FeedCity

A pop-up cafe in Tokyo is giving people with dementia a place to volunteer as well as a sense of community. A volunteer there, Toshio Morita, has become something of a local celebrity. At the Orange Day Café, muddled orders, long pauses and gentle confusion aren’t mistakes —...

How to use a skill (progressive disclosure):

1. After deciding to use a skill, open its SKILL.md. Read only enough to follow the workflow.
2. If SKILL.md points to extra folders such as references/, load only the specific files needed for the request; don't bulk-load everything.
3. If scripts/ exist, prefer running or patching them instead of retyping large code blocks.
4. If assets/ or templates exist, reuse them instead of recreating from scratch.

Description as trigger: The YAML description in SKILL.md is the primary trigger signal; rely on it to decide applicability. If unsure, ask a brief clarification before proceeding.

— OpenAI Codex CLI, core/src/skills/render.rs, full prompt

Tags: skills, openai, ai, llms, codex-cli, prompt-engineering, rust, generative-ai

One of the things that most excited me about Anthropic's new Skills mechanism back in October is how easy it looked for other platforms to implement. A skill is just a folder with a Markdown file and some optional extra resources and scripts, so any LLM tool with the ability...

Six-minute segment from Amazon’s AWS re:Invent keynote last week: Payam Mirrashidi, VP, Cloud Systems & Platforms, Apple, explains how AWS Graviton helps improve developer velocity at scale. Hear Swift’s journey from the premier programming language for the Apple eco...

How does lake ice do this? Incredible! (Mirror Lake, New Hampshire)

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The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life by Ian Bogost. “How modern conveniences not only fail to deliver on their promises but also rob us of small, satisfying tasks and moments that keep us grounded and human.”

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“Eating the right foods in the proper quantities, 16th-century Britons believed, balanced mind and soul. So in Shakespeare’s plays, roasts, ales, and pies are not props, but clues to characters’ souls, moods, and motivations.”

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I guess this is as good an explanation of contemporary culture as anything.

Hungover from a world that told us we could be anything, we decided to be DJs. We don’t create our own music. We curate playlists, recirculating songs that will make people think we’re cool. And we do this through the labels we wear, the books we read, the people we hang out with, and the opinions we parrot. The DJ figure, ruled by the same logic, is just another celebration of self.

(via @youtubesilike.bsky.social)

Tags: music · remix · video

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LLM 0.28 I released a new version of my LLM Python library and CLI tool for interacting with Large Language Models. Highlights from the release notes: New OpenAI models: gpt-5.1, gpt-5.1-chat-latest, gpt-5.2 and gpt-5.2-chat-latest. #1300, #1317 When fetching URLs as frag...

The Flow State podcast recently celebrated their 300th episode with a 2h41m mix of instrumental music sourced from a group of “musicians, curators, label heads, music fans”. They even let me pick a song.

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Irving Finkel is a scholar of ancient languages and a longtime curator at the British Museum, renowned for his expertise in Mesopotamian history and cuneiform writing. He specializes in reading and interpreting cuneiform inscriptions, including tablets from Sumerian, Akkadia...

Weekly sponsorships have been the top source of revenue for Daring Fireball ever since I started selling them back in 2007. They’ve succeeded, I think, because they make everyone happy. They generate good money. There’s only one sponsor per week and the sponsors are always r...

I first posted about Nick Veasey’s work back in 2005 and thought it was worth another look. Veasey uses x-ray photography to get inside views of familiar objects, sometimes on a large scale. And here’s a peek behind-the-scenes at his process, which includes, critically, a “bespoke concrete chamber” to keep the radiation at bay. See also Bone Music: Forbidden Soviet Records Made From Used X-Ray Films. Tags: Nick Veasey · photography · x-rays 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Youki Terada, writing for Edutopia in 2022 (via Jens Kutílek): Under close scrutiny, the evidence for dyslexia-friendly fonts falls apart. In a 2017 study, for example, researchers tested whether OpenDyslexic, a popular font with thicker lines near the bottom of the lett...

Small follow-up point re: my post this week on iMessage’s delivery architecture being built atop the Apple Push Notification service: APNs can only relay messages up to 4 or 16 KB in size, depending on the iOS or iPadOS version. If the message text is too long or if an a...

Oilwell is a (fake) wellness app “to help you embrace climate chaos” that includes features like “Drowning Mindfully”, “Lo-Fi Beats to Frack To”, and “12 Hour Wildfire Relaxation”.

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OpenAI:

In ChatGPT, GPT‑5.2 Instant, Thinking, and Pro will begin rolling out today, starting with paid plans. In the API, they are available now to all developers.

Overall, GPT‑5.2 brings significant improvements in general intelligence, long-context understanding, agentic tool-calling, and vision — making it better at executing complex, real-world tasks end-to-end than any previous model.

5.1 was released just one month ago, but 5.2 delivers a slew of measurable improvements across the board. Where 5.1 was seemingly more about the feel of responses, the personality, 5.2 was clearly focused on tangible and benchmarkable gains.

Link: openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-2/

I just updated the 2025 Kottke Gift Guide with some new suggestions, including inflatable tube men (for your front yard; your neighbors will love!), some of the year’s best cookbooks, ramen kits from Japan, and some low- of no-spend gifts.

It’s faster than a speeding bullet. It’s smarter than a polymath genius. It’s everywhere but it’s invisible. It’s artificial intelligence. But what actually is it? Today we ask this simple question and explore why it’s so damn hard to answer. Special thanks to Stephanie Yin ...