On the Real-Life Story of Deep-Cover Russian Spies Living As American Families. “People who crave external validation would never make the cut as illegals, she said. ‘A spy is an actor, b…

From a 1968 book, a collection of illustrations of regional patterns & designs of the art of Ukrainian pysanky, or egg decorating. From the Center for Russian, East European, & Eurasian S…

Here’s the full trailer for season two of Poker Face (Natasha Lyonne, Rian Johnson). For this season, they have tripled down on special guest stars, incl. Cynthia Erivo, Giancarlo Esposito,…

Introducing OpenAI o3 and o4-mini OpenAI are really emphasizing tool use with these: For the first time, our reasoning models can agentically use and combine every tool within ChatGPT—this in…

Last month Carla Fernandez gave a deeply inspiring and uplifting talk on grief. As someone who grew up with a dad who studied death and past lives, I am grateful for humans like Carla who so open-hear…

“The most successful givers aren’t doing it because they are being told to. They do it because doing it is fun. It gives them joy.” – Seth Godin (This sums up our CreativeMorni…

openai/codex Just released by OpenAI, a "lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal". Looks like their version of Claude Code, though unlike Claude Code Codex is released under an open…

Timothy Snyder on “the beginning of an American policy of state terror” (re: disappearing people to foreign gulags). “Whatever the government does is good, because by definition the its…

A cephalopod captured on video in March has been confirmed as a juvenile colossal squid, the first live colossal squid observed in its native habitat. It’s been 100 years since the colos…

Here’s a gift link to the WSJ article about Elon Musk’s “legion” of children that he’s had with his “harem” of women. “To reach legion-level before the apocalypse, we will nee…

How Well Is [NYC’s] Congestion Pricing Doing? Very. “The number of complaints about excessive car-honking in January and February was 70 percent lower than last January and February.”…

For the past 11 years, the Breakthrough Prize awards have “celebrated outstanding scientific achievements, honoring scientists driving remarkable discoveries in gene editing, human diseas…

The Guggenheim Fellows for 2025 have been announced and they include Miranda July, Nicole Krauss, Sheila Heti, and Sloane Crosley. (I have once again been overlooked. Next year!)…

Robin Sloan’s monthly newsletter is one of my favorites, chock full of thoughts, recommendations, and links. The April 2025 issue is typically great. 💬 Join…

New cookbook from Samin Nosrat called Good Things that includes “the things she most loves to cook for herself and for friends”. Nosrat is the author of the nearly ubiquitous Salt, Fat, A…

Photographer Joshua Rozells on his photo of our increasingly crowded night skies: The light pollution caused by satellites is quickly becoming a growing problem for astronomers. In 2021, o…

David Graeber (co-author of The Dawn of Everything): Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You! “Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a r…

“Drew Struzan is a legendary movie poster illustrator, the man behind all the posters we grew up with. He started with legendary titles like Blade Runner, The Thing, and Back to the Future,…

The single most impactful investment I’ve seen AI teams make isn’t a fancy evaluation dashboard—it’s building a customized interface that lets anyone examine what their AI is actually doi…

This is a really interesting essay from Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor about the rise of end times fascism and the far right’s bet against the future. The governing ideology of the far right…

Do Not Comply: A Lesson from the Last Three Months of Anti-Trans Attacks. “The cruelty lies in the ambiguity. These orders don’t explicitly bar specific conduct but deputize decision-make…

This is how everyone in Vermont drives in the winter. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

I Didn’t Think Things Would Get This Chaotic When We Elected President Donkey Kong. “But for all the talk from pundits about how we’d see a new side of Donkey Kong once he took office,…

Harvard is refusing to comply with Trump’s demands related to his regime’s racist, xenophobic political agenda, including a threat to cut $9 billion in research funding. From the AP: Har…

Ars Technica is doing a three-part series on the history of the internet; here’s part one, which covers ARPANET, IMPs, TCP/IP, RFCs, DNS, CompuServe, etc. “It was the first time that auto…

In a meeting today, dictators Donald Trump & Nayib Bukele talked about building Salvadoran concentration camps for US citizens and defying a Supreme Court order to return Abrego Garcia from u…

From Akela Lacy at The Intercept, Palestinian Student Leader Was Called In for Citizenship Interview — Then Arrested by ICE (archive): Mohsen K. Mahdawi arrived at the U.S. Citizenship a…

Filmmaker Ryan Coogler (Black Panther, Creed) is a big ol’ movie dork, and it’s endearing to watch him break down all the different types of film, aspect ratios, and projection options…

Why do AI company logos look like buttholes? “The fluidity and warmth of human-centered thinking through the use of circles is perhaps the most elegant way anyone has ever described making…

OpenAI introduced three new models this morning: GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini and GPT-4.1 nano. These are API-only models right now, not available through the ChatGPT interface (though you can try them…

Hey, it’s been awhile since we’ve done one of these. If you are out there looking for work, post a quick summary of what you do, what you’re looking for, and a link to your resume/portf…

M. Gessen: “This is my radical proposal for universities: Act like universities, not like businesses. Spend your endowments. Accept more, not fewer students. Open up your campuses and [brin…

Believing AI vendors who promise you that they won't train on your data is a huge competitive advantage these days. Tags: llms, generative-ai, ai…

Heather Cox Richardson on where we are right now in terms of what type of government we currently have: Here’s the thing: Once you give up the idea that we are all equal before the law and…

Letter from a high-ranking FBI official who recently resigned. “I took an oath to defend the Constitution. The unqualified leaders Donald Trump chose to lead the bureau act like they took a…

I was chuffed to see that KDO’s own Edith Zimmerman has a cartoon in the New Yorker today! Go Edith! 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

One of the most-asked questions I get is “What would you change about Atomic Design?” My answer is: I would probably talk about design tokens! In the world of UI, design tokens are subat…

SQLite File Format Viewer Neat browser-based visual interface for exploring the structure of a SQLite database file, built by Visal In using React and a custom parser implemented in TypeScript.…

George Monbiot: Rightwing populists will keep winning until we grasp this truth about human nature. “Economic inequality breeds resentment and a desire to get even. That’s what fuels supp…

Using LLMs as the first line of support in Open Source From reading the title I was nervous that this might involve automating the initial response to a user support query in an issue tracker wi…

Stevens: a hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs Geoffrey Litt reports on Stevens, a shared digital assistant he put together for his family using SQLite a…

I am catching up on what happened in season one of The Last of Us by watching and reading recaps. Season 2 starts tonight on HBO & Max at 9pm ET. 💬 Join the d…

A few pics from a short trip to London for Geri’s birthday. Highlights included lunch at Session Arts Club, cocktails at Tayēr + Elementary, Record Store Day at Rough…

New Study Finds Average American Stands No Chance Against What’s Coming. “The typical American is toast.”…

Slopsquatting -- when an LLM hallucinates a non-existent package name, and a bad actor registers it maliciously. The AI brother of typosquatting. Credit to @sethmlarson for the name — Andrew Ne…

Backticks are traditionally banned from use in future language features, due to the small symbol. No reader should need to distinguish ` from ' at a glance. — Steve Dower, CPython core develope…

In the two and a half years that we've been talking about prompt injection attacks I've seen alarmingly little progress towards a robust solution. The new paper Defeating Prompt Injections by Des…