Tim Berners-Lee: “I gave the world wide web away for free because...
Tim Berners-Lee: “I gave the world wide web away for free because I thought that it would only work if it worked for everyone. Today, I believe that to be truer than ever.”
Oh I don’t know, the appearance of two perfectly overlapping fiery rings...
Oh I don’t know, the appearance of two perfectly overlapping fiery rings in the sky doesn’t seem like a good omen to me, even at low frequencies.
We Are Not Fascists, and If You Call Us Fascists, We Will...
We Are Not Fascists, and If You Call Us Fascists, We Will Arrest You. “There is nothing funny about calling me or Donald Trump a fascist, and if you do, we will ship you to Guantanamo.”
The Atlas Obscura Podcast
• SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura
Atlas Obscura Goes Off Assignment: To the Bear We Didn't Find
A girl and her father take a walk in the woods. This essay was written by Emily Lowe and edited by Tusshara Nalakumar Srilatha, and originally appeared in Off Assignment.
Plus: Off Assignment is offering a writing course, called The Practice of Imagination. It begins November 4, and you can use code ATLAS20 for 20% off: https://www.offassignment.com/practice-of-imagination
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Bad bots
Two of my public Datasette instances - for my TILs and my blog's backup mirror - were getting hammered with misbehaving bot traffic today. Scaling them up to more Fly instances got them running again but I'd rather not pay extra just so bots can crawl me harder.
The log file...
S&P Global
My thanks to S&P Global for sponsoring this last week at DF. S&P Global believes that the future of information delivery is AI — and AI thrives on clean, trustworthy metadata. That’s why they’re embracing open web standards to make data more accessible and machine-readable. Explore their open data at dunl.org, their open data portal, and discover rich metadata at S&P’s Metadata Marketplace.
Link: marketplace.spglobal.com/en/solutions/metadata-marketplace-…
Embracing the parallel coding agent lifestyle
For a while now I've been hearing from engineers who run multiple coding agents at once - firing up several Claude Code or Codex CLI instances at the same time, sometimes in the same repo, sometimes against multiple checkouts or git worktrees.
I was pretty skeptical about th...
Let the LLM Write the Prompts: An Intro to DSPy in Compound Al Pipelines
Let the LLM Write the Prompts: An Intro to DSPy in Compound Al Pipelines
I've had trouble getting my head around DSPy in the past. This half hour talk by Drew Breunig at the recent Databricks Data + AI Summit is the clearest explanation I've seen yet of the kinds of problems...
Keeping Up Appearances star Patricia Routledge dies at 96. I loved that...
Keeping Up Appearances star Patricia Routledge dies at 96. I loved that show — almost every time I’m driving and see a herd of cows in a nearby field, I shrill, “Mind the cows, Richard!”
Cheap Batteries Are Dangerous
theverge.com/news/784966/lumafield-x-ray-ct-scan-lithium-ion-battery-risks-manufacturing-defect
Andrew Liszewski, The Verge:
Lumafield has released the results of a new study of
lithium-ion batteries that “reveals an enormous gap in quality
between brand-name batteries and low-cost cells” that are readily
available through online stores including Amazon and Temu. T...
★ Complying With ‘Demand’ From Trump Administration, Apple Removes ICEBlock From App Store
Ashley Oliver, reporting for Fox Business:
DOJ officials, at the direction of Attorney General Pam Bondi,
asked Apple to take down ICEBlock, a move that comes as Trump
administration officials have claimed the tool, which allows users
to anonymously report ICE agents’ pr...
80 of the Most Iconic Guitar Intros
Watch as Paul Davids plays 80 of rock’s most iconic guitar intros, including ones from Robert Johnson, Chuck Berry, The Kinks, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Black Sabbath, ZZ Top, Joan Jett, AC/DC, Blur, and The White Stripes.
Name A 28-Year-Old. “The data tells us that 3,880,894 children were born...
Name A 28-Year-Old. “The data tells us that 3,880,894 children were born in the year 1997, and yet we can find no trace of them in popular culture.”
I think I’m gonna read Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence next,...
I think I’m gonna read Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence next, inspired by Evan Puschak’s recent video. Just downloaded the free ebook from Standard Ebooks.
Harvard Library’s collection of Soviet and post-Soviet lapel pins. Sputnik, Aeroflot, the...
Harvard Library’s collection of Soviet and post-Soviet lapel pins. Sputnik, Aeroflot, the 1980 Olympics, Tolstoy…collect your favorites!
Swift Justice: A Look Inside a Taliban Courtroom
Swift Justice is a short documentary that, perhaps for the first time, takes viewers inside a rural Afghan courtroom operated by the Taliban, whose arbiters decide cases using Sharia law. [Content warning: a man is visibly beaten in the courtroom to make him “speak the tru...
Ping
Life Is More Than an Engineering Problem, an interview with Ted Chiang...
Life Is More Than an Engineering Problem, an interview with Ted Chiang from earlier this year. “I don’t believe it’s meaningful to say that something is better art absent any context of how it was created. Art is all about context.”
The 25 Most Influential Magazine Covers of All Time, including, of course,...
The 25 Most Influential Magazine Covers of All Time, including, of course, Ali on the cover of Esquire as Saint Sebastian. See also all the nominated covers.
Instead of hiding rips and tears, the visible mending movement turns them...
Instead of hiding rips and tears, the visible mending movement turns them into art. “Born from the Japanese art of sashiko, visible mending enables crafters to eschew fast fashion and make mistakes beautiful.”