CBS cancelled the Late Show with Stephen Colbert just days after he criticized the $16 million bribe the network paid to Trump. Here’s why “Colbert’s cancellation is a dark warning”.…

Fascism For First Time Founders. “Let’s have a little chat about why embracing fascism is probably the worst possible business strategy for anyone actually trying to build something innov…

How to run an LLM on your laptop I talked to Grace Huckins for this piece from MIT Technology Review on running local models. Apparently she enjoyed my dystopian backup plan! Simon Willison has…

“The extreme sports pioneer Felix Baumgartner, famed for a record-breaking 2012 skydive from the edge of space, has died in a paragliding accident.” 💬 Joi…

Next year, “the average person who buys Affordable Care Act insurance will be paying 75% more for their premium” because of “the expiration of enhanced premium tax credits in the ACA ma…

Noah Kalina is uploading videos of the “long photograph” variety of peaceful & contemplative nature scenes to YouTube. 4K. No AI. “Press play and walk away.” T…

I've been immersing myself in the AI news for the last few months, trying to get understanding of the landscape, what and why there's excitement, whether the ethics (both from a copyright and climate…

Matter vs. Force: Why There Are Exactly Two Types of Particles. “Collectivist bosons account for the forces that move us while individualist fermions keep our atoms from collapsing.” (Hon…

From Beautiful Public Data, a look into the Internet Archive’s collection of 5000 images from the NASA Ames Research Center. “Browsing through this amazing archive gives you a unique view…

How AI Wreaked Havoc on the Lo-Fi Beat Scene. “The music’s association with aimless, unfocused listening — vibe music before vibe became a buzzword — means people aren’t paying as m…

For years now, photographer Fujio Kito has been documenting cement playground equipment in Japan, often capturing them at night, lit up in captivating ways. (via laura olin a…

This morning, working entirely on my phone, I scraped a conference website and vibe coded up an alternative UI for interacting with the schedule using a combination of OpenAI Codex and Claude Art…

Elderly Woman Keeps Mind Active Justifying Trump’s Actions. “I’m developing new neural pathways each time I shrug off Trump’s clear violations of the Constitution and his total contem…

Iceland’s 36-hour workweek has been a huge success. “On his free days, he loves to sleep in, then to make long phone calls to his fellow pigeon fanciers while cleaning the kitchen…” S…

A comprehensive illustrated article on how screens work. This is the first part of a new work-in-progress called Making Software that aims to explain how software systems & tools work from th…

I don’t think anything could be more up my alley, in my wheelhouse, in my lane, my cup of tea, my speed than this upcoming retrospective of Wes Anderson’s work at London�…

The winners of Core77 Design Awards. Categories include apps, packaging, transportation, branding, consumer tech, and more. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.or…

Finding of a recent survey of 90,000+ trans Americans: “trans people who go back to living as their sex assigned at birth do so because of transphobia, not because of doubts about gender or…

I haven’t watched the NBA in years and I only know about Joel Embiid by media osmosis, but for some reason I spent 45 minutes this morning reading this profile of him.…

The modern workforce shouldn't be flinging copies to each other. A copy is outdated the moment it is downloaded. A copy has no protection against illicit reading. A copy can never be revoked. Dat…

From Smithsonian Magazine, the story of how Reading Rainbow came about, in part as an effort to combat schoolchildren’s summer reading slumps. 💬 Join the di…

A collection of photos from the 70s & 80s of kids jumping their bikes, sometimes over other kids. In that first pic, there is no way the two kids at the end of the row didn’t get stomped by…

Voxtral Mistral released their first audio-input models yesterday: Voxtral Small and Voxtral Mini. These state‑of‑the‑art speech understanding models are available in two sizes—a 24B v…

I had no idea Subaru actively courted lesbian car buyers with targeted ad campaigns in the early 90s; here’s a 2016 Planet Money episode about it: When Subaru Came Out.…

The Pedestrians Who Abetted a Hawk’s Deadly Attack. “The hawk appears to have learned to interpret a traffic signal and take advantage of it, in its quest to hunt. Which is…more impress…

common-pile/caselaw_access_project Enormous openly licensed (I believe this is almost all public domain) training dataset of US legal cases: This dataset contains 6.7 million cases from the Cas…

Over at the Atlantic, Alan Taylor has collected a bunch of photos showing just how hard China is pushing on solar energy. As the Trump administration’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” elimin…

Fell in a hole, got out. This is an absolutely fascinating entrepreneurial war story by Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine, describing how they went from losing $2.6 million per month in 2022 to being…

Let Your Kid Climb That Tree. “Your fear that your kid will get hurt is depriving them of something they’ll never get back.” (The bit about “kinematic movers” is really interesting.…

Bruce Springsteen on Surviving Depression and His Strategy for Living Through the Visitations of the Darkness. “My depression is spewing like an oil spill all over the beautiful turquoise-g…

Writing Advice and Literary Wisdom from the Great E.B. White. “A blank sheet of paper holds the greatest excitement there is for me — more promising than a silver cloud, prettier than a l…

Passing Namur on my way to Portugal. Remembers me of Alexandre Plennevaux bringing students to beyond tellerrand in DUS for many years. Repl…

A great look at how Baltimore’s investment in an “ecosystem of community–oriented interventions” has drastically reduced violent crime in the city by treating crime as a public health…

Twenty years! It’s been twenty years since Bloc Party’s debut album Silent Alarm was released. To celebrate, the band stopped by the NPR office’s for a Tiny Desk Concert. To celebrat…

A map of the best places to see the Northern Lights. “Kuril’s analysis culminated in a map highlighting the locations with the best potential to see the northern lights.”…

Shipping WebGPU on Windows in Firefox 141 WebGPU is coming to Mac and Linux soon as well: Although Firefox 141 enables WebGPU only on Windows, we plan to ship WebGPU on Mac and Linux in the com…

Documenting what you're willing to support (and not) Devious company culture hack from Rachel Kroll: At some point, I realized that if I wrote a wiki page and documented the things that we…

CEO Tony Stubblebine shares how Medium went from the brink of shutting down to being profitable for almost a year now. “In 2022, Medium was losing $2.6M each month. We were also losing subs…

After dealing with years of “Xfinity’s bullcrap” as customers, a pair of brothers built an all-fiber ISP that’s cheaper & faster to compete with them. �…

In his film Best of Luck With the Wall, director Josh Begley takes us on a journey across the entire US/Mexico border. It’s a simple premise — a continuous display of 200,000 satellite…

“BuildMyTransit is a web app to design, visualize, and simulate New York City subway systems. Perfect for exploring ‘what-if’ scenarios.” You can design new routes, add/remove trains,…

Reflections on OpenAI Calvin French-Owen spent just over a year working at OpenAI, during which time the organization grew from 1,000 to 3,000 people and Calvin found himself in "the top 30% by…

Historical Tech Tree. “The tech tree is an interactive visualization of technological history from 3 million years ago to today. A work in progress, it currently contains 1890 technologies…

Wanting to get away from manufactured perfection, artist Wang Mansheng makes his own paint brushes. Manufactured things are, you know, have a certain form. Like a manufactured brush; they�…

Marc Andreessen Is a Traitor. “He has betrayed the very system that made his success possible; the system in which he and a handful of others like him have profited disproportionately relat…

Please Shout Fire. This Theater Is Burning. “The United States is being destroyed from within, and mainstream journalism isn’t making that clear.”…

xAI: "We spotted a couple of issues with Grok 4 recently that we immediately investigated & mitigated" They continue: One was that if you ask it "What is your surname?" it doesn't have one so i…

Good lord, the World Cup is going to be a total shitshow next year. And the 2028 LA Olympics. A jingoistic facade papering over a faded superpower careening towards ruin.…

This is great: a proposed “poli-sci course that equips one for modern political analysis better than most classic theory and has a syllabus sourced entirely from random internet posts”.…

How Was the Wheel Invented? “How did an obscure, scientifically naive mining society discover the wheel, when highly advanced civilizations, such as the ancient Egyptians, did not?”…

Application development without programmers This book by James Martin published in 1982, includes the following in the preface: Applications development did not change much for 20 years, but no…

“Fed up with big legacy news? Here are 13 independent, worker-owned outlets to support.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

The Media’s Pivot to AI Is Not Real and Not Going to Work. “The only AI-related business strategy that makes any sense whatsoever is one where media companies and journalists go to great…

I am only a couple of chapters into James McBride’s Deacon King Kong (loving it!) and in the first chapter, there’s a relatively short passage about some cheese, Jesus’s Cheese, that co…

A lovely, beautiful, and uplifting obituary of poet and activist Andrea Gibson. “One of the last things Andrea said on this plane was, ‘I fucking loved my life.’”…

DOJ Removes All Mentions Of Justice From Website. This Onion article got me for a sec; totally plausible. Wouldn’t be surprised if they actually changed it to the Department of Jesus or som…

Here are some of the winners, finalists, and nominees from the 2025 BigPicture Natural World Photography Competition and their People’s Choice Awards. Photos by (from top to bottom): Simon…

ccusage Claude Code logs detailed usage information to the ~/.claude/ directory. ccusage is a neat little Node.js tool which reads that information and shows you a readable summary of your usage…

Someone at work mentioned this. I can totally see what’s going on here. My dad used to say that what my brother lacked, that I had, was “common sense.” Generative AI wasn’t around then…

America is Losing Its Soul in Brown-Skinned Screams and White-Skinned Silence. “The greatest, most grievous failure of America in this moment isn’t legislative but moral. The soul of this…

Skater Demarcus James is skateboarding across the entire United States, from Oakland to NYC, to spread awareness about mental health. Check out his GoFundMe to support his journey.…

Inside the Storehouse from level 2. That glass floor is a lot of fun. Another hot and sweaty weekend in London, with prolonged highs of 30°C. The temp settled around…