FeedCity

A rare event to capture on video: an underwater volcanic eruption in the Solomon Islands.

From a few weeks ago: Bush’s Tiny Desk Concert. Machinehead and Glycerine still hit.

Lisa Melton, who ran the team that created Safari, regarding her interactions with Steve Jobs: When Steve asked you a question? You didn’t ramble and, whatever you did, you didn’t make up an answer. If you didn’t know, you just said that you didn’t know. But then you tol...

Your Backpack Got Worse On Purpose. “From a shareholder’s perspective, the bag that falls apart is the better product. That’s the business model. Repeat failure, repeat purchase, repeat revenue. The quality decline isn’t a side effect. It’s the strategy.”

Two Japanese aquariums have released their 2026 flowcharts of their penguins’ relationships. “Penguin drama can include serious crushes and heartbreaks but also adultery and egg-stealing.”

I love these oversized prints of vintage Pan-Am luggage tags from artist Ella Freire. The typography and colors are just perfect. (via daringfireball) Tags: art · design · Ella Freire · travel

The real goldmine isn’t that Apple gets a cut of every App Store transaction. It’s that Apple’s platforms have the best apps, and users who are drawn to the best apps are thus drawn to the iPhone, Mac, and iPad. That edge is waning. Not because software on other platforms is getting better, but because third-party software on iPhone, Mac, and iPad is regressing to the mean, to some extent, because fewer developers feel motivated — artistically, financially, or both — to create well-crafted idiomatic native apps exclusively for Apple’s platforms.

— John Gruber

Tags: apple, john-gruber

Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS Google released Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS today, a new text-to-speech model that can be directed using prompts. It's presented via the standard Gemini API using gemini-3.1-flash-tts-preview as the model ID, but can only output audio files. The prompting guide...

Tool: Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS

See my notes on Google's new Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS text-to-speech model.

Tags: gemini, google

Release: datasette-ports 0.3

A small update for my tool for helping me figure out what all of the Datasette instances on my laptop are up to.

• Show working directory derived from each PID
• Show the full path to each database file

Output now looks like this:

http://127.0.0.1:8007/ - v1.0a26
  Directory: /Users/simon/dev/blog
  Databases:
    simonwillisonblog: /Users/simon/dev/blog/simonwillisonblog.db
  Plugins:
    datasette-llm
    datasette-secrets
http://127.0.0.1:8001/ - v1.0a26
  Directory: /Users/simon/dev/creatures
  Databases:
    creatures: /tmp/creatures.db

Tags: datasette

Fun trompe-l’œil graph paper drawings.

Don’t Just Replace Chavez — Rethink Monuments. “A memorial based on the great-man theory of history is a tale only half told.” And: “There are elegant ways to pay tribute to groups of people.”

I think we will see some people employed (though perhaps not explicitly) as meat shields: people who are accountable for ML systems under their supervision. The accountability may be purely internal, as when Meta hires human beings to review the decisions of automated moderation systems. It may be external, as when lawyers are penalized for submitting LLM lies to the court. It may involve formalized responsibility, like a Data Protection Officer. It may be convenient for a company to have third-party subcontractors, like Buscaglia, who can be thrown under the bus when the system as a whole misbehaves.

— Kyle Kingsbury, The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

Tags: ai-ethics, careers, ai, kyle-kingsbury

David Pierce, writing at The Verge (gift link): The Pixel 10 Pro solidified a feeling I’d been having through all of my tests: Android is a better operating system than iOS. [...] If all you got from your phone was the out-of-the-box experience, I’d have picked the Pixe...

I’d vaguely remembered that Hulu was adapting The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale, as a sequel to the TV series of the same name, but I was surprised to find out that the show has premiered and is already three episodes in (a fourth will be available today).

The initial series lost its way after 2-3 seasons, but I still ended up watching the whole thing. I’ll probably give The Testaments a shot as well.

Tags: books · Margaret Atwood · movies · The Handmaid's Tale · The Testaments · trailers · video

Listen to the NYC Subway play some Train Jazz. “Every dot is a real subway train. Eight hundred of them, give or take, form a small jazz combo (walking bass, piano, sax, vibes, brushes) that has been playing without pause for over a hundred years.”

The Engineer Guy Bill Hammack has written a book based on his great YouTube channel: The Things We Make: The Unknown History of Invention from Cathedrals to Soda Cans.