With AI now, we are able to write new programs that we could never hope to write by hand before. We do it by specifying objectives (e.g. classification accuracy, reward functions), and we search…

llm-anthropic 0.22 New release of my llm-anthropic plugin: Support for Claude's new structured outputs feature for Sonnet 4.5 and Opus 4.1. #54 Support for the web search tool using -o web_sea…

“A Personal Business is run by people who are truly into what they are doing, and invested enough to offer products, services, and/or experiences that are both high-quality and idiosyncrati…

parakeet-mlx Neat MLX project by Senstella bringing NVIDIA's Parakeet ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition, like Whisper) model to to Apple's MLX framework. It's packaged as a Python CLI tool, so y…

Jett Brunet carves incredibly realistic duck decoys. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

This Black Fungus Might Be Healing Chernobyl By Drinking Radiation. The fungi contain melanin, which “absorbs radiation, which is then converted into usable energy, allowing it to grow in a…

Building a geolocation test plan doesn't have to be complicated. The hard part isn't simulating different locations – WonderProxy handles that. The hard part is staying organized when…

The Farmers’ Almanac, citing a “chaotic media environment”, will cease publication after their 2026 edition. The almanac dates back to 1818. (The Old Farmer’s Almanac, started in 1792…

This seems promising: researchers have demonstrated that a “nanoparticle-based vaccine can effectively prevent melanoma, pancreatic and triple-negative breast cancer in mice”.…

Well, this is fun. (via Chris)…

GPT-5.1 Instant and GPT-5.1 Thinking System Card Addendum I was confused about whether the new "adaptive thinking" feature of GPT-5.1 meant they were moving away from the "router" mechanism wher…

Yancey Strickler, founder of Metalabel and Kickstarter, wrote an interesting piece titled What’s the difference between an artist and a creator? An artist is a self-directed artistic expressor.…

“The more I think it over, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.” – Vincent van Gogh…

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” – Viktor Frankl…

Greetings, Design Pals. Here's issue #58 of Studio Notes™—quick bits delivered to you each Friday. 🗡️ Artist Julien Curi is making another animated film called Knig…

Introducing GPT-5.1 for developers OpenAI announced GPT-5.1 yesterday, calling it a smarter, more conversational ChatGPT. Today they've added it to their API. We actually got four new models tod…

Datasette 1.0a22 New Datasette 1.0 alpha, adding some small features we needed to properly integrate the new permissions system with Datasette Cloud: datasette serve --default-deny option for…

Nano Banana can be prompt engineered for extremely nuanced AI image generation Max Woolf provides an exceptional deep dive into Google's Nano Banana aka Gemini 2.5 Flash Image model, still the b…

My dear friend Maggie Doyne is an embodiment of love and without a doubt the most remarkable woman I know. I love her deeply. She just made her documentary, Between the Mountain and the Sky, available…

On Monday, this Court entered an order requiring OpenAI to hand over to the New York Times and its co-plaintiffs 20 million ChatGPT user conversations [...] OpenAI is unaware of any court orderin…

Almost every time I share a new example of an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle a variant of this question pops up: how do you know the labs aren't training for your benchmark? The strongest argu…

After 230 years, the US Mint has ended production of new pennies. One of the very few things that incompetent stopped clock in the White House has gotten accidentally right.…

The Northern Lights Put on a Show. “A powerful geomagnetic storm brought spectacular light displays to night skies across the Northern Hemisphere, with sightings of pink, red, and green lig…

Put wings on your car. “We call it a private jet for tax reasons really. Private jets don’t pay duty on fuel, so by adding wings to the vehicle, we should qualify for the same exemption.�…

Recently discovered 55-million-year-old crocodile eggshells perhaps belong to “drop crocs”, a species that “perhaps [hunted] like leopards — dropping out of trees on any unsuspecting…

More women are riding the streets of Tehran on motorbikes, in violation of the law & social restrictions. “There is not any political manifesto or social agenda here. It’s just that since…

For his Yakuza project, photographer Anton Kusters spent two years documenting some members of the Japanese mafia. A limited edition of a book containing the photos is available. Steward M…

A group of archaeologists has proposed “applying a model of how humans expanded to the different islands across the Pacific Ocean during their early migration to glean insights into how hum…

“The reason there are no weird blogs anymore is that it’s more fruitful to drive them out of business.” Private equity is ripping media into shreds. 💬 J…

The fact that MCP is a difference surface from your normal API allows you to ship MUCH faster to MCP. This has been unlocked by inference at runtime Normal APIs are promises to developers, becaus…

22 Thanksgiving Main Dishes That Are Better Than Turkey. I’ve been trying to get the fam to pivot from turkey to chicken (with all the usual sides in place), but no dice.…

Just as You Feared — Life in Zohran Mamdani’s New York. “Breakfast is sugar-free pea fibre from the state-run ZohranMart. I wish that I could give my son something better — it’s his…

Fun-reliable side-channels for cross-container communication Here's a very clever hack for communicating between different processes running in different containers on the same machine. It's bas…

Operation Space Station is a two-part PBS documentary series on the International Space Station. Here’s a very short teaser trailer: A synopsis: The size of a football field, the Intern…

Meet the 2025 National Book Award Finalists. “Literary Hub caught up with the finalists to ask them a bit about their books, their reading habits, and their writing lives.” Some great stu…

As I think about how command line AI tools can be used, I know it's already a bit of the wild west not disimilar to the way we install npm modules. I've seen a bit of writing about how these tools sho…

A simple but effective fix to working with web components and VS Code. I wanted to get syntax highlighting and prettier support (to auto fix indenting, quotes, etc) in my component's templates. The ex…

Scaling HNSWs Salvatore Sanfilippo spent much of this year working on vector sets for Redis, which first shipped in Redis 8 in May. A big part of that work involved implementing HNSW - Hierarchi…

Agentic Pelican on a Bicycle Robert Glaser took my pelican riding a bicycle benchmark and applied an agentic loop to it, seeing if vision models could draw a better pelican if they got the chanc…

Bill Wurtz’s History of Japan is the most entertaining history of anything I have ever seen. [This is a vintage post originally from Feb 2016.] Tags: Bill Wurtz · Jap…

I've been upgrading a ton of Datasette plugins recently for compatibility with the Datasette 1.0a20 release from last week - 35 so far. A lot of the work is very repetitive so I've been outsourci…

Mattias Krantz bought an octopus from the fish market and taught it how to play piano. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

The trailer for Train Dreams, a film adaptation of the novella by Denis Johnson. “In select theaters November 7 and on Netflix November 21.” 💬 Join the di…

Jamelle Bouie: “I’m gonna make a case to you that no matter what you’ve heard about the filibuster, you should want the filibuster to be sent to the ash bin of history.”…

Jessica Guo: “If there’s something out there that calls to you, I hope you listen. Give yourself permission to do the thing.” Guo just finished hiking both the the Continental Divide Tr…