MTV Rewind is an interface through which you can watch music videos from the 70s to the 20s, organized by decade. There are also “channels” for 120 Minutes, MTV Unplugged, Yo! MTV Raps,…

The proliferation of hummingbird feeders has become a “major evolutionary force” for the Anna’s hummingbird species in the western US. “Over just a few generations, their beaks have d…

AGI is here! When exactly it arrived, we’ll never know; whether it was one company’s Pro or another company’s Pro Max (Eddie Bauer Edition) that tip-toed first across the line … you…

Lost episodes of Star Trek from the 70s. They were going to do a reboot of the TV series (without Spock!) but the project morphed into the first movie. There are 19 episode scripts & treatmen…

Robin Sloan asserts (provocatively) that AGI is already here (and has been for a few years). “We’ve got this ubiquitous term, Artificial General Intelligence, & it appears that the Artifi…

A field guide to sandboxes for AI This guide to the current sandboxing landscape by Luis Cardoso is comprehensive, dense and absolutely fantastic. He starts by differentiating between containers…

Per tradition, my first blog post of the year is a recap of the prior year. Here’s what I remember from 2025. I’ve been writing these recaps for many years now, and I’ve also been reading every…

Identity — The Story of Czech Graphic Design is a seven-part series available on YouTube. In seven parts, the Identita series introduces viewers to the history of Czech graphic design. W…

“Norman Rockwell was antifa”, says Daisy Rockwell, Norman’s granddaughter. “So you’ll understand her indignation when President Trump began hijacking her grandfather’s legacy to p…

A couple of weeks ago, someone uploaded to YouTube and Google Drive eleven unreleased tracks from Boards of Canada (made from 1985-1996). This seems to be a legit, high-quality leak, judgin…

This sucks: the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is no more. “Its board of directors chose Monday to shutter CPB completely instead of keeping it in existence as a shell.” GOP ghouls f…

An ecologist in Wales uses tracking dogs to help track & protect the endangered wild otter population; meet The Detectorists. Set against the serene backdrop of rural Wales, this short doc…

Tiled.art: “Discover great tessellation art, understand how it works, and create your own.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

Anna’s Archive (“the largest truly open library in human history”) is backing up the entirety of Spotify. “We have archived around 86 million songs from Spotify. While this only repre…

Chip Rossetti, 2014 Donald James Parker has written no fewer than 18 evangelical Christian feature films since 2013, and he starred in most of them as well, including Gramps Goes to Colle…

When Two Filmmakers Make the Same Movie — and One of Them Is Werner Herzog. A comparison of the two 2022 documentaries about volcanologists Maurice & Katia Krafft, Herzog’s The Fire Withi…

From Book Riot’s Zero to Well-Read podcast: How to Read More (and Better) in 2026. “They dig into when to push through, when to quit a book, how to choose books outside the algorithm, and…

Until the late 19th century, Japan’s relations with Europe were relatively limited. So when a pair of letters written by a Japanese man in the early 1600s were discovered in Venice, a mys…

Greetings, folks!I write to you today with a quick—but impactful—update to our Secret Club™ offering to kick off the new year. Starting today, an annual SC subscription will incl…

A Year of Clean Energy Milestones. “Wind, solar, and electric vehicles made huge strides globally in 2025. For the first time, wind & solar supplied more power than coal worldwide, while pl…

It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons Devastating critique of the new menu icons in macOS Tahoe by Nikita Prokopov, who starts by quoting the 1992 Apple HIG rule to not "overload the user with comp…

A number of studies show that various vaccines (shingles, RSV, flu) are associated with “off-target” benefits like reduced cardiovascular risk, lower rates of dementia, and lower Alzheime…

Why I Left Substack. A combination of “a good deal of gross misogyny, transphobia, and hard-right stuff” plus Substack “trying to deny this responsibility [as a publisher], to pretend t…

Oxide and Friends Predictions 2026, today at 4pm PT I joined the Oxide and Friends podcast last year to predict the next 1, 3 and 6 years(!) of AI developments. With hindsight I did very badly,…

In 2024, schoolteacher Ginny Robinson won the Best in Show award at a quilting convention for her quilt called What We Will Use as Weapons: A List of School Supplies. This is a protest qui…

M. Gessen on the new world order the Trump regime seems eager to bring about. “If Trump can take Venezuela and Putin can take Ukraine, surely President Xi Jinping of China can take Taiwan.�…

The Media Refuses to Call Trump’s Venezuela Attack an Act of War. “Overwhelmingly, the US media and its purportedly straight reporters have adopted wholesale the White House’s pseudo-le…

We Are the Bad Guys. “What do we call it when a stronger person decides to rob a weaker person because he can? It is just gangsterism. We are the most dangerous gangsters in the world today…

Isaac Chotiner interviews Oona Hathaway, an expert in international law, about the “brazen illegality” of the Trump regime’s invasion of Venezuela to kidnap president Nicolás Maduro.…

The Power of the Powerless (Czech: Moc bezmocných) is an expansive political essay written in October 1978 by the Czech dramatist, poet, political dissident, and later statesman, Václav Havel. Very…

In an effort to detangle myself of all things Jeff Bezos, I am bookmarking: Libation is a free, open-source application for downloading and managing your Audible audiobooks. Here’s another tutor…

Read the book, Typographic Firsts When ancient Egyptians embalmed their dead, organs were removed from the body. The brain, considered useless, was disposed of, while the stomach, liver, intestines, a…

A flexible system for consistent stroke widths across type sizes Before vector art, high-DPI raster image processing, and retina screens took over the world, if someone wanted to draw very fine a…

It genuinely feels to me like GPT-5.2 and Opus 4.5 in November represent an inflection point - one of those moments where the models get incrementally better in a way that tips across an invisibl…

With enough users, every observable behavior becomes a dependency - regardless of what you promised. Someone is scraping your API, automating your quirks, caching your bugs. This creates a career…

Something I like about our weird new LLM-assisted world is the number of people I know who are coding again, having mostly stopped as they moved into management roles or lost their personal side…

Added to the film diary:Wake Up Dead ManRian Johnson, 2025, ★★½PFS at the Bourse, Philadelphia, PAThe 10th VictimElio Petri, 1965, ★★★½Sleepless in SeattleNora Ephron, 1993, ★★★½…

I'm not joking and this isn't funny. We have been trying to build distributed agent orchestrators at Google since last year. There are various options, not everyone is aligned... I gave Claude Co…

Evergreen: No Blood For Oil vs. Exactly How Much Oil Are We Talking About?…

Was Daft Punk Having a Laugh When They Chose the Tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger? Depending on how you measure it, the tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger appears to be 123.45 be…

Variety has a list of 50 great movies from 2025 that are now streaming, incl. One Battle After Another (HBO), Bugonia (Peacock), Black Bag (Prime), Frankenstein (Netflix), Sinners (HBO & Prim…

Investigating a possible Daft Punk Easter egg: is the tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger an exact 123.45 BPM and if so, was that intentional on the part of “our helmet-clad robot fri…

360-degree panoramas of the interiors of several Star Trek ships (Enterprise, TNG’s Enterprise D, Voyager, Defiant, etc.) 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.or…

My experience is that real AI adoption on real problems is a complex blend of: domain context on the problem, domain experience with AI tooling, and old-fashioned IT issues. I’m deeply skeptica…

The most popular blogs of Hacker News in 2025 Michael Lynch maintains HN Popularity Contest, a site that tracks personal blogs on Hacker News and scores them based on how well they perform on th…

In 2023, Paul Scheer spent a few days talking to fathers who accompanied their daughters to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in LA, either as concert-goers or just chauffeurs. I love this video.…

Things I Learned While Looking Up Other Things! “Thermochauvinism is the (often unconscious) assumption that it’s reasonable to live in cold places but unreasonable to live in hot ones.�…

“What if you held a tree long enough for it to grow around your hand?” For a piece called It Will Continue to Grow Except at That Point, Giuseppe Penone fitted a cast of his hand to a g…

Happy New Year, folks! Here's issue #65 of Studio Notes™—quick bits delivered to you each Friday. 🥔 Got mesmerized by these weaved Pringles photos. Art is everywhere! I&ap…

Stewart Cheifet died last weekend at age 87. Those of a certain age and nerdiness will remember Cheifet as the host of Computer Chronicles, a public television show about personal computing t…

“America is no longer a democracy. That doesn’t mean authoritarianism has won. But merely restoring the pre-Trump status quo won’t work. The country needs a democratic transformation.�…

NeatoCal is a tiny JavaScript app that outputs a printable calendar with a full year on a single page. I love the view where all the weekends line up. 💬 Join…