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The team at Tuk South visited one of the tallest sand dunes in Chile and did the obvious: threw a tire down it and followed it with a drone to see how long it would roll. The answer: almost three minutes. Take a break from whatever shit you might be dealing with at the moment, set your troubles aside, and watch this simple story of tenacity and gravity.

And yes, they went to retrieve the tire after it stopped: “Fear not. We collected the tyre. Leave only tuk tuk tyre tracks, take only memories.”

(I would like to see a Nolan cut of this, where it’s ambiguous if the tire stops at the end or not, like Cobb’s totem at the end of Inception.)

Tags: this is a metaphor for something · video

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Forget everything you think you know about decaf.

Nine single origins. Six signature blends. Four Mizudashi cold brews. All micro-lot and top-rated coffees shipped to you within 24 hours of roasting. No shortcuts. No crash. This is coffee at its most refined, just without the caffeine.

20% off for DF readers with code “DF” at dekaf.com.

We’re betting you’ll never look at decaf the same way again. But that’s kind of the point.

Link: dekaf.com/df

Welcome to the Era of Big Stupid in America. “When you make smart and ambitious young people feel unwelcome in America and give them no indication that they’ll have a job in this country at all…they may eventually decide not to come here.”

I shipped LLM 0.27 today, adding support for the new GPT-5 family of models from OpenAI plus a flurry of improvements to the tool calling features introduced in LLM 0.26. Here are the annotated release notes. GPT-5 New models: gpt-5, gpt-5-mini and gpt-5-nano. #1229 I w...

Amrith Ramkumar and Robbie Whelan, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link): Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices have agreed to give the Trump administration a portion of the sales from their artificial-intelligence chips to China, unusual agreements that deepen t...

I Spent 6 Years Building a Ridiculous Wooden Pixel Display. “I built the world’s most impractical 1000-pixel display and anyone in the world can draw on it.”

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The president of the United States, on his blog three days ago:

The CEO of INTEL is highly CONFLICTED and must resign, immediately. There is no other solution to this problem. Thank you for your attention to this problem!

The president of the United States, on his blog today:

I met with Mr. Lip-Bu Tan, of Intel, along with Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, and Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent. The meeting was a very interesting one. His success and rise is an amazing story. Mr. Tan and my Cabinet members are going to spend time together, and bring suggestions to me during the next week. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Sane, steady, predictable leadership.

Link: truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114987288040725570

CNBC:

President Donald Trump on Monday delayed high U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods from snapping back into place for another 90 days, a White House official told CNBC. [...]

Monday’s extension is the latest example of how Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs have shifted with little prior notice, a dynamic that has made U.S. trade policy unpredictable for many businesses.

TACO Tuesday, but on a Monday. What a country! America really is great again.

Bonus question for the CNBC copy desk: how much water is the word many carrying in that closing sentence?

Link: cnbc.com/2025/08/11/trump-china-tariffs-deadline-extended…

Just the other day, I learned that Andy Serkis, who played Gollum in the LoTR movies, did an unabridged audiobook version of the original trilogy, as well as one of The Hobbit: The Hobbit (Libro.fm, Amazon, Audible) The Fellowship of the Ring (Libro.fm, Amazon, Audible) T...

Sam Altman, in a long post yesterday on X, following up on OpenAI’s decision last week to make GPT-4o available as a legacy model, at least temporarily: If you have been following the GPT-5 rollout, one thing you might be noticing is how much of an attachment some people...

Scientists have found a “robust” candidate for a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri A, the Sun-like star closest to our solar system. “Not only that, but it orbits the star in its habitable zone, meaning the temperature isn’t too hot or too cold…”

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Reddit will block the Internet Archive

Well this sucks. Jay Peters for the Verge:

Reddit says that it has caught AI companies scraping its data from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, so it’s going to start blocking the Internet Archive from indexing the vast majority of Reddit. The Wayback Machine will no longer be able to crawl post detail pages, comments, or profiles; instead, it will only be able to index the Reddit.com homepage, which effectively means Internet Archive will only be able to archive insights into which news headlines and posts were most popular on a given day.

Tags: internet-archive, reddit, scraping, ai, training-data, ai-ethics

Honey, I Have No Clue What You’re Talking About — I Did NOT Use AI to Write My Wedding Vows. “Do you remember when we moved in together and spent that whole first weekend building furniture? This is an example of an anecdote you could include.”

In a preseason game yesterday, Jacksonville Jaguars kicker Cam Little nailed a 70-yard field goal. The official NFL record is 66 yards.

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My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring DF last week. With WorkOS you can start selling to enterprises with just a few lines of code. It provides a complete User Management solution along with SSO, SCIM, and FGA. The APIs are modular and easy-to-use, allowing integrations to be completed in minutes instead of months. WorkOS simplifies MCP authorization with a single API built on five OAuth standards.

Today, some of the fastest growing startups are already powered by WorkOS, including Perplexity, Vercel, and Webflow.

For SaaS apps that care deeply about design and user experience, WorkOS is the perfect fit. From high-quality documentation to self-serve onboarding for your customers, it removes all the unnecessary complexity for your engineering team.

Link: workos.com/blog/mcp-authorization-in-5-easy-oauth-specs?utm…

Mark Tyson at Tom’s Hardware: AOL, now a Yahoo property, will end its dial-up internet service, the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN)-based internet connectivity service, on September 30, 2025. Its dial-up service has been publicly available for 34 years, and has ...

If you've been experimenting with OpenAI's Codex CLI and have been frustrated that it's not possible to select text and copy it to the clipboard, at least when running in the Mac terminal (I genuinely didn't know it was possible to build a terminal app that disabled copy and...

This is a fun new website featuring 80+ years of artifacts & memorabilia related to Smokey Bear, the famous spokesbear for the US Forest Service. In 1944, the USDA Forest Service, National Association of State Foresters, and Ad Council launched the first poster...

Karen Attiah: I Gained 20 Pounds of Muscle. Here’s What I Learned. “Weightlifting embodies a form of female expression that society is not quite ready for: physical power that we define on our own terms.”

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