A forthcoming book from long-time technology writer David Pogue: Apple: The First 50 Years. “Deeply researched & lavishly illustrated, Apple: The First 50 Years includes new interviews with 150 key people who made the journey, including Steve Wozniak…”
How Does A Blind Model See The Earth?
How Does A Blind Model See The Earth?
Fun, creative new micro-eval. Split the world into a sampled collection of latitude longitude points and for each one ask a model:
If this location is over land, say 'Land'. If this location is over water, say 'Water'. Do not say anything else.
Author henry goes a step further: for models that expose logprobs they use the relative probability scores of Land or Water to get a confidence level, for other models they prompt four times at temperature 1 to get a score.
And then.. they plot those probabilities on a chart! Here's Gemini 2.5 Flash (one of the better results):
This reminds me of my pelican riding a bicycle benchmark in that it gives you an instant visual representation that's very easy to compare between different models.
Via @natolambert
Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, evals
Thread Meeting
A 90-minute video of making a batch of woodblock prints “from blank...
A 90-minute video of making a batch of woodblock prints “from blank paper to finished print” from the printer’s POV. Relaxing & ASMR-adjacent.
“‘This Show Felt Like It Was Falling Out of Me’. Six female...
“‘This Show Felt Like It Was Falling Out of Me’. Six female artists on how they prepared for their major solo debuts this fall.”
I love that The Kid Should See This has dozens of videos...
I love that The Kid Should See This has dozens of videos about poop, including a recent one about why poop is brown.
simonw/codespaces-llm
simonw/codespaces-llm
GitHub Codespaces provides full development environments in your browser, and is free to use with anyone with a GitHub account. Each environment has a full Linux container and a browser-based UI using VS Code.
I found out today that GitHub Codespaces co...
The Atlas Obscura Podcast
• SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura
America’s Oldest Tofu Shop
Ota Tofu in Portland, Oregon is the oldest tofu shop in the United States. Two brothers opened the shop in 1911 and even today their tofu is still made the old-fashioned way, using a labor-intensive process that is difficult to find (even in Japan!).
Learn more about Ota Tofu: https://www.otapdx.com/
And check out the work of guest Lauren Yoshiko: http://laurenyoshiko.com/
This episode was produced in partnership with Travel Portland.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
At 40, She Discovered She Was One of America’s Best Free Divers....
At 40, She Discovered She Was One of America’s Best Free Divers. Sara Burnett took a free diving intro course and a year later she competed in a world championship for the US team. “Why am I doing an extreme sport at this age?”
Cassette 1.0
New app from Devin Davies, developer of the ADA-winning Crouton:
Cassette is an app for iPhone and iPad that helps you enjoy your
home videos like the good old days. With a retro interface
Cassette auto plays through videos from your devices’ Photo
Library. Mirror your d...
Perplexity Made an Offer to Buy TikTok — Well, Half of TikTok — Back in January
apnews.com/article/tiktok-bytedance-trump-perplexity-87988733973760927bb5681f7de9b9af
Haleluya Hadero and Christopher Rugaber, reporting for the AP back on January 26, six days into Trump 2.0:
Perplexity AI has presented a new proposal to TikTok’s parent company that would allow the U.S. government to own up to 50% of a new entity that merges Perplexity with TikTok’s U.S. business, according to a person familiar with the matter. The proposal, submitted last week, is a revision of a prior plan the artificial intelligence startup had presented to TikTok’s parent ByteDance on Jan. 18, a day before the law that bans TikTok went into effect.
They should have added a similar provision to their Chrome offer sheet today. Give 25% to the US Treasury and another 25% to Trump’s future presidential “library”.
If you’re still back-to-school (or racing-the-tariffs) shopping, these M4 Macbook Airs are...
If you’re still back-to-school (or racing-the-tariffs) shopping, these M4 Macbook Airs are somehow still on sale. “$800 is an absurdly low price for so much computer.”
Car and plane travel from Canada to the US has dropped sharply...
Car and plane travel from Canada to the US has dropped sharply year-over-year, with a 37% drop in July car trips and 26% drop in air travel. Not sure why they call it a “boycott” — the Trump regime’s outright hostility to outsiders is the cause here.
Perplexity Jumps the Shark, Makes Clownish $34.5 Billion Stunt Offer to Buy Chrome From Google
wsj.com/tech/perplexity-ai-google-chrome-offer-5ddb7a22?st=r5gGet&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Katherine Blunt, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (main link is a paywall-puncturing gift link; also on News+):
Artificial-intelligence startup Perplexity on Tuesday offered to
purchase Google’s Chrome browser for $34.5 billion as it works to
challenge the tech gian...
The Only Time Prince & Miles Davis Jammed Together Onstage: Watch the...
The Lego Game Boy
Lego is coming out with a near 1:1 replica of Nintendo’s iconic Game Boy handheld video game system. It’s not playable, but you can insert & remove Lego game cartridges and use different lenticular screens to pretend. Here’s a short video showing how it “works”:
You can preorder the kit from Amazon; the price is $60, which is only $30 less than the actual Game Boy cost when it was released.1
I still have my original Game Boy from 1989 — it’s sitting on a table near where I’m typing this. I played so so much Tetris on that thing… (via moss & fog)
Although $90 in 1989 is $235 in 2025 dollars, which is right around what the Playdate handheld costs.↩
Tags: Game Boy · Lego · Nintendo · remix · video games
💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context
Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context
Gemini and OpenAI both have million token models, so it's good to see Anthropic catching up. This is 5x the previous 200,000 context length limit of the various Claude Sonnet models.
Anthropic have previously made 1 million t...
A Man Read 3,599 Books Over 60 Years, and Now His Family...
A Man Read 3,599 Books Over 60 Years, and Now His Family Has Shared the Entire List Online. That’s roughly a book a week. The list runs over 100 pages and he checked most of the books out of the local library.
The Boston Globe’s Prescient 2016 View of Our Trumpist Future
On April 9, 2016, several months before Donald Trump was elected President for the first time, the Boston Globe ran an editorial entitled “The GOP must stop Donald Trump”.
Donald J. Trump’s vision for the future of our nation is as deeply disturbing as it is profoundly un-...
Wplace Is Exploding Online Amid a New Era of Youth Protest. “Some...
Wplace Is Exploding Online Amid a New Era of Youth Protest. “Some pixels started movements. At one point there was just a single wooden ship flying a Brazilian flag off Portugal. Soon, a fleet appeared, a tongue-in-cheek invasion.”