When the Klan Got Kicked Out of Town. “More than 500 Lumbee men and women showed up, many of whom were war veterans. Some came with shotguns. Some came with baseball bats.”…

The Art of Roland-Garros. Each year since 1980, the French Open has selected an artist to make an official poster for the tournament; this site displays all of the posters from 1980 to 2025.…

In looking over the shortlist for the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025 competition, I thought about how I’ve seen thousands or even tens of thousands of incredible astronomical image…

New Sphere-Packing Record Stems From an Unexpected Source. “Sometimes all a sticky problem needs is a few fresh ideas, and venturing outside one’s immediate field can be rewarding.” I l…

Grok 4 Released last night, Grok 4 is now available via both API and a paid subscription for end-users. Key characteristics: image and text input, text output. 256,000 context length (twice that…

No One Else Has a Bike Like Mine. “The most elaborately decorated e-bikes often include colorful adhesive ribbons wrapped around the posts, seat tube and headset, spoke covers and LED light…

The Bayeux Tapestry is returning to the UK for the first time in more than 900 years. “The huge embroidery - which is widely believed to have been created in Kent - will go on display at th…

Carl Zimmer writes about the results of a new genetic study of humans and the diseases that afflicted us over the past 37,000 years. It’s a really fascinating read — in part because of ho…

Craig Mod: Overtourism in Japan, and How it Hurts Small Businesses. When your bar gets TikToked: “The only reason he opened the bar, he said, was so locals and friends like her would come.…

“Lately, it has been difficult to ignore a tendency at the NY Times to make astonishingly bad news judgments. As Republicans increasingly circulate insane conspiracy theories and racist non…

A question from a viewer of XKCD’s What If? series: “What would happen if the Moon were replaced with an equivalently-massed black hole? And what would a lunar (“holar”?) eclipse lo…

When Moderation Becomes Appeasement. “Because reactionary centrists do not really have values, they struggle to understand the motivations of those who do.”…

4.6 Billion Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment. “Instead of relying on scattered deposits of fossil fuel — the control of which has largely defined geopolitics — we are moving rapidly…

Wow, Apple’s AirPods Pro 2 earbuds are $149. That’s $100 off…the lowest price I’ve seen on the best earbuds I’ve ever owned.…

Artist Jason Freeny is making these neat anatomical sculptures of Lego people. You can see more of his work in progress on his Facebook page. Reminds me of Michael Paulus’ work. (via col…

Who Goes MAGA? “His Substack has 10,000 subscribers and a name like ‘Uncomfortable Truths’ or ‘Against the Grain.’ He has an advanced degree & a career in academia or journalism. He…

Something Extraordinary Is Happening All Over the World. “Millions of people from the poor world are trying to cross seas, forests, valleys and rivers, in search of safety, work and some ki…

Infinite Monkey Mihai Parparita's Infinite Mac lets you run classic MacOS emulators directly in your browser. Infinite Monkey is a new feature which taps into the OpenAI Computer Use and Claude…

“REFLECTIVE URBANISMS: Mapping New York Chinatown is an interactive web project that maps Manhattan Chinatown through its architectural changes.” The project combines 3D maps, photos from…

Baggage is a short, stop-animation film by Lucy Davidson about the sometimes unpleasant experience of being seen — when going through airport security and also just generally. Three girl…

My 15 year old son Tilo has taken to the Cello. His love for this beautiful instrument is slowly but surely taking over my heart too.…

“Your purpose is not the thing you do. It’s the thing that happens in others when you do what you do.” – Dr. Caroline Leaf…

Yes to this sentiment/poster. Ordered. Also, this one.…

“Love is never wasted, For its value does not rest upon reciprocity.” – C. S. Lewis…

On the Expert Generalist. “We’ve seen this capability be an essential quality in our best colleagues, to the degree that its importance is something we’ve taken for granted.”…

The things you subscribe to change over time. This time I simply wanted to list (and advertise) the newsletters that hit my inbox these days. Next to…

Vintage recordings of J.R.R. Tolkien reading (and singing, in Elvish) selections from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy. 💬 Join the discussion on k…

Social media can support or undermine democracy — it comes down to how it’s designed. “Platforms routinely claim they merely reflect user behavior, yet […] toxic content often gets a…

I’m not ignoring your message – I’m overwhelmed by the tyranny of being reachable. “Because we appear online, we’re assumed to be free.” 💬 Join th…

From Marcin Wichary, a history of Mac settings (1984-2004). The article includes several embedded emulators, so you can actually use the setting panels under discussion. Amazing.…

If you're running low on disk space and are a uv user, don't forget about uv cache prune: uv cache prune removes all unused cache entries. For example, the cache directory may contain entries cr…

A Masterclass on Status, Power, & the Economy with Tressie McMillan Cottom. I’ve only started listening to this podcast, but it’s so good already and I’ve heard only great things about…

Did Shakespeare Write Hamlet While He Was Stoned? Examining the evidence that the Bard smoked weed and that he was aware of its effect on his creativity. 💬 Jo…

ChatGPT kept directing people to use a non-existent feature on Soundslice…so the team built it. “To my knowledge, this is the first case of a company developing a feature because ChatGPT…

This Breakthrough Sponge Could Change How the World Gets Clean Water. “A team of scientists has developed a groundbreaking sponge-like aerogel that can turn seawater into clean drinking wat…

This is a unique look at the history of the world from 1925 to 2025, told through the lens of movies whose plots take place in those years. For example, the WWII era is represented by The S…

How Four Masters — Michelangelo, Donatello, Verrocchio & Bernini — Sculpted David. I saw Bernini’s David recently and it’s an amazing sculpture. 💬 Joi…

I Deleted My Second Brain. Why I Erased 10,000 Notes, 7 Years of Ideas, and Every Thought I Tried to Save. “Instead of accelerating my thinking, it began to replace it. Instead of aiding me…

When in doubt, go for a walk. “Walking won’t solve everything. But it won’t make anything worse. That’s more than you can say for most things we do when we’re stressed, tired, or lo…

In 1966, Huey Newton & Bobby Seale formed the Black Panther Party and wrote a 10-point manifesto of what the group stood for and what they wanted. Here’s the full text of the plan. 4. We W…

Medieval Murder Maps. “Discover the murders, sudden deaths, sanctuary churches, and prisons of three thriving medieval cities. Click on a pin to read the story based on the original record…

beyond tellerrand has always been more than a conference to me. It’s a creative and friendly community and festival built on curiosity and connecti…

Let me give you one of the reasons why I am in love with Kirby CMS for more than a decade now. I just upgraded 5 of my websites running on Kirby fro…

Jellyfish Lake in Palau is home to approximately 13 million jellyfish. Their mild stings mean you can snorkel in their midst and capture beautifully surreal scenes like this: If I had a bu…

How Silicon Valley Got Rich. “When Apple went public in 1980, it created 300 millionaires. When Microsoft did in 1986, 3,000 employees became millionaires. After Google’s IPO in 2004, 1,0…

“All games are cooperative. The very act of agreeing to & honouring rules, & the deeper compact, of temporarily engaging in the roleplay that the drama taking place on the table is *importa…

Online bookseller bookshop.org recently released a list of their bestselling books of the year (so far). The list is quite a bit different than what you might see from larger booksellers an…

Always worth a read: the latest issue of Jodi Ettenberg’s The Curious About Everything newsletter. (I have so many tabs open to read now… 🎉🫠) 💬 Join…

I strongly suspect that Market Research Future, or a subcontractor, is conducting an automated spam campaign which uses a Large Language Model to evaluate a Mastodon instance, submit a plausible…

Become a command-line superhero with Simon Willison's llm tool Christopher Smith ran a mini hackathon in Albany New York at the weekend around uses of my LLM - the first in-person event I'm…

Clocking in at almost an hour, this “definitive interview” with Wes Anderson by Vanity Fair about all 12 of his films is perhaps only for Wes stans or cinephiles, but then again, listen…

“The fundamental dilemma [of media like NYT]: journalism is, by its nature, supposed to be on the side of accuracy, against lies & liars, but the GOP is lies & liars top to bottom. And for…

Here’s what Tom Holland’s lip-sync of Umbrella can teach us about stormwater management. “So set designers must have accounted for the flow to go somewhere, but not all residential or c…

Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists Adrian Holovaty describes how his SoundSlice service saw an uptick in users attempting to use their sheet music scanner to import AS…

Science writer Jennifer Ouellette reflects on the 30th anniversary of Apollo 13, including the movie’s realism “The actors, once locked in, breathed air pumped into the suits just like th…

Making sure your website feels local wherever it appears isn’t an option. It’s what customers expect. But tracking region-specific details can get messy fast. It's not easy to do wh…

Ah, this is awesome: Great Art Explained is one of my favorite YouTube channels and there’s a book version coming out in the fall. Art can be thrilling, and resonate on a deep personal l…

The detention center in Florida easily fits the definition of concentration camp. “This facility’s purpose fits the classic model, and its existence points to serious dangers ahead for th…

Conscientious SUV Shopper Just Wants Something That Will Kill Family In Other Car In Case Of Accident. “The last thing I want is a flimsy sedan that takes out Mommy and Daddy in the front s…

I Shipped a macOS App Built Entirely by Claude Code Indragie Karunaratne has "been building software for the Mac since 2008", but recently decided to try Claude Code to build a side project: Con…

There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing ex…

Supabase MCP can leak your entire SQL database Here's yet another example of a lethal trifecta attack, where an LLM system combines access to private data, exposure to potentially malicious inst…

Serving 200 million requests per day with a cgi-bin Jake Gold tests how well 90s-era CGI works today, using a Go + SQLite CGI program running on a 16-thread AMD 3700X. Using CGI on modest hardw…

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