FeedCity: Featured

Light Fantastic

Using thousands of photos taken by NASA astronauts Butch Wilmor and Don Pettit earlier this year from the International Space Station, Seán Doran made this incredible timelapse called Light Fantastic. 21,837 images across 18 time-lapse sequences photographed by NASA astro...

Daring Fireball
19 Dec 17:34 • John Gruber

Apple’s 26.2 OS Updates

daringfireball.net/linked/2025/12/19/apples-262-os-updates

Apple released all of its OS 26.2 updates a week ago today. A little unusual for Apple to release OS updates on a Friday, but I think they wanted to get these out before Christmas week. And I don’t think it was rushed — for iOS 26.2 at least, there were two release candidate...

kottke.org
19 Dec 16:48 • Jason Kottke

A report from one of the competitors in a parallel parking championship....

A report from one of the competitors in a parallel parking championship. “You’ve got to get uncomfortably close. Those bumpers are called bumpers for a reason.”

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Daniel Pietzsch
19 Dec 16:24

Yesterday was the last HWC of 2025. It’s been good discussions - as always - but we also collectively worked on each others websites. Mainly in regards to CSS.

The first HWC DUS in 2026 will be on Jan. 22^nd.

kottke.org
19 Dec 16:19 • Jason Kottke

Savory Rice Krispies treats? “Savory chicken fat and fried onions push Rice...

Savory Rice Krispies treats? “Savory chicken fat and fried onions push Rice Krispies Treats into gloriously salty-sweet territory.”

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Daring Fireball
19 Dec 15:48 • John Gruber

Apple Is Adding More Ad Spots to App Store Results

ads.apple.com/app-store/help/ad-placements/0082-search-results#ntf

Apple, on its Apple Ads site: Search is the way most people find and download apps on the App Store, with nearly 65 percent of downloads happening directly after a search. To help give advertisers more opportunities to drive downloads from search results, Apple Ads will ...

kottke.org
19 Dec 15:06 • Jason Kottke

In 2023, seismologists detected a “global hum” originating in Greenland that lasted...

In 2023, seismologists detected a “global hum” originating in Greenland that lasted for 9 days. A rockslide triggered a 200m-high tsunami that sloshed back & forth in a fjord every 90 seconds, slamming into the fjord’s walls “like a beating heart”.

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Radiolab
19 Dec 15:00 • WNYC Studios

The Good Show

radiolab.org/podcast/the-good-show

The standard view of evolution is that living things are shaped by cold-hearted competition. And there is no doubt that today's plants and animals carry the genetic legacy of ancestors who fought fiercely to survive and reproduce. But in this hour that we first broadcast bac...

Simon Willison's Weblog
19 Dec 05:42

Introducing GPT-5.2-Codex

Introducing GPT-5.2-Codex The latest in OpenAI's Codex family of models (not the same thing as their Codex CLI or Codex Cloud coding agent tools). GPT‑5.2-Codex is a version of GPT‑5.2⁠ further optimized for agentic coding in Codex, including improvements on long-horizon wo...

The Atlas Obscura Podcast
19 Dec 05:05 • SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura

12 Days of Wonder: World's Quietest Room

Experience the Orfield Anechoic Chamber: a room inside a concrete bunker that was once known as the quietest place on earth.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Daring Fireball
19 Dec 04:24 • John Gruber

ByteDance Signs Deal to Divest U.S. TikTok App

reuters.com/business/american-investor-consortium-acquire-tiktok-us-entity-axios-reports-2025-12-18/

David Shepardson, reporting for Reuters: TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, said Thursday it signed binding agreements with three major investors to form a joint venture to operate TikTok’s U.S. app led by American and global investors in a bid to avoid a U.S. government...

Daring Fireball
19 Dec 02:13 • John Gruber

Michael Bierut Told Us What He Really Thinks of ITC Garamond

designobserver.com/i-hate-itc-garamond/

Michael Bierut, “I Hate ITC Garamond”, for Design Observer back in 2004: ITC Garamond was designed in 1975 by Tony Stan for the International Typeface Corporation. Okay, let’s stop right there. I’ll admit it: the single phrase “designed in 1975 by Tony Stan” conjures up ...

Simon Willison's Weblog
19 Dec 01:30

Agent Skills

Agent Skills Anthropic have turned their skills mechanism into an "open standard", which I guess means it lives in an independent agentskills/agentskills GitHub repository now? I wouldn't be surprised to see this end up in the AAIF, recently the new home of the MCP specifica...

Daring Fireball
19 Dec 01:18 • John Gruber

Condensed Serif Typefaces, à la Apple Garamond, Are Back in Vogue

wsj.com/lifestyle/serif-instrument-skinny-font-e22b8054

Katie Deighton, reporting last month for The Wall Street Journal: Henry Modisett wanted his employer to stand out. Competitors of the artificial-intelligence firm Perplexity were embracing their science-fiction roots with futuristic branding that felt cold to him. So Mod...

Accidental Tech Podcast
19 Dec 00:37

670: Institutionally Inescapable

Pre-show: Marco joins team snow tires i3: 155/70R19 XC90: 275/40R21 Molex F-150 Lightning’s demise 🗣️ Remember, ATP gift memberships are a thing! 🗣️ New ATP Members Special: ATP Movie Club: WarGames WarGames Follow-up: Some impromptu spoiler-free follow-up about...

Simon Willison's Weblog
19 Dec 00:27

Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work

In all of the debates about the value of AI-assistance in software development there's one depressing anecdote that I keep on seeing: the junior engineer, empowered by some class of LLM tool, who deposits giant, untested PRs on their coworkers - or open source maintainers - ...

Simon Willison's Weblog
19 Dec 00:27

swift-justhtml

swift-justhtml

First there was Emil Stenström's JustHTML in Python, then my justjshtml in JavaScript, then Anil Madhavapeddy's html5rw in OCaml, and now Kyle Howells has built a vibespiled dependency-free HTML5 parser for Swift using the same coding agent tricks against the html5lib-tests test suite.

Kyle ran some benchmarks to compare the different implementations:

Rust (html5ever) total parse time: 303 ms

Swift total parse time: 1313 ms

JavaScript total parse time: 1035 ms

Python total parse time: 4189 ms

Tags: html5, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, vibe-coding, swift

kottke.org
18 Dec 22:21 • Jason Kottke

Forks Out: A Benoit Blanc Sesame Street Mystery

For years now, the people have wanted only one thing: for Daniel Craig’s chicken-fried detective Benoit Blanc to feature in a Muppet movie (with Craig as the only human). Earlier this year, Netflix picked up the streaming rights for Sesame Street. That partnership has borne ...

kottke.org
18 Dec 21:33 • Jason Kottke

Prepare to lose a few hours to these: Andy Baio’s top 10...

Prepare to lose a few hours to these: Andy Baio’s top 10 free browser games of 2025.

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kottke.org
18 Dec 20:57 • Jason Kottke

Just dropped: Lane 8’s Winter 2025 Mixtape....

Just dropped: Lane 8’s Winter 2025 Mixtape.

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