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In a special edition of The Rewatchables, Bill Simmons is joined by Sean Fennessey and Chris Ryan to reveal his 50 most rewatchable movies of the 21st century. Producers: Craig Horlbeck, Chia Hao Tat, Eduardo Ocampo, and Chris Wohlers Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Some follow-up on the looks-like-AI-slop “painting” Tim Cook posted on Twitter/X on Christmas Eve to promote the Pluribus season finale. Slashdot contacted the credited artist, Keith Thomson, and quoted this interaction with him: Slashdot: I just wanted to confirm that t...

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shot-scraper 1.9 New release of my shot-scraper CLI tool for taking screenshots and scraping websites with JavaScript from the terminal. The shot-scraper har command has a new -x/--extract option which extracts all of the resources loaded by the page out to a set of files....

Shel Silverstein’s Homework Machine was one of my kids’ favorite poems of his when they were little. First published in 1981, the short poem turned out to be rather prescient about AI, especially the earlier LLMs, which couldn’t math their way out of a wet paper bag.

Your homework comes out, quick and clean as can be.
Here it is— ‘nine plus four?’ and the answer is ‘three.’
Three?
Oh me …
I guess it’s not as perfect
As I thought it would be.

(via @brooksrocco)

Tags: artificial intelligence · poetry · Shel Silverstein

But once we got that and got this aviation grade testing in place, the number of bugs just dropped to a trickle. Now we still do have bugs but the aviation grade testing allows us to move fast, which is important because in this business you either move fast or you're disru...

The hard part of computer programming isn't expressing what we want the machine to do in code. The hard part is turning human thinking -- with all its wooliness and ambiguity and contradictions -- into computational thinking that is logically precise and unambiguous, and th...

Copyright Release for Contributions To SQLite D. Richard Hipp called me out for spreading misinformation on Hacker News that SQLite refuses outside contributions: No, Simon, we don't "refuse". We are just very selective and there is a lot of paperwork involved to confirm th...

Conservatives are trying to roll the Constitution back to the pre-Civil War version. “It will be a society of the dominators and the dominated. But it will not be a democracy worthy of the name.”

One of America’s Most Successful Experiments Is Coming to a Shuddering Halt. “‘It’s not the same. Why am I here? I question that to myself.’ Amid an astonishing wave of anti-Indian animus, it’s a question many Indian Americans are asking.”

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Ultracold atoms observed climbing a quantum staircase. (Relatable: the upstairs of my house is warmer than the ground floor too.)

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I pushed a key change to the Underscore music player over the weekend. Members can now click on any song in their collection to play it (previously there was only a randomize button). I added this because I often wanted to listen to a particular song/album/playlist, genre,...

Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life. “A thick desire is one that changes you in the process of pursuing it. A thin desire is one that doesn’t.”

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The Internet Archive has a playable version of the NY Times Crossword Puzzle app from 1992. It ran on Windows 3.1 and included a few hundred puzzles. (Click on Game/Open to select a puzzle.)

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I love these photos of Rama Duwaji by Szilveszter Mako — a perfect combination of photographer and subject. Duwaji is an artist, illustrator, New Yorker, and second-generation Syrian-American. She is also married to Zohran Mamdani, who is the mayor-elect of NYC. Tags: art · fashion · photography · Rama Duwaji · Szilveszter Mako · Zohran Mamdani 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Good morning! Just wanted to let you all know that Rian Johnson subtly rickrolled us with a scene in Wake Up Dead Man.

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Jevons paradox is coming to knowledge work. By making it far cheaper to take on any type of task that we can possibly imagine, we’re ultimately going to be doing far more. The vast majority of AI tokens in the future will be used on things we don't even do today as workers: they will be used on the software projects that wouldn't have been started, the contracts that wouldn't have been reviewed, the medical research that wouldn't have been discovered, and the marketing campaign that wouldn't have been launched otherwise.

— Aaron Levie, Jevons Paradox for Knowledge Work

Tags: ai-ethics, careers, ai, llms, generative-ai, jevons-paradox

At various points, I felt like this movie might ride a more surreal, illusionary wave. But that never happened. And this is why I felt there are some shortcomings in the plot and characters. But otherwise this does a really effective job portraying the terror he faces. It's a bit like Funny Games. Not as drastic, though. I liked how this all played out in the same place throughout the movie. I'm still not quite sure what the movie wants to say. But that's ok, and might be intentional anyway.

simonw/actions-latest

Today in extremely niche projects, I got fed up of Claude Code creating GitHub Actions workflows for me that used stale actions: actions/setup-python@v4 when the latest is actions/setup-python@v6 for example.

I couldn't find a good single place listing those latest versions, so I had Claude Code for web (via my phone, I'm out on errands) build a Git scraper to publish those versions in one place:

https://simonw.github.io/actions-latest/versions.txt

Tell your coding agent of choice to fetch that any time it wants to write a new GitHub Actions workflows.

(I may well bake this into a Skill.)

Here's the first and second transcript I used to build this, shared using my claude-code-transcripts tool (which just gained a search feature.)

Tags: github, ai, github-actions, git-scraping, generative-ai, llms, coding-agents, claude-code