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A short video that explains *a lot* about the modern world & conservatism. “They also want to feel normal. They want to walk around and see that most other people have made the same choice they made.” And that last line!

One of my favorite end-of-year lists is Tom Whitwell’s annual record of 52 things he’s learned in the past year. Some favorites of mine from the 2025 installment: 4. You can unlock the wheels on a shopping cart by playing sounds on your phone. [Joseph Gabay] 5. In the UK...

Photographing the Microscopic: Winners of Nikon Small World 2025. “Overall Winner: A rice weevil perched on a grain of rice.”

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More than half of the teens surveyed believe journalists regularly engage in unethical behaviors like making up details or quotes in stories, paying sources, taking visual images out of context or doing favors for advertisers. Less than a third believe reporters correct their errors, confirm facts before reporting them, gather information from multiple sources or cover stories in the public interest — practices ingrained in the DNA of reputable journalists.

— David Bauder, AP News, A lost generation of news consumers? Survey shows how teenagers dislike the news media

Tags: journalism

Adding to an “overwhelming body of evidence”, a recent study showed that “suicidality scores dropped significantly an average of two years and up to five years after [trans youth] received gender-affirming treatment”.

The Atlantic hurricane season has come to a close and Google’s DeepMind AI-based hurricane model performed really well in predicting track and intensity of storms.

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In 2010, Randall Munroe’s fiancée (now wife) was diagnosed with cancer. Every once in awhile, he updates his audience at XKCD on how that’s going. The most recent missive: Fifteen Years.

If you’re not up on XKCD lore, here’s an explanation. 💞

Tags: cancer · comics · Randall Munroe · XKCD

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For years, lawmakers at the state and federal levels have tried a variety of measures aimed at making kids safer on the internet, from kids-tailored design standards to age verification for individual websites. More recently, a new model has caught on in the states, and now it's gaining steam in Congress: putting the onus on […]

YouTube embeds fail with a 153 error I just fixed this bug on my blog. I was getting an annoying "Error 153: Video player configuration error" on some of the YouTube video embeds (like this one) on this site. After some digging it turns out the culprit was this HTTP header, ...

Special guest: Tyler Hayes. Topics include how to get a small phone today, which way foldables should fold, the state of Apple TV (including its new “sonic logo”), and some holiday gift gadget recommendations.

Sponsored by:

• Clic for Sonos: No lag. No hassle. Just Clic.
• Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code talkshow.

Link: daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2025/11/30/ep-436

I am increasingly worried about AI in the video game space in general. [...] I'm not sure that the CEOs and the people making the decisions at these sorts of companies understand the difference between actual content and slop. [...] It's exactly the same cryolab, it's exact...

It's ChatGPT's third birthday today. It's fun looking back at Sam Altman's low key announcement thread from November 30th 2022: today we launched ChatGPT. try talking with it here: chat.openai.com language interfaces are going to be a big deal, i think. talk to the compute...

Michael Levin is a biologist at Tufts University working on novel ways to understand and control complex pattern formation in biological systems. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep486-sc See below for timestamps, transcript, ...

The most annoying problem is that the [GitHub] frontend barely works without JavaScript, so we cannot open issues, pull requests, source code or CI logs in Dillo itself, despite them being mostly plain HTML, which I don't think is acceptable. In the past, it used to gracefully degrade without enforcing JavaScript, but now it doesn't.

— Rodrigo Arias Mallo, Migrating Dillo from GitHub

Tags: browsers, progressive-enhancement, github

Miss Universe 2025 has been rocked by controversies and chaos, from stage falls and contestants storming out, to judges quitting and allegations of vote rigging – which the organisers deny. The pageant – styled as a celebration of women of all backgrounds and nationalities –...

Armed gangs now control much of Port-au-Prince and more than a million people have been forced from their homes. In this Global News Podcast special, Nick Miles and Nawal Al-Maghafi hear from Haitians on the front line, including a pro-democracy activist, a feminist campaign...

Last year developer Simon Støvring launched a fun new app for the Mac called Festivitas, which let you decorate your menu bar and Dock with animated holiday lights and falling snow. This year he’s added an iOS version for iPhone and iPad that lets you create widgets to decorate your home screens with holidays lights and festive photo frames. Pure fun.

See also: Jason Snell on using Festivitas’s Shortcuts support to create an automation that gives a 10 percent chance of snow every 20 minutes. Støvring’s own Shortcuts examples (available in the app’s Settings window) include things like turning on the lights when music starts playing. With support for Shortcuts, users can create their own fun.

Link: festivitas.app/

My thanks to Dekáf for sponsoring Daring Fireball this week. They’ve just launched a nice lineup of holiday gift bundles — curated sets of their most-loved coffees that make gift-buying easy.

Nine single origins. Six signature blends. Four Mizudashi cold brews. All micro-lot and top-rated coffees are shipped within 24 hours of roasting. No shortcuts. No crash. Dekáf is coffee at its most refined, just without the caffeine. I’ve gone through a few bags, and each one tasted great — like high quality regular coffee.

And, there’s a special offer just for DF readers: get 20% off with code DF.

Link: dekaf.com/s/df

Delightful, and there’s an equally delightful behind-the-scenes video.

Link: youtube.com/watch?v=-avONMmQtlI