FeedCity

A French curator infiltrates a Nazi army to save masterpieces from the Jeu De Paume museum. 

Read more in Michelle Young’s new book, The Art Spy: The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

From Smithsonian Magazine, the story of how Reading Rainbow came about, in part as an effort to combat schoolchildren’s summer reading slumps.

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

A collection of photos from the 70s & 80s of kids jumping their bikes, sometimes over other kids. In that first pic, there is no way the two kids at the end of the row didn’t get stomped by that landing.

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Voxtral Mistral released their first audio-input models yesterday: Voxtral Small and Voxtral Mini. These state‑of‑the‑art speech understanding models are available in two sizes—a 24B variant for production-scale applications and a 3B variant for local and edge deployments....

I had no idea Subaru actively courted lesbian car buyers with targeted ad campaigns in the early 90s; here’s a 2016 Planet Money episode about it: When Subaru Came Out.

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

The Pedestrians Who Abetted a Hawk’s Deadly Attack. “The hawk appears to have learned to interpret a traffic signal and take advantage of it, in its quest to hunt. Which is…more impressive than how most humans use a pedestrian crosswalk.”

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

common-pile/caselaw_access_project

Enormous openly licensed (I believe this is almost all public domain) training dataset of US legal cases:

This dataset contains 6.7 million cases from the Caselaw Access Project and Court Listener. The Caselaw Access Project consists of nearly 40 million pages of U.S. federal and state court decisions and judges’ opinions from the last 365 years. In addition, Court Listener adds over 900 thousand cases scraped from 479 courts.

It's distributed as gzipped newline-delimited JSON.

This was gathered as part of the Common Pile and used as part of the training dataset for the Comma family of LLMs.

Via @enricoshippole

Tags: law, ai, generative-ai, llms, training-data

Over at the Atlantic, Alan Taylor has collected a bunch of photos showing just how hard China is pushing on solar energy. As the Trump administration’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” eliminates many clean-energy incentives in the U.S., China continues huge investments in wind an...

Spencer Kimball, reporting for CNBC one week ago: The Defense Department will become the largest shareholder in rare earth miner MP Materials after agreeing to buy $400 million of its preferred stock, the company said Thursday. MP Materials owns the only operational rar...

Fell in a hole, got out. This is an absolutely fascinating entrepreneurial war story by Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine, describing how they went from losing $2.6 million per month in 2022 to being monthly profitable since mid 2024. By the middle of 2022, the readers were compl...

Let Your Kid Climb That Tree. “Your fear that your kid will get hurt is depriving them of something they’ll never get back.” (The bit about “kinematic movers” is really interesting.)

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Bruce Springsteen on Surviving Depression and His Strategy for Living Through the Visitations of the Darkness. “My depression is spewing like an oil spill all over the beautiful turquoise-green gulf of my carefully planned and controlled existence.”

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Jason Snell: If you find yourself walking down the street in the 1980s and you see someone coming who prefers the VIC-20 to the Apple II, cross to the other side of the street. (That said, the VIC-20 really was revolutionary. It was by far the most affordable home comput...

Writing Advice and Literary Wisdom from the Great E.B. White. “A blank sheet of paper holds the greatest excitement there is for me — more promising than a silver cloud, prettier than a little red wagon. It holds all the hope there is, all fears.”

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Jason Schwartzman, actor, songwriter, and musician, talks  about how the soundtrack to 'Rushmore'—his first film—changed his life. I met Jason briefly in 2017, as he was leaving the room where I was supposed to interview the band Phoenix. I was shocked when he stopped on his way out to tell me he loved Song Exploder. Eight years later, I reached out to him to see if he’d want to be a guest on Key Change, and we ended up talking for almost two hours, just on the phone. By the time he came over to record, I felt like I’d met a kindred spirit who’d also been cataloguing his whole life through the songs he’d encountered along the way. The fact that we got to talk about one of my favorite movies, 'Rushmore,' made the experience even more meaningful and thrilling for me.

For more, visit songexploder.net/jason-schwartzman.

A great look at how Baltimore’s investment in an “ecosystem of community–oriented interventions” has drastically reduced violent crime in the city by treating crime as a public health crisis.

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Twenty years! It’s been twenty years since Bloc Party’s debut album Silent Alarm was released. To celebrate, the band stopped by the NPR office’s for a Tiny Desk Concert.

To celebrate, this Tiny Desk set begins with the super catchy and energetic pop anthem “Banquet” from Silent Alarm. The band continues with a couple songs from 2008’s Intimacy: the shimmery, glockenspiel-forward “Signs,” then “Mercury,” where we give a sneak peek of Okereke’s vocal effects rig under the Desk. Bloc Party closes with “Blue,” a sweet song on the slower side of the band’s catalog. It ends quietly, yet powerfully, as Okereke sings, “I fall asleep on your sleeve / with those three words in my dreams.”

Still bangs. (via @unlikelywords.bsky.social)

Tags: Bloc Party · music · Tiny Desk Concerts · video

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

A map of the best places to see the Northern Lights. “Kuril’s analysis culminated in a map highlighting the locations with the best potential to see the northern lights.”

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Shipping WebGPU on Windows in Firefox 141

WebGPU is coming to Mac and Linux soon as well:

Although Firefox 141 enables WebGPU only on Windows, we plan to ship WebGPU on Mac and Linux in the coming months, and finally on Android.

From this article I learned that it's already available in Firefox Nightly:

Note that WebGPU has been available in Firefox Nightly on all platforms other than Android for quite some time.

I tried the most recent Nightly on my Mac and now the Github Issue Generator running locally w/ SmolLM2 & WebGPU demo (previously) works! Firefox stable gives me an error message saying "Error: WebGPU is not supported in your current environment, but it is necessary to run the WebLLM engine."

The Firefox implementation is based on wgpu, an open source Rust WebGPU library.

Via Hacker News

Tags: browsers, firefox, mozilla, rust, webgpu