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When the US government captured Venezuela’s president, Nicolas Maduro, on Saturday, most of the world was shocked. But US officials had for years been gaming out different scenarios, including predicting what would happen if Maduro was ousted. According to one man who took part, each ended in disaster. On today’s episode, we speak to the former Washington Post journalist Douglas Farah, who participated in war games on Venezuela during Donald Trump’s first term, as well as during the Obama and Biden administrations. The Global Story brings clarity to politics, business and foreign policy in a time of connection and disruption. For more episodes, just search 'The Global Story' wherever you get your BBC Podcasts.

Also note that the python visualizer tool has been basically written by vibe-coding. I know more about analog filters -- and that's not saying much -- than I do about python. It started out as my typical "google and do the monkey-see-monkey-do" kind of programming, but then I cut out the middle-man -- me -- and just used Google Antigravity to do the audio sample visualizer.

— Linus Torvalds, Another silly guitar-pedal-related repo

Tags: ai, vibe-coding, linus-torvalds, python, llms, generative-ai

A Software Library with No Code

Provocative experiment from Drew Breunig, who designed a new library for time formatting ("3 hours ago" kind of thing) called "whenwords" that has no code at all, just a carefully written specification, an AGENTS.md and a collection of conformance tests in a YAML file.

Pass that to your coding agent of choice, tell it what language you need and it will write it for you on demand!

This meshes nearly with my recent interest in conformance suites. If you publish good enough language-independent tests it's pretty astonishing how far today's coding agents can take you!

Tags: testing, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, drew-breunig, coding-agents

Elizabeth Lopatto, writing at The Verge, “Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai Are Cowards”: Since X’s users started using Grok to undress women and children using deepfake images, I have been waiting for what I assumed would be inevitable: X getting booted from Apple’s and Google...

Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic (gift link), on the fifth anniversary of the January 6 insurrection and the first year of the second Trump presidency:

We have been watching indecency triumph in the public sphere on and off for more than 10 years now, since the moment Trump insulted John McCain’s war record. For reasons that are quite possibly too unbearable to contemplate, a large group of American voters was not repulsed by such slander — they were actually aroused by it — and our politics have not been the same. Much has been said, including by me, about Trump’s narcissism, his autocratic inclinations, his disconnection from reality, but not nearly enough has been said about his fundamental indecency, the characteristic that undergirds everything he says and does.

Link: theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/02/trump-indecency-jan-6…

The Australian 'kindness influencer' who raised nearly two million dollars to help an elderly US veteran. Samuel Weidenhofer flew thousands of miles to find Ed Bambas after being told he needed help. Ed, who's 88, was still working in a shop because he couldn't afford to re...

New from Fly.io today: Sprites.dev. Here's their blog post and YouTube demo. It's an interesting new product that's quite difficult to explain - Fly call it "Stateful sandbox environments with checkpoint & restore" but I see it as hitting two of my current favorite probl...

The main feed of this site now automatically includes posts from my Photo Journal and Dan’s Polaroids.

This way, I do not have to manually link those here, and one can follow all my posts with a single feed. If you see a bunch of new entries, you now know it’s because I messed with my feed.

words.zip is “an infinite collaborative word search where anyone can find and submit words — no account required.”

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

There’s a shark called the cookiecutter shark because it leaves bite marks the shape of “neat, circular holes resembling the cut of a cookie cutter”.

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Burn Harry Burn: Reckoning With My Harry Potter Fandom as a Trans Person. “I dug a fire pit in my backyard and burned my complete set of hardcover Harry Potters.”

A soaring US vs a stagnant EU? “Europeans benefit from more leisure time than Americans, higher life expectancy & lower inequality levels, all w/ comparable productivity rates. However one looks at it, this is a considerably better economic performance.”

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Alexandra Petri: I Tried to Be the Government. It Did Not Go Well. “I have just driven six and a half hours to Ohio in order to forecast my own weather. From a hot-air balloon.” She also inspects milk & does lawn work on National Park land.

What You’re Watching Isn’t What You’re Really Watching. “You think you’re watching an innocent woman being shot and killed in cold blood by the federal government, but what you’re really watching is the death of the United States of America.”