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French artist Mantra paints photo-realistic murals that look like massive butterfly specimen display frames. Fantastic.

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Tressie McMillan Cottom, one of America’s leading public intellectuals, posted this to Bluesky yesterday: I’m going to be very honest and clear. I am fully preparing myself to die under this new American regime. That’s not to say that it’s the end of the world. It isn’t. ...

CBS News:

Paramount will settle President Trump’s lawsuit over a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris for $16 million, the company announced late Tuesday.

CBS News’ parent company worked with a mediator to resolve the lawsuit. Under the agreement, $16 million will be allocated to Mr. Trump’s future presidential library and the plaintiffs’ fees and costs. Neither Mr. Trump nor his co-plantiff, Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson, will be directly paid as part of the settlement.

The settlement did not include an apology.

It could have been a lot worse, but this is, ultimately, bribery.

Link: cbsnews.com/news/paramount-trump-60-minutes-lawsuit…

Something I've realized about LLM tool use is that it means that if you can reduce a problem to something that can be solved by an LLM in a sandbox using tools in a loop, you can brute force that problem.

The challenge then becomes identifying those problems and figuring out how to configure a sandbox for them, what tools to provide and how to define the success criteria for the model.

That still takes significant skill and experience, but it's at a higher level than chewing through that problem using trial and error by hand.

My x86 assembly experiment with Claude Code was the thing that made this click for me.

Tags: llm-tool-use, ai-assisted-programming, claude-code, sandboxing, generative-ai, ai, llms

I Will Do Anything to End Homelessness Except Build More Homes. “Look, if you give people homes, the next thing you know, they’re going to start to get their lives together and then get jobs and start organizing.”

Diogo Jota, Liverpool and Portugal footballer, dies aged 28 in car crash. This is sad news. Jota was a favorite player of mine; he brought a positive energy to the pitch.

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Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw.

Tags: careers, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, ai, llms

If you were to visit a cigar factory in Cuba, you’d hear something unexpected: the sound of the daily news report, or maybe a poem or a novel, being read aloud. The cigar “reader” is a tradition held by just a handful of people, and it came from a fundamentally revolutionary idea. Eliot Stein, author of Custodians of Wonder, joins Dylan to explain.

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Kilmar Ábrego García says he was tortured in El Salvadorian prison. Hundreds of people are still there, sent there from the US by the Trump administration to be tortured, all sanctioned by the Supreme Court and Congress.

If you want to sit in this chair, you have to be able to solve a Rubik’s Cube because the chair is a Rubik’s Cube. (Ok, technically it looks like you only need to place the four leg corners of the chair correctly, but we’re not going to pick nits on this because it is fun and loooorrrrrrrd do we all need some fun right now.) Oh and I like how the unsolved chair in the last photo looks like it’s striking a break dancing pose. Fresh! (via moss & fog) Tags: design · furniture · games · Rubik’s Cube 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

American science to soon face its largest brain drain in history. “Over the first half of 2025, the US has cut science as never before. This disaster for American science may be a gift to the rest of the world.”

Architect David Romero has built several digital models of Frank Lloyd Wright’s unrealized buildings, including a mile-high Chicago skyscraper with 528 floors.

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8 Forgotten Figures From the American Revolution, including Margaret Corbin, Joseph Brant, James Armistead Lafayette, and Joseph Plumb Martin.

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On global homogenetic culture. “GHC is Trader Joe’s bags outside of the States. GHC is people en masse wearing the same exact outfits on accident in public. GHC is adult dorms. GHC is a Louis Vuitton in every city. GHC is Shake Shake going global.”

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I read this piece by Jessica Winter a few months ago and it’s come in handy a few times so I thought I’d share. If you want something from someone, adopting the pose of the Kindly Brontosaurus might go a lot further than throwing a fit. A practitioner, nay, an artist, of...

Before he died, David Lynch talked to Natasha Lyonne about AI. “Natasha, this is a pencil. Everyone has access to a pencil, and likewise, everyone with a phone will be using AI, if they aren’t already. It’s how you use the pencil. You see?”

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors: Well, would you look at that? The A18 Pro is 46% faster than the M1 in single-core tasks, and almost identical to the M1 on multi-core and graphics tasks. If you wanted to get rid of the M1 MacBook Air but have decided that even today,...

On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out ?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

— Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 1864

Tags: charles-babbage

That Dropped Call With Customer Service? It Was on Purpose. “Not hiring enough agents leads to longer wait times, which in turn weeds out a percentage of callers. Choosing cheaper telecom carriers [can mean] many of the calls disconnect on their own.” 🤬

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