full of unexpected challenges, meaning I’ve lost focus in some areas and chosen not to spend energy documenting things. But making music c…

    Two Days Ago · 16:00
  • Live Audio Situation, Part II Chris Coyier

    This all started here. Where that ended was ordering new gear that seemed better suited to this recurring gig than what I was doing. All that gear has arrived and I’ve used it now, and I’m…

    Two Days Ago · 15:31
  • Grok-1 code and model weights release Simon Willison

    Grok-1 code and model weights release xAI have released their Grok-1 model under an Apache 2 license (for both weights and code). It's distributed as a 318.24G torrent file and likely requir…

    Two Days Ago · 14:20
  • Add ETag header for static responses Simon Willison

    Add ETag header for static responses I've been procrastinating on adding better caching headers for static assets (JavaScript and CSS) served by Datasette for several years, because I'v…

    Two Days Ago · 13:25
  • How does SQLite store data? Simon Willison

    How does SQLite store data? Michal Pitr explores the design of the SQLite on-disk file format, as part of building an educational implementation of SQLite from scratch in Go.…

    Two Days Ago · 12:47
  • Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote a long piece about how conservative groups have “co-opted... Jason Kottke

    Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote a long piece about how conservative groups have “co-opted both the rhetoric of colorblindness and the legal legacy of Black activism not to advance racial progress…

    Two Days Ago · 11:37
  • Weeknotes: the aftermath of NICAR Simon Willison

    NICAR was fantastic this year. Alex and I ran a successful workshop on Datasette and Datasette Cloud, and I gave a lightning talk demonstrating two new GPT-4 powered Datasette plugins - datasette…

    Three Days Ago · 12:36
  • Quoting Leopold Aschenbrenner, OpenAI Simon Willison

    One year since GPT-4 release. Hope you all enjoyed some time to relax; it’ll have been the slowest 12 months of AI progress for quite some time to come.— Leopold Aschenbrenner, OpenAI…

    Three Days Ago · 09:23
  • npm install everything, and the complete and utter chaos that follows Simon Willison

    npm install everything, and the complete and utter chaos that follows Here's an experiment which went really badly wrong: a team of mostly-students decided to see if it was possible to insta…

    Four Days Ago · 23:18
  • Phanpy Simon Willison

    Phanpy Phanpy is "a minimalistic opinionated Mastodon web client" by Chee Aun. I think that description undersells it. It's beautifully crafted and designed and has a ton of innovative idea…

    Four Days Ago · 19:34
  • Drawing Media, an Interview With Jason Kottke Jason Kottke

    Hi, Edith here. This is the first in an interview series in which I talk to people about their media diets and habits. Jason seemed like a good person to start with as we figure out the for…

    Four Days Ago · 11:15
  • Should there be an Oscar for title design? Or movie poster design?... Jason Kottke

    Should there be an Oscar for title design? Or movie poster design? An interview with several designers about how the materials they produce increasingly shape moviegoers’ perceptions of fil…

    Four Days Ago · 10:32
  • Yesterday the Atlantic published a list of great American novels — 136... Jason Kottke

    Yesterday the Atlantic published a list of great American novels — 136 of them. I’ve read them all! Just kidding. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

    Four Days Ago · 09:56
  • The real enshittification has only just begun. Greg Storey

    One of my godson’s got caught using AI to generate papers for his history class. He does school from home and can turn in work when he’s finished. I’m not sure how they caught him…

    Four Days Ago · 09:30
  • A forthcoming book from urbanist Carlos Moreno: The 15-Minute City: A Solution... Jason Kottke

    A forthcoming book from urbanist Carlos Moreno: The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet. “…everyday destinations like schools, stores, and offices should only be…

    Four Days Ago · 09:14
  • From The Pudding, a visual essay about how Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest... Jason Kottke

    From The Pudding, a visual essay about how Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” lists changed from 2003 to 2020. Who the voters were and how we listen to music both affecte…

    Four Days Ago · 08:38
  • The Metaphysically Science-ish Drawings of Daniel Martin Diaz Jason Kottke

    I have to admit that the illustration style of Daniel Martin Diaz is not completely my cup of tea, but I do like a few of his pieces (like those pictured above). They have an infographi…

    Four Days Ago · 08:08
  • Google Scholar search: "certainly, here is" -chatgpt -llm Simon Willison

    Google Scholar search: "certainly, here is" -chatgpt -llm Searching Google Scholar for "certainly, here is" turns up a huge number of academic papers that include parts that were evidently writte…

    Four Days Ago · 07:43
  • Advanced Topics in Reminders and To Do Lists Simon Willison

    Advanced Topics in Reminders and To Do Lists Fred Benenson's advanced guide to the Apple Reminders ecosystem. I live my life by Reminders - I particularly like that you can set them with Sir…

    The Other Day · 20:38
  • Chris Coyier

    Brad follows up on some some of the chatter and happenings since the big Global Design System concept dropped. In addition to many of the positive responses, I heard plenty of skepticism, open questio…

    The Other Day · 20:21
  • Short interview with a seismologist who has debunked a Harvard astrophysicist’s claim... Jason Kottke

    Short interview with a seismologist who has debunked a Harvard astrophysicist’s claim that an alien artifact was found on Earth. “One, if you want to do seismic analysis, it’s ideal if…

    The Other Day · 16:49
  • It’s really become a thing for bands to go on tour to... Jason Kottke

    It’s really become a thing for bands to go on tour to play their classic albums from start to finish (e.g. Death Cab, Postal Service). When did this start? I found this 10-year-old Reddit t…

    The Other Day · 15:24
  • How Figma’s databases team lived to tell the scale Simon Willison

    How Figma’s databases team lived to tell the scale The best kind of scaling war story: "Figma’s database stack has grown almost 100x since 2020. [...] In 2020, we were running a single Postg…

    The Other Day · 15:23
  • “Sometimes it’s desperate because I can’t touch someone, my hands don’t move,... Jason Kottke

    “Sometimes it’s desperate because I can’t touch someone, my hands don’t move, and no one touches me except in rare occasions, which I cherish.” Extraordinary obituary for lawyer and…

    The Other Day · 13:17
  • 26 Years Ago… Jason Kottke

    On this day in 1998, 26 freaking years ago, I started writing this blog. I’ve talked at you a lot about the site recently, so I’ll be brief. Last year on this anniversary, I wrote: My lo…

    The Other Day · 09:55
  • The deepest points in each of the Earth’s oceans are called The... Jason Kottke

    The deepest points in each of the Earth’s oceans are called The Five Deeps. I didn’t know the deepest spot in the Atlantic Ocean is a trench off the coast of Puerto Rico. 💬 Join th…

    The Other Day · 09:22
  • On TV: ‘Free to Be… You and Me’ Jason Kottke

    I didn’t know (or had somehow forgotten) that Marlo Thomas’s seminal children’s album Free to Be… You and Me (Spotify, Apple Music) was turned into a TV special that aired in 1974. T…

    The Other Day · 08:45
  • Dew Point I is a mesmerizing water sculpture piece by Lily Clark... Jason Kottke

    Dew Point I is a mesmerizing water sculpture piece by Lily Clark — water droplets seem to appear from nowhere and bead up on a surface made of superhydrophobic ceramic. 💬 Join the di…

    The Other Day · 08:10