FeedCity: Featured

Victorian-Era Mourning Objects From the V&A’s Collection

From the archives of London’s V&A Museum, a selection of items that were used by Victorian-era mourners to remember and pay tribute to loved ones who had died, including jewelry with human hair, black dresses, jet black jewelry, mourning cards, and postmortem photograp...

kottke.org
10 Dec 21:09 • Jason Kottke

The trailer for It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, a documentary film about...

The trailer for It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, a documentary film about the late singer/songwriter.

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Simon Willison's Weblog
10 Dec 21:09

Useful patterns for building HTML tools

I've started using the term HTML tools to refer to HTML applications that I've been building which combine HTML, JavaScript, and CSS in a single file and use them to provide useful functionality. I have built over 150 of these in the past year, almost all of them written by ...

kottke.org
10 Dec 20:39 • Jason Kottke

Timothy Snyder: “What comes next? For the Nazis, the deportation and the...

Timothy Snyder: “What comes next? For the Nazis, the deportation and the pogrom of autumn 1938 were steps towards creating a centralised national police agency. In the US, something similar is unfolding with ICE.”

Simon Willison's Weblog
10 Dec 20:39

The Normalization of Deviance in AI

The Normalization of Deviance in AI This thought-provoking essay from Johann Rehberger directly addresses something that I’ve been worrying about for quite a while: in the absence of any headline-grabbing examples of prompt injection vulnerabilities causing real economic har...

kottke.org
10 Dec 20:09 • Jason Kottke

Size of Life, a visual comparison of living things from DNA to...

Size of Life, a visual comparison of living things from DNA to a quaking aspen clone. Lovely illustrations.

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kottke.org
10 Dec 18:21 • Jason Kottke

I hate how good this is: Radiohead sings Santa Claus Is Coming...

I hate how good this is: Radiohead sings Santa Claus Is Coming to Town (There I Ruined It).

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kottke.org
10 Dec 17:39 • Jason Kottke

2000 Words for Japanese Rain

From artist Miya Ando, Water of the Sky, A Dictionary of 2,000 Japanese Rain Words. Through a collection of 2,000 Japanese words, their English interpretations, and 100 drawings, Ando describes the breadth and diversity of rain’s many expressions: when it falls, how it f...

Song Exploder
10 Dec 17:30 • Hrishikesh Hirway

Key Change: Rian Johnson on Wagner's 'Das Rheingold'

play.prx.org/listen?ge=prx_93_194d7573-c8db-4380-98d0-a2da51e6fcaa&uf=http%3A%2F%2Ffeed.songexploder.net%2FSongExploder

23:24

My guest today is director Rian Johnson, which is exciting for me, because I’ve been a huge fan of his ever since seeing his first feature film, ‘Brick,' in 2006. Since then, he’s made six more feature films, including ‘Looper‘ in 2012; ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi‘ in 2017; the murder mystery ‘Knives Out‘ in 2019; and his most recent movie, another in the 'Knives Out' series, ‘Wake Up Dead Man,‘ which is already out in theaters, and comes to Netflix on December 12. I talked to Rian about a piece of music that had a profound impact on him, which was the overture to ‘Das Rheingold‘ by Richard Wagner.

For more info, visit songexploder.net/rian-johnson.

Daring Fireball
10 Dec 17:09 • John Gruber

U.S. State Department Changes Back to Times New Roman From Calibri

nytimes.com/2025/12/09/us/politics/rubio-state-department-font.html?unlocked_article_code=1.7k8.NI-S.Il8KdkMKKnGV

Michael Crowley and Hamed Aleaziz, reporting for The New York Times: While mostly framed as a matter of clarity and formality in presentation, Mr. Rubio’s directive to all diplomatic posts around the world blamed “radical” diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility p...

kottke.org
10 Dec 16:18 • Jason Kottke

The loose flap of skin around the elbow is called the what...

The loose flap of skin around the elbow is called the what now??

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Simon Willison's Weblog
10 Dec 16:15

Dark mode

I've never been particularly invested dark v.s. light mode but I get enough people complaining that this site is "blinding" that I decided to see if Claude Code for web could produce a useful dark mode from my existing CSS. It did a decent job, using CSS properties, @media (...

Simon Willison's Weblog
10 Dec 00:54

10 Years of Let's Encrypt

10 Years of Let's Encrypt Internet Security Research Group co-founder and Executive Director Josh Aas: On September 14, 2015, our first publicly-trusted certificate went live. [...] Today, Let’s Encrypt is the largest certificate authority in the world in terms of certifica...

Simon Willison's Weblog
10 Dec 00:27

Devstral 2

Devstral 2 Two new models from Mistral today: Devstral 2 and Devstral Small 2 - both focused on powering coding agents such as Mistral's newly released Mistral Vibe which I wrote about earlier today. Devstral 2: SOTA open model for code agents with a fraction of the parame...

Simon Willison's Weblog
09 Dec 23:57

Under the hood of Canada Spends with Brendan Samek

I talked to Brendan Samek about Canada Spends, a project from Build Canada that makes Canadian government financial data accessible and explorable using a combination of Datasette, a neat custom frontend, Ruby ingestion scripts, sqlite-utils and pieces of LLM-powered PDF ext...

Simon Willison's Weblog
09 Dec 22:51

Agentic AI Foundation

Agentic AI Foundation Announced today as a new foundation under the parent umbrella of the Linux Foundation (see also the OpenJS Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, OpenSSF and many more). The AAIF was started by a heavyweight group of "founding platinum members" ...

Daring Fireball
09 Dec 22:48 • John Gruber

★ iMessage’s Delivery Architecture Makes It Hard to Block Without Blocking All iOS Push Notifications

From Apple’s iMessage Security Overview: Apple iMessage is a messaging service for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple Vision Pro. Relying on the Apple Push Notification service (APNs), iMessage lets users send texts and attachments like photos, contacts, locations...

Daring Fireball
09 Dec 22:21 • John Gruber

The Real Problem of Humanity

harvardmagazine.com/2009/09/james-watson-edward-o-wilson-intellectual-entente

Sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson, back in 2009:

The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.

A related adage I heard, and internalized, recently: “We’re not thinking creatures who feel; we’re feeling creatures who think.” (Via Jason Kottke.)

Link: harvardmagazine.com/2009/09/james-watson-edward-o-wilson…

Daring Fireball
09 Dec 21:30 • John Gruber

ProPublica: ‘Trump’s Own Mortgages Match His Description of Mortgage Fraud, Records Reveal’

propublica.org/article/trump-mortgage-fraud-florida-principal-residences

Justin Elliott, Robert Faturechi, and Alex Mierjeski, reporting for ProPublica: For months, the Trump administration has been accusing its political enemies of mortgage fraud for claiming more than one primary residence. President Donald Trump branded one foe who did so ...

Daring Fireball
09 Dec 21:00 • John Gruber

The Wall Street Journal: ‘Behind Paramount’s Relentless Campaign to Woo Warner Discovery and President Trump’

wsj.com/business/media/paramount-netflix-warner-bros-battle-ellisons-a86fe15c?st=gwekR4&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Joe Flint, Brian Schwartz, and Natalie Andrews, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link, also in News+): “Just tried calling you about new bid we have submitted,” Ellison texted Zaslav. “I heard you on all your concerns and believe we have addressed them in our ...