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Watch Chuck Jones Draw Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Porky Pig
Jason Kottke
This is great: a 25-minute interview with legendary animator Chuck Jones as he sits and draws some of his iconic characters (Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck). He told this anecdote about…
Today · 10:42 -
Christopher Slayton built a bunch of iconic cosmic structures in Minecraft, including...
Jason Kottke
Christopher Slayton built a bunch of iconic cosmic structures in Minecraft, including the Sun, the Pillars of Creation, galaxies, a supermassive black hole, and galaxies.…
Today · 09:51 -
An experimental data sonification of what a “decentralized, digitized, decarbonized electricity grid”...
Jason Kottke
An experimental data sonification of what a “decentralized, digitized, decarbonized electricity grid” would sound like. “Should we be dramatic, Hans-Zimmer-style ‘bahhhhhhhhnnnnn’ s…
Today · 08:53 -
Why Good Captioned Videos Are Important [link]
Remy Sharp
Absolutely essential reading and viewing on how to produce captions with valuable real world examples of how to completely mess it up (and a lot of social posted videos do the bad mess version). As so…
Today · 08:51 -
Sounds like The Onion has been rescued from an agonizing death by...
Jason Kottke
Sounds like The Onion has been rescued from an agonizing death by private equity by an acquisition by people who actually care about it. “The Onion is just an institution. It should be pres…
Today · 07:38 -
Food Delivery Leak Unmasks Russian Security Agents
Simon Willison
Food Delivery Leak Unmasks Russian Security Agents This story is from April 2022 but I realize now I never linked to it. Yandex Food, a popular food delivery service in Russia, suffered a major…
Yesterday · 19:59 -
Just a Beautiful Drawing of Bluebells
Jason Kottke
…By the artist Skevoulla Gordon. (Prints are available, too, and she’s a good follow on Instagram!) Tags: art · bluebells · flowers · Skevoulla Gordon …
Yesterday · 15:00 -
Life-Ruining Mistakes?
Jason Kottke
The other day, the novelist Robin Sloan mentioned in his newsletter that he really liked the Financial Times. It seems everyone’s talking up the Financial Times lately, so I went and follow…
Yesterday · 14:00 -
The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed
Jason Kottke
Here is a pleasantly painful trailer for a new movie from the filmmaker Joanna Arnow. It opens this Friday, April 26, at IFC and Lincoln Center in NYC. I don’t know if I’m going to watc…
Yesterday · 13:00 -
Size XXXS, Miniature Sweaters
Jason Kottke
Oh my gosh — this video about making the teeny-tiny sweaters seen in the movie Coraline! Says artist Althea Crome: I think knitters are often fascinated by the fact that I use such tiny n…
Yesterday · 12:15 -
“I have no training for this work. I got the job by...
Jason Kottke
“I have no training for this work. I got the job by bringing in my posters to be framed … and asking the frame shop guy—my boss—if he needed an assistant.” I loved this essay about…
Yesterday · 11:45 -
Diary Comics, Dec. 15 & 16
Jason Kottke
Hello! Here are a few more journal comics from last December, these are a bit cheerier than the ones from last week. Tags: comics 💬 Join the discussion on…
Yesterday · 11:00 -
A Huge Collaborative Flipbook Animation
Jason Kottke
I love this: The Pudding ran an online experiment where they started with a shape (like a straight line or circle) and asked people to trace, as best they could, the tracing of the person bef…
Yesterday · 10:15 -
Kelly Hayes: the double standards of conservatism (i.e. “there must be in-groups...
Jason Kottke
Kelly Hayes: the double standards of conservatism (i.e. “there must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind…”) are about hierarchy (or caste, if you will). “They are outl…
Yesterday · 09:22 -
Literatur & Livemusik 2024
Marc Thiele
On May 13th and 14th, I organise my annual stop of beyond tellerrand in Düsseldorf. If you are from Düsseldorf or arrive in Düsseldorf before you…
Yesterday · 09:09 -
The Biden administration is imposing new regulations on coal burning power plants....
Jason Kottke
The Biden administration is imposing new regulations on coal burning power plants. “Taken together, the regulations could deliver a death blow in the United States to coal, the fuel that……
Yesterday · 08:49 -
Quoting Alex Jason, via Adam Savage
Simon Willison
The only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down— Alex Jason, via Adam Savage…
Yesterday · 08:17 -
What Bird Is That?
Jason Kottke
As someone who is interested in birds but doesn’t know a whole lot about them, this new animated video series from Will Rose is right up my alley. What Bird Is That? is a beginners guide…
Yesterday · 08:13 -
How teens benefit from having the choice to read “disturbing” books. They...
Jason Kottke
How teens benefit from having the choice to read “disturbing” books. They reported being more empathetic, thoughtful, happier, and better readers. I read a lot of “age-inappropriate”…
Yesterday · 07:47 -
A Message from the Chancellor on the Recent Student Protest. “But this...
Jason Kottke
A Message from the Chancellor on the Recent Student Protest. “But this recent protest is different. These students will never inspire change. Fifty years from now, we will definitely not pr…
Yesterday · 06:55 -
Weeknotes 25 April
Jon Hicks
Just a few notes and linky-poos to end the week (technically it's Thursday, but Leigh and I are off to Madrid for the weekend!): Votre Saucisse est trés plastique There's a new episode of One Footer…
Yesterday · 02:35 -
Quoting James Betker
Simon Willison
I’ve been at OpenAI for almost a year now. In that time, I’ve trained a lot of generative models. [...] It’s becoming awfully clear to me that these models are truly approximating their dat…
Two Days Ago · 23:13 -
Blogmarks that use markdown
Simon Willison
Blogmarks that use markdown I needed to attach a correction to an older blogmark (my 20-year old name for short-form links with commentary on my blog) today - but the commentary field has always…
Two Days Ago · 22:34 -
No, Most Books Don't Sell Only a Dozen Copies
Simon Willison
No, Most Books Don't Sell Only a Dozen Copies I linked to a story the other day about book sales claiming "90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a do…
Two Days Ago · 21:41 -
Snowflake Arctic Cookbook
Simon Willison
Snowflake Arctic Cookbook Today's big model release was Snowflake Arctic, an enormous 480B model with a 128×3.66B MoE (Mixture of Experts) architecture. It's Apache 2 licensed and Snowflake sta…
Two Days Ago · 20:47 -
My Desktop
Marc Thiele
Dirk Hesse collects photos of creatives – and who isn’t creative – for his website “Le Bureau”. Mine was recently published and I wanted to…
Two Days Ago · 15:58 -
What does it mean to “be a serious person”? I don’t know...
Jason Kottke
What does it mean to “be a serious person”? I don’t know if I am one. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…
Two Days Ago · 15:40 -
Can I Lick It? (Yes, You Can?!)
Jason Kottke
Is the periodic table yummy? Well, it depends on the element. But if you’ve ever wondered if a little taste of xenon or iridium would do you any harm, this periodic table is for you. See…
Two Days Ago · 13:33 -
“What would you consider as the most recognizable bitmap fonts in tech...
Jason Kottke
“What would you consider as the most recognizable bitmap fonts in tech history?” Atari font, Chicago, Commodore 64 font, Minecraft font, London Underground digital marquee font, etc.…
Two Days Ago · 12:46 -
The novelist R.O. Kwon: The Parents Who Regret Having Children. “It’s possible...
Jason Kottke
The novelist R.O. Kwon: The Parents Who Regret Having Children. “It’s possible to have strong, lasting regrets about a life choice while ferociously loving — and caring for — the frui…
Two Days Ago · 11:53 -
Bizarre Traveling Flame Discovery
Jason Kottke
Steve Mould’s videos are always entertaining and informative but this one is also a little bit mind-blowing. If you build a circular trough with just the right dimensions and fill it with…
Two Days Ago · 11:05 -
A Day in Tokyo: A 1968 Film Captures a City Reborn 23...
Jason Kottke
A Day in Tokyo: A 1968 Film Captures a City Reborn 23 Years After Its Destruction. “Bullet trains, high-speed expressways, and color television broadcasts were spreading throughout the land…
Two Days Ago · 09:51 -
Quoting Cherlynn Low
Simon Willison
When I said “Send a text message to Julian Chokkattu,” who’s a friend and fellow AI Pin reviewer over at Wired, I thought I’d be asked what I wanted to tell him. Instead, the device simpl…
Two Days Ago · 09:07 -
Vintage Japanese Train Tickets
Jason Kottke
Oh, these old Japanese train tickets, sourced from this collector, are wonderful. So much design inspiration. You can find more at Present and Correct. See also Vintage Wee…
Two Days Ago · 08:59 -
Two men swapped at birth – one Indigenous, one white – finally...
Jason Kottke
Two men swapped at birth – one Indigenous, one white – finally get apology. “To have the core understanding of who you are — and who your parents were and who your siblings were — t…
Two Days Ago · 07:53 -
openelm/README-pretraining.md
Simon Willison
openelm/README-pretraining.md Apple released something big three hours ago, and I’m still trying to get my head around exactly what it is. The parent project is called CoreNet, described as …
Three Days Ago · 20:57 -
Quoting Erika Hall
Simon Willison
A bad survey won’t tell you it’s bad. It’s actually really hard to find out that a bad survey is bad — or to tell whether you have written a good or bad set of questions. Bad code will ha…
Three Days Ago · 18:31 -
Designer/creative Connell McCarthy: “I got married and over-engineered everything.” He obviously designed...
Jason Kottke
Designer/creative Connell McCarthy: “I got married and over-engineered everything.” He obviously designed everything — invites, website (using AWS!), signage — but also made custom ca…
Three Days Ago · 15:58 -
Megan Marie Myers
Chris Coyier
In Bend, you can’t miss the illustration work of Megan Marie Myers. It’s absolutely everywhere. There are murals. There are calendars for sale everywhere. Prints are hung up at coffeeshops…
Three Days Ago · 15:42 -
Cool Art: Naja Tepe’s Pottery
Jason Kottke
In the spirit of recommending things I truly love, I wanted to highlight the pottery of Northern California artist Naja Tepe. I’ve ordered from her twice now, and her work is fabulous. I…
Three Days Ago · 14:45 -
Okay, here’s a toy car for actually cleaning floors. You load it...
Jason Kottke
Okay, here’s a toy car for actually cleaning floors. You load it up with paper towels and set the kids loose. It’s probably not something I need, but the reviews are strangely compelling.…
Three Days Ago · 13:31 -
Quoting Daniel Holmgren
Simon Willison
We [Bluesky] took a somewhat novel approach of giving every user their own SQLite database. By removing the Postgres dependency, we made it possible to run a ‘PDS in a box’ [Personal Data Ser…
Three Days Ago · 13:00 -
Music for Programming, a collection of “the most compelling music for sustained...
Jason Kottke
Music for Programming, a collection of “the most compelling music for sustained concentration”. I love the interface. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org…
Three Days Ago · 12:36 -
microsoft/Phi-3-mini-4k-instruct-gguf
Simon Willison
microsoft/Phi-3-mini-4k-instruct-gguf Microsoft’s Phi-3 LLM is out and it’s really impressive. This 4,000 token context GGUF model is just a 2.2GB (for the Q4 version) and ran on my Mac usin…
Three Days Ago · 11:40 -
Fascinated by this “WTF Notebook” post because 1) it’s a really good...
Jason Kottke
Fascinated by this “WTF Notebook” post because 1) it’s a really good listening/note-taking idea for new team members 2) applied for weirdly Machiavellian ends, e.g. wanting ppl to think…
Three Days Ago · 11:33 -
Mountain Bike Advice?
Jason Kottke
Ok mountain bike nerds, I need your advice. Here’s my situation: I’ve been riding for 3.5 years now on a Kona Honzo hardtail (which I really love) and am pondering a full-suspension bik…
Three Days Ago · 10:39 -
Weeknotes: Llama 3, AI for Data Journalism, llm-evals and datasette-secrets
Simon Willison
Llama 3 landed on Thursday. I ended up updating a whole bunch of different plugins to work with it, described in Options for accessing Llama 3 from the terminal using LLM. I also wrote up the tal…
Three Days Ago · 10:30 -
Scientists have repurposed a 50-year-old drug to revolutionize bone marrow transplants. “Today,...
Jason Kottke
Scientists have repurposed a 50-year-old drug to revolutionize bone marrow transplants. “Today, agonizing searches for a matched donor are largely a thing of the past” and “the drug cut…
Three Days Ago · 10:13 -
Happy to announce that thanks to folks buying The Process Tee, we’ve...
Jason Kottke
Happy to announce that thanks to folks buying The Process Tee, we’ve donated a total of more than $4,700 to the National Network of Abortion Funds to aid them in their goal of “abortion a…
Three Days Ago · 09:32 -
Sharks: “the scary triangles of the sea”. (What are the scary triangles...
Jason Kottke
Sharks: “the scary triangles of the sea”. (What are the scary triangles of other places?) 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…
Three Days Ago · 08:56 -
What Are you Starting Right Now?
Jason Kottke
The NY Times Style Magazine recently published an entire issue dedicated to “what it means start an artistic life”. I have only scratched the surface of this multi-article package, but I…
Three Days Ago · 08:21 -
Why earthquakes on the East Coast are felt farther away than ones...
Jason Kottke
Why earthquakes on the East Coast are felt farther away than ones on the West Coast. It’s the age of the rock and the faults. 💬 Join the discussion on kottk…
Three Days Ago · 07:18 -
The Instruction Hierarchy: Training LLMs to Prioritize Privileged Instructions
Simon Willison
The Instruction Hierarchy: Training LLMs to Prioritize Privileged Instructions By far the most detailed paper on prompt injection I’ve seen yet from OpenAI, published a few days ago and with s…
Four Days Ago · 21:36 -
Quoting Phi-3 Technical Report
Simon Willison
We introduce phi-3-mini, a 3.8 billion parameter language model trained on 3.3 trillion tokens, whose overall performance, as measured by both academic benchmarks and internal testing, rivals tha…
Four Days Ago · 21:00 -
timpaul/form-extractor-prototype
Simon Willison
timpaul/form-extractor-prototype Tim Paul, Head of Interaction Design at the UK’s Government Digital Service, published this brilliant prototype built on top of Claude 3 Opus. The video shows…
Four Days Ago · 16:01 -
No one buys books
Simon Willison
No one buys books Fascinating insights into the book publishing industry gathered by Elle Griffin from details that came out during the Penguin vs. DOJ antitrust lawsuit. Publishing turns out to…
Four Days Ago · 15:55 -
Denis Villeneuve’s Four Favorite Films
Jason Kottke
Letterboxd asked Dune director Denis Villeneuve what his four favorite films were and he cheated and listed five (including 2001 and Blade Runner). First of all, who knows how long Blade R…
Four Days Ago · 15:53 -
Chris Coyier
Most internet travels by wire. Straight through the dang ocean. Josh Dzieza in a feature for The Verge: These fragile wires are constantly breaking — a precarious system on which everything from ban…
Four Days Ago · 15:45 -
They fixed it: NASA is able to talk to Voyager I again....
Jason Kottke
They fixed it: NASA is able to talk to Voyager I again. “For the first time since November, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard…
Four Days Ago · 14:35 -
A Little Comments Check-In
Jason Kottke
Hey there everyone. As I quickly touched on over the weekend, I launched a few new tweaks/features for the comments here on kottke.org: 1. Ability to edit comments. After you post a new comm…
Four Days Ago · 13:34 -
A database of useful biological numbers, including the duration of an eye...
Jason Kottke
A database of useful biological numbers, including the duration of an eye blink, the surface area of human skin, the diameter of a water molecule, and the mass of a male fruit fly.…
Four Days Ago · 13:02 -
Hold the Line is a “piece of sound art generated by data...
Jason Kottke
Hold the Line is a “piece of sound art generated by data from Canada’s 2023 wildfire season”, an data sonification if you will. Clicks represent fires (Zippo “tings” for human-start…
Four Days Ago · 12:01 -
For All Mankind has been renewed for a fifth season and the...
Jason Kottke
For All Mankind has been renewed for a fifth season and the show is getting a Apple TV+ spin-off called Star City, which will follow the same alt-timeline as FAM but from the Soviet perspecti…
Four Days Ago · 11:13 -
The Lost Mixtape From The Hood Internet
Jason Kottke
This weekend I was doing some programming work (comments, another small project) and listening to some old-school electronica (DJ-Kicks by Kruder & Dorfmeister anyone?). When I write, I tend…
Four Days Ago · 10:16 -
This had me cackling in laughter this morning: Kevin Del Aguila hamming...
Jason Kottke
This had me cackling in laughter this morning: Kevin Del Aguila hamming it up in the wings off-stage while the show, Some Like It Hot, goes on. How on Earth did the actors not completely brea…
Four Days Ago · 09:42 -
A bot that pairs the clichéd “I hope this email finds you”...
Jason Kottke
A bot that pairs the clichéd “I hope this email finds you” with snippets from books beginning with “finds you…” E.g.: “I hope this email finds you wherever you go, and lands righ…
Four Days Ago · 09:10 -
This looks promising: an RNA-based vaccine effective against any strain of a...
Jason Kottke
This looks promising: an RNA-based vaccine effective against any strain of a virus and works for those with weakened immune system (babies, immunocompromised). “This could be the universal…
Four Days Ago · 08:38 -
Once again, it is cheaper to decarbonize our world now than to...
Jason Kottke
Once again, it is cheaper to decarbonize our world now than to pay for the costs of climate damage in the future. “Climate damages by 2050 will be 6 times the cost of limiting warming to 2…
Four Days Ago · 08:03 -
Options for accessing Llama 3 from the terminal using LLM
Simon Willison
Llama 3 was released on Thursday. Early indications are that it's now the best available openly licensed model - Llama 3 70b Instruct has taken joint 5th place on the LMSYS arena leaderboard, beh…
Four Days Ago · 07:38 -
Eno.
Marc Thiele
A generated film that never is played in the same way, you ask? For whom could this work out and isn't that too chaotic to watch? Well, if your subj…
Four Days Ago · 05:10 -
qrank
Simon Willison
qrank Interesting and very niche project by Colin Dellow. Wikidata has pages for huge numbers of concepts, people, places and things. One of the many pieces of data they publish is QRank—“…
The Other Day · 16:28 -
tiny-world-map
Simon Willison
tiny-world-map I love this project. It’s a JavaScript file (694K uncompressed, 283KB compressed) which can be used with the Leaflet mapping library and provides a SVG base map of the world wit…
The Other Day · 16:11
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Posts from blogs I like written in the last few days.