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From Alan Taylor at The Atlantic, whose curatorial eye I’ve always admired, “a grab bag of curious and interesting historical images from the 20th century”, including photos of the world’s largest banjo, diving archery, death-defying photography, and underwater alligator racing. Tags: Alan Taylor · photography 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Something that has become undeniable this month is that the best available open weight models now come from the Chinese AI labs. I continue to have a lot of love for Mistral, Gemma and Llama but my feeling is that Qwen, Moonshot and Z.ai have positively smoked them over the ...

A perfect game in Tetris is defined as achieving the max score (999,999) in the least amount of time possible, meaning you need to score a bunch of Tetrises in a row (and nothing else) at the highest possible starting speed. A few years ago, a player used a tool to develop...

Zim&Zou’s ’80s-Inspired Paper Cassettes and Boombox Radiate with Color. Strange, now I have a hankering to watch an entire papercraft version of Do The Right Thing.

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Qwen3-30B-A3B-Thinking-2507 Yesterday was Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507. Qwen are clearly committed to their new split between reasoning and non-reasoning models (a reversal from Qwen 3 in April), because today they released the new reasoning partner to yesterday's model: Qwen...

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:

YouTube on Tuesday announced it’s beginning to roll out age-estimation technology in the U.S. to identify teen users in order to provide a more age-appropriate experience. The company says it will use a variety of signals to determine the users’ possible age, regardless of what the user entered as their birthday when they signed up for an account.

Well-intentioned though I think this is, it still feels more than a little dystopian.

Link: techcrunch.com/2025/07/29/youtube-rolls-out-age…

Note to self: spend some time checking out Tapestry, Iconfactory’s universal feed/social reader app. (Old heads will remember FriendFeed…)

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Boulders Beach in Simon’s Town in South Africa is a destination where sunbathers, tourists, and penguins share both the beach and parts of the town. 
 

All this week, the Atlas Obscura Podcast is hitting the sand, and taking a tour of the world’s most unusual beaches.

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Substack sent a push alert promoting a Nazi blog. “Substack is primarily funded by Andreessen Horowitz, a firm whose founders have pushed extreme far right rhetoric.” There was *an actual swastika* in the push alert!

Trailer for Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse, a documentary film on the comic artist who created the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus.

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Archaeologists Discover a 2,400-Year-Old Skeleton Mosaic That Urges People to “Be Cheerful and Live Your Life”. This skeleton is a whole vibe.

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Reuters:

Sony released the first game in the Horizon series, Horizon: Zero Dawn, on its PlayStation 4 in 2017. The games follow a red-headed woman named Aloy as she navigates a post-apocalyptic world populated by human tribes and robotic animals.

Sony said in its complaint that it declined an offer from Tencent to collaborate on a new Horizon game last year. Tencent later announced Light of Motiram, which Sony said features identical gameplay, story themes and artistic elements to Horizon as well as many other similarities.

Sony said that video game journalists have characterized Light of Motiram as a “knock-off” of Horizon, including one who called the game Horizon Zero Originality.

Tencent is the Chinese software giant behind, amongst many other things, WeChat, China’s “everything app”.

Link: reuters.com/legal/litigation/sony-sues-tencent-allegedly…

I’m Giving My Kids a ’90s Summer — the 1890s. “Just like the 1890s and the 2020s, they’ll play with the unvaccinated kids down the street and drink raw milk until dark.” Dangerous factory jobs too!

Back in March I linked to and recommended Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, a cogent collection of 20 short essays. I was never a big e-book reader, both because I love printed books so much and because I welcome any respite from reading on screens of any sort. But if e-books are your thing, note that Apple Books currently has it for just $2. Amazon’s Kindle edition is also $2 — and the paperback edition, which is the lovely little thing I own, is an oddly but low-priced $7.31.

Link: books.apple.com/us/book/on-tyranny/id1195458571

OpenAI: Introducing study mode New ChatGPT feature, which can be triggered by typing /study or by visiting chatgpt.com/studymode. OpenAI say: Under the hood, study mode is powered by custom system instructions we’ve written in collaboration with teachers, scientists, and pe...

I bought a 15” Apple Macbook Air M4 a few months ago and I love it. Of course, I loved my previous computer (an M1 Macbook Air) too, but bumping up the screen size and quality has been a game-changer for me. More speed and memory is great too for running virtual machines a...

Qwen/Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 New model update from Qwen, improving on their previous Qwen3-30B-A3B release from late April. In their tweet they said: Smarter, faster, and local deployment-friendly. ✨ Key Enhancements: ✅ Enhanced reasoning, coding, and math skills ✅ Broa...

Last week, I linked to a video mashup by Bill McClintock of several metal songs, saying “although the video was posted a day or two before Ozzy Osbourne died, it feels like a fitting tribute to one of metal’s true pioneers”. This morning, YouTube helpfully informed me that McClintock had since done a proper tribute in the form of a compilation of every Ozzy/Sabbath-related video mashup he’d ever done.

Rest in darkness, Ozzy. 🤘

Tags: Bill McClintock · music · Ozzy Osbourne · remix · video

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Auto? Polo! Auto? Polo! Auto? Polo! Photographs of Auto Polo (ca. 1912).

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Our plan is to build direct traffic to our site. and newsletters just one kind of direct traffic in the end. I don’t intend to ever rely on someone else’s distribution ever again ;

— Nilay Patel, on The Verge's new newsletter strategy

Tags: nilay-patel, journalism, email