FeedCity

America’s Polarization Has Become the World’s Side Hustle. “Social media monetization programs have incentivized this effort and are almost entirely to blame.” Team USA just scoring own goal after own goal these days.

Requiem for Early Blogging. “I still look for people with early blogger energy, though — people willing to make an effort to understand the world and engage in a way that isn’t a performance, or trolling, or outright grifting.”

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llm-anthropic 0.23

New plugin release adding support for Claude Opus 4.5, including the new thinking_effort option:

llm install -U llm-anthropic
llm -m claude-opus-4.5 -o thinking_effort low 'muse on pelicans'

This took longer to release than I had hoped because it was blocked on Anthropic shipping 0.75.0 of their Python library with support for thinking effort.

Tags: projects, ai, generative-ai, llms, llm, anthropic, claude

Uh-oh, The Ringer’s Bill Simmons, Chris Ryan, and Cousin Sal are gambling again! The guys fire up their favorite Monday night parlay after revisiting the 2005 sports thriller ‘Two for the Money,’ starring Matthew McConaughey, Al Pacino, and Rene Russo. Producers: Craig Horlbeck, Chia Hao Tat, and Eduardo Ocampo Through the Subaru Share the Love® Event, Subaru and our retailers donate to charity for every new vehicle purchased or leased. Learn more about the charities Subaru and our retailers support at https://Subaru.com/share. A State Farm agent can help you choose the coverage you need. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.® Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

LLM SVG Generation Benchmark Here's a delightful project by Tom Gally, inspired by my pelican SVG benchmark. He asked Claude to help create more prompts of the form Generate an SVG of [A] [doing] [B] and then ran 30 creative prompts against 9 frontier models - prompts like "an octopus operating a pipe organ" or "a starfish driving a bulldozer". Here are some for "butterfly inspecting a steam engine": And for "sloth steering an excavator": It's worth browsing the whole collection, which gives a really good overall indication of which models are the best at SVG art. Via tkgally on Hacker News Tags: benchmarks, svg, ai, generative-ai, llms, evals, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, tom-gally

Meet our new Holiday Gift Bundles, curated sets of our most loved coffees designed for effortless gifting.

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

DF readers get 20% off with code DF at dekaf.com/s/df.

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

Link: dekaf.com/s/df

Dave Winer:

The new Amazon Alexa with AI has the same basic problem of all AI bots, it acts as if it’s human, with a level of intimacy that you really don’t want to think about, because Alexa is in your house, with you, listening, all the time. Calling attention to an idea that there’s a pseudo-human spying on you is bad. Alexa depends on the opposite impression, that it’s just a computer. I think AI’s should give up the pretense that they’re human, and this one should be first.

Amen.

Link: scripting.com/2025/11/20.html#a143930

Charlie Warzel, writing for The Atlantic: X’s decision to show where accounts are based is, theoretically, a positive step in the direction of transparency for the platform, which has let troll and spam accounts proliferate since Musk’s purchase, in late 2022. And yet th...

The New York Times: Sean Duffy, the secretary of transportation, began a new campaign on Wednesday that he called “The Golden Age of Travel Starts With You,” complete with a 1960s-style public service announcement that spliced together scenes of the country’s first air t...

Dave Nanian and Bruce Lacey, at Shirt Pocket:

Mistakes are a part of life.

They’re not a great part, but when viewed “correctly”, they’re an opportunity.

Well, we have three opportunities, brought to our attention by a security researcher. They’re security vulnerabilities that have been in SuperDuper! since the very first version, released almost 22 years ago.

Today, we’re releasing fixes for the current release (the SuperDuper! v3.20 Beta is already fixed), a discussion of the problems, and the steps users can take to mitigate the issues if they cannot install the update.

We don’t know of any bad actors making use of these exploits as of this post.

Another good postmortem, with technical details and an apology.

Link: shirt-pocket.com/blog/index.php/shadedgrey/comments…

If the person is unnecessarily rude, mean, or insulting to Claude, Claude doesn't need to apologize and can insist on kindness and dignity from the person it’s talking with. Even if someone is frustrated or unhappy, Claude is deserving of respectful engagement.

— Claude Opus 4.5 system prompt, also added to the Sonnet 4.5 and Haiku 4.5 prompts on November 19th 2025

Tags: system-prompts, anthropic, claude, generative-ai, ai, llms

The Surprising Benefits of Giving Up. A recent meta-analysis reveals that “adjusting our goals in response to stress or challenges, rather than grinding on, is often ‘a more appropriate and beneficial response’”.

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A thread of “feel good” YouTube channels to watch. E.g.: “CinemaTherapy. Two former college roommates (one a filmmaker, the other a therapist) analyze movies.”

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I’ve posted about Korean artist Lee Hyun-Joung’s swirling and swooping work before, but I recently saw one of her pieces in person and decided to feature some of her most recent stuff. It’s always a good time to look at art. Tags: art · Lee Hyun-Joung 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Lots to like about Variety’s list of 100 Best Comedy Movies of All Time, but Coming to America at #46 and no Trading Places at all make me question the list’s credibility.

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Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5 this morning, which they call "best model in the world for coding, agents, and computer use". This is their attempt to retake the crown for best coding model after significant challenges from OpenAI's GPT-5.1-Codex-Max and Google's Gemini 3...

How the Elite Behave When No One Is Watching: Inside the Epstein Emails. They reveal “a power elite practiced at disregarding pain” who have “learned to look away from so much other abuse and suffering” to protect their network of power.

sqlite-utils 3.39 I got a report of a bug in sqlite-utils concerning plugin installation - if you installed the package using uv tool install further attempts to install plugins with sqlite-utils install X would fail, because uv doesn't bundle pip by default. I had the same ...

So I’ve been watching Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus on Apple TV and this review from Inkoo Kang resonated with me (emphasis mine): Millions of offscreen casualties aside, it’s clear that Gilligan is aiming for a lighter — and stranger — outing than his tw...