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We meet Becky Sigwright, who captains a wind-powered boat that’s been sailing around Maine since before the invention of the telephone. 

It's Maine Week on the show, so every day we're introducing you to someone from that great state — people who live, and work, and get inspired by Maine’s rugged beauty. This episode was produced in partnership with the Maine Office of Tourism.

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

My thanks to Finalist for sponsoring last week at Daring Fireball. Finalist is a remarkable, ambitious, and novel app for iPhone, iPad, and the Mac from indie developer Slaven Radic. It’s a planner — a digital take on traditional paper planners. Its motto: “Most productivity...

Every time you are inclined to use the word “teach”, replace it with “learn”. That is, instead of saying, “I teach”, say “They learn”. It’s very easy to determine what you teach; you can just fill slides with text and claim to have taught. Shift your focus to determining how you know whether they learned what you claim to have taught (or indeed anything at all!). That is much harder, but that is also the real objective of any educator.

— Shriram Krishnamurthi, Pedagogy Recommendations

Tags: teaching

Chance Miller, reporting for 9to5Mac this week: To comply with the Mobile Software Competition Act (MSCA), Apple has announced a set of major changes to the App Store and iPhone in Japan. The changes include new app distribution options for developers and new alternative...

We're working on a listener-powered episode about travel resolutions and we want to hear yours! What are you hoping to change about the way you travel or move through the world? What inspired this resolution? Maybe you wanna travel to a new continent. Maybe you are learning ...

In 2002, Aardman Animations produced a series of short episodes called Wallace & Gromit’s Cracking Contraptions. In each episode, Wallace unveils a new invention, which Gromit then has to deal with. For the holiday season, Aardman has packaged a few of these short shorts into this compilation, Wallace & Gromit’s Cracking Christmas, free to watch on YouTube.

You can watch a longer compilation of (I believe) all of the episodes here.

Aardman even produced a new episode this year, in the form of a clothing commercial:

I hadn’t seen most of these before; I legit laughed out loud several times while watching.

See also: Nick Park demonstrates how to draw Gromit.

Tags: Aardman Animations · advertising · animation · Christmas · holidays · stop motion · TV · video · Wallace and Gromit

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

In 2025, Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) emerged as the de facto new major stage to add to this mix. By training LLMs against automatically verifiable rewards across a number of environments (e.g. think math/code puzzles), the LLMs spontaneously develop strategies that look like "reasoning" to humans - they learn to break down problem solving into intermediate calculations and they learn a number of problem solving strategies for going back and forth to figure things out (see DeepSeek R1 paper for examples).

— Andrej Karpathy, 2025 LLM Year in Review

Tags: andrej-karpathy, llm, generative-ai, llm-reasoning, definitions, ai, llms, deepseek

“The embrace of the unitary executive theory by both the president and the [Supreme Court] has given us the worst of all worlds: an ultrapowerful presidency without an actual president at the helm.”

Kleiner süßer Film.

On reading Proust vs experiencing the world intermediated by screens (even when you’re not on one). “Your attention is, on a foundational level, all you have. This is why it feels worse than bad to waste it. It feels annihilating.”

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If you want to see the future of clean energy, you have to go to China. They have flying 2-seater taxis, lunch delivery drones, robots that can swap your empty EV battery in 3 minutes, bullet trains, driverless taxis, etc.

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Inkblot Books via the Public Domain Review. These pre-date use of the inkblot in the Rorschach test.

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The Computer History Museum: Thomas Knoll, a PhD student in computer vision at the University of Michigan, had written a program in 1987 to display and modify digital images. His brother John, working at the movie visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic, foun...

Apple TV’s press page has stories this month announcing release dates and first looks for a bunch of shows: Imperfect Women (a “psychological thriller”), Beat the Reaper (“dramedy”), a still-untitled Monarch: Legacy of Monsters spinoff, Widow’s Bay (“blends genuine horror with character-driven comedy”), season 2 of the Idris Elba thriller Hijack, and Margo’s Got Money Troubles, a series from David E. Kelley starring Elle Fanning, Michelle Pfeiffer, Nicole Kidman, and Nick Offerman (good cast!).

But not a word about Jessica Chastain’s The Savant, which was supposed to debut in September, was postponed after the Charlie Kirk shooting (against Chastain’s wishes), and has been in “At a later date” scheduling limbo ever since.

Link: apple.com/tv-pr/news/filters/2025/12/

Alexander Smith and Claire Cardona, NBC News:

Online tipsters have had a mixed record when it comes to providing information about mass casualty incidents. But Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said this Reddit user “blew the case wide open” after posting about their encounter on Saturday with the suspect.

“I’m being dead serious,” wrote the Reddit user, identified in an affidavit as “John,” three days after the shootings at Brown. “The police need to look into a grey Nissan with Florida plates, possibly a rental.”

Link: nbcnews.com/news/us-news/reddit-tipster-cracked-brown…

Yesterday I wrote: For the last 40 years Apple has only gone through three identity fonts: Garamond → Myriad → San Francisco. DF reader Cameron McKay emailed to observe: “It strikes me that Apple changes CPU architectures (68K → PowerPC → Intel → ARM) more often than i...

“The Global Village Construction Set is a modular, DIY, low-cost, high-performance platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts.”

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In Juli Clover’s aforelinked rundown of what’s new across the whole system in iOS 26.2, I misunderstood this item regarding the Passwords app: In the Settings section of the Passwords app, there’s an option to manage websites where passwords are not saved when signing in...

Sam Rose explains how LLMs work with a visual essay

Sam Rose is one of my favorite authors of explorable interactive explanations - here's his previous collection.

Sam joined ngrok in September as a developer educator. Here's his first big visual explainer for them, ostensibly about how prompt caching works but it quickly expands to cover tokenization, embeddings, and the basics of the transformer architecture.

The result is one of the clearest and most accessible introductions to LLM internals I've seen anywhere.

Tags: ai, explorables, generative-ai, llms, sam-rose, tokenization