The most annoying problem is that the [GitHub] frontend barely works without JavaScript, so we cannot open issues, pull requests, source code or CI logs in Dillo itself, despite them being mostly plain HTML, which I don't think is acceptable. In the past, it used to gracefully degrade without enforcing JavaScript, but now it doesn't.
— Rodrigo Arias Mallo, Migrating Dillo from GitHub
Tags: browsers, progressive-enhancement, github
Last year developer Simon Støvring launched a fun new app for the Mac called Festivitas, which let you decorate your menu bar and Dock with animated holiday lights and falling snow. This year he’s added an iOS version for iPhone and iPad that lets you create widgets to decorate your home screens with holidays lights and festive photo frames. Pure fun.
See also: Jason Snell on using Festivitas’s Shortcuts support to create an automation that gives a 10 percent chance of snow every 20 minutes. Støvring’s own Shortcuts examples (available in the app’s Settings window) include things like turning on the lights when music starts playing. With support for Shortcuts, users can create their own fun.
Link: festivitas.app/
My thanks to Dekáf for sponsoring Daring Fireball this week. They’ve just launched a nice lineup of holiday gift bundles — curated sets of their most-loved coffees that make gift-buying easy.
Nine single origins. Six signature blends. Four Mizudashi cold brews. All micro-lot and top-rated coffees are shipped within 24 hours of roasting. No shortcuts. No crash. Dekáf is coffee at its most refined, just without the caffeine. I’ve gone through a few bags, and each one tasted great — like high quality regular coffee.
And, there’s a special offer just for DF readers: get 20% off with code DF.
Link: dekaf.com/s/df
Delightful, and there’s an equally delightful behind-the-scenes video.
Context appears at disparate sources, by user activity or changes in the user’s environment: what they’re working on changes, emails appear, documents are edited, it’s no longer sunny outside, the available tools have been updated.
This context is not always where the AI runs (and the AI runs as closer as possible to the point of user intent).
So the job of making an agent run really well is to move the context to where it needs to be. [...]
So I’ve been thinking of AI system technical architecture as plumbing the sources and sinks of context.
Tags: definitions, matt-webb, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-agents, context-engineering
Large language models (LLMs) can be useful tools, but they are not good at creating entirely new Wikipedia articles. Large language models should not be used to generate new Wikipedia articles from scratch.
— Wikipedia content guideline, promoted to a guideline on 24th November 2025
The Atlas Obscura Podcast
• SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura
Bluesky Thread Viewer thread by @simonwillison.net
I've been having a lot of fun hacking on my Bluesky Thread Viewer JavaScript tool with Claude Code recently. Here it renders a thread (complete with demo video) talking about the latest improvements to the tool itself.
I've been mostly vibe-coding this thing since April, now spanning 15 commits with contributions from ChatGPT, Claude, Claude Code for Web and Claude Code on my laptop. Each of those commits links to the transcript that created the changes in the commit.
Bluesky is a lot of fun to build tools like this against because the API supports CORS (so you can talk to it from an HTML+JavaScript page hosted anywhere) and doesn't require authentication.
Tags: projects, tools, ai, generative-ai, llms, cors, bluesky, vibe-coding, coding-agents, claude-code
Rebecca Solnit: A Year on From Trump’s Victory, Resistance Is Everywhere. “There has, in fact, been a tremendous amount and variety of resistance and opposition and it’s mattered tremendously.”
Atul Gawande of Harvard’s School of Public Health: The Trump regime’s destruction of USAID “has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children”.
I’m still working on the KDO gift guide for this year. In the meantime, here’s the 2024 edition, which has aged well and includes these popular Japanese nail clippers.
“Australia is on course to meet a target of eliminating cervical cancer by 2035, which, if achieved, will make it the first country to do so.” This is due in large part to their HPV vaccination campaign.
Radiolab
• WNYC Studios
The Atlas Obscura Podcast
• SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura
You can learn a lot about a person from their hands. In this episode, we hear the story of a doctor who made it possible for us to hold onto the stories of presidents, astronauts, musicians, artists and more… through bronze molds of their hands.
READ MORE IN THE ATLAS: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/adrian-e-flatt-m-d-hand-collection
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A masterpiece from Randall Munroe, perfect for Thanksgiving.
Link: xkcd.com/3172/
