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Marco’s AppleCare “Express” Replacement 🗣️ It’s St. Jude time again! 🗣️ The Marco Offset Podcastathon 2025 Follow-up: Auburn’s colors are UVA’s colors (via Tony Scida) You don’t need the trick new Apple charger to charge an iPhone 17 at full speed iPhone Air Why p...

Former NBA star Reggie Miller’s neighbors got him hooked on mountain biking. “I was still in basketball shape. And they destroyed me. Being out there on the mountain bike, I was like ‘oh my God this is so fun!’ And that’s what got me hooked.”

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Artist and composer Matthew Wilcock looks for patterns in the everyday and creates music from them. It’s easier to quickly watch an example than to explain: Instantly thought of the video for Star Guitar by The Chemical Brothers, directed by Michel Gondry. They also see...

Zadie Smith: “In my experience, every kind of writing requires some kind of self-soothing Jedi mind trick, and, when it comes to essay composition, the rectangle is mine.”

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Gooood lord, just look at this exquisite handmade bike, a collaboration between British design collective Tomato¹ and Shinichi Konno of Cherubim.

1. Karl Hyde and Rick Smith of the electronic group Underworld are Tomato co-founders. I found my way to this bike after watching Underworld’s recent Boiler Room set.’↩

Tags: bicycles · biking · design · Shinichi Konno · Tomato · Underworld

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New issue of Laura Olin’s newsletter, full of good stuff. “I had forgotten that the Statue of Liberty was, upon installation, brown.”

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Two Slice is a bitmappy font that’s only two pixels tall and “somewhat readable”.

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Fantastic essay by Roxane Gay: Civility Is a Fantasy. “Calling for civility is about exerting power. It is a way of reminding the powerless that they exist at the will of those in power and should act accordingly. It is a demand for control.”

John Koblin, reporting for The New York Times (gift link): Jimmy Kimmel’s broadcast return scored big in the ratings. Tuesday’s episode of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” averaged 6.2 million viewers, according to preliminary figures from Nielsen. That is nearly four times bigger ...

Ryan Gould and Liana Baker, reporting for Bloomberg: Intel Corp. has approached Apple Inc. about securing an investment in the ailing chipmaker, according to people familiar with the matter, part of efforts to bolster a business that’s now partially owned by the US gover...

George Kelly, The Standard:

Joe Betz, the owner of San Francisco’s House of Prime Rib, who transformed the Van Ness Avenue restaurant into an institution beloved by locals and visitors, has died. He was 86. […]

Joe Betz purchased House of Prime Rib in 1985 from Lou Balaski, who founded it in 1949, and over four decades preserved its old-world charm while building it into one of the city’s most enduring dining destinations.

My favorite restaurant in San Francisco, and one of my favorite restaurants anywhere in the world. Incredibly consistent excellent food, impeccable service, and a one-of-a-kind atmosphere.

Link: sfstandard.com/2025/09/24/san-francisco-joe-betz-owner…

If you hide the system prompt and tool descriptions for your LLM agent, what you're actually doing is deliberately hiding the most useful documentation describing your service from your most sophisticated users!

Tags: ai-agents, llms, ai, generative-ai

[2 points] Learn basic NumPy operations with an AI tutor! Use an AI chatbot (e.g., ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Stanford AI Playground) to teach yourself how to do basic vector and matrix operations in NumPy (import numpy as np). AI tutors have become exceptionally good at creating interactive tutorials, and this year in CS221, we're testing how they can help you learn fundamentals more interactively than traditional static exercises.

— Stanford CS221 Autumn 2025, Problem 1: Linear Algebra

Tags: stanford, computer-science, education, ai, llms, python, numpy, generative-ai

Cross-Agent Privilege Escalation: When Agents Free Each Other Here's a clever new form of AI exploit from Johann Rehberger, who has coined the term Cross-Agent Privilege Escalation to describe an attack where multiple coding agents - GitHub Copilot and Claude Code for exampl...

Steamed Hams but It’s a Critically Acclaimed Feature Film. The classic Simpsons bit but it’s live-action and a My Dinner with Andre parody. So many more where that came from.

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I had a lot of fun playing around with this collection of generative design tools, especially the textual ones. I wore out the “randomize” button on each of these. (via sidebar) Tags: art · design · programming 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Why Do Wind Turbines Have Three Blades? Why not two? Or five? Or eight? Turns out that three is sort of a Goldilocks sweet spot for blade count due to physics, engineering, and aesthetic reasons.

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Huntington’s disease successfully treated for first time. “An emotional research team became tearful as they described how data shows the disease was slowed by 75% in patients.”

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Enigmatriz uses ASCII art to punch up and blow out public domain photos and illustrations — I love their style. From It’s Nice That: Using the Image to ASCII tool available online, Enigmatriz found a new way to play with digital assets. “Everyday, I sit on my co...