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Our correspondent Orla Guerin travels alongside Colombia's Jungle Commandos - an elite police force - as they seek to eradicate cocaine production in the Colombian Amazon and Andes. The defence minister told the BBC that they destroy cocaine factories "every forty minutes". ...

Simon Willison:

OpenAI just released a new macOS app for their Codex coding agent. I’ve had a few days of preview access — it’s a solid app that provides a nice UI over the capabilities of the Codex CLI agent and adds some interesting new features, most notably first-class support for Skills, and Automations for running scheduled tasks.

Interesting, for sure. But super-duper interesting? I don’t know.

Link: simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/2/introducing-the-codex-app/

Apple Newsroom:

Xcode 26.3 introduces support for agentic coding, a new way in Xcode for developers to build apps using coding agents such as Anthropic’s Claude Agent and OpenAI’s Codex. With agentic coding, Xcode can work with greater autonomy toward a developer’s goals — from breaking down tasks to making decisions based on the project architecture and using built-in tools.

I don’t know if this is super-duper interesting news, but I think it’s super-duper interesting that Apple saw the need to release this now, not at WWDC in June.

Link: apple.com/newsroom/2026/02/xcode-26-point-3-unlocks-the…

This Github project from Ankur Gupta allows you to “generate beautiful, minimalist map posters for any city in the world”. There are a variety of different themes you can choose from and the resulting images are big enough to print out actual posters (20-inch height maximum). You can install the Python scripts on your computer or use this website (which seems quite slow). Also, I wonder if the height/width minimums can be changed to output bigger posters? Tags: Ankur Gupta · design · maps 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Introducing Deno Sandbox Here's a new hosted sandbox product from the Deno team. It's actually unrelated to Deno itself - this is part of their Deno Deploy SaaS platform. As such, you don't even need to use JavaScript to access it - you can create and execute code in a hoste...

The full trailer for The Devil Wears Prada 2. The pitch perfection of Miranda completely forgetting Andy gives me hope that this will be a worthy sequel.

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Been thinking a lot about this Ted Chiang quote recently: “I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism. And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too.”

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Vibe-coding gone wild. “Stories of family groceries delivered to data centers, and “world burnt bacon day” became memes — and resulted in class-action lawsuits against kitchen appliance manufacturers like Breville, Viking, and Cusinart.”

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A collection of thousands of photographs of NYC restaurants (2002-2008) taken by Noah Kalina. Quite an archive of interior design from that era.

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A couple of weeks ago, AI company Anthropic published the constitution that they use to train their Claude LLM (“under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Deed, meaning it can be freely used by anyone for any purpose without asking for permission”). From the company’s news release: ...

The Case of the Green Covers is a risograph-printed zine that documents the history of the “Green Penguins”, “a series of hundreds of crime novels published with green covers by the UK publisher Penguin in the 1960s”.

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Podcast interview with two photojournalists who have been covering ICE in Minnesota. “It’s a conversation about what they’ve seen, the vital role of photojournalism at this moment, and the personal toll of doing this work.”

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Haven’t watched this 90-minute video yet, but I’ve seen so many recommendations for it that I’m posting it as a to-do list item for myself: You are being misled about renewable energy technology.

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President Zelensky accuses Moscow of using the coldest days of winter to terrorise Ukrainians, as temperatures drop to -20 degrees celsius. Also: French police raid the Paris offices of the social media platform, X. Spain becomes latest country to consider banning social med...

A group of 50 Chilians recently spent several hours powering a human-operated chatbot. Some questions were answered quickly but “when they didn’t know the answer, they walked around the room to see if someone else did”.

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Late last week, Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello led a crowd gathered at the iconic First Avenue music venue in a spirited rendition of the band’s Killing In the Name. The band handled the music while the crowd, in the absence of Rage frontman Zack De La Rocha, sang ...

The Border Patrol Is the Problem. It Always Has Been. “If you are uncomfortable with what the Border Patrol is doing in Minneapolis, you are uncomfortable with the Border Patrol, full stop.”

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I just sent the January edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here. In the newsletter for January:

• LLM predictions for 2026
• Coding agents get even more attention
• Clawdbot/Moltbot/OpenClaw went very viral
• Kakapo breeding season is off to a really strong start
• New options for sandboxes
• Web browsers are the "hello world" of coding agent swarms
• Sam Altman addressed the Jevons paradox for software engineering
• Model releases and miscellaneous extras

Here's a copy of the December newsletter as a preview of what you'll get. Pay $10/month to stay a month ahead of the free copy!

Tags: newsletter

President Trump says India has agreed to stop buying Russian oil as part of a trade deal with the United States. In return, Washington will lower tariffs on Indian goods to 18%. Mr Trump said Delhi has pledged to buy more oil from the US and, potentially, from Venezuela. Als...

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