Watch a man named Ozzie make rope using a very simple hand-cranked machine. The real magic happens starting at about the 12-minute mark, where the three strands of the rope come together �…

49 Literary Movies and TV Shows to Watch This Fall. That seems like a lot! Includes Frankenstein, The Twits (Roald Dahl), various Seuss stories, The Running Man, Train Dreams, Hamnet, etc.…

Whoa, I have not watched this documentary in a loooong time — very interesting to watch in the future this company helped to create, for good and very, very bad. Code Rush is a documenta…

USGS Unveils New National Geologic Map. “In a significant advancement for geoscience, the U.S. Geological Survey has released the most detailed national-scale geologic map of the country to…

I recently spoke with the CTO of a popular AI note-taking app who told me something surprising: they spend twice as much on vector search as they do on OpenAI API calls. Think about that for a se…

This is the trailer for a documentary celebrating the life and work of actor & comedian John Candy. I loved John Candy; how could you not? Uncle Buck was my favorite of his movies. I can�…

Yesterday, Jackson Goldstone won the 2025 Downhill Mountain Bike World Championship. Here’s the POV of his winning run down the *very* steep course in Champéry, Switzerland. (This is *bana…

Forthcoming book by Bernie Sanders: Fight Oligarchy. “Sanders explains how the United States today is an oligarchic society in which a small handful of multibillionaires exercise enormous e…

Why more and more people are tuning the news out: ‘Now I don’t have that anxiety’. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

Is the LLM response wrong, or have you just failed to iterate it? More from Mike Caulfield (see also the SIFT method). He starts with a fantastic example of Google's AI mode usually correctly ha…

I agree with the intellectual substance of virtually every common critique of AI. And it's very clear that turning those critiques into a competition about who can frame them in the most scathing…

The SIFT method The SIFT method is "an evaluation strategy developed by digital literacy expert, Mike Caulfield, to help determine whether online content can be trusted for credible or reliable…

When I wrote about how good ChatGPT with GPT-5 is at search yesterday I nearly added a note about how comparatively disappointing Google's efforts around this are. I'm glad I left that out, becau…

"Don't use chatbots as search engines" was great advice for several years... until it wasn't. I wrote about how good OpenAI's o3 was at using its Bing-backed search tool back in April. GPT-5 feel…

I am once again shocked at how much better image retrieval performance you can get if you embed highly opinionated summaries of an image, a summary that came out of a visual language model, than…

Kimi-K2-Instruct-0905 New not-quite-MIT licensed model from Chinese Moonshot AI, a follow-up to the highly regarded Kimi-K2 model they released in July. This one is an incremental improvement -…

RDF has the same problems as the SQL schemas with information scattered. What fields mean requires documentation. There - they have a name on a person. What name? Given? Legal? Chosen? Preferred…

Anthropic to pay $1.5 billion to authors in landmark AI settlement I wrote about the details of this case when it was found that Anthropic's training on book content was fair use, but they neede…

After struggling for years trying to figure out why people think [Cloudflare] Durable Objects are complicated, I'm increasingly convinced that it's just that they sound complicated. Feels like we…

Hello there, Good People. Here's issue #48 of Studio Notes™—quick bits delivered to you each Friday. S I love that this exists: An entire website and merch store dedicated to the…

Florida Decided There Were Too Many Children. “Florida is the first state to take the courageous step toward decluttering itself of excess children, but under the inexpert guidance of Rober…

Introducing EmbeddingGemma Brand new open weights (under the slightly janky Gemma license) 308M parameter embedding model from Google: Based on the Gemma 3 architecture, EmbeddingGemma is train…

How Are You Supposed To Get The COVID Vaccine Now? An Explainer. “If you are not in one of the 16-ish states requiring a prescription for a COVID vaccine, you should be able to self-report…

Any time I share my collection of tools built using vibe coding and AI-assisted development (now at 124, here's the definitive list) someone will inevitably complain that they're mostly trivial.…

Beyond Vibe Coding Back in May I wrote Two publishers and three authors fail to understand what “vibe coding” means where I called out the authors of two forthcoming books on "vibe coding" f…

In the aftermath of the 2016 election, British American artist Jo Hay began a series of engaging portraits called Persisters “that depict contemporary, trailblazing women in pursuit of ci…

“I almost admire the confidence it must take to tell people what to do online. But I long for the days when the internet wasn’t just lists of bossy self-optimisation plans.”…

Shane Schieffer is attempting to swim the entire 140-mile length of Lake Powell in 10 days, self-supported. Yeah, that means he’s dragging 215lbs of gear behind him on a paddle board whil…

The Rise of the Traveling Third Space. “Traveling third spaces are not physically fixed; they move across cafes, malls, restaurants, and host various programming for a singular community in…

Lucasfilm recently released an official map of the galaxy that Star Wars takes place in. And it’s huge. The map is slightly interactive; you can zoom and scroll it, but you can’t searc…

A thoughtful essay about e-bikes as a metaphor for AI, augmentation vs amputation, and the bargain of innovation. “We often consider what technology promises to enable for us, without consi…

From Lewis Hine, a photograph of Clyde Bradford. Hine’s photos of child laborers resulted in some of the first laws in the US against child labor. 💬 Join th…

When I mentioned, how my timeline looks on Facebook these days, when I visit it – which I rarely do really, Jeremy Keith gave me the tip to add “…

In 1987, choir director Dennis Bell arranged a version of U2’s #1 hit I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For for his choir, the New Voices of Freedom. After hearing a recording of t…

A list of 29 heroes and interesting people that few people have heard of. I’ve only heard of one or two of these folks. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org…

The Baltimore Museum of Art is exhibiting Amy Sherald’s American Sublime show after Sherald pulled it from the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery due to attempted censorship. I saw t…

From Orbital Mechanics, a visualization of the 2153 nuclear weapons exploded on Earth since 1945. 2153! I had no idea there had been that much testing. According to Wikipedia, the number i…

3books, a site that features the books recommended by guests at the end of each Ezra Klein Show podcast. Built by my pal Michael Sippey. 💬 Join the discussion…

Great interactive feature on how former world record holder Max Park solves the Rubik’s Cube. You scroll through his slow-motion solve — he makes 12 moves in the first second. “It’s l…

I loved this: The History of The New Yorker’s Vaunted Fact-Checking Department. “The writer had already engaged in the charm and betrayal inherent in reporting. We were in the harm-reduct…