New evidence suggests that Neanderthals were making fire in the UK 400,000 years ago. The previous earliest date of human fire-making was a mere 50,000 years ago.
Victorian-Era Mourning Objects From the V&A’s Collection
From the archives of London’s V&A Museum, a selection of items that were used by Victorian-era mourners to remember and pay tribute to loved ones who had died, including jewelry with human hair, black dresses, jet black jewelry, mourning cards, and postmortem photograp...
The trailer for It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, a documentary film about...
The trailer for It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, a documentary film about the late singer/songwriter.
Useful patterns for building HTML tools
I've started using the term HTML tools to refer to HTML applications that I've been building which combine HTML, JavaScript, and CSS in a single file and use them to provide useful functionality. I have built over 150 of these in the past year, almost all of them written by ...
Timothy Snyder: “What comes next? For the Nazis, the deportation and the...
Timothy Snyder: “What comes next? For the Nazis, the deportation and the pogrom of autumn 1938 were steps towards creating a centralised national police agency. In the US, something similar is unfolding with ICE.”
The Normalization of Deviance in AI
The Normalization of Deviance in AI
This thought-provoking essay from Johann Rehberger directly addresses something that I’ve been worrying about for quite a while: in the absence of any headline-grabbing examples of prompt injection vulnerabilities causing real economic har...
Size of Life, a visual comparison of living things from DNA to...
Size of Life, a visual comparison of living things from DNA to a quaking aspen clone. Lovely illustrations.
I hate how good this is: Radiohead sings Santa Claus Is Coming...
I hate how good this is: Radiohead sings Santa Claus Is Coming to Town (There I Ruined It).
2000 Words for Japanese Rain
From artist Miya Ando, Water of the Sky, A Dictionary of 2,000 Japanese Rain Words.
Through a collection of 2,000 Japanese words, their English interpretations, and 100 drawings, Ando describes the breadth and diversity of rain’s many expressions: when it falls, how it f...
Song Exploder
• Hrishikesh Hirway
Key Change: Rian Johnson on Wagner's 'Das Rheingold'
My guest today is director Rian Johnson, which is exciting for me, because I’ve been a huge fan of his ever since seeing his first feature film, ‘Brick,' in 2006. Since then, he’s made six more feature films, including ‘Looper‘ in 2012; ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi‘ in 2017; the murder mystery ‘Knives Out‘ in 2019; and his most recent movie, another in the 'Knives Out' series, ‘Wake Up Dead Man,‘ which is already out in theaters, and comes to Netflix on December 12. I talked to Rian about a piece of music that had a profound impact on him, which was the overture to ‘Das Rheingold‘ by Richard Wagner.
For more info, visit songexploder.net/rian-johnson.
U.S. State Department Changes Back to Times New Roman From Calibri
Michael Crowley and Hamed Aleaziz, reporting for The New York Times:
While mostly framed as a matter of clarity and formality in
presentation, Mr. Rubio’s directive to all diplomatic posts around
the world blamed “radical” diversity, equity, inclusion and
accessibility p...
The loose flap of skin around the elbow is called the what...
The loose flap of skin around the elbow is called the what now??
Dark mode
I've never been particularly invested dark v.s. light mode but I get enough people complaining that this site is "blinding" that I decided to see if Claude Code for web could produce a useful dark mode from my existing CSS. It did a decent job, using CSS properties, @media (...
The Atlas Obscura Podcast
• SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura
12 Days of Wonder: Return to Recipe Graves
Gastro Obscura’s senior editor Sam O’Brien returns to the podcast to go deeper with us on her strange beat – recipes etched into gravestones. We probe how food can help heal and remember those we’ve lost.
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10 Years of Let's Encrypt
10 Years of Let's Encrypt
Internet Security Research Group co-founder and Executive Director Josh Aas:
On September 14, 2015, our first publicly-trusted certificate went live. [...] Today, Let’s Encrypt is the largest certificate authority in the world in terms of certifica...
Devstral 2
Devstral 2
Two new models from Mistral today: Devstral 2 and Devstral Small 2 - both focused on powering coding agents such as Mistral's newly released Mistral Vibe which I wrote about earlier today.
Devstral 2: SOTA open model for code agents with a fraction of the parame...
Under the hood of Canada Spends with Brendan Samek
I talked to Brendan Samek about Canada Spends, a project from Build Canada that makes Canadian government financial data accessible and explorable using a combination of Datasette, a neat custom frontend, Ruby ingestion scripts, sqlite-utils and pieces of LLM-powered PDF ext...
Agentic AI Foundation
Agentic AI Foundation
Announced today as a new foundation under the parent umbrella of the Linux Foundation (see also the OpenJS Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, OpenSSF and many more).
The AAIF was started by a heavyweight group of "founding platinum members" ...
★ iMessage’s Delivery Architecture Makes It Hard to Block Without Blocking All iOS Push Notifications
From Apple’s iMessage Security Overview:
Apple iMessage is a messaging service for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple
Watch, and Apple Vision Pro. Relying on the Apple Push
Notification service (APNs), iMessage lets users send texts and
attachments like photos, contacts, locations...
The Real Problem of Humanity
harvardmagazine.com/2009/09/james-watson-edward-o-wilson-intellectual-entente
Sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson, back in 2009:
The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.
A related adage I heard, and internalized, recently: “We’re not thinking creatures who feel; we’re feeling creatures who think.” (Via Jason Kottke.)
Link: harvardmagazine.com/2009/09/james-watson-edward-o-wilson…