Nancy Friedman: 52 Things I Learned in 2025. Incl. “Seventy-one percent of people in Iceland are Costco members” and “In Sweden, the largest size of Hellmann’s mayonnaise — 600 grams — is called “American size”.
Kent Hendricks: 52 Things I Learned in 2025. Incl. “Birders in the United States spend $107 billion per year, including $93B on binoculars, feeders, cameras, and other equipment; and $14B on travel. That’s more than the GDP of New Hampshire.”
A trip to the forest. Cinema. Folkerdey. And the usual day-to-day. (30 photos)
Jason Pargin is — well, to my tastes — a master of the TikTok video format. This one is so good, and ends with a mic-drop closing line.
mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-in-charge-at-this-hertz-location-and-buddy-youre-not-getting-a-car-today
Emily Delaney, at McSweeney’s:
Okay, now you’re getting upset. You’re getting upset despite the fact that we have strict rules against getting upset at this Hertz location. But tell me, honestly, when you reserved a rental car through Hertz, you thought… what? That we were going to set aside a special little car just for you? Seriously? Oh my god.
(Via Kottke.)
Link: mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-in-charge-at-this-hertz-location…
[...] The puzzle is still there. What’s gone is the labor. I never enjoyed hitting keys, writing minimal repro cases with little insight, digging through debug logs, or trying to decipher some obscure AWS IAM permission error. That work wasn’t the puzzle for me. It was just friction, laborious and frustrating. The thinking remains; the hitting of the keys and the frustrating is what’s been removed.
Tags: ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, armin-ronacher, ai, llms
nytimes.com/2025/12/26/travel/airpods-live-translation-japan.html
A wildlife photographer “discovered thousands of dinosaur footprints preserved in the vertical face of a mountainside” in the Italian Alps dating back 200M years. “This is now really one of the most important places for Triassic dinosaur footprints.”
npr.org/2025/12/08/nx-s1-5631826/iceblock-app-lawsuit-trump-bondi?ref=platformer.news
Oh this is devilish…a game where you have make to 45 groups of 45 items each by matching two at a time. Must take hours? (Where’s the multiplayer option when you need it?)
From Lit Hub, the best audiobooks of 2025. (It’s not new, but I just started listening to Milkman by Anna Burns and it’s really good so far.)
