Copaganda and Me. “The police are the good guys, or so I thought as a kid growing up in the suburbs in the 1980s and 1990s when just about everything I knew about policing came from what I…

Like many others, I became a little obsessed with Andor over the past few months. I was lukewarm on the first season when it came out, but a pre-s02 rewatch completely changed my tune — I t…

The Public Domain Cinematic Universe. Beloved characters like Mickey Mouse, Winnie-the-Pooh, and Popeye have entered the public domain. So far, the adaptations have been awful.…

On not being an asshole. “There’s real societal value to self censorship. Watching your words and how they might affect people around you is a pro-social exercise that should be encourage…

Super Mario Clouds for 10 Minutes. Marc Weidenbaum got Cory Arcangel’s just-the-clouds version of Super Mario Bros. (featured in the 2004 Whitney Biennial) to run on a modern portable gamin…

Diego Luna is guest-hosting Jimmy Kimmel Live this week and for his first monologue, the Mexico native spoke about immigration and what he’s experienced and observed in the US and LA duri…

A provocative piece about using AI coding agents: My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts. “Something real is happening. My smartest friends are blowing it off.”…

From Heather Cox Richardson, a video series called Ten Steps to Revolution, which “explains how the king’s American subjects came to oppose monarchy and, over the course of only thirteen…

Death of a Fantastic Machine (aka the camera) is a short documentary on “what happens when humanity’s infatuation with itself and an untethered free market meet 45 billion cameras”……

“The web platform makes no demands because it offers nothing beyond the opportunity to do good work. Certainly it offers no attention — that, you have to find on your own. Here is you…

Premiering this Friday June 27 on the PBS, an episode of the series American Masters on Hannah Arendt, historian, philosopher, and one of the 20th century’s most influential political thi…

Here's a fascinating new entrant into the AI-assisted-programming / coding-agents space by Fly.io, introduced on their blog in Phoenix.new – The Remote AI Runtime for Phoenix: describe an app i…

“Between 2015 and 2020, ICE deported at least 70 people who were U.S. citizens” and detained or arrested many more. “ICE has not implemented a reliable system to track and correct its m…

I've added a Disclosures section to my about page, listing my various sources of income and the companies that directly sponsor my work or have supported it in the recent past. I do not receive…

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile is operational and will soon embark on its primary mission: to take a detailed image of the sky every night for the next ten years. A powerful new…

Last Week Tonight’s John Oliver on AI slop. “Do you hear us, cabbage Hulk? Stay the hell away from John’s cabbage wife.” ??!?…

The Classic Web account on Bluesky is currently going through kottke.org’s blogroll list from 2004 and displaying screenshots of those sites as they appeared then. Look at all those varied…

Jaws turns 50 years old this summer. Here’s an interview with marine biologist & shark conservationist David Schiffman about the huge impact Jaws had on society’s perception of sharks. Pe…

An excellent profile of design legend Michael Bierut, who recently “retired” as a Pentagram partner. There wisdom throughout this piece about retaining & flexing your humanity in the dehu…

From The Onion: Congress, Now More Than Ever, Our Nation Needs Your Cowardice. “Now is not the time for bravery or valor! This is the time for protecting your own hide and lining your pocke…

So you can think really big thoughts and the leverage of having those big thoughts has just suddenly expanded enormously. I had this tweet two years ago where I said "90% of my skills just went t…

To The People I Know Who Voted for Him. “you had a chance…to condemn his criminality, to prevent his lawlessness, to denounce his bigotry — and you flat-out refused. More than that, you…

My First Open Source AI Generated Library Armin Ronacher had Claude and Claude Code do almost all of the work in building, testing, packaging and publishing a new Python library based on his des…

Edit is now open source Microsoft released a new text editor! Edit is a terminal editor - similar to Vim or nano - that's designed to ship with Windows 11 but is open source, written in Rust and…

model.yaml From their GitHub repo it looks like this effort quietly launched a couple of months ago, driven by the LM Studio team. Their goal is to specify an "open standard for defining crosspl…

Happening all day today: a Reading Rainbow marathon on PBS Retro. PBS Retro is available on Plex, Roku, and Prime Video. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org �…

Is it safe to say that LLMs are, in essence, making us "dumber"? No! Please do not use the words like “stupid”, “dumb”, “brain rot”, "harm", "damage", and so on. It does a huge diss…

AbsenceBench: Language Models Can't Tell What's Missing Here's another interesting result to file under the "jagged frontier" of LLMs, where their strengths and weaknesses are often un…

Magenta RealTime: An Open-Weights Live Music Model Fun new "live music model" release from Google DeepMind: Today, we’re happy to share a research preview of Magenta RealTime (Magenta RT), an…

For fans of Edith Zimmerman, a new Etsy offering: “A 4x6” made-to-order printing of any single comics frame of your choosing, from my newsletter.” 💬 Joi…

Agentic Misalignment: How LLMs could be insider threats One of the most entertaining details in the Claude 4 system card concerned blackmail: We then provided it access to emails implying that…

I love this interactive video at Design Ah! Exhibition Neo at Tokyo Node. The display introduces the audience to a series of simple hand gestures, followed by some outcomes of their perform…

python-importtime-graph I was exploring why a Python tool was taking over a second to start running and I learned about the python -X importtime feature, documented here. Adding that option caus…

Speaking of what fast looks like, here’s a pair of synced videos that show just how fast F1 cars are. On the left are drivers participating in a track day, that is, normal folks who want to…

Mistral-Small 3.2 Released on Hugging Face a couple of hours ago, so far there aren't any quantizations to run it on a Mac but I'm sure those will emerge pretty quickly. This is a minor bump to…

As an aid to his travel planning, Kevin Kelly has compiled a meta-calendar of Asian festivals. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

A group of researchers tracked down the original photo used in the final scene of The Shining. “It was a real photo from the 1920s, and Nicholson’s face had been superimposed over someone…

If you’re like most people, you probably started yawning as soon as you read the title of this post and saw the video’s thumbnail. And then yawned like two or three times watching it. T…

Today’s weather report styled like The Weather Channel in the 90s: WeatherStar 4000+. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

You Sure You’re In The Mood For Another Wes Anderson Film With Everything That’s Going On? “Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston rattling off my signature droll dialogue — enticing or not?”…

Decisions and opportunity in America are no longer cheap. “Life is an open world game. It rewards you for exploring. And capitalism cannot fucking stand that. It wants you on rails.”…

In 1996, Harper’s published a long piece by David Foster Wallace called Shipping Out, in which Wallace, a decidedly non-luxury cruise person, goes on a week-long luxury cruise in the Caribb…

Your beginning-of-summer PSA: Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning. “There is very little splashing, no waving, and no yelling or calls for help of any kind.” So here’s what to look fo…

It is been a while that I have been in the lovely city of Kortrijk. Last time that was 2012 ans the event still was called Multimania. I finally made…

Cato CTRL™ Threat Research: PoC Attack Targeting Atlassian’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) Introduces New “Living off AI” Risk Stop me if you've heard this one before: A threat actor (a…

Here's a tip that works on YouTube and almost any other web page that shows you a video. You can increase the playback rate beyond the usually-exposed 2x by running this in your browser DevTools…

Want to use your phone less? Try Forest. “Whenever you want to stay focused, plant a [virtual] tree. Your tree will grow while you focus on your work. Leaving the app halfway will cause you…

The Fear of Never Landing is a new album from ambient music band Marconi Union, whose 2011 song Weightless has been described as “the world’s most relaxing song”. Get it on YT, Bandcamp…

How OpenElections Uses LLMs The OpenElections project collects detailed election data for the USA, all the way down to the precinct level. This is a surprisingly hard problem: while county and s…