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Today I learned that the opening theme song for the original Iron Chef TV program was adapted from a song composed by Hans Zimmer, who has done scores for films like Interstellar, Dune, Blade Runner: 2049, Inception, and Dunkirk. Perhaps even weirder, the name of the theme song is “Show Me Your Firetruck”. (The song is from Zimmer’s score for the movie Backdraft.)

Tags: Hans Zimmer · Iron Chef · music · TV · video

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Vote for the 2025 Tiny Awards Site of the Year! This looks like a fantastic group of nominees that celebrate “the best of the small, poetic, creative, handmade web”.

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This website is for humans. “I write the content on this website for people, not robots. I’m sharing my opinions and experiences so that you might identify with them and learn from them.”

Reddit will block the Internet Archive. “The company says that AI companies have scraped data from the Wayback Machine, so it’s going to limit what the Wayback Machine can access.” AI scraping will kill the open web — everyone’s shutting the gates.

From opera singers to strange noises emitting from air conditioners, listeners share stories about their unusual neighbors.  Plus:  We want to hear stories about your commute. Are there people that you see on the train platform everyday, but still remain a stranger...

I think there's been a lot of decisions over time that proved pretty consequential, but we made them very quickly as we have to. [...]

[On pricing] I had this kind of panic attack because we really needed to launch subscriptions because at the time we were taking the product down all the time. [...]

So what I did do is ship a Google Form to Discord with the four questions you're supposed to ask on how to price something.

But we got with the $20. We were debating something slightly higher at the time. I often wonder what would have happened because so many other companies ended up copying the $20 price point, so did we erase a bunch of market cap by pricing it this way?

— Nick Turley, Head of ChatGPT, interviewed by Lenny Rachitsky

Tags: chatgpt, discord, generative-ai, openai, llm-pricing, ai, llms

The Ringer’s Bill Simmons and Brian Koppelman record the first podcast without penalties, substitutions, or time limit as they revisit Norman Jewison’s 1975 classic ‘Rollerball’ starring James Caan, John Houseman, and John Beck.

Producers: Craig Horlbeck and Ronak Nair

Free eBooks library. It’s on Prime.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Demetri Sevastopulo and Michael Acton, reporting for the Financial Times: Nvidia and AMD have agreed to give the US government 15 per cent of the revenues from chip sales in China, as part of an unusual arrangement with the Trump administration to obtain export licences ...

The team at Tuk South visited one of the tallest sand dunes in Chile and did the obvious: threw a tire down it and followed it with a drone to see how long it would roll. The answer: almost three minutes. Take a break from whatever shit you might be dealing with at the moment, set your troubles aside, and watch this simple story of tenacity and gravity.

And yes, they went to retrieve the tire after it stopped: “Fear not. We collected the tyre. Leave only tuk tuk tyre tracks, take only memories.”

(I would like to see a Nolan cut of this, where it’s ambiguous if the tire stops at the end or not, like Cobb’s totem at the end of Inception.)

Tags: this is a metaphor for something · video

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Forget everything you think you know about decaf.

Nine single origins. Six signature blends. Four Mizudashi cold brews. All micro-lot and top-rated coffees shipped to you within 24 hours of roasting. No shortcuts. No crash. This is coffee at its most refined, just without the caffeine.

20% off for DF readers with code “DF” at dekaf.com.

We’re betting you’ll never look at decaf the same way again. But that’s kind of the point.

Link: dekaf.com/df

Welcome to the Era of Big Stupid in America. “When you make smart and ambitious young people feel unwelcome in America and give them no indication that they’ll have a job in this country at all…they may eventually decide not to come here.”

I shipped LLM 0.27 today, adding support for the new GPT-5 family of models from OpenAI plus a flurry of improvements to the tool calling features introduced in LLM 0.26. Here are the annotated release notes. GPT-5 New models: gpt-5, gpt-5-mini and gpt-5-nano. #1229 I w...

Amrith Ramkumar and Robbie Whelan, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link): Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices have agreed to give the Trump administration a portion of the sales from their artificial-intelligence chips to China, unusual agreements that deepen t...

I Spent 6 Years Building a Ridiculous Wooden Pixel Display. “I built the world’s most impractical 1000-pixel display and anyone in the world can draw on it.”

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The president of the United States, on his blog three days ago:

The CEO of INTEL is highly CONFLICTED and must resign, immediately. There is no other solution to this problem. Thank you for your attention to this problem!

The president of the United States, on his blog today:

I met with Mr. Lip-Bu Tan, of Intel, along with Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, and Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent. The meeting was a very interesting one. His success and rise is an amazing story. Mr. Tan and my Cabinet members are going to spend time together, and bring suggestions to me during the next week. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Sane, steady, predictable leadership.

Link: truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114987288040725570

CNBC:

President Donald Trump on Monday delayed high U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods from snapping back into place for another 90 days, a White House official told CNBC. [...]

Monday’s extension is the latest example of how Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs have shifted with little prior notice, a dynamic that has made U.S. trade policy unpredictable for many businesses.

TACO Tuesday, but on a Monday. What a country! America really is great again.

Bonus question for the CNBC copy desk: how much water is the word many carrying in that closing sentence?

Link: cnbc.com/2025/08/11/trump-china-tariffs-deadline-extended…

Just the other day, I learned that Andy Serkis, who played Gollum in the LoTR movies, did an unabridged audiobook version of the original trilogy, as well as one of The Hobbit: The Hobbit (Libro.fm, Amazon, Audible) The Fellowship of the Ring (Libro.fm, Amazon, Audible) T...

Sam Altman, in a long post yesterday on X, following up on OpenAI’s decision last week to make GPT-4o available as a legacy model, at least temporarily: If you have been following the GPT-5 rollout, one thing you might be noticing is how much of an attachment some people...

Scientists have found a “robust” candidate for a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri A, the Sun-like star closest to our solar system. “Not only that, but it orbits the star in its habitable zone, meaning the temperature isn’t too hot or too cold…”

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