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"In the 1960s, she invited an audience to cut off her clothes. As attacks on women’s rights escalate, 'Cut Piece' and other decades-old works of feminist art feel more relevant than ever."

Merriam-Webster: The 1820s and 1830s shared another linguistic fad with today: an appreciation for deliberate misspellings. (Kewl, rite?) This trend, which had humorists adopting now-cringey bumpkin personas with ignorance manifested in uneducated spellings, turned no go...

In today's episode I travel to Revolution Recording in Toronto to sit down with one of the most inventive and influential guitarists in rock history: Alex Lifeson of Rush. In this interview, Alex and I deconstruct the mechanics behind his monumental guitar tone. We explore hi...

In his first teaching document, Pope Leo warns AI risks accelerating war and threatens humanity. It was published at an event in the Vatican attended by AI experts including the co-founder of Anthropic. Also: Muslims begin annual Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca as Saudi city hits 4...

My thanks to WorkOS for once again sponsoring DF last week. The context that actually matters isn’t in your database. It’s in the tools your users live in every day. Multi-stage agents stall the moment they hit a step they can’t see. And every missing integration is a different OAuth flow, a different token lifecycle, weeks of plumbing before the agent reads a single record.

WorkOS Pipes connects your agent to the tools your users live in. Pre-built connectors for GitHub, Slack, Salesforce, Google Drive, and more. Pipes handles OAuth, token refresh, and credential storage. You call the real provider API with a fresh token, every time. Your agent pulls context at every step, for as long as the task runs.

Give your agent context.

Link: workos.com/docs/pipes?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium…

"Clarke Seicher is something much more specific and much rarer: a professional book reader who evaluates literature specifically for screen adaptation."

The Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and South Sudan co-ordinate their response to the Ebola outbreak as the number of suspected cases in the DRC surpasses 900. Also: a pro-Palestinian activist makes serious allegations about her treatment after being detained on board a...

Release: datasette 1.0a30

The big new feature in this alpha is a new customizable "Jump to..." menu, described in detail in The extensible "Jump to" menu in Datasette 1.0a30 on the Datasette blog. You can try it out by hitting / on latest.datasette.io - it looks like this:

The new jump_items_sql() plugin hook allows plugins to add their own items to the set that's searched by the plugin.

Tags: projects, datasette, annotated-release-notes

Release: datasette-agent 0.1a4

Taking advantage of the new makeJumpSections() JavaScript plugin hook added in Datasette 1.0a30, datasette-agent now presents this "Start a new agent chat" interface as part of the Jump to menu, any time you hit /:

You can try this out by signing into agent.datasette.io using your GitHub account.

Tags: datasette, datasette-agent

Release: datasette-fixtures 0.1a0 One of the smaller features in Datasette 1.0a30 is this: New documented datasette.fixtures.populate_fixture_database(conn) helper for creating the fixture database tables used by Datasette's own tests, intended for plugin test suite...

Tool: Mad House — Usborne Creepy Computer Games

Via Hacker News I learned that UK publisher Usborne published free PDFs of their 1980s Computer Books, some of which I remember working through on my Commodore 64 as a child.

These were so great! Beautifully illustrated books with fun projects made up of code you could type into your own machine.

I remember playing "Mad House" typed in from the 1983 book "Creepy Computer Games", so I fed that PDF into Claude and had it build an interactive version of that game in JavaScript and HTML:

Build a vanilla JS artifact that exactly recreates the game Mad House from this book, make sure it's mobile friendly and has a suitable retro aesthetic

Credit the book title and link to https://usborne.com/us/books/computer-and-coding-books

Tags: computer-history, games, tools

The most frustrating failure mode right now is that people submit issues that are not in their own voice. They contain an observed problem somewhere, but it has been thrown into a clanker and the clanker reworded it and made a huge mess of it. Typically, it was prompted so ...

The mayor of the Californian city of Arcadia has agreed to plead guilty to charges she acted as an illegal agent for China. Prosecutors say Eileen Wang was directly co-ordinating with a Chinese official to disseminate news stories downplaying human rights concerns in China, ...

Terrific, poignant profile of Warriors head coach Steve Kerr by Wright Thompson for ESPN: Kerr doesn’t want the Warriors to end up like the New England Patriots, marred by grudges and grievances. He watched Michael Jordan retire, then unretire, then retire, then unretire...