“What if you held a tree long enough for it to grow around your hand?” For a piece called It Will Continue to Grow Except at That Point, Giuseppe Penone fitted a cast of his hand to a g…

Happy New Year, folks! Here's issue #65 of Studio Notes™—quick bits delivered to you each Friday. 🥔 Got mesmerized by these weaved Pringles photos. Art is everywhere! I&ap…

Stewart Cheifet died last weekend at age 87. Those of a certain age and nerdiness will remember Cheifet as the host of Computer Chronicles, a public television show about personal computing t…

“America is no longer a democracy. That doesn’t mean authoritarianism has won. But merely restoring the pre-Trump status quo won’t work. The country needs a democratic transformation.�…

NeatoCal is a tiny JavaScript app that outputs a printable calendar with a full year on a single page. I love the view where all the weekends line up. 💬 Join…

I sent the December edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access a copy here. In the newsletter this month: An in-depth…

[Claude Code] has the potential to transform all of tech. I also think we’re going to see a real split in the tech industry (and everywhere code is written) between people who are outcome-drive…

I am a huge fan of gistpreview.github.io, the site by Leon Huang that lets you append ?GIST_id to see a browser-rendered version of an HTML page that you have saved to a Gist. The last commit was…

Imagine if The Criterion Channel and Netflix had a baby, but the baby only streamed public-domain classics — and it was completely FREE. That’s WikiFlix. It’s a clean, modern interface where you…

“You are a museum of everything you have ever loved.” (via)…

(Thank you John!)…

I got a speeding ticket the other day, my first in probably more than 25 years. After a decade and a half of not owning a car, L and I reluctantly accepted a hand-me-down Hyundai Tucson a couple ye…

This post is mostly data driven (from my own web site's data) to give me a sense of the quality of the books I've read, otherwise individual reviews are all linked in this post or available on my book…

This is the third in my annual series reviewing everything that happened in the LLM space over the past 12 months. For previous years see Stuff we figured out about AI in 2023 and Things we learn…

Spotify really started something, didn’t they? Everyone has a “Wrapped” this year; I even got an email one from the cruise line on which I took a trip this summer. Like, “Congratula…

Codex cloud is now called Codex web It looks like OpenAI's Codex cloud (the cloud version of their Codex coding agent) was quietly rebranded to Codex web at some point in the last few days. Here…

Nancy Friedman: 52 Things I Learned in 2025. Incl. “Seventy-one percent of people in Iceland are Costco members” and “In Sweden, the largest size of Hellmann’s mayonnaise — 600 gram…

Kent Hendricks: 52 Things I Learned in 2025. Incl. “Birders in the United States spend $107 billion per year, including $93B on binoculars, feeders, cameras, and other equipment; and $14B o…

I've been doing these posts ending my years, aiming to publish on the 31st, so I'm pleased that I've managed to get this post out the door. Mostly for my own reading, but perhaps yours too.…

[...] The puzzle is still there. What’s gone is the labor. I never enjoyed hitting keys, writing minimal repro cases with little insight, digging through debug logs, or trying to decipher some…

TIL: Downloading archived Git repositories from archive.softwareheritage.org Back in February I blogged about a neat Python library called sqlite-s3vfs for accessing SQLite databases hosted in a…

Yesterday I linked to a Windows 3.x NYT crossword puzzle app from 1992 that you can play directly on the Internet Archive. I was a Windows user back in the day (my conversion to Apple didn�…

A wildlife photographer “discovered thousands of dinosaur footprints preserved in the vertical face of a mountainside” in the Italian Alps dating back 200M years. “This is now really on…

Toby Buckle for the New Republic: The Americans Who Saw All This Coming — But Were Ignored and Maligned. This is not that far from the position many ordinary Americans found themselves in…

Oh this is devilish…a game where you have make to 45 groups of 45 items each by matching two at a time. Must take hours? (Where’s the multiplayer option when you need it?)…

Along with Sinners and One Battle After Another,1 Wake Up Dead Man is one of my favorite films of the year. So I enjoyed director Rian Johnson breaking down the investigative scene in the b…

ProPublica launches Rx Inspector database. “We’ve launched a first-of-its-kind app to help you find out where your generic drugs come from and see the track records of the factories that…

From Lit Hub, the best audiobooks of 2025. (It’s not new, but I just started listening to Milkman by Anna Burns and it’s really good so far.) 💬 Join the d…

In essence a language model changes you from a programmer who writes lines of code, to a programmer that manages the context the model has access to, prunes irrelevant things, adds useful materia…

The 20 Best Podcasts of 2025, incl. Signal Hill (“this inventive program functions like an audio magazine”) and Our Ancestors Were Messy (“this delightful show recounts stories from the…

Josh Safdie, 2025, ★★★★ What a relief that this is not the uplifting sports drama it’s being sold as, but rather a properly stressful Safdie movie full of terrible people. Also,…

shot-scraper 1.9 New release of my shot-scraper CLI tool for taking screenshots and scraping websites with JavaScript from the terminal. The shot-scraper har command has a new -x/--extract opt…

But once we got that and got this aviation grade testing in place, the number of bugs just dropped to a trickle. Now we still do have bugs but the aviation grade testing allows us to move fast, w…

The hard part of computer programming isn't expressing what we want the machine to do in code. The hard part is turning human thinking -- with all its wooliness and ambiguity and contradictions -…

Shel Silverstein’s Homework Machine was one of my kids’ favorite poems of his when they were little. First published in 1981, the short poem turned out to be rather prescient about AI,…

Copyright Release for Contributions To SQLite D. Richard Hipp called me out for spreading misinformation on Hacker News that SQLite refuses outside contributions: No, Simon, we don't "refuse".…

Conservatives are trying to roll the Constitution back to the pre-Civil War version. “It will be a society of the dominators and the dominated. But it will not be a democracy worthy of the…

One of America’s Most Successful Experiments Is Coming to a Shuddering Halt. “‘It’s not the same. Why am I here? I question that to myself.’ Amid an astonishing wave of anti-Indian…

Ultracold atoms observed climbing a quantum staircase. (Relatable: the upstairs of my house is warmer than the ground floor too.) 💬 Join the discussion on kot…

I pushed a key change to the Underscore music player over the weekend. Members can now click on any song in their collection to play it (previously there was only a randomize button). I add…

Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life. “A thick desire is one that changes you in the process of pursuing it. A thin desire is one that doesn’t.” 💬 Join the…

The Internet Archive has a playable version of the NY Times Crossword Puzzle app from 1992. It ran on Windows 3.1 and included a few hundred puzzles. (Click on Game/Open to select a puzzle.)…

I love these photos of Rama Duwaji by Szilveszter Mako — a perfect combination of photographer and subject. Duwaji is an artist, illustrator, New Yorker, and second-generation Syrian-Am…

Good morning! Just wanted to let you all know that Rian Johnson subtly rickrolled us with a scene in Wake Up Dead Man. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

Jevons paradox is coming to knowledge work. By making it far cheaper to take on any type of task that we can possibly imagine, we’re ultimately going to be doing far more. The vast majority of…

simonw/actions-latest Today in extremely niche projects, I got fed up of Claude Code creating GitHub Actions workflows for me that used stale actions: actions/setup-python@v4 when the latest is…