TIL: Dependency groups and uv run I wrote up the new pattern I'm using for my various Python project repos to make them as easy to hack on with uv as possible. The trick is to use a PEP 735 depe…

Read the book, Typographic Firsts In my past Font of the Month columns, I admitted to extreme fixation for ‘stencilism’ and avaricious hoarding of stencil type and lettering specimens. The…

For most of human history, around 50% of children used to die before they reached the end of puberty. In 2020, that number is 4.3%. It’s 0.3% in countries like Japan & Norway. This drama…

Very Good Music Fun Facts from Go Jeff Go including: “Hall and Oates never referred to themselves as “Hall and Oates.” All their records say Daryl Hall and John Oates. Also, there is a…

Level Devil. This game is hilarious and diabolical. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

Retrospekt refurbs and sells retro technology (VHS tapes, cassette players, instant cameras, typewriters, iPods). 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

In a letter to the Times of London, Dr. Michael Baum tells how a line in Arcadia by Tom Stoppard sparked an idea which resulted in adjuvant systemic chemotherapy, a therapy Baum helped pionee…

Anthropic acquires Bun Anthropic just acquired the company behind the Bun JavaScript runtime, which they adopted for Claude Code back in July. Their announcement includes an impressive revenue u…

I’m in Charge at This Hertz Location, and Buddy, You’re Not Getting a Car Today. “Tell me, honestly, when you reserved a rental car through Hertz, you thought… what? That we were goin…

In just a few days (Dec 5), the entirety of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill duology will be released in theaters as one four-hour-long film. Here’s the trailer: Quentin Tarantino’s KIL…

Introducing Mistral 3 Four new models from Mistral today: three in their "Ministral" smaller model series (14B, 8B, and 3B) and a new Mistral Large 3 MoE model with 675B parameters, 41B active.…

A list of 25 Things to Say to Your Children, including “You can do hard things. I’ve seen you do them before and you can do them again.”; “I’m proud of you.”; and “It’s so bra…

Paul Ford on normalized AI & what happens when bubbles burst. “When the bubble is big, every idea feels like a billion-dollar idea. I yearn for cheap ideas from strangers.”…

There are a few artists where you hear their name and “Tiny Desk” together and you think, well, that’s going to be great. David Byrne is one of those and his performance does not disa…

Claude 4.5 Opus' Soul Document Richard Weiss managed to get Claude 4.5 Opus to spit out this 14,000 token document which Claude called the "Soul overview". Richard says: While extracting C…

DeepSeek-V3.2 Two new open weight (MIT licensed) models from DeepSeek today: DeepSeek-V3.2 and DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale, both 690GB, 685B parameters. Here's the PDF tech report. DeepSeek-V3.2 is D…

100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025. The big end-of-year lists mostly feature books from big publishers; this list aims to spread the attention to smaller publishers.…

Keene, NH has been replacing their stop-lighted intersections with roundabouts, resulting in big reductions in pollution, accidents & injuries, and costs. “Slowly moving is better than wait…

I am not generally a fan of rom-coms so I didn’t think I was going to post Evan Puschak’s newest video, but he’s so good at them. Puschak argues that rom-coms are compelling because t…

I Was Stabbed in the Back With a Real Knife While Performing Julius Caesar. “I realised what had happened while acting out my character’s death, and thinking: I have to lie here until the…

I just send out the November 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: Th…

On next-gen GLP-1 drugs. “A mere decade ago, obesity drugs powerful enough for people to routinely drop double-digit percentages of their body weight were unheard-of. Today, there are two,…

A short video that explains *a lot* about the modern world & conservatism. “They also want to feel normal. They want to walk around and see that most other people have made the same choice…

One of my favorite end-of-year lists is Tom Whitwell’s annual record of 52 things he’s learned in the past year. Some favorites of mine from the 2025 installment: 4. You can unlock the…

Photographing the Microscopic: Winners of Nikon Small World 2025. “Overall Winner: A rice weevil perched on a grain of rice.” 💬 Join the discussion on kot…

More than half of the teens surveyed believe journalists regularly engage in unethical behaviors like making up details or quotes in stories, paying sources, taking visual images out of context o…

Adding to an “overwhelming body of evidence”, a recent study showed that “suicidality scores dropped significantly an average of two years and up to five years after [trans youth] recei…

The Atlantic hurricane season has come to a close and Google’s DeepMind AI-based hurricane model performed really well in predicting track and intensity of storms.…

In 2010, Randall Munroe’s fiancée (now wife) was diagnosed with cancer. Every once in awhile, he updates his audience at XKCD on how that’s going. The most recent missive: Fifteen Years.…

YouTube embeds fail with a 153 error I just fixed this bug on my blog. I was getting an annoying "Error 153: Video player configuration error" on some of the YouTube video embeds (like this one)…

David Lynch, 2017, ★★★★ I’ve always been amazed Twin Peaks ever made it to air on network television in 1990, and its 2017 return, perhaps David Lynch’s most unfiltered vision…

I am increasingly worried about AI in the video game space in general. [...] I'm not sure that the CEOs and the people making the decisions at these sorts of companies understand the difference b…

It's ChatGPT's third birthday today. It's fun looking back at Sam Altman's low key announcement thread from November 30th 2022: today we launched ChatGPT. try talking with it here: chat.openai.…

The most annoying problem is that the [GitHub] frontend barely works without JavaScript, so we cannot open issues, pull requests, source code or CI logs in Dillo itself, despite them being mostly…

Added to the film diary:Kansas City ConfidentialPhil Karlson, 1952, ★★★★White HeatRaoul Walsh, 1949, ★★★★ Tagged: November 2025 Reply via email…

Being a fan is all about bringing the enthusiasm. It’s being a champion of possibility. It’s believing in someone. And it’s contagious. When you’re around someone who is super excited about so…

We rendered over 1 million of the web’s top homepages. This is the result. Zoom, pan and click to explore – like Google Maps. Source: One Million Screenshots…

A few months ago, I had the privilege of being interviewed on the Design Systems Collective by Shane P Williams. This interview captures a lot of my current thinking about design systems, our design t…

Japanese researchers turned to “experimental archaeology” to study how ancient humans navigated powerful ocean currents and migrated offshore. Scientists Retrace 30,000-Year-Old Ocean Voyage, in a…

My signed copy of Iroha Ni Kompeito. I never expected to see Akiko Yano play live, let alone meet her and get an album signed. In case you don’t know, she’s “the J…

Context plumbing Matt Webb coins the term context plumbing to describe the kind of engineering needed to feed agents the right context at the right time: Context appears at disparate sources, b…

Large language models (LLMs) can be useful tools, but they are not good at creating entirely new Wikipedia articles. Large language models should not be used to generate new Wikipedia articles fr…

In June 2025 Sam Altman claimed about ChatGPT that "the average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours". In March 2020 George Kamiya of the International Energy Agency estimated that "streaming a Netfl…

Context: back in March 2025 I decided to put aside my scepticism and try AI driven development for the day. I appreciate that in 8 months, the AI landscape, particularly around agentic software dev ha…

Bluesky Thread Viewer thread by @simonwillison.net I've been having a lot of fun hacking on my Bluesky Thread Viewer JavaScript tool with Claude Code recently. Here it renders a thread (complete…

On tour for the 35th anniversary of Home Alone, Macaulay Culkin said his kids love the movie, but don’t know he’s Kevin. They’re only three and four years old, so this makes sense, but…

Rebecca Solnit: A Year on From Trump’s Victory, Resistance Is Everywhere. “There has, in fact, been a tremendous amount and variety of resistance and opposition and it’s mattered tremen…

Atul Gawande of Harvard’s School of Public Health: The Trump regime’s destruction of USAID “has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children”.…

A long profile of comics legend Alan Moore. “For the first time in his 45-year career, Alan Moore is alone on the page.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.o…

Hello E-Commerce-Email-Wading Friends. Here's issue #60 of Studio Notes™—quick bits delivered to you each Friday. I realize you're getting emails from every single company you&…

I don’t know if it’s because some new responsibilities are taking me out of the house more than usual, or because humanity’s current ugly streak makes everything else look more beauti…

I’m still working on the KDO gift guide for this year. In the meantime, here’s the 2024 edition, which has aged well and includes these popular Japanese nail clippers.…

“Australia is on course to meet a target of eliminating cervical cancer by 2035, which, if achieved, will make it the first country to do so.” This is due in large part to their HPV vacci…

Our Black Friday sale starts now! It will run now through Friday, December 5th. Level up your design systems game and save with our biggest sale of the year: MEGA BUNDLE: save 45% & get all course…