Simon Willison And SWYX Tell Us Where AI Is In 2025 I recorded this podcast episode with Brian McCullough and swyx riffing off my Things we learned about LLMs in 2024 review. We also touched on…

LLMs shouldn't help you do less thinking, they should help you do more thinking. They give you higher leverage. Will that cause you to be satisfied with doing less, or driven to do more? — Alex…

Codestral 25.01 Brand new code-focused model from Mistral. Unlike the first Codestral this one isn't (yet) available as open weights. The model has a 256k token context - a new record for Mistra…

Steward Brand has talked about Pace Layering for a long time: Pace layers provide many-leveled corrective, stabilizing feedback throughout the system. It is in the contradictions between these layers…

Hey folks. After a busy and productive fall & holiday season, kottke.org will be closed this week for some much-needed rest, relaxation, and recharging. I will be back next week, ready to g…

I was using o1 like a chat model — but o1 is not a chat model. If o1 is not a chat model — what is it? I think of it like a “report generator.” If you give it enough context, and tell it…

On the way to Berlin for the Eno premiere with Gary Huswit, Brendan Dawes and also looking forward to seeing Keir Whitaker. 🙌 #firsttripin25…

Generative AI – The Power and the Glory Michael Liebreich's epic report for BloombergNEF on the current state of play with regards to generative AI, energy usage and data center growth. I lear…

Agents Chip Huyen's 8,000 word practical guide to building useful LLM-driven workflows that take advantage of tools. Chip starts by providing a definition of "agents" to be used in the piece - i…

Phi-4 Bug Fixes by Unsloth This explains why I was seeing weird suffexes during my experiments with Phi-4 the other day: it turns out the Phi-4 tokenizer definition as released by Microsoft had…

I paged through this illustrated retrospective of Hayao Miyazaki’s work at the bookstore a few months ago and it was gorgeous. “The book is artistic biography, aesthetic treatise, creativ…

A British company is selling a wristwatch that’s a shrunk-down replica of the Apollo Guidance Computer interface that the Apollo astronauts used to maneuver their spacecraft to the Moon a…

Did we all know this already? “Chip is a nickname for a guy named after his dad. Skip is a nickname for a guy named after his grandfather. Trip is a nickname for a guy named after his dad A…

The Art of the Snack Solo. “And now I am into my stride. A fig is plucked. The cornichons emerge. The cheeses multiply. Little packets of oatcakes are opened. Maple syrup is experimentally…

While these might look like they are AI-generated, these floating orb-structures created by Masakatsu Sashie are actually oil paintings. You can check out more of his work on Instagram an…

33 Ways To Improve Your Life, Japanese Style. Including “be happy in your own company”, “find your inner otaku”, “take inspiration — but with respect”, and “be reliable”.…

My fiddle player friend Darin sent me this documentary about GB Grayson, which I enjoyed: The documentary talks about how very few people even recognize the name despite all of recorded tunes essentia…

Jessica Hische & Chris Shiflett are launching a company called Studioworks that makes business management software for creative studios. 💬 Join the discussion…

Back in 2016, I wrote about The Most Relaxing Song in the World, an ambient track by Marconi Union called Weightless. Today I learned the band’s record label hosts a 24/7 streaming video of…

Learning from Finland’s success in combatting homelessness. “It is the result of a sustained, well-resourced national strategy […] which provides people experiencing homelessness with i…

Hello, Folks. Here's issue #14 of Studio Notes—quick bits delivered to you each Friday. This is a weekly newsletter that I'm publishing here on the blog as well. You should subscribe if haven't alre…

The Oxide and Friends podcast has an annual tradition of asking guests to share their predictions for the next 1, 3 and 6 years. Here's 2022, 2023 and 2024. This year they invited me to participa…

The Euthanasia Coaster is designed to thrill the hell out of its passengers just before it kills them. Each inversion would have a smaller diameter than the one before in order to inflict…

When Your Terminal Illness Makes You a TikTok Star. “After being diagnosed with A.L.S. in 2022, Brooke Eby could have turned inward. Instead, she opened up — and found a fan base online.�…

While designing a one-off t-shirt for a holiday gift, I stumbled across this amazing page on the Doctor Who Wiki about the design of the show’s title cards. It’s a pretty thorough resou…

The Beauty Of Old Hollywood In One Scene. Evan Puschak dissects a scene from The Philadelphia Story, featuring Katherine Hepburn & Jimmy Stewart. 💬 Join the d…

Ernest Wright has been making scissors in Sheffield, England since 1902. This video takes a look at how they make one of the their most sought after models. In this episode of Sheffield Ma…

Double-keyed Caching: How Browser Cache Partitioning Changed the Web Addy Osmani provides a clear explanation of how browser cache partitioning has changed the landscape of web optimization tric…

What Dinosaurs Were Really Like. This is an entertaining and informative look at what we know about dinosaurs today (for those of us who haven’t kept up much since Jurassic Park).…

“Coyote time” is a trick video game designers use to be more forgiving about players jumping — the jump button still works after running off the end of the platform. It’s named after…

Over the holiday’s our family did the Exploring Hogwarts puzzle. It was just 500 pieces but took us like… a month? Of course, in the end, there was a missing piece that we absolutely could…

Wow, check out these amazing hyperrealistic pencil drawings by Kohei Ohmori. The detail is next-level…here’s a close-up view of the drawing above: This drawing took 280 hours (~11.7…

Montana youth score a major climate victory in court. “Montana’s Supreme Court has ruled that the 16 youth who sued the state in a landmark climate change lawsuit have a constitutional ri…