The most annoying problem is that the [GitHub] frontend barely works without JavaScript, so we cannot open issues, pull requests, source code or CI logs in Dillo itself, despite them being mostly…

Being a fan is all about bringing the enthusiasm. It’s being a champion of possibility. It’s believing in someone. And it’s contagious. When you’re around someone who is super excited about so…

We rendered over 1 million of the web’s top homepages. This is the result. Zoom, pan and click to explore – like Google Maps. Source: One Million Screenshots…

A few months ago, I had the privilege of being interviewed on the Design Systems Collective by Shane P Williams. This interview captures a lot of my current thinking about design systems, our design t…

Japanese researchers turned to “experimental archaeology” to study how ancient humans navigated powerful ocean currents and migrated offshore. Scientists Retrace 30,000-Year-Old Ocean Voyage, in a…

My signed copy of Iroha Ni Kompeito. I never expected to see Akiko Yano play live, let alone meet her and get an album signed. In case you don’t know, she’s “the J…

Context plumbing Matt Webb coins the term context plumbing to describe the kind of engineering needed to feed agents the right context at the right time: Context appears at disparate sources, b…

Large language models (LLMs) can be useful tools, but they are not good at creating entirely new Wikipedia articles. Large language models should not be used to generate new Wikipedia articles fr…

In June 2025 Sam Altman claimed about ChatGPT that "the average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours". In March 2020 George Kamiya of the International Energy Agency estimated that "streaming a Netfl…

Context: back in March 2025 I decided to put aside my scepticism and try AI driven development for the day. I appreciate that in 8 months, the AI landscape, particularly around agentic software dev ha…

Bluesky Thread Viewer thread by @simonwillison.net I've been having a lot of fun hacking on my Bluesky Thread Viewer JavaScript tool with Claude Code recently. Here it renders a thread (complete…

On tour for the 35th anniversary of Home Alone, Macaulay Culkin said his kids love the movie, but don’t know he’s Kevin. They’re only three and four years old, so this makes sense, but…

Rebecca Solnit: A Year on From Trump’s Victory, Resistance Is Everywhere. “There has, in fact, been a tremendous amount and variety of resistance and opposition and it’s mattered tremen…

Atul Gawande of Harvard’s School of Public Health: The Trump regime’s destruction of USAID “has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children”.…

A long profile of comics legend Alan Moore. “For the first time in his 45-year career, Alan Moore is alone on the page.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.o…

Hello E-Commerce-Email-Wading Friends. Here's issue #60 of Studio Notes™—quick bits delivered to you each Friday. I realize you're getting emails from every single company you&…

I don’t know if it’s because some new responsibilities are taking me out of the house more than usual, or because humanity’s current ugly streak makes everything else look more beauti…

I’m still working on the KDO gift guide for this year. In the meantime, here’s the 2024 edition, which has aged well and includes these popular Japanese nail clippers.…

“Australia is on course to meet a target of eliminating cervical cancer by 2035, which, if achieved, will make it the first country to do so.” This is due in large part to their HPV vacci…

Our Black Friday sale starts now! It will run now through Friday, December 5th. Level up your design systems game and save with our biggest sale of the year: MEGA BUNDLE: save 45% & get all course…

A browser extension for avoiding AI slop.  Download it for Chrome or Firefox. This is a search tool that will only return content created before ChatGPT’s first public release on November 30, 2022.…

To evaluate the model’s capability in processing long-context inputs, we construct a video “Needle-in- a-Haystack” evaluation on Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B-Instruct. In this task, a semantically sa…

It’s been a really tough year for many of us, the citizens of the world. But on this day of thanksgiving in the US, I wanted to ask you all: what are you thankful for today? I’m thankful…

deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-Math-V2 New on Hugging Face, a specialist mathematical reasoning LLM from DeepSeek. This is their entry in the space previously dominated by proprietary models from OpenAI a…

Akiva Schaffer, 2025, ★★★ This undoubtedly would have fared better in a packed theater than it did with me watching it alone at home, but I was pleasantly surprised it made me laugh…

Perhaps inspired by All Streets, Ben Fry’s map of all the streets in the US, Nelson Minar built a US map out of all the rivers in the country. Minar put all the data and files he used…

“Art is valuable precisely because it is not easy to create. We are interested in art, in any and all of its forms, because humans made it. That’s the very thing that makes it interesting…

If Quantum Computing Is Solving “Impossible” Questions, How Do We Know They’re Right? “In order to validate quantum computers, methods are needed to compare theory and result without…

This is the trailer for an HBO documentary called Thoughts and Prayers about “the impact of the $3 billion active shooter preparedness industry on schools and communities across America”.…

In a London increasingly dominated by rideshare services, some drivers are still opting to study for years for The Knowledge, “the grueling examination that requires applicants to essential…

21st-Century Culture Has Hit a Wall. “We — creators and audiences alike — have to make an effort to encourage bold new forms of culture. Even failures and half steps will be more intere…

TL;DR: our Black Friday sale starts this Friday November 28th and runs through Friday December 5th. We’ll be offering two deals: A MEGA BUNDLE with all of our courses for $1000 and a Subatomic + At…

I got to talk with Seth Casana on the Wake Up Excited! podcast. I’d love it if you check it out and consider subscribing to the show! At first glance, Seth Casana is a very unassuming, normal…

Konnichiwa! I’m back from Japan and finally getting over my jetlag, which took much longer than I expected. Here’s a list of all the things I’ve been reading, watching, listening to, an…

I talked with CL Kao and Dori Wilson for an episode of their new Data Renegades podcast titled Data Journalism Unleashed with Simon Willison. I fed the transcript into Claude Opus 4.5 to extract…

Chindōgu is the Japanese practice of inventing things that are not exactly useful but neither are they useless; they’re more unuseless, a term coined by chindōgu’s originator Kenji Kawa…

Google Antigravity Exfiltrates Data PromptArmor demonstrate a concerning prompt injection chain in Google's new Antigravity IDE: In this attack chain, we illustrate that a poisoned web source (…

My Car Is Becoming a Brick. “Cars used to be entirely mechanical objects” but now “certain models are destined to age their way out of compatibility with the latest software” (like sm…

To Explore Violence Against Women, She Drugs Herself Onstage. “It’s an attempt to explore whether performance can give form to the disorganizing experience of trauma, its gaps and obsessi…

What’s the difference between an artist and a creator? “An artist is a self-directed artistic expressor” vs. “a creator is a self-directed market expressor”. (Wondering where I fit…

Constant-time support lands in LLVM: Protecting cryptographic code at the compiler level Substantial LLVM contribution from Trail of Bits. Timing attacks against cryptography algorithms are a gn…

Vanity Fair sat down with Harrison Ford and asked him to identify which of his lines he’d said in which movie, mostly as a way of getting him to talk about his career. A few observations:…