Artist Guy Buffet has painted a number of different variations of his depiction of how to make various drinks (martini, margarita, Manhattan) but I like this version the best. (thx, ollie)
Tags: art · cocktails · food · Guy Buffet
Go Computer Now! – The Story of Sphere Computers. “If things had...
Go Computer Now! – The Story of Sphere Computers. “If things had gone a little differently for them, we might be remembering Sphere the way people have fond memories of the Commodore 64 and Apple II.” Wow, I’ve never heard of Sphere.
Luis Mendo is self-publishing a book about his life as a writer/artist...
Luis Mendo is self-publishing a book about his life as a writer/artist in Japan. “You don’t buy the book, you support the artist.” (You’ve maybe seen his work; Mendo does illustrations for Craig Mod’s books.)
My first adventure of the day is going to the Shunkaen Bonsai...
My first adventure of the day is going to the Shunkaen Bonsai Museum. Other Japan bonsai recs welcome!
I hoping to post some of my photos from Japan here when...
I hoping to post some of my photos from Japan here when I get a bit more organized, but for now, you can follow my adventures on Instagram Stories.
I stopped into the MEGA Donki (Don Quijote) in Shibuya last night...
I stopped into the MEGA Donki (Don Quijote) in Shibuya last night and it was like being inside a slot machine. They had 20 different Kit Kat flavors, including a sake flavor. Ppl had baskets overflowing with candy. It was so bonkers.
Quoting Barry Zhang
Skills actually came out of a prototype I built demonstrating that Claude Code is a general-purpose agent :-)
It was a natural conclusion once we realized that bash + filesystem were all we needed
— Barry Zhang, Anthropic
Tags: skills, claude-code, ai-agents, generative-ai, ai, llms
Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
Anthropic this morning introduced Claude Skills, a new pattern for making new abilities available to their models:
Claude can now use Skills to improve how it performs specific tasks. Skills are folders that include instructions, scripts, and resources that Claude can load ...
M5 MacBook Pro Does Not Include a Charger in the Box in Europe
macrumors.com/2025/10/15/new-macbook-pro-lacks-charger-in-europe/
Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:
The new 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M5 chip does not include a
charger in the box in European countries, including the U.K.,
Ireland, Germany, Italy, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Norway,
and others, according to Apple’s online store. In the U...
An iconic Philly skate locale, Love Park, was demolished in 2016 —...
An iconic Philly skate locale, Love Park, was demolished in 2016 — but has been reconstructed in Malmö, Sweden (including street lights and trash cans).
661: Intimate and Regimented
Follow-up:
Languages in Scotland
ATP merch has more benefits (via Christian Heiler)
Slide Over fade animation (via Daniel Luz)
Marco’s iPhone case survey: Ryan London bare bottom (via Oliver Thomas)
/u/LaughingMan11 is Benson Leung (via Deta & Daniel Luz)
ZFS and th...
The Freedom of Enough
I just reread this 2023 post about a neighborhood Tokyo izakaya (and my related thoughts), spurred by a conversation w/ my friend Andrew about what makes for good work, a good life, and a good society. It dovetails with this podcast conversation between Rich Roll and Craig M...
Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal: ‘A Cartoonist’s Review of AI Art’
Good and thoughtful graphic essay by Matthew Inman, expressing why he dislikes AI-generated art. It’s been widely linked to, largely approvingly. I fundamentally disagree with the premise. Near the start, Inman writes:
When I consume AI art, it also evokes a feeling. Goo...
The 39 coolest neighbourhoods in the world in 2025, including Jimbōchō, Tokyo;...
The 39 coolest neighbourhoods in the world in 2025, including Jimbōchō, Tokyo; Ménilmontant, Paris; Vallila, Helsinki; Linden, Johannesburg; and Portales, Mexico City.
POP Phone: a USB-C handset that you plug into your phone for...
POP Phone: a USB-C handset that you plug into your phone for when you’re missing the warm analog embrace of Ma Bell. The hours I spent as a youth wrapping and unwrapping that coiled phone cord around my fingers!
The Space Exploration Logo Archive
Good luck losing less than an hour to this: a huge archive of logos for government, non-profit, private, military, and even fictional space agencies and companies. There is also a book, but it looks like it was only available on Kickstarter — hopefully it’ll be republished? (via sidebar)
Tags: design · logos · space
💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
NVIDIA DGX Spark + Apple Mac Studio = 4x Faster LLM Inference with EXO 1.0
NVIDIA DGX Spark + Apple Mac Studio = 4x Faster LLM Inference with EXO 1.0
EXO Labs wired a 256GB M3 Ultra Mac Studio up to an NVIDIA DGX Spark and got a 2.8x performance boost serving Llama-3.1 8B (FP16) with an 8,192 token prompt.
Their detailed explanation taught me a lot...
Quoting Riana Pfefferkorn
Pro se litigants [people representing themselves in court without a lawyer] account for the majority of the cases in the United States where a party submitted a court filing containing AI hallucinations. In a country where legal representation is unaffordable for most people, it is no wonder that pro se litigants are depending on free or low-cost AI tools. But it is a scandal that so many have been betrayed by them, to the detriment of the cases they are litigating all on their own.
— Riana Pfefferkorn, analyzing the AI Hallucination Cases database for CIS at Stanford Law
Tags: ai-ethics, generative-ai, law, hallucinations, ai, llms
Coding without typing the code
Last year the most useful exercise for getting a feel for how good LLMs were at writing code was vibe coding (before that name had even been coined) - seeing if you could create a useful small application through prompting alone.
Today I think there's a new, more ambitious and significantly more intimidating exercise: spend a day working on real production code through prompting alone, making no manual edits yourself.
This doesn't mean you can't control exactly what goes into each file - you can even tell the model "update line 15 to use this instead" if you have to - but it's a great way to get more of a feel for how well the latest coding agents can wield their edit tools.
Tags: coding-agents, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, ai, llms
“‘Take on Me’ is an ideal song for Song Exploder, because it’s...
“‘Take on Me’ is an ideal song for Song Exploder, because it’s so well known and beloved that it feels like a song predestined to be a massive hit, but the truth couldn’t be further from the case.”