Planning to Visit the US? Take It From This American Citizen – Don’t. “If I were a tourist, though, I’d pick a less totalitarian place to travel.”…

Matt Webb reports on going to algoraves. “There are special browser-based programming languages like strudel where you type code to define the beats and the sound, like mod synth in code, a…

Ever since Stars of the Lid Forever went live last month, I've been getting a nice batch of new show recordings. I've finally got through processing them all, and I’ve just published 8 new shows, br…

firefox parser/html/java/README.txt TIL (or TIR - Today I was Reminded) that the HTML5 Parser used by Firefox is maintained as Java code (commit history here) and converted to C++ using a custom…

Ragú Unveils Sensory Deprivation Marinara Tank. “The detoxifying marinara is slowly simmered to the exact temperature of the user’s body, allowing the mind to drift freely into a meditat…

The new ChatGPT Images is here OpenAI shipped an update to their ChatGPT Images feature - the feature that gained them 100 million new users in a week when they first launched it back in March,…

s3-credentials 0.17 New release of my s3-credentials CLI tool for managing credentials needed to access just one S3 bucket. Here are the release notes in full: New commands get-bucket-policy a…

ty: An extremely fast Python type checker and LSP The team at Astral have been working on this for quite a long time, and are finally releasing the first beta. They have some big performance cl…

Over his storied career, Steven Spielberg has made only four studio films about aliens: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, ET, War of the Worlds, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the C…

Poe the Poet I was looking for a way to specify additional commands in my pyproject.toml file to execute using uv. There's an enormous issue thread on this in the uv issue tracker (300+ comments…

Seven Voting Laws Every Blue State Should Enact Right Now. “1. Enact a statutory right to vote for every eligible citizen. This may surprise you, but there is no general federal constitutio…

The Hit Hollywood Didn’t Want. “Sinners is a threat to a business model built only on regurgitation, on endless return trips to Jurassic World, on more Toy Stories and feature-length toy…

If we were all Japanese pond frogs, we’d have nothing to fear from murder hornets. “When I watched the recorded videos in slow motion, the frogs were clearly stung multiple times yet show…

Hmm, I really don’t know about this one: an animated adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm as a sort of Ice Age-ish comedy adventure? One commenter on YouTube says, “This movie is…

I had the opportunity to participate in a discussion with my pals at Storybook to show off the powerful formula of Design Systems + AI (we’ve been using the abbreviation “DS+AI” as “AI+DS”…

“The Trump administration’s vision for the United States is one of a white Christian nation. And the path to accomplish it is through the exclusion and removal of all who do not fit that…

A roundup of the words/phrases of the year for 2025, including “rage bait”, “vibe coding”, “Mar-a-Lago face”, “chaos”, “performative male”, and “Kavanaugh stop”.…

Born Poor (PBS/Frontline) is a documentary filmed across 14 years about three kids in the US as they grow into young adults while “dealing with an economy where they face more obstacles t…

Oh, so we're seeing other people now? Fantastic. Let's see what the "competition" has to offer. I'm looking at these notes on manifest.json and content.js. The suggestion to remove scripting perm…

I’ve been watching junior developers use AI coding assistants well. Not vibe coding—not accepting whatever the AI spits out. Augmented coding: using AI to accelerate learning while maintainin…

I wrote about JustHTML yesterday - Emil Stenström's project to build a new standards compliant HTML5 parser in pure Python code using coding agents running against the comprehensive html5lib-tes…

America Is an Unserious Country Filled With Unserious People. “We’ll tolerate this just like we tolerate everything else. Because this is who we are, collectively, as a country.”…

‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.…

2025 Word of the Year: Slop Slop lost to "brain rot" for Oxford Word of the Year 2024 but it's finally made it this year thanks to Merriam-Webster! Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen…

Alan Sepinwall wrote a lovely remembrance of Rob Reiner and his career. “A legend. No doubt about it.” Reiner and his wife Michele Singer were found dead at their home in LA yesterday. Wh…

MY WIFE GRADUATED AND GOT HER MASTERS IN MENTAL HEALTH COUNSELING AND ART THERAPY! I am so massively proud of her! Melissa has busted her ass and has demonstrated superhuman levels of grit and…

I recently came across JustHTML, a new Python library for parsing HTML released by Emil Stenström. It's a very interesting piece of software, both as a useful library and as a case study in soph…

It’s hard to overstate how much I love this project. Pedro Neves, a professor at UIC’s School of Design, invited 40 designers from around the world to create letterforms out of Lego, which were…

Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry Brian Merchant has been collecting personal stories for his series AI Killed My Job - previously covering tech workers, translators, and ar…

Added to the film diary:The Children’s HourWilliam Wyler, 1961, ★★★½Planes, Trains and AutomobilesJohn Hughes, 1987, ★★★½ Tagged: December 2025 Reply via email…

If the part of programming you enjoy most is the physical act of writing code, then agents will feel beside the point. You’re already where you want to be, even just with some Copilot or Cursor…

How to use a skill (progressive disclosure): After deciding to use a skill, open its SKILL.md. Read only enough to follow the workflow. If SKILL.md points to extra folders such as references/, l…

One of the things that most excited me about Anthropic's new Skills mechanism back in October is how easy it looked for other platforms to implement. A skill is just a folder with a Markdown file…

The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life by Ian Bogost. “How modern conveniences not only fail to deliver on their promises but also rob us of small, satisfying tasks and moments…

How does lake ice do this? Incredible! (Mirror Lake, New Hampshire) 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

“Eating the right foods in the proper quantities, 16th-century Britons believed, balanced mind and soul. So in Shakespeare’s plays, roasts, ales, and pies are not props, but clues to char…

I guess this is as good an explanation of contemporary culture as anything. Hungover from a world that told us we could be anything, we decided to be DJs. We don’t create our own music.…

LLM 0.28 I released a new version of my LLM Python library and CLI tool for interacting with Large Language Models. Highlights from the release notes: New OpenAI models: gpt-5.1, gpt-5.1-chat-…

The Flow State podcast recently celebrated their 300th episode with a 2h41m mix of instrumental music sourced from a group of “musicians, curators, label heads, music fans”. They even let…

I first posted about Nick Veasey’s work back in 2005 and thought it was worth another look. Veasey uses x-ray photography to get inside views of familiar objects, sometimes on a large scale…

Oilwell is a (fake) wellness app “to help you embrace climate chaos” that includes features like “Drowning Mindfully”, “Lo-Fi Beats to Frack To”, and “12 Hour Wildfire Relaxatio…

Season's Greetings, Friends. Here's issue #62 of Studio Notes™—quick bits delivered to you each Friday. 🍝 I don't make fresh pasta—but I certainly eat it.…

I just updated the 2025 Kottke Gift Guide with some new suggestions, including inflatable tube men (for your front yard; your neighbors will love!), some of the year’s best cookbooks, ramen…

Size of Life by Neal Agarwal is absolutely beautiful, incredible, and informative. Web design inspiration at its finest.…