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When horrible people make bad art, the reviews are fun to read. Melania doc review: “Trump film is a gilded trash remake of The Zone of Interest” and “it’s one of those rare, unicorn films that doesn’t have a single redeeming quality”.

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“The end of Temporary Protected Status has Holocaust survivors offering to hide Haitian staffers, according to the CEO of a senior-living center in Florida.” The CEO of the center: “That reminds me of Anne Frank.”

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Illustrator Chris Piascik has made several of his “Fuck ICE”/”No Kings” pieces available for free, high-res download. Print them out and use them for protest signs.

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On his Filatelia Grafica Instagram account, graphic designer Diego Bucciero shares some of his favorite postage stamps, with an emphasis on “iconography, form, typography and branding”. (via it’s nice that) Tags: design · Diego Bucciero · stamps 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

In September 1999, just weeks into Vladimir Putin’s first premiership, four bombs blew up four apartment buildings, over a period of twelve days, killing hundreds and plunging the entire nation into fear. The government blamed Chechen militants, a conclusion corroborated by...

A second woman has alleged she was sent to Britain by the late sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein, to have sex with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor who has always denied wrongdoing. Also: there are explosions in Iran amid heightened tensions; a US federal judge allows ICE to continue ...

Nathan Lambert and Sebastian Raschka are machine learning researchers, engineers, and educators. Nathan is the post-training lead at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) and the author of The RLHF Book. Sebastian Raschka is the author of Build a Large Language Model (From Scratc...

Originally in 2019, GPT-2 was trained by OpenAI on 32 TPU v3 chips for 168 hours (7 days), with $8/hour/TPUv3 back then, for a total cost of approx. $43K. It achieves 0.256525 CORE score, which is an ensemble metric introduced in the DCLM paper over 22 evaluations like ARC/MMLU/etc.

As of the last few improvements merged into nanochat (many of them originating in modded-nanogpt repo), I can now reach a higher CORE score in 3.04 hours (~$73) on a single 8XH100 node. This is a 600X cost reduction over 7 years, i.e. the cost to train GPT-2 is falling approximately 2.5X every year.

— Andrej Karpathy

Tags: andrej-karpathy, gpt-2, generative-ai, ai, llms, openai

I learned two important pieces of news in this post: 1) Frozen OJ from concentrate as a product is being discontinued by major producers. 2) Beverage analysts refer to market share as “share of throat.” And I think that’s just lovely.

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We meet a woman whose near death experience as a teenager inspired her to study why some people are willing to risk their lives for others. Dr Abigail Marsh was rescued by a stranger after a car accident and wanted to understand what drove him to help her. She says altruists...

Next week, Sa. 07.02.2026, I’ll be playing my first gig with Brutal Unrest in Aachen. If you want to know what this might sound like, the last album is on Bandcamp.

Singing the gospel of collective efficacy Lovely piece from Matt Webb about how you can "just do things" to help make your community better for everyone: Similarly we all love when the swifts visit (beautiful birds), so somebody started a group to get swift nest boxes made ...

Getting agents using Beads requires much less prompting, because Beads now has 4 months of “Desire Paths” design, which I’ve talked about before. Beads has evolved a very complex command-line interface, with 100+ subcommands, each with many sub-subcommands, aliases, alternate syntaxes, and other affordances.

The complicated Beads CLI isn’t for humans; it’s for agents. What I did was make their hallucinations real, over and over, by implementing whatever I saw the agents trying to do with Beads, until nearly every guess by an agent is now correct.

— Steve Yegge, Software Survival 3.0

Tags: steve-yegge, coding-agents, generative-ai, ai-agents, ai, llms

Apple Newsroom, yesterday: “Today, Apple is proud to report a remarkable, record-breaking quarter, with revenue of $143.8 billion, up 16 percent from a year ago and well above our expectations,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “iPhone had its best-ever quarter driven by unpr...

The hottest project in AI right now is Clawdbot, renamed to Moltbot, renamed to OpenClaw. It's an open source implementation of the digital personal assistant pattern, built by Peter Steinberger to integrate with the messaging system of your choice. It's two months old, has ...

US President Donald Trump is again threatening military strikes on Iran, saying he has sent a ‘huge armada’ to the Middle East while signalling he is open to negotiations. Meanwhile, Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi has been holding talks in Turkey, where President Re...

This guy built an autonomous flying umbrella (powered by drones) that automagically follows you around in the rain. (A possible counter to a personal raincloud?)

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For his Spurious Correlations project, Tyler Vigen compares data sets that are the very definition of “correlation is not causation”. For instance, the number of Walmart stores worldwide correlates very strongly with the current distance between the Earth & Saturn. Or Google searches for “avocado toast” closely tracks biomass power generated in the Philippines. Tags: infoviz · Tyler Vigen 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →