FeedCity: Featured

Alexander Smith and Claire Cardona, NBC News:

Online tipsters have had a mixed record when it comes to providing information about mass casualty incidents. But Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said this Reddit user “blew the case wide open” after posting about their encounter on Saturday with the suspect.

“I’m being dead serious,” wrote the Reddit user, identified in an affidavit as “John,” three days after the shootings at Brown. “The police need to look into a grey Nissan with Florida plates, possibly a rental.”

Link: nbcnews.com/news/us-news/reddit-tipster-cracked-brown…

Daring Fireball
19 Dec 19:24 • John Gruber

Apple Changes Processor Architectures More Often Than Its Identity Font

daringfireball.net/linked/2025/12/18/condensed-serif-typefaces

Yesterday I wrote: For the last 40 years Apple has only gone through three identity fonts: Garamond → Myriad → San Francisco. DF reader Cameron McKay emailed to observe: “It strikes me that Apple changes CPU architectures (68K → PowerPC → Intel → ARM) more often than i...

kottke.org
19 Dec 19:22 • Jason Kottke

“The Global Village Construction Set is a modular, DIY, low-cost, high-performance platform...

“The Global Village Construction Set is a modular, DIY, low-cost, high-performance platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts.”

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Daring Fireball
19 Dec 19:22 • John Gruber

★ A Request Regarding ‘Magic Link’ Sign-Ins and Apple’s Passwords App

In Juli Clover’s aforelinked rundown of what’s new across the whole system in iOS 26.2, I misunderstood this item regarding the Passwords app: In the Settings section of the Passwords app, there’s an option to manage websites where passwords are not saved when signing in...

Simon Willison's Weblog
19 Dec 19:00

Sam Rose explains how LLMs work with a visual essay

Sam Rose explains how LLMs work with a visual essay

Sam Rose is one of my favorite authors of explorable interactive explanations - here's his previous collection.

Sam joined ngrok in September as a developer educator. Here's his first big visual explainer for them, ostensibly about how prompt caching works but it quickly expands to cover tokenization, embeddings, and the basics of the transformer architecture.

The result is one of the clearest and most accessible introductions to LLM internals I've seen anywhere.

Animation. Starts in tokens mode with an array of 75, 305, 24, 887 - clicking embeddings animates those into a 2D array showing each one to be composed of three floating point numbers.

Tags: ai, explorables, generative-ai, llms, sam-rose, tokenization

kottke.org
19 Dec 18:00 • Jason Kottke

Light Fantastic

Using thousands of photos taken by NASA astronauts Butch Wilmor and Don Pettit earlier this year from the International Space Station, Seán Doran made this incredible timelapse called Light Fantastic. 21,837 images across 18 time-lapse sequences photographed by NASA astro...

Daring Fireball
19 Dec 17:34 • John Gruber

Apple’s 26.2 OS Updates

daringfireball.net/linked/2025/12/19/apples-262-os-updates

Apple released all of its OS 26.2 updates a week ago today. A little unusual for Apple to release OS updates on a Friday, but I think they wanted to get these out before Christmas week. And I don’t think it was rushed — for iOS 26.2 at least, there were two release candidate...

kottke.org
19 Dec 16:48 • Jason Kottke

A report from one of the competitors in a parallel parking championship....

A report from one of the competitors in a parallel parking championship. “You’ve got to get uncomfortably close. Those bumpers are called bumpers for a reason.”

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Daniel Pietzsch
19 Dec 16:24

Yesterday was the last HWC of 2025. It’s been good discussions - as always - but we also collectively worked on each others websites. Mainly in regards to CSS.

The first HWC DUS in 2026 will be on Jan. 22^nd.

kottke.org
19 Dec 16:19 • Jason Kottke

Savory Rice Krispies treats? “Savory chicken fat and fried onions push Rice...

Savory Rice Krispies treats? “Savory chicken fat and fried onions push Rice Krispies Treats into gloriously salty-sweet territory.”

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Daring Fireball
19 Dec 15:48 • John Gruber

Apple Is Adding More Ad Spots to App Store Results

ads.apple.com/app-store/help/ad-placements/0082-search-results#ntf

Apple, on its Apple Ads site: Search is the way most people find and download apps on the App Store, with nearly 65 percent of downloads happening directly after a search. To help give advertisers more opportunities to drive downloads from search results, Apple Ads will ...

kottke.org
19 Dec 15:06 • Jason Kottke

In 2023, seismologists detected a “global hum” originating in Greenland that lasted...

In 2023, seismologists detected a “global hum” originating in Greenland that lasted for 9 days. A rockslide triggered a 200m-high tsunami that sloshed back & forth in a fjord every 90 seconds, slamming into the fjord’s walls “like a beating heart”.

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Radiolab
19 Dec 15:00 • WNYC Studios

The Good Show

radiolab.org/podcast/the-good-show

01:02:31

The standard view of evolution is that living things are shaped by cold-hearted competition. And there is no doubt that today's plants and animals carry the genetic legacy of ancestors who fought fiercely to survive and reproduce. But in this hour that we first broadcast bac...

Simon Willison's Weblog
19 Dec 05:42

Introducing GPT-5.2-Codex

Introducing GPT-5.2-Codex The latest in OpenAI's Codex family of models (not the same thing as their Codex CLI or Codex Cloud coding agent tools). GPT‑5.2-Codex is a version of GPT‑5.2⁠ further optimized for agentic coding in Codex, including improvements on long-horizon wo...

Daring Fireball
19 Dec 04:24 • John Gruber

ByteDance Signs Deal to Divest U.S. TikTok App

reuters.com/business/american-investor-consortium-acquire-tiktok-us-entity-axios-reports-2025-12-18/

David Shepardson, reporting for Reuters: TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, said Thursday it signed binding agreements with three major investors to form a joint venture to operate TikTok’s U.S. app led by American and global investors in a bid to avoid a U.S. government...

Daring Fireball
19 Dec 02:13 • John Gruber

Michael Bierut Told Us What He Really Thinks of ITC Garamond

designobserver.com/i-hate-itc-garamond/

Michael Bierut, “I Hate ITC Garamond”, for Design Observer back in 2004: ITC Garamond was designed in 1975 by Tony Stan for the International Typeface Corporation. Okay, let’s stop right there. I’ll admit it: the single phrase “designed in 1975 by Tony Stan” conjures up ...

Simon Willison's Weblog
19 Dec 01:30

Agent Skills

Agent Skills Anthropic have turned their skills mechanism into an "open standard", which I guess means it lives in an independent agentskills/agentskills GitHub repository now? I wouldn't be surprised to see this end up in the AAIF, recently the new home of the MCP specifica...

Daring Fireball
19 Dec 01:18 • John Gruber

Condensed Serif Typefaces, à la Apple Garamond, Are Back in Vogue

wsj.com/lifestyle/serif-instrument-skinny-font-e22b8054

Katie Deighton, reporting last month for The Wall Street Journal: Henry Modisett wanted his employer to stand out. Competitors of the artificial-intelligence firm Perplexity were embracing their science-fiction roots with futuristic branding that felt cold to him. So Mod...

Accidental Tech Podcast
19 Dec 00:37

670: Institutionally Inescapable

01:39:56

Pre-show: Marco joins team snow tires i3: 155/70R19 XC90: 275/40R21 Molex F-150 Lightning’s demise 🗣️ Remember, ATP gift memberships are a thing! 🗣️ New ATP Members Special: ATP Movie Club: WarGames WarGames Follow-up: Some impromptu spoiler-free follow-up about...

Simon Willison's Weblog
19 Dec 00:27

Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work

In all of the debates about the value of AI-assistance in software development there's one depressing anecdote that I keep on seeing: the junior engineer, empowered by some class of LLM tool, who deposits giant, untested PRs on their coworkers - or open source maintainers - ...