FeedCity

 Today, Sea View Hospital on Staten Island is largely abandoned. But it was here, in this forgotten place, staffed by people who were shunned and segregated, where medical workers eventually found a cure for a disease that had plagued humanity for nearly 500,000 years: tuberculosis.

Learn more in Maria’s book, The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis: https://www.amazon.com/Black-Angels-Untold-Nurses-Tuberculosis/dp/0593544927

The Staten Island Museum has an exhibit about the nurses called Taking Care: The Black Angels of Sea View Hospital: https://www.statenislandmuseum.org/exhibitions/takingcare/

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

This is the third in my annual series reviewing everything that happened in the LLM space over the past 12 months. For previous years see Stuff we figured out about AI in 2023 and Things we learned about LLMs in 2024. It’s been a year filled with a lot of different trends. ...

A look back at Apple’s 2025, with special guest Rene Ritchie.

Sponsored by:

• Factor: Healthy eating, made easy. Get 50% off your first box, plus free breakfast for 1 year, with code talkshow50off.
• Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code talkshow.

Link: daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2025/12/31/ep-438

Joel David Hamkins is a mathematician and philosopher specializing in set theory, the foundations of mathematics, and the nature of infinity, and he’s the #1 highest-rated user on MathOverflow. He is also the author of several books, including Proof and the Art of Mathematic...

Spotify really started something, didn’t they? Everyone has a “Wrapped” this year; I even got an email one from the cruise line on which I took a trip this summer. Like, “Congratulations! You went on {1} cruise for {7} days!” — and then nothing else. Two stats. So I though...

Matthew Walther, in an opinion piece last week for The New York Times (gift link): MAGA’s internal culture has always rewarded theatrical confrontation over achievement. Boorishness commands attention, and boors mistake attention for leverage. Pseudo-martyrdom becomes an...

Codex cloud is now called Codex web It looks like OpenAI's Codex cloud (the cloud version of their Codex coding agent) was quietly rebranded to Codex web at some point in the last few days. Here's a screenshot of the Internet Archive copy from 18th December (the capture on the 28th maintains that Codex cloud title but did not fully load CSS for me): And here's that same page today with the updated product name: Anthropic's equivalent product has the incredibly clumsy name Claude Code on the web, which I shorten to "Claude Code for web" but even then bugs me because I mostly interact with it via Anthropic's native mobile app. I was hoping to see Claude Code for web rebrand to Claude Code Cloud - I did not expect OpenAI to rebrand in the opposite direction! Tags: ai, openai, generative-ai, llms, anthropic, coding-agents, async-coding-agents

After posting a link to the Computer History Museum’s release of the Photoshop 1.0 source code last week, I spent some time paging through the original Photoshop manuals. I found a screenshot of the dialog box where you entered your serial number, and posted it to Mastodon, ...

Nancy Friedman: 52 Things I Learned in 2025. Incl. “Seventy-one percent of people in Iceland are Costco members” and “In Sweden, the largest size of Hellmann’s mayonnaise — 600 grams — is called “American size”.

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Kent Hendricks: 52 Things I Learned in 2025. Incl. “Birders in the United States spend $107 billion per year, including $93B on binoculars, feeders, cameras, and other equipment; and $14B on travel. That’s more than the GDP of New Hampshire.”

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

A trip to the forest. Cinema. Folkerdey. And the usual day-to-day. (30 photos)

The new year is just around the corner. And the Atlas Obscura staff look back on the lessons and experiences they learned this year throughout their travels. 

Plus, we want to hear about your New Year's travel resolutions. What are you hoping to change about the way you travel or move through your existing world? What inspired this resolution? Give us a call at 315-992-7902 and leave a message telling us your name and story. Our mailbox will cut you off after three minutes so please call in if you get disconnected. Or better yet, you can record a voice memo and email it to us at hello@atlasobscura.com.

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

Jason Pargin is — well, to my tastes — a master of the TikTok video format. This one is so good, and ends with a mic-drop closing line.

Link: knowyourmeme.com/videos/433740-just-coffee-black

Emily Delaney, at McSweeney’s:

Okay, now you’re getting upset. You’re getting upset despite the fact that we have strict rules against getting upset at this Hertz location. But tell me, honestly, when you reserved a rental car through Hertz, you thought… what? That we were going to set aside a special little car just for you? Seriously? Oh my god.

(Via Kottke.)

Link: mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-in-charge-at-this-hertz-location…

TIL: Downloading archived Git repositories from archive.softwareheritage.org Back in February I blogged about a neat Python library called sqlite-s3vfs for accessing SQLite databases hosted in an S3 bucket, released as MIT licensed open source by the UK government's Departme...

[...] The puzzle is still there. What’s gone is the labor. I never enjoyed hitting keys, writing minimal repro cases with little insight, digging through debug logs, or trying to decipher some obscure AWS IAM permission error. That work wasn’t the puzzle for me. It was just friction, laborious and frustrating. The thinking remains; the hitting of the keys and the frustrating is what’s been removed.

— Armin Ronacher

Tags: ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, armin-ronacher, ai, llms

Yesterday I linked to a Windows 3.x NYT crossword puzzle app from 1992 that you can play directly on the Internet Archive. I was a Windows user back in the day (my conversion to Apple didn’t happen until the early 00s) and so of course I had to see what other Win3.x games ...

Ruffin Prevost, writing at The New York Times: As everyone filed out, I repeated, in English, some of the priest’s comments to my guide, Keiko Hatada, who taught English for 30 years and has led custom tours of Tokyo for the past decade. I wanted to make sure I had under...

Toby Buckle for the New Republic: The Americans Who Saw All This Coming — But Were Ignored and Maligned. This is not that far from the position many ordinary Americans found themselves in at the start of the Trump era. They weren’t time travelers but saw what was coming cl...