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Ultracold atoms observed climbing a quantum staircase. (Relatable: the upstairs of my house is warmer than the ground floor too.)

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I pushed a key change to the Underscore music player over the weekend. Members can now click on any song in their collection to play it (previously there was only a randomize button). I added this because I often wanted to listen to a particular song/album/playlist, genre,...

Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life. “A thick desire is one that changes you in the process of pursuing it. A thin desire is one that doesn’t.”

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The Internet Archive has a playable version of the NY Times Crossword Puzzle app from 1992. It ran on Windows 3.1 and included a few hundred puzzles. (Click on Game/Open to select a puzzle.)

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I love these photos of Rama Duwaji by Szilveszter Mako — a perfect combination of photographer and subject. Duwaji is an artist, illustrator, New Yorker, and second-generation Syrian-American. She is also married to Zohran Mamdani, who is the mayor-elect of NYC. Tags: art · fashion · photography · Rama Duwaji · Szilveszter Mako · Zohran Mamdani 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Good morning! Just wanted to let you all know that Rian Johnson subtly rickrolled us with a scene in Wake Up Dead Man.

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When a 180-year old bur oak tree collapsed during a rainstorm, a couple in Minnesota made a new life for it. 

Plus: How many U.S. states have you visited? Join the AO community and create your own U.S. state tracker map here: https://www.atlasobscura.com/my-state-map  

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Jevons paradox is coming to knowledge work. By making it far cheaper to take on any type of task that we can possibly imagine, we’re ultimately going to be doing far more. The vast majority of AI tokens in the future will be used on things we don't even do today as workers: they will be used on the software projects that wouldn't have been started, the contracts that wouldn't have been reviewed, the medical research that wouldn't have been discovered, and the marketing campaign that wouldn't have been launched otherwise.

— Aaron Levie, Jevons Paradox for Knowledge Work

Tags: ai-ethics, careers, ai, llms, generative-ai, jevons-paradox

At various points, I felt like this movie might ride a more surreal, illusionary wave. But that never happened. And this is why I felt there are some shortcomings in the plot and characters. But otherwise this does a really effective job portraying the terror he faces. It's a bit like Funny Games. Not as drastic, though. I liked how this all played out in the same place throughout the movie. I'm still not quite sure what the movie wants to say. But that's ok, and might be intentional anyway.

simonw/actions-latest

Today in extremely niche projects, I got fed up of Claude Code creating GitHub Actions workflows for me that used stale actions: actions/setup-python@v4 when the latest is actions/setup-python@v6 for example.

I couldn't find a good single place listing those latest versions, so I had Claude Code for web (via my phone, I'm out on errands) build a Git scraper to publish those versions in one place:

https://simonw.github.io/actions-latest/versions.txt

Tell your coding agent of choice to fetch that any time it wants to write a new GitHub Actions workflows.

(I may well bake this into a Skill.)

Here's the first and second transcript I used to build this, shared using my claude-code-transcripts tool (which just gained a search feature.)

Tags: github, ai, github-actions, git-scraping, generative-ai, llms, coding-agents, claude-code

Solid horror movie. I liked the obviously Carpenter-esque soundtrack. And also how the "creatures" looked like and how the movie looked and felt in general - more like an 70s/80s horror film. But I found those "creatures" not menacing enough and the story was a bit so-so in the end.

This review may contain spoilers. Tap or click to view.

This was really entertaining. I think it all looked great, the Creepers are well done - and are really likeable - and the acting is fantastic, too. Sure, it's over the top, but that fits the movie well. Robert Pattinson's performance it's just perfect IMO. But also Mark Ruffalo's and Naomi Ackie's. I like the whole idea of the film, and its whole vibe. It's funny, too. Would watch again!

👍 Recommended!

This review may contain spoilers. Tap or click to view.

Like these kind of absurdist trip kind of movies. Leo is fantastic, and so is everyone else to be honest. Although I found Sean Penn's character Lockjaw a little too over the top. Two scenes that I will certainly remember: First, how the car chase at the end is filmed. Haven't really seen anything like this. Second: that stunt and whole sequence where he falls down between two buildings trying to jump the gap, then still gets up, only to get tasered around the next corner. As impressive as it is hilarious.

👍 Recommended!

My thanks to Copilot Money for sponsoring last week at DF. Copilot is a personal finance app for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and they’ve always deeply believed in the value of embracing the design idioms and technical features of truly native apps for Apple platforms. Apple h...

Major update to Rogue Amoeba’s essential audio utility for the Mac. I’ve written about versions 5 and 4 previously, and everything I wrote then remains true. SoundSource remains the system-wide audio menu item that ought to be built into MacOS, giving you easy, intuitive con...

I just sent out the latest edition of the newsletter version of this blog. It's a long one! Turns out I wrote a lot of stuff in the past 10 days.

The newsletter is out two days later than I had planned because I kept running into an infuriating issue with Substack: it would refuse to save my content with a "Network error" and "Not saved" and I couldn't figure out why.

So I asked ChatGPT to dig into it, which dug up this Hacker News post about the string /etc/hosts triggering an error.

And yeah, it turns out my newsletter included this post describing a SQL injection attack against ClickHouse and PostgreSQL which included the full exploit that was used.

Deleting that annotated example exploit allowed me to send the letter!

Tags: sql-injection, security, newsletter, substack

The whole illustration is just weird looking, for one thing. As for sloppy details, the tree is in soft focus but somehow has a crisp edge, the carton is labeled both “Whole Milk” and “Lowfat Milk”, and the “Cow Fun Puzzle” maze is just goofily wrong. (I can’t recall ever se...

In advocating for LLMs as useful and important technology despite how they're trained I'm beginning to feel a little bit like John Cena in Pluribus.

Pluribus spoiler (episode 6)

Given our druthers, would we choose to consume HDP? No. Throughout history, most cultures, though not all, have taken a dim view of anthropophagy. Honestly, we're not that keen on it ourselves. But we're left with little choice.

Tags: ai-ethics, generative-ai, tv, training-data, ai, llms

A year ago, Claude struggled to generate bash commands without escaping issues. It worked for seconds or minutes at a time. We saw early signs that it may become broadly useful for coding one day.

Fast forward to today. In the last thirty days, I landed 259 PRs -- 497 commits, 40k lines added, 38k lines removed. Every single line was written by Claude Code + Opus 4.5.

— Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code

Tags: anthropic, claude, ai, claude-code, llms, coding-agents, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai

textarea.my on GitHub Anton Medvedev built textarea.my, which he describes as: A minimalist text editor that lives entirely in your browser and stores everything in the URL hash. It's ~160 lines of HTML, CSS and JavaScript and it's worth reading the whole thing. I picked u...