“Fed up with big legacy news? Here are 13 independent, worker-owned outlets to support.”
Experts Said This Was a Damn Clever Post by Jason Kottke
Jason Kottke:
Large media companies, and the NY Times in particular these days, like to use the phrase “experts said” instead of simply stating facts. The thing is, many other statements of plain truth in that brief Times post lack the confirmation of expertise. To aid the paper in steering their readers away from notions of objective truth, here’s a suggested rewrite of that Bluesky post.
Elmore Leonard’s Perfect Pitch
newyorker.com/magazine/2025/07/07/elmore-leonards-perfect-pitch
Anthony Lane, in a crackerjack piece for The New Yorker on the writing and work of Elmore Leonard:
So, when does Leonard become himself? Is it possible to specify
the moment, or the season, when he crosses the border? I would
nominate “The Big Bounce,” from 1969 — which,...
The Media’s Pivot to AI Is Not Real and Not Going to...
The Media’s Pivot to AI Is Not Real and Not Going to Work. “The only AI-related business strategy that makes any sense whatsoever is one where media companies and journalists go to great pains to show their audiences that they are human beings…”
The Cheese Was Free
I am only a couple of chapters into James McBride’s Deacon King Kong (loving it!) and in the first chapter, there’s a relatively short passage about some cheese, Jesus’s Cheese, that comes into the lives of the members of the book’s community that is a first ballot Hall of F...
Reborn Commodore Is Taking Pre-Orders for New Commodore 64 Models
Last year, retro computing YouTuber Christian “Peri Fractic” Simpson bought licensed the branding rights and some of the IP belonging to Commodore (which rights have been transferred five times since the original company went bankrupt in 1994). Last week they launched their ...
A lovely, beautiful, and uplifting obituary of poet and activist Andrea Gibson....
A lovely, beautiful, and uplifting obituary of poet and activist Andrea Gibson. “One of the last things Andrea said on this plane was, ‘I fucking loved my life.’”
DOJ Removes All Mentions Of Justice From Website. This Onion article got...
DOJ Removes All Mentions Of Justice From Website. This Onion article got me for a sec; totally plausible. Wouldn’t be surprised if they actually changed it to the Department of Jesus or something.
Photos From the 2025 BigPicture Natural World Photography Competition
Here are some of the winners, finalists, and nominees from the 2025 BigPicture Natural World Photography Competition and their People’s Choice Awards. Photos by (from top to bottom): Simon Biddie, Kat Zhou, Zhou Donglin, Jonas Beyer, and Hitomi Tsuchiya.
A Ghost goby (Ple...
ccusage
Claude Code logs detailed usage information to the
~/.claude/ directory. ccusage is a neat little Node.js tool which reads that information and shows you a readable summary of your usage patterns, including the estimated cost in USD per day.
You can run it using npx like this:
npx ccusage@latest
Tags: javascript, nodejs, anthropic, claude-code
America is Losing Its Soul in Brown-Skinned Screams and White-Skinned Silence. “The...
America is Losing Its Soul in Brown-Skinned Screams and White-Skinned Silence. “The greatest, most grievous failure of America in this moment isn’t legislative but moral. The soul of this place is dying in screams and silences.”
Skater Demarcus James is skateboarding across the entire United States, from Oakland...
Skater Demarcus James is skateboarding across the entire United States, from Oakland to NYC, to spread awareness about mental health. Check out his GoFundMe to support his journey.
‘Classic Web’ on Mastodon
Classic Web is a fun account to follow on Mastodon. Curator Richard MacManus posts half a dozen or so screenshots per day of, well, classic websites from the late 1990s and 2000s. Makes me feel old and young at the same time.
Drata
My thanks to Drata for sponsoring this last week at DF. Their message is short and sweet: Automate compliance. Streamline security. Manage risk. Drata delivers the world’s most advanced Trust Management platform.
Link: drata.com/daring/?utm_source=Daring_Fireball&utm_medium…
Happy 20th birthday Django! Here's my talk on Django Origins from Django's 10th
Today is the 20th anniversary of the first commit to the public Django repository!
Ten years ago we threw a multi-day 10th birthday party for Django back in its birthtown of Lawrence, Kansas. As a personal celebration of the 20th, I'm revisiting the talk I gave at that event...
Taking Journalism’s ‘Experts Said…’ Chicanery About Facts to Its Natural, Absurd Conclusion
Yesterday, the NY Times published an article about Donald Trump’s threat to take away citizenship from a US-born citizen: Trump threatens to strip Rosie O’Donnell of U.S. citizenship. The Times Bluesky account posted a link to the article accompanied by this text:
Preside...
Grok 4 System Prompt Shenanigans
Simon Willison:
Grok 4 Heavy is the “think much harder” version of Grok 4 that’s
currently only available on their $300/month plan. Jeremy Howard
relays a report from a Grok 4 Heavy user who wishes to remain
anonymous: it turns out that Heavy, unlike regular Grok 4, has
...
Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity
Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity
METR - for Model Evaluation & Threat Research - are a non-profit research institute founded by Beth Barnes, a former alignment researcher at OpenAI (see Wikipedia). They've previously...
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
David Heinemeier Hansson (aka DHH) is a legendary programmer, creator of Ruby on Rails, co-owner & CTO of 37signals that created Basecamp, HEY, & ONCE, and is a NYT-best-selling author (with Jason Fried) of 4 books: REWORK, REMOTE, Getting Real, and It Doesn’t Have T...
Grok 4 Heavy won't reveal its system prompt
Grok 4 Heavy won't reveal its system prompt
Grok 4 Heavy is the "think much harder" version of Grok 4 that's currenly only available on their $300/month plan. Jeremy Howard relays a report from a Grok 4 Heavy user who wishes to remain anonymous: it turns out that Heavy, unli...