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Tiled.art: “Discover great tessellation art, understand how it works, and create your own.”

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Anna’s Archive (“the largest truly open library in human history”) is backing up the entirety of Spotify. “We have archived around 86 million songs from Spotify. While this only represents 37% of songs, it represents around 99.6% of listens.”

Bill is joined by Chris Ryan and Craig Horlbeck to read listener submissions for new categories as we gear up for 2026 on The Rewatchables. Producers: Craig Horlbeck, Chia Hao Tat, and Eduardo Ocampo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Pickle CEO Daniel Park posted on Twitter/X, attempting to rebut the analysis from Matthew Dowd I linked to over the weekend pointing out the ways that Pickle’s AR glasses, for which they’re accepting $800 pre-orders, look like a scam. Park’s rebuttal, in my opinion, boils do...

This essay from UI critic Nikita Prokopov is just devastatingly good. If you’ve looked at MacOS 26 Tahoe, you’re surely appalled by the new UI guideline that recommends putting icons next to every single menu item. Prokopov argues — with copious screenshot illustrations ever...

Starting the new year with more clarity around your money is easier with Copilot Money — now available across iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Web.

Copilot Money brings all your spending, budgets, investments, and net worth into one organized dashboard, with intelligent categorization and insights that help you stay on track without spreadsheets or app-hopping. Designed to feel calm and intuitive, Copilot makes it easy to understand your finances across all your devices.

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Link: copilot.money/?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium…

When Two Filmmakers Make the Same Movie — and One of Them Is Werner Herzog. A comparison of the two 2022 documentaries about volcanologists Maurice & Katia Krafft, Herzog’s The Fire Within, and Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love.

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From Book Riot’s Zero to Well-Read podcast: How to Read More (and Better) in 2026. “They dig into when to push through, when to quit a book, how to choose books outside the algorithm, and how small shifts in attention can enrich your reading life.”

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Until the late 19th century, Japan’s relations with Europe were relatively limited. So when a pair of letters written by a Japanese man in the early 1600s were discovered in Venice, a mystery was born. Who was this man, why was he in Italy, and why was there little previous evidence that he’d been there? In part one of a new series, Evan Puschak sets the geopolitical stage and introduces us to the samurai who travelled to Rome to treat with the Pope.

Tags: Evan Puschak · Japan · religion · video

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A Year of Clean Energy Milestones. “Wind, solar, and electric vehicles made huge strides globally in 2025. For the first time, wind & solar supplied more power than coal worldwide, while plug-in vehicles accounted for more than 1/4 of new car sales.”

It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons

Devastating critique of the new menu icons in macOS Tahoe by Nikita Prokopov, who starts by quoting the 1992 Apple HIG rule to not "overload the user with complex icons" and then provides comprehensive evidence of Tahoe doing exactly that.

In my opinion, Apple took on an impossible task: to add an icon to every menu item. There are just not enough good metaphors to do something like that.

But even if there were, the premise itself is questionable: if everything has an icon, it doesn’t mean users will find what they are looking for faster.

And even if the premise was solid, I still wish I could say: they did the best they could, given the goal. But that’s not true either: they did a poor job consistently applying the metaphors and designing the icons themselves.

Via Hacker News

Tags: apple, design, macos, usability

A number of studies show that various vaccines (shingles, RSV, flu) are associated with “off-target” benefits like reduced cardiovascular risk, lower rates of dementia, and lower Alzheimer’s risk for older people.

Why I Left Substack. A combination of “a good deal of gross misogyny, transphobia, and hard-right stuff” plus Substack “trying to deny this responsibility [as a publisher], to pretend that their decisions weren’t decisions at all”.

Oxide and Friends Predictions 2026, today at 4pm PT

I joined the Oxide and Friends podcast last year to predict the next 1, 3 and 6 years(!) of AI developments. With hindsight I did very badly, but they're inviting me back again anyway to have another go.

We will be recording live today at 4pm Pacific on their Discord - you can join that here, and the podcast version will go out shortly afterwards.

I'll be recording at their office in Emeryville and then heading to the Crucible to learn how to make neon signs.

Via Bryan Cantrill

Tags: podcasts, ai, llms, oxide

In 2024, schoolteacher Ginny Robinson won the Best in Show award at a quilting convention for her quilt called What We Will Use as Weapons: A List of School Supplies. This is a protest quilt. It was made by an artist whose day job puts her on the front lines of one of th...

M. Gessen on the new world order the Trump regime seems eager to bring about. “If Trump can take Venezuela and Putin can take Ukraine, surely President Xi Jinping of China can take Taiwan.”

The Media Refuses to Call Trump’s Venezuela Attack an Act of War. “Overwhelmingly, the US media and its purportedly straight reporters have adopted wholesale the White House’s pseudo-legalistic, limited framework of an ‘operation’ to ‘arrest’ Maduro.”

We Are the Bad Guys. “What do we call it when a stronger person decides to rob a weaker person because he can? It is just gangsterism. We are the most dangerous gangsters in the world today.”