Bad Map Projection: Interrupted Spheres
Covid safety measures drastically reduced flu deaths, but the fatality rate has...
Covid safety measures drastically reduced flu deaths, but the fatality rate has risen sharply again. “90% of reported pediatric deaths this season have occurred in children who were not fully vaccinated against influenza”.
★ Tea, the Women’s Dating Gossip App Riddled With Security Vulnerabilities, Remains #3 on the US iPhone App Store
Tea remains #3 overall in the US iPhone App Store. Here’s a screenshot of the top free iPhone apps today, and a list of the current top 10, using the full names the apps choose to display:
ChatGPT
Wingstop
Tea Dating Advice
Threads
Google
Google Maps
WhatsApp Messenger
Par...
Weird & Wonderful Historical Photos From the 20th Century
From Alan Taylor at The Atlantic, whose curatorial eye I’ve always admired, “a grab bag of curious and interesting historical images from the 20th century”, including photos of the world’s largest banjo, diving archery, death-defying photography, and underwater alligator racing.
Tags: Alan Taylor · photography
💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
The best available open weight LLMs now come from China
Something that has become undeniable this month is that the best available open weight models now come from the Chinese AI labs.
I continue to have a lot of love for Mistral, Gemma and Llama but my feeling is that Qwen, Moonshot and Z.ai have positively smoked them over the ...
Someone Played a Perfect Game of Tetris
A perfect game in Tetris is defined as achieving the max score (999,999) in the least amount of time possible, meaning you need to score a bunch of Tetrises in a row (and nothing else) at the highest possible starting speed. A few years ago, a player used a tool to develop...
Zim&Zou’s ’80s-Inspired Paper Cassettes and Boombox Radiate with Color. Strange, now I...
Zim&Zou’s ’80s-Inspired Paper Cassettes and Boombox Radiate with Color. Strange, now I have a hankering to watch an entire papercraft version of Do The Right Thing.
Qwen3-30B-A3B-Thinking-2507
Qwen3-30B-A3B-Thinking-2507
Yesterday was Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507. Qwen are clearly committed to their new split between reasoning and non-reasoning models (a reversal from Qwen 3 in April), because today they released the new reasoning partner to yesterday's model: Qwen...
YouTube Is Rolling Out an Age-Estimation Algorithm to Identify US Teens
Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:
YouTube on Tuesday announced it’s beginning to roll out age-estimation technology in the U.S. to identify teen users in order to provide a more age-appropriate experience. The company says it will use a variety of signals to determine the users’ possible age, regardless of what the user entered as their birthday when they signed up for an account.
Well-intentioned though I think this is, it still feels more than a little dystopian.
Note to self: spend some time checking out Tapestry, Iconfactory’s universal feed/social...
Note to self: spend some time checking out Tapestry, Iconfactory’s universal feed/social reader app. (Old heads will remember FriendFeed…)
Substack sent a push alert promoting a Nazi blog. “Substack is primarily...
Substack sent a push alert promoting a Nazi blog. “Substack is primarily funded by Andreessen Horowitz, a firm whose founders have pushed extreme far right rhetoric.” There was *an actual swastika* in the push alert!
Trailer for Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse, a documentary film on...
Trailer for Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse, a documentary film on the comic artist who created the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus.
Archaeologists Discover a 2,400-Year-Old Skeleton Mosaic That Urges People to “Be Cheerful...
Archaeologists Discover a 2,400-Year-Old Skeleton Mosaic That Urges People to “Be Cheerful and Live Your Life”. This skeleton is a whole vibe.
Sony Sues Tencent for Allegedly Ripping Off ‘Horizon’ Video Games
reuters.com/legal/litigation/sony-sues-tencent-allegedly-ripping-off-horizon-video-games-2025-07-28/
Reuters:
Sony released the first game in the Horizon series, Horizon: Zero Dawn, on its PlayStation 4 in 2017. The games follow a red-headed woman named Aloy as she navigates a post-apocalyptic world populated by human tribes and robotic animals.
Sony said in its complaint that it declined an offer from Tencent to collaborate on a new Horizon game last year. Tencent later announced Light of Motiram, which Sony said features identical gameplay, story themes and artistic elements to Horizon as well as many other similarities.
Sony said that video game journalists have characterized Light of Motiram as a “knock-off” of Horizon, including one who called the game Horizon Zero Originality.
Tencent is the Chinese software giant behind, amongst many other things, WeChat, China’s “everything app”.
Link: reuters.com/legal/litigation/sony-sues-tencent-allegedly…
I’m Giving My Kids a ’90s Summer — the 1890s. “Just like...
I’m Giving My Kids a ’90s Summer — the 1890s. “Just like the 1890s and the 2020s, they’ll play with the unvaccinated kids down the street and drink raw milk until dark.” Dangerous factory jobs too!
The E-Book Editions of Timothy Snyder’s ‘On Tyranny’ Are Just $2
Back in March I linked to and recommended Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, a cogent collection of 20 short essays. I was never a big e-book reader, both because I love printed books so much and because I welcome any respite from reading on screens of any sort. But if e-books are your thing, note that Apple Books currently has it for just $2. Amazon’s Kindle edition is also $2 — and the paperback edition, which is the lovely little thing I own, is an oddly but low-priced $7.31.
OpenAI: Introducing study mode
OpenAI: Introducing study mode
New ChatGPT feature, which can be triggered by typing /study or by visiting chatgpt.com/studymode. OpenAI say:
Under the hood, study mode is powered by custom system instructions we’ve written in collaboration with teachers, scientists, and pe...
Macbook Air M4s Are on Sale
I bought a 15” Apple Macbook Air M4 a few months ago and I love it. Of course, I loved my previous computer (an M1 Macbook Air) too, but bumping up the screen size and quality has been a game-changer for me. More speed and memory is great too for running virtual machines a...
Qwen/Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507
Qwen/Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507
New model update from Qwen, improving on their previous Qwen3-30B-A3B release from late April. In their tweet they said:
Smarter, faster, and local deployment-friendly.
✨ Key Enhancements:
✅ Enhanced reasoning, coding, and math skills
✅ Broa...