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The Strange Afterlife of Hilma af Klint, Painting’s Posthumous Star. “As af Klint’s fame has grown, so have the questions — about what she believed, whom she worked with, and who should be allowed to speak in her name.”

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Google Antigravity Google's other major release today to accompany Gemini 3 Pro. At first glance Antigravity is yet another VS Code fork Cursor clone - it's a desktop application you install that then signs in to your Google account and provides an IDE for agentic coding aga...

The Fascinating History of Tarot Card Decks: From the Renaissance to the Modern Day. The V&A does an unboxing of a half dozen tarot card decks from the last 500 years.

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President Donald Trump, today in the Oval Office alongside his “very good friend” Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, after ABC News reporter Mary Bruce had the temerity to pose a question regarding Mohammed having ordered the brutal murder of Washington Post columnist J...

In an interview lasting for more than an hour, classicist Mary Beard shares her knowledge & experience about how the picture of Rome we might have in our heads, inherited from Hollywood movies like Gladiator, is incomplete (and just plain wrong in some cases) and what ...

Three years ago, we were impressed that a machine could write a poem about otters. Less than 1,000 days later, I am debating statistical methodology with an agent that built its own research environment. The era of the chatbot is turning into the era of the digital coworker. To be very clear, Gemini 3 isn’t perfect, and it still needs a manager who can guide and check it. But it suggests that “human in the loop” is evolving from “human who fixes AI mistakes” to “human who directs AI work.” And that may be the biggest change since the release of ChatGPT.

— Ethan Mollick, Three Years from GPT-3 to Gemini 3

Tags: gemini, ethan-mollick, generative-ai, chatgpt, ai, llms, ai-agents

Raccoons Are Showing Early Signs of Domestication. “City-dwelling raccoons seem to be evolving a shorter snout — a telltale feature of our pets and other domesticated animals.”

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Google released Gemini 3 Pro today. Here's the announcement from Sundar Pichai, Demis Hassabis, and Koray Kavukcuoglu, their developer blog announcement from Logan Kilpatrick, the Gemini 3 Pro Model Card, and their collection of 11 more articles. It's a big release! I had a ...

Mark Gurman, in his (paywalled, alas) Power On column for Bloomberg over the weekend: The next major update didn’t arrive until 2023, when Apple finally transitioned the desktop to in-house chips with the M2 Ultra Mac Pro. Two years later, that model remains largely unch...

A Japanese experimental music group called Open Reel Ensemble plays reel-to-reel tape recorders from the 70s & 80s as musical instruments (give it a sec to get going): Brilliant! A YouTube commenter notes: “Very cool, looks like you’re fishing for sound waves.” Here’s...

Cloudflare suffered an hours-long global outage, starting around 12pm UTC / 7am ET, which brought down an enormous chunk of the Internet. This included, humorously, Down Detector. It also included (not so humorously to me) Daring Fireball, which has been routed through Cloudflare since 2018. My apologies if you tried to reach the site while it was down. (DF was back up by the time I woke up this morning.) As of this writing, Cloudflare still hasn’t determined exactly what happened, but they’ve been updating their status report for the incident a few times per hour. The most recent update:

We continue to monitor the system through recovery and we are seeing errors and latency return to normal levels. A full post-incident investigation and details about the incident will be made available asap.

Link: theguardian.com/technology/live/2025/nov/18/cloudflare-down…

The winners of the LIT Lighting Design Awards, encompassing the best work in lighting architecture, product design (lamps, etc.), concerts, healthcare, streets, and many more categories.

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A Beloved Clothing Store Closed. A Customer Bought All 4,500 Items. “Ms. Szuflita said she had nearly broken even purely on the numbers. There’s also value in the still unfolding adventure.”

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London Centric: Sam was walking past a Royal Mail depot in south London in January when his path was blocked by a group of eight men. “I tried to move to let them pass, but the last guy blocked the path,” the 32-year-old told London Centric. “They started pushing me and...

As part of a city-wide urban greening program, Taipei turned an abandoned football stadium into a community garden. Here’s an overview of the terraced garden that’s taken over Zhongshan Soccer Stadium from James Stewart on Instagram. A couple of screenshots from the video: So cool! (thx, alaina) Tags: cities · Taiwan 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

There's going to be sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll, chips, dips, chains, whips … your basic Rewatchables episode. The Ringer’s Bill Simmons and Kyle Brandt revisit John Hughes’s 1985 hit ‘Weird Science,’ starring Anthony Michael Hall, Kelly LeBrock, and Ilan Mitchell-Smith. Producers: Craig Horlbeck, Chia Hao Tat, and Eduardo Ocampo Talk to a State Farm agent today to learn how you can choose to bundle and save with the Personal Price Plan®. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there®. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Apple Newsroom, last week: Apple today announced the launch of Digital ID, a new way for users to create an ID in Apple Wallet using information from their U.S. passport, and present it with the security and privacy of iPhone or Apple Watch. At launch, Digital ID accepta...

The fate of “small” open source Nolan Lawson asks if LLM assistance means that the category of tiny open source libraries like his own blob-util is destined to fade away. Why take on additional supply chain risks adding another dependency when an LLM can likely kick out the ...

Ryan Christoffel, reporting for 9to5Mac a month ago:

Meta has published a support doc that states its Messenger app for Mac is being discontinued. New users won’t be able to download the app at all, and existing users have about 60 more days of use before it stops working altogether. Why the change? Unfortunately, no reason has been given. But users are being pushed to the Facebook website for all their Messenger needs instead.

There’s a nearly identical support document for the native Messenger app for Windows too. They’re not even replacing them with web-app wrappers, like they just did with the Windows WhatsApp client. Just telling users to use the website.

Link: 9to5mac.com/2025/10/16/meta-is-killing-off-messengers-mac…