I just sent out the latest edition of the newsletter version of this blog. It's a long one! Turns out I wrote a lot of stuff in the past 10 days. The newsletter is out two days later than I had p…

In advocating for LLMs as useful and important technology despite how they're trained I'm beginning to feel a little bit like John Cena in Pluribus. Pluribus spoiler (episode 6) Given our druthe…

A year ago, Claude struggled to generate bash commands without escaping issues. It worked for seconds or minutes at a time. We saw early signs that it may become broadly useful for coding one day…

textarea.my on GitHub Anton Medvedev built textarea.my, which he describes as: A minimalist text editor that lives entirely in your browser and stores everything in the URL hash. It's ~160 lin…

How uv got so fast Andrew Nesbitt provides an insightful teardown of why uv is so much faster than pip. It's not nearly as simple as just "they rewrote it in Rust" - uv gets to skip a huge amoun…

My new favorite description of Christianity’s God is from Vince Staples (~16:05): “a floating man with a blowout”.…

It’s Time to Accept That the US Supreme Court Is Illegitimate and Must Be Replaced. “…so that Americans don’t have to suffer future decades of oligarchy-facilitating rule that makes a…

The Anthony Bourdain Reader (Amazon) is a collection of writings from the late author, TV host, and chef, including some unpublished pieces. The Anthony Bourdain Reader is also a showcase…

Digging the soulful jazz + drum & bass energy of Chanpan. Hard to categorize what this is — so many influences and styles. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.o…

Rob Pike (that Rob Pike) is furious. Here's a Bluesky link for if you have an account there and a link to it in my thread viewer if you don't. Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trilli…

Clean Energy Is Still Winning. These 10 Charts Prove It. In March 2025, more electricity was generated with clean energy than with fossil fuels for the first time.…

Martin Scorsese remembers his friend Rob Reiner. “He had a beautiful sense of uninhibited freedom, fully enjoying the life of the moment, and he had a great barreling laugh.”…

Adam Serwer: “The reason so many of yesterday’s free-speech champions transitioned so easily into today’s pro-Trump censors is that their definition of free speech never included the ri…

I’m live-coding a redesign of my website! You can watch me here.…

Since we had a robust discussion last month on whether Pluribus sucks or not, I thought I’d ask: now that the season finale has aired, what did you think of the first season as a whole?…

The data is clear: congestion pricing in NYC has been a “huge success”. “Pollution: -22%. Revenue for mass transit: $548M.” 💬 Join the discussion on k…

Happy Holidays, Friends! Here's issue #64 of Studio Notes™—quick bits delivered to you each Friday. This week's issue is an abbreviated one, while we're recovering from ho…

Infinite Ball Drop: what if the Times Square NYE ball started dropping now? (It’s currently more than 200 miles above the surface of the Earth.) 💬 Join the…

I've released claude-code-transcripts, a new Python CLI tool for converting Claude Code transcripts to detailed HTML pages that provide a better interface for understanding what Claude Code has d…

Santa Tracker Shows Sleigh Stopped For 40 Minutes Outside Old Girlfriend’s House. “NORAD’s official tracking app confirmed that Santa Claus paid a visit to his former girlfriend’s hou…

uv-init-demos uv has a useful uv init command for setting up new Python projects, but it comes with a bunch of different options like --app and --package and --lib and I wasn't sure how they dif…

RiotGrlErin made some great mashups of Christmas movie posters featuring Muppets. I think my favorite is Oscar the Elf but the Die Hard one is so good too. Many more in this thread.…

Reminder: NASA’s holiday yule log fireplace video is delightful — it’s a rocket engine (in a fireplace). “8.8 million pounds of total thrust…”…

From Mr. Bean’s official YouTube channel, the show’s hilarious Christmas episode. While Christmas shopping, Mr Bean purchases a bulky string of tree lights before making a shambles of…

If this [MicroQuickJS] had been available in 2010, Redis scripting would have been JavaScript and not Lua. Lua was chosen based on the implementation requirements, not on the language ones... (sm…

For finding a good book, there is no substitute for going into your local independent bookstore and browsing what’s on the front tables, the bestsellers shelf, and the staff picks. But bo…

The Truth Physics Can No Longer Ignore. “To truly understand living systems as self-organized, autonomous agents, physicists need to abandon their ‘just the particles, ma’am’ mentalit…

Allspice is a single spice?! “Allspice is the dried fruit of the Pimenta dioica plant.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

We Asked Four AI Coding Agents to Rebuild Minesweeper… “Cloning Minesweeper isn’t a trivial task that can be done in just a handful of lines of code, but it’s also not an incredibly c…

MicroQuickJS New project from programming legend Fabrice Bellard, of ffmpeg and QEMU and QuickJS and so much more fame: MicroQuickJS (aka. MQuickJS) is a Javascript engine targetted at embedded…

The Case for a Public Social Media Platform. “What if the United States government decided to, overnight, nationalize Facebook and make it a digital division of the post office. What would…

Watch Jonas Wolf and three friends sing a choral arrangement of the Bee Gee’s Stayin’ Alive in the style of a madrigal. Just in case (like the me of 1 minute ago) you don’t know what…

Finland uses a progressive scale for speeding tickets; the fine amount is based in part on income. In 2023, a businessman got hit with a €121,000 fine. 💬 Jo…

It's been ten years since 'Hickensian Christmas II' on Troika, probably because I get more curmudgeonly about 'Christmas Music' every year. This even includes quirky 'indie' versions of Christmas favo…