Motherfucking windfarms. In Europe, they’re called Royale with Breeze. (I stole that joke from Bluesky.) 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

In 2009, novelist Haruki Murakami controversially accepted the Jerusalem prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society in the aftermath of Israeli military action in Gaza. In his accepta…

Forthcoming book from Bill McKibben: Here Comes the Sun. “Energy from the sun and wind is suddenly the cheapest power on the planet and growing faster than any energy source in history —…

Bill McKibben: Rooftop Solar Is a Miracle. Why Are We Killing It With Red Tape? In many countries, getting rooftop solar or “balcony solar” can be as easy going to the store, buying some…

Rebecca Solnit: The renewable energy revolution is a feat of technology. “It is nothing less than astonishing and unbelievable that we have achieved so much progress in so little time.”…

Last year I shared 40 thoughts as I turned 40, and I really enjoyed the opportunity to reflect and share. I got the idea to use my subsequent birthdays to build upon those thoughts. So as I…

Ross Anderson writes about how scientific empires, from the ancient Sumerians to the Nazis to the Soviet Union in the 1950s, have crumbled (or been willfully dismantled by ideologues) and the…

Side effect of the Tour de France: pro riders gobbling up all the Strava top times (King of the Mountains) across France: “1,809 KOMs nabbed by the pros during the three weeks of racing”.…

How conspiracy theories about COVID’s origins are hampering our ability to prevent the next pandemic. “Evidence hasn’t emerged” to support that idea that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a la…

Making accessibility standards easy to understand, one success criterion at a time. WCAG in Plain English is fantastic. It breaks down each WCAG standard and goes into details with beautiful headlines…

The Wirecutter’s list of the best canned cocktails. Very interested to hear people’s thoughts on this. None of these are available at my local liquor store, but we do have Barr Hill’s c…

Ollama's new app Ollama has been one of my favorite ways to run local models for a while - it makes it really easy to download models, and it's smart about keeping them resident in memory w…

How to Leave Substack. “Unfortunately, Substack willingly platforms, and allows bad actors to monetize, hate speech and misinformation. You should probably leave Substack.”…

“Israel has deliberately starved the people of Gaza. It couldn’t have done it without the west’s help. The current hand-wringing by Keir Starmer and other western politicians is empty b…

Photos: Starvation and Chaos in Gaza. “Israel’s blockade of most food and aid, along with distribution difficulties inside the Gaza Strip, have driven many of Gaza’s 2 million Palestini…

A compilation of super hero landings from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

When you vibe code, you are incurring tech debt as fast as the LLM can spit it out. Which is why vibe coding is perfect for prototypes and throwaway projects: It's only legacy code if you have to…

Covid safety measures drastically reduced flu deaths, but the fatality rate has risen sharply again. “90% of reported pediatric deaths this season have occurred in children who were not ful…

From Alan Taylor at The Atlantic, whose curatorial eye I’ve always admired, “a grab bag of curious and interesting historical images from the 20th century”, including photos of the…

Something that has become undeniable this month is that the best available open weight models now come from the Chinese AI labs. I continue to have a lot of love for Mistral, Gemma and Llama but…

Zim&Zou’s ’80s-Inspired Paper Cassettes and Boombox Radiate with Color. Strange, now I have a hankering to watch an entire papercraft version of Do The Right Thing.…

Qwen3-30B-A3B-Thinking-2507 Yesterday was Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507. Qwen are clearly committed to their new split between reasoning and non-reasoning models (a reversal from Qwen 3 in April),…

A perfect game in Tetris is defined as achieving the max score (999,999) in the least amount of time possible, meaning you need to score a bunch of Tetrises in a row (and nothing else) at t…

Note to self: spend some time checking out Tapestry, Iconfactory’s universal feed/social reader app. (Old heads will remember FriendFeed…) 💬 Join the disc…

Substack sent a push alert promoting a Nazi blog. “Substack is primarily funded by Andreessen Horowitz, a firm whose founders have pushed extreme far right rhetoric.” There was *an actual…

Trailer for Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse, a documentary film on the comic artist who created the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus. 💬 Join the…

Archaeologists Discover a 2,400-Year-Old Skeleton Mosaic That Urges People to “Be Cheerful and Live Your Life”. This skeleton is a whole vibe. 💬 Join the…

We took a little weekend trip to Maine and I captured some found type. My plan is to visit various New England towns to find inspired lettering and document it all. The only criteria is that the town…

I’m Giving My Kids a ’90s Summer — the 1890s. “Just like the 1890s and the 2020s, they’ll play with the unvaccinated kids down the street and drink raw milk until dark.” Dangerous…

OpenAI: Introducing study mode New ChatGPT feature, which can be triggered by typing /study or by visiting chatgpt.com/studymode. OpenAI say: Under the hood, study mode is powered by custom sys…

I bought a 15” Apple Macbook Air M4 a few months ago and I love it. Of course, I loved my previous computer (an M1 Macbook Air) too, but bumping up the screen size and quality has been a…

Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 New model update from Qwen, improving on their previous Qwen3-30B-A3B release from late April. In their tweet they said: Smarter, faster, and local deployment-friend…

Last week, I linked to a video mashup by Bill McClintock of several metal songs, saying “although the video was posted a day or two before Ozzy Osbourne died, it feels like a fitting tribut…

Auto? Polo! Auto? Polo! Auto? Polo! Photographs of Auto Polo (ca. 1912). 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

Our plan is to build direct traffic to our site. and newsletters just one kind of direct traffic in the end. I don’t intend to ever rely on someone else’s distribution ever again ;) — Nilay…

XKCD: Kite Incident. “I don’t know. Lemme look up a map of where the jet stream goes.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

Oooh, George Saunders’ next novel comes out in January. “Vigil transports us, careening, through the wild final evening of an epic, complicated life.” 💬…

Science Is Winning the Tour de France. Data, nutrition, equipment, and training are propelling riders to performances that best the dopers of yesteryear. “In other words, Armstrong on dope…

An article about The Quintessential Urban Design of ‘Sesame Street’ with a bunch of photos? This is extremely up my alley. One of the show’s big influences when it began was Jane Jaco…

An analysis of every word that’s visible on NYC’s streets (from 18 years of Google Street View Data). “The data is astonishing; it feels like sifting through the city’s source code. F…

I wrote about the new GLM-4.5 model family yesterday - new open weight (MIT licensed) models from Z.ai in China which their benchmarks claim score highly in coding even against models such as Cla…

Season 4 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is going to feature an episode where all the characters are Muppetized (with puppets created by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop). I love this show.…

We’re rolling out new weekly rate limits for Claude Pro and Max in late August. We estimate they’ll apply to less than 5% of subscribers based on current usage. [...] Some of the biggest Clau…

A list of the top 100 “most innovative, influential, and informative” podcasts of all time. The list includes 99% Invisible, The Big Dig, Code Switch, Heavyweight, In Our Time, Radiolab,…

Meet Jackson Goldstone. He’s 6 years old, lives in British Columbia, and is already ripping it up on his bike. Here’s a video of him taking the long way around on his way to kindergarten:…

Is starvation in Gaza really Israel’s fault? The facts are clear. “Israeli officials have, for months — indeed, since the start of the war — not only admitted to working to restrict t…

Another piece from Hitler scholar Timothy Ryback that is uncomfortably resonant today: What Happened When Hitler Took On Germany’s Central Banker.…

José Andrés: The World Cannot Stand By With Gaza on the Brink of Famine. “There is no excuse for the world to stand by and watch two million human beings suffer on the brink of full-blown…

TIL the etymology of boycott. “When Boycott set about evicting 11 tenants, the locals had had enough. The Mayo branch of the Irish Land League urged Boycott’s employees to withdraw their…

“Finding the way, is the way.” – Marcus Aurelius…

From MinuteEarth, a quick tour of all the different kinds of dogs in the world, wild & domesticated, and how they are related to each other. Great Danes are the tallest dogs in the world.…

GLM-4.5: Reasoning, Coding, and Agentic Abililties Another day, another significant new open weight model release from a Chinese frontier AI lab. This time it's Z.ai - who rebranded (at least in…

Watch this: Chinese EV maker BYD built a driverless car that can *jump over potholes*, has a top speed of 243mph, and can charge from 30% to 80% battery in 10 minutes. It’s a Mario Kart Wor…

My friend Mahyad is creating CURA, part documentary, part art installation, part healing ritual. It is designed to ignite hope, joy, and a profound reconnection to nature. The experience unfolds as a…

New York Times’ Style Guide Substitutions for “The President Violated the Constitution”. “The president, tiptoeing precipitously down the sidelines of legality, inadvertently ran the…

“Two leading human rights organisations based in Israel, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, say Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the country’s weste…

Is this the beginning of the end of HIV/AIDS? Lenacapavir “offers 100% protection” against contracting HIV and there are already 6 generic manufacturers lined up to produce the drug under…

With the remaster of Stars of the Lid's debut album Music for Nitrous Oxide being released, they're a band that's been on my mind a lot recently. It was quite an experience to see them live and their…

The many, many, many JavaScript runtimes of the last decade Extraordinary piece of writing by Jamie Birch who spent over a year putting together this comprehensive reference to JavaScript runtim…

TIL: Exception.add_note Neat tip from Danny Roy Greenfeld: Python 3.11 added a .add_note(message: str) method to the BaseException class, which means you can add one or more extra notes to any P…

Enough AI copilots! We need AI HUDs Geoffrey Litt compares Copilots - AI assistants that you engage in dialog with and work with you to complete a task - with HUDs, Head-Up Displays, which enhan…