Among many misunderstandings, [users] expect the RAG system to work like a search engine, not as a flawed, forgetful analyst. They will not do the work that you expect them to do in order to veri…

Futura, the typeface favored by the likes of filmmakers Stanley Kubrick and Wes Anderson was also used extensively for NASA’s Apollo 11 mission (along with an American knock-off of Fu…

Hey, public voting is open for the Tiny Awards! I was on the judging committee so I can’t tell you my favorites, but there are lots of lovingly crafted, goofy, creative sites to choose from…

The SENDUNE email designer focuses on simplicity and ease of use. It is light-weight. It does pure HTML - no intermediate code wranglers like mjml. There is no lock-in of any kind. Save HTML output as…

Tags: diary comics 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

Image resize and quality comparison Another tiny tool I built with Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Artifacts. This one lets you select an image (or drag-drop one onto an area) and then displays that same…

Did you know about Instruments? Thorsten Ball shows how the macOS Instruments app (installed as part of Xcode) can be used to run a CPU profiler against any application - not just code written i…

Our estimate of OpenAI’s $4 billion in inference costs comes from a person with knowledge of the cluster of servers OpenAI rents from Microsoft. That cluster has the equivalent of 350,000 Nvidi…

Using methods generally employed to track the evolution and spread of plants and animals over time and across geography, this paper aims to provide a scientific classification of Italian st…

Susannah Breslin discovers that you can post nudity on YouTube if it’s artistic (or advertising?) “[YouTube’s policy] did not seem to allow for viewer interpretation.”…

Introducing sqlite-lembed: A SQLite extension for generating text embeddings locally Alex Garcia's latest SQLite extension is a C wrapper around the llama.cpp that exposes just its embedding sup…

AI crawlers need to be more respectful Eric Holscher: At Read the Docs, we host documentation for many projects and are generally bot friendly, but the behavior of AI crawlers is currently caus…

An interview with YACHT’s Claire Evans & Jona Bechtolt on that indie life. “We’re not a brand. We’re not a company. We’re human beings. Of course it’s going to change every 30 sec…

Button Stealer Really fun Chrome extension by Anatoly Zenkov: it scans every web page you visit for things that look like buttons and stashes a copy of them, then provides a page where you can s…

Ok, I did not know this, and it’s blowing my mind: we have been imaging exoplanets for such a long time that scientists have made time lapse movies of their motion around their stars. This…

wat This is a really neat Python debugging utility. Install with pip install wat-inspector and then inspect any Python object like this: from wat import wat wat / myvariable The wat / x syntax…

On her birthday, US Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who is Palestinian-American, wore a keffiyeh & held up a “Guilty of Genocide” sign during Netanyahu’s Congressional address. “It’s shameful t…

Fun little browser game: What Beats Rock? 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

Laura Dern was forced to drop out of UCLA’s film school to star in Blue Velvet and the head of dept. called her “insane” for doing so. Now, the film is a requirement at the school. Dern…

Vice President Kamala Harris has debuted her first ad for her presidential run and it’s a good one. First of all: Beyoncé. But also: “freedom” is a great theme for Harris. For too lo…

A recent book, Van Gogh and the End of Nature, is a “radical revisioning” of van Gogh’s work “in relation to industrial pollution and climate change”.…

Have you ever been frustrated by the amount of noise you have to wade through with git log -p -- ? What if there was a way to narrow down the diff output so that you could see how a single function or…

The Index Card is a new book by Helaine Olen and Harold Pollack about simple advice for personal finance. The idea for the book came about when Pollack jotted down financial advice that wor…

“In supposedly affluent Western nations, the dire state or absence of public toilets has become a universal nightmare, impacting the health and quality of life of all of us, but particularl…

A study of the world’s most, and least, walkable cities (and those that rely most on public transport). Shocking but not shocking: “The 100 least active cities in the study are all found…

Some good climate news: the pace of decarbonization in the US is increasing (due in part to Biden policies); we’re on track to “reduce GHG emissions by 38-56% below 2005 levels in 2035”…

Matt Lamothe and Jenny Volvovski wrote an illustrated a new book called All About U.S. (Bookshop), which features a look into the lives of 50 kids from the US, one from each state. From the…

Over the last few months I watched… They were all kinda dark. I’m starting the Bear Season 3 now and we’ll see if I can take it. I might need something a little funnier or lighter or…

If you’re feeling nostalgic, here’s a version of MS Paint that works in the browser. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

Google is the only search engine that works on Reddit now thanks to AI deal This is depressing. As of around June 25th reddit.com/robots.txt contains this: User-agent: * Disallow: / Along with…

The Gods of Logic: Benjamín Labatut (When We Cease to Understand the World) on artificial intelligence. “It is never safe to call on the gods, or even come close to them.”…

If you can wait, you win..…

Dr. Mara Einstein is an author and media studies professor with a special interest in religion & cults and she recently shared a list of books to read and movies to watch “in order to get…

In the latest data release, the UN’s global population peak projection was revised downward to 10.3 billion people in 2084. “The global fertility rate has more than halved since the 1960s…

Mistral Large 2 The second release of a GPT-4 class open weights model in two days, after yesterday's Llama 3.1 405B. The weights for this one are under Mistral's Research License, which "allows…

Martin Pollack writes about his Gestapo father and his family, who remained Nazis in spirit after the war. “My father did terrible things during the second world war, and my other relatives…

After the success of the first Ambient Witney, Doug Tolley of Nine is the Level has organised another event for later this year. It now has a proper name 'Bypass//Engage' and has sponsorship from Chas…

One interesting observation is the impact of environmental factors on training performance at scale. For Llama 3 405B , we noted a diurnal 1-2% throughput variation based on time-of-day. This flu…

llm-gguf I just released a new alpha plugin for LLM which adds support for running models from Meta's new Llama 3.1 family that have been packaged as GGUF files - it should work for other GGUF c…

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything that encapsulates the feeling of America in the 1970s more than this local news report about 13-year-old Terry “Evel Knievel” Bolinger and his…

Chronic Pain is Psychedelic. “In moments of extreme pain, physical or psychological, we become stitched to the present moment. It becomes impossible not to be radically present.” See also…

As we've noted many times since March, these benchmarks aren't necessarily scientifically sound and don't convey the subjective experience of interacting with AI language models. [...] We've inst…

Flint, MI is giving pregnant residents a “cash prescription” of $1500 during pregnancy and $500/mo for the 1st year of the baby’s life. “In Flint, the poorest city in [Michigan], we a…

In this visual essay (and video embedded above), Alvin Chang shows how science fiction movies have gotten darker and more complex since the 1950s, when many movies were set in the present w…

Livestream of a blooming corpse flower (you know, the big stinky one) from Milk Barn Farm. “It’s an unusual thing to find in a greenhouse in Oregon. In fact, it may be the first time one…

Andrea Pitzer, who wrote about about the history of concentration camps in her 2017 book One Long Night, has a piece in Scientific American about the historical parallels between Trump’s de…

A generic version of a drug that’s “as close as we’ve ever been to an HIV vaccine” could be made for $40 a year per patient (with a 30% profit). Current pricing by Gilead: $42,250 per…

I believe the Llama 3.1 release will be an inflection point in the industry where most developers begin to primarily use open source, and I expect that approach to only grow from here.— Mark Zu…

Kamala Harris is to the left of Joe Biden on health care issues, particularly when it comes to reproductive freedom, support for Medicare for All, drug pricing, and health care antitrust.…

On Saturday, I played a 45-minute set at Delia’s Third Happening. The audience, which included many friends old and new, was lovely, and the venue was be…

Introducing Llama 3.1: Our most capable models to date We've been waiting for the largest release of the Llama 3 model for a few months, and now we're getting a whole new model family instead. M…

From Scientific American: What to Know about Project 2025’s Dangers to Science. Project 2025 “would sabotage science-based policies that address climate change, the environment, abortion,…

“Dark oxygen” source discovered on ocean floor. “The metal nodules are able to make oxygen precisely because they act like batteries”, splitting seawater into hydrogen and oxygen.…

I read Kathryn Jezer-Morton’s newsletter about “a more lateral approach to Mother’s Day” back when it came out in May, and while I’m not the target audience, I keep thinking about t…

Bodycam footage of Aston Villa midfielder Youri Tielemans shows how quick and demanding Premier League football is, even in the preseason. 💬 Join the discussi…

Be Better not Bitter by Folk.…

I LOVE Jefferson Fisher’s content on Instagram. I have taken so many of his communication tips into my life. Incredibly helpful. He just recently launched podcast where he dives in a bit deeper.…

I can never look at a rooster the same way again.…

“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we…

“Creativity is intelligence having fun.” – Albert Einstein…

If you know me, you know that my heart beats for hand crafted, human curated community events, where you can see and feel that people who care and wa…

sqlite-jiff I linked to the brand new Jiff datetime library yesterday. Alex Garcia has already used it for an experimental SQLite extension providing a timezone-aware jiff_duration() function -…

In a recent (personal) audit of accessibility and continued struggle to get my head around Voice Over (for macos), I remembered that the spoken sound of "ffconf" (as I'll usually display it)…

An explainer and organizational toolkit from Red Wine & Blue about Project 2025. “It is frighteningly anti-democratic and goes against what the vast majority of Americans want for our count…

Kamala Harris and her views on the climate crisis. “Harris has made clear throughout her career that she views climate change as a significant threat.”…

Breaking Instruction Hierarchy in OpenAI's gpt-4o-mini Johann Rehberger digs further into GPT-4o's "instruction hierarchy" protection and finds that it has little impact at all on common pr…

Back in 2016 I wrote a book called Practical SVG. Recently, the publisher, A Book Apart, closed shop. Now you can Read Practical SVG on the web, here on this site, for free. I always like how Mat̵…

News Happening Faster Than Man Can Generate Uninformed Opinions. “It’s getting harder and harder to come up with enough incoherent perspectives to meet the moment.”…

No More Blue Fridays Brendan Gregg: "In the future, computers will not crash due to bad software updates, even those updates that involve kernel code. In the future, these updates will push eBPF…