My mouth is watering reading this retrospective by Cup of Jo’s retiring food writer, Jenny Rosenstrach. Lots of good recipes, like Smashed Pea Toasts with Ricotta? Yum.…

Balkonkraftwerk: a German word meaning “balcony power plant”, aka the low-cost solar panels people are hanging from their balconies to generate extra household energy.…

A Thirty-Year-Old Man Today vs. a Thirty-Year-Old Man in 1884. “Today: Is working toward paying off a two-bedroom condo by age seventy-five, if all goes well. 1884: Owns a drafty, four-hund…

OpenAI o3 breakthrough high score on ARC-AGI-PUB François Chollet is the co-founder of the ARC Prize and had advanced access to today's o3 results. His article here is the most insightful cover…

OpenAI's new o3 system - trained on the ARC-AGI-1 Public Training set - has scored a breakthrough 75.7% on the Semi-Private Evaluation set at our stated public leaderboard $10k compute limit. A h…

I posted this picture of my jade plant flowering on BS and a lot of people expressed surprise that jade plants flower, and I was wondering: did you know jade plants flower? Growing up, my mom…

It's the final day of OpenAI's 12 Days of OpenAI launch series, and since I built a live blogging system a couple of months ago I've decided to roll it out again to provide live commentary during…

Al Green released a soulful cover of R.E.M’s “Everybody Hurts,” and it whips. Of the song, Green said: “I could really feel the heaviness of the song, and I wanted to inject a li…

“As an entomologist, I’ve been doing this for over 25 years now, and it is a rare day when the humans actually get to win one against the insects.” Murder hornets eradicated from the US…

20-minute video of carving a capital “I” in stone. I love how you can tell how deep he’s carving by the volume of the hammering. 💬 Join the discussion o…

This year I scrobbled my little heart out. I was determined to record everything I played (at least for one year), whether it be on Plex, Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal, CD or vinyl. It hasn't been strai…

I had big plans for December: for one thing, I was hoping to get to an actual RC of Datasette 1.0, in preparation for a full release in January. Instead, I've found myself distracted by a constan…

Building effective agents My principal complaint about the term "agents" is that while it has many different potential definitions most of the people who use it seem to assume that everyone else…

50% of cybersecurity is endlessly explaining that consumer VPNs don’t address any real cybersecurity issues. They are basically only useful for bypassing geofences and making money telling peop…

Those new model releases just keep on flowing. Today it's Google's snappily named gemini-2.0-flash-thinking-exp, their first entrant into the o1-style inference scaling class of models. I posted…

Gisèle Pelicot is the person of the year for 2024. “She told the court in Avignon she wants women who have been raped to know that ‘it’s not for us to have shame – it’s for them’…

From Literary Hub, The 50 Biggest Literary Stories of 2024. Book bannings, AI, Gaza, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Taylor Swift, Alice Munro, The Hugo Awards, etc. 💬 Join…

Megastars used a pandemic-era grant intended to save music venues from closing to pay for sneakers and birthday parties, which is especially annoying because of how many venues closed after n…

Is AI progress slowing down? This piece by Arvind Narayanan, Sayash Kapoor and Benedikt Ströbl is the single most insightful essay about AI and LLMs I've seen in a long time. It's long and wort…

Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott writes about the $2 billion in donations her foundation gave in 2024 and also some alternate and forgotten definitions of the word “invest”: “To devote re…

The Killings of Young Mothers. In the US, “when women under age 25 get pregnant, their odds of death by homicide more than double.” 💬 Join the discussion…

Vanity Fair has done a video interview Billie Eilish every year since she was a relatively unknown 15-year-old singer/songwriter. They skipped releasing last year’s interview but they are…

q and qv zsh functions for asking questions of websites and YouTube videos with LLM Spotted these in David Gasquez's zshrc dotfiles: two shell functions that use my LLM tool to answer questions…

Hmm. I don’t know. I haven’t liked Superman in a movie since the early 80s. What do you think? Does Superman even make sense as a contemporary superhero? Tags: movie…

I've written a lot about how I've been using Claude to build one-shot HTML+JavaScript applications via Claude Artifacts. I recently started using a similar pattern to create one-shot Python utili…

The only Christmas music I want to hear this year is The Muppets doing Carol of the Bells. Beaker, Animal, and the Swedish Chef makes a great trio, don’t you think? Ta…

I didn’t know that the whereabouts of one of Vincent van Gogh’s most important works, a 1890 painting called “Portrait of Dr. Gachet”, is unknown and that the painting had not been…

Java in the Small Core Java author Cay Horstmann describes how he now uses Java for small programs, effectively taking the place of a scripting language such as Python. TIL that hello world in…

A new free tier for GitHub Copilot in VS Code It's easy to forget that GitHub Copilot was the first widely deployed feature built on top of generative AI, with its initial preview launching all…

I’m an Apple News+ Article. Come and Get Me, Baby. “‘You can look, but don’t touch,’ I whisper from my protected paywall’s safe, loving embrace.” �…

A polite disagreement bot ring is flooding Bluesky — reply guy as a (dis)service Fascinating new pattern of AI slop engagement farming: people are running bots on Bluesky that automatically re…

Saving this for future reference: the 25 most popular recipes published by NYT Cooking in 2024. Includes a link to the full top 50. 💬 Join the discussion on k…

Thanks to a large donation, lift tickets will be free all season at Storrs Hill Ski Area in NH. “We hope this initiative brings neighbors together and inspires a love of skiing in a fun and…

Marisa Kabas correctly asserts that Substack’s latest announcement reaffirms their status as a publication (and not a platform) and as a place that will publish disinformation and hate unde…

How to make your own Die Hard Christmas tree ornament of John McClane crawling through the air duct. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

I am almost positive that I have posted this before but I don’t care: rotating sandwiches. (There seem to be a couple spinning clockwise but maybe that’s just an optical illusion?)…

First published in 1955, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45 (Bookshop) is a book by Milton Mayer for which he interviewed ten ordinary Germans about their experiences living in…

Jamelle Bouie: “Either democracy was on the ballot in November, or it wasn’t, and if it was, it makes no political, ethical or strategic sense to act as if we live in normal times.” 100…

Note: This article was originally posted on 18 January 2020, but I updated it several times and last on 18 December 2024 again. I collected these lin…

OpenAI WebRTC Audio demo OpenAI announced a bunch of API features today, including a brand new WebRTC API for setting up a two-way audio conversation with their models. They tweeted this opaque…

🔔 Laaaast call for The 2024 Kottke Holiday Gift Guide. If you still have holiday shopping to do, it’s probably coming down to the last day or two for ordering in time for Dec 25 (Xmas an…

36 Things That Stuck With Us in 2024, including Chappell Roan, Missy Elliott, Kendrick Lamar, The Substance, Twisters in 4DX (🤔), and Nobody Wants This. (I think there’s maybe a better v…

A group of scientists warns against creating mirror cells. This sentence is somehow not sci-fi: “Drug developers might be able to create mirror antibiotics, but the treatments might not be…

Writer Karen Attiah recently wrote about the pleasure of perusing other people’s personal libraries and then asked her followers what their “personal foundational texts” were…those…

Then Comes The Body is a great short documentary from Jacob Krupnick about a Nigerian man who taught himself how to dance ballet from watching YouTube tutorials, the ballet school he starte…

It is easy to be cynical about the do-gooding motivations of a $3 trillion company, but Apple’s commitment to accessibility is admirable. This music fan bought Airpods Pro and nearly cried…

Yo-Yo Ma played the prelude to Bach’s Suite No. 1 in G major at the reopening of the Notre Dame in Paris. I bet this sounded wonderful, with the sound reverberating around the cathedral.…

Happy to share that Anthropic fixed a data leakage issue in the iOS app of Claude that I responsibly disclosed. 🙌 👉 Image URL rendering as avenue to leak data in LLM apps often exists in mo…

Speaking of speaking of Tiny Desk Concerts here are two recent good ones. (Eep, wait, they’re all really good. What if any performance by a very talented performer in an intimate setting is…

Apple has renewed Silo for two more seasons. The show will end after season four, having told “the entire story contained within Hugh Howey’s books”. 💬…

2024's top three front end framework [React, Vue, Angular] were all launched over a decade ago. Now sure, all three have evolved a lot along the way, and the patterns of 2014 would seem downright…

Security ProbLLMs in xAI's Grok: A Deep Dive Adding xAI to the growing list of AI labs that shipped feature vulnerable to data exfiltration prompt injection attacks, but with the unfortunat…

A teaser trailer for the third season of The White Lotus is out and the release date has been revealed: February 16, 2025. Parker Posey? Walton Goggins? Yes, please. But I’ve got a love/h…

Veo 2 Google's text-to-video model, now available via waitlisted preview. I got through the waitlist and tried the same prompt I ran against OpenAI's Sora last week: A pelican riding a bicycle…

Speaking of Tiny Desk Concerts, the most popular set of 2024 (18M views) is by “Argentine power duo” Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso. Their music is “heavily dependent on electronic sounds” bu…

Need a bit of a break. Can’t go outside? Try One Minute Park.…

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I am excited for what the Fediverse promises: A diverse community of interconnected social platforms. More in this blog post about the open social web.…

“Always go to the funeral” means that I have to do the right thing when I really, really don’t feel like it. I have to remind myself of it when I could make some small gesture, but I…

Actual things my parents said while watching my son’s swimming lesson. “MOM: He’s so beautiful. The teacher must be beside herself. DAD: She’s barely controlling herself. She’s tryi…

HPV vaccines have been linked to a steep drop in cervical cancer deaths in young women. “We observed a substantial reduction in mortality — a 62% drop in cervical cancer deaths over the l…

WebDev Arena New leaderboard from the Chatbot Arena team (formerly known as LMSYS), this time focused on evaluating how good different models are at "web development" - though it turns out to ac…

During the pandemic, Billie Eilish did a Tiny Desk Concert at home amidst a very faithful recreation of the NPR office. Last week, Eilish played a proper set at the actual office. From the…

“Americans spend more years being unhealthy than people in any other country.” Among high income countries, the US has the highest rates of adults with multiple chronic conditions, shorte…

Isle of Tune: a web-based game where you build streetscapes that play music when a car is driven on them — trees, house, and light poles all make different sounds. Big Star Guitar vibes.…

From an old version of the Wikipedia page for Warren G and Nate Dogg’s Regulate, an extremely dry synopsis of the song. “Warren, unaware that Nate is surreptitiously observing the scene u…