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Longreads Valid
Text • Dr. Dinesh Kumar Jangra

The People Who Know Too Much: A Reading List on Amateur Experts

The people whose private fixations become a way of seeing, remembering, and caring for the world.

The Atlas Obscura Podcast Updates instantly via WebSub
Audio • SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura

The Complicated History of Natchez, Mississippi

Natchez, Mississippi is home to one of the largest concentrations of antebellum homes, and tourists come from far and wide to see them. But Natchez was also a center of the cotton trade, and had one of the biggest slave markets in the country. Filmmakers Suzannah Herbert and Darcy McKinnon made a documentary about this beautiful and complicated place, and how its residents wrestle with which story should be told to visitors.  

The documentary, called “Natchez,” is out now. Suzannah and Darcy also put together a Visitor's Guide to the city of Natchez if you want to visit yourself. 


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Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Snap Unveils Specs, Its $2,200 AR Glasses, and They’re Fugly

theverge.com/tech/950492/snap-specs-ar-glasses-launch-date-preorder?view_token=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJpZCI6IlZTMmZYVXprcHciLCJwIjoiL3RlY2gvOTUwNDkyL3NuYXAtc3BlY3MtYXItZ2xhc3Nlcy1sYXVuY2gtZGF0ZS1wcmVvcmRlciIsImV4cCI6MTc4MjE3Nzc0OSwiaWF0IjoxNzgxNzQ1NzQ5fQ.Pdh1hCJafS7ca3UfJ7pPoS-wRpZQ6tEAr7HEVfTOAd8

Jay Peters, The Verge (gift link): Snap is finally launching augmented glasses for the public. Specs, which Snap describes as “a wearable computer built into see-through augmented reality glasses,” will cost $2,195. You can preorder a pair of Specs now at specs.com with ...

kottke.org Valid
Text • Jason Kottke

Watch Baseball Games in Realtime in 8-Bit View

This is kind of fantastic: Ribbie lets you watch actual MLB baseball games “rendered pitch by pitch in a cozy 8-bit view while they happen”. Ribbie is a simple way to keep a live baseball game nearby. It shows the score, the bases, the count, and a tiny pixel field that moves with the real game. I built it because I wanted something between a stats tab and a full broadcast. Something you can leave open while you work, cook, or do whatever else, then glance over and know what is happening. There are a few different views you can use. The image above is the fullscreen view. Here’s the fullscreen game chooser view and the room view of the game. I love this. Nice use of Silkscreen too. 😊 Tags: baseball · design · Silkscreen · sports · typography

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Vehicle Motion Cues — a.k.a. Apple’s Weird Anti-Nausea Dots

theverge.com/tech/942854/apple-vehicle-motion-cues-review-really-work

Thomas Ricker, writing for The Verge:

I’ll just work from the car, I thought. But after a few minutes of staring at my screen on quick mountain switchbacks I could feel the first signs of cold, coagulated nausea bubbling up from that sweaty place in my gut. I looked to the horizon for relief, but nothing helped... until I remembered Apple’s magic dots.

Introduced in 2024, Apple’s Vehicle Motion Cues promise to tap into your device’s accelerometer and gyroscope to reduce or, in my case, even eliminate the motion sickness felt when trying to use an iPhone, iPad, or MacBook inside a moving vehicle.

My son has suffered from motion sickness in cars his whole life, and Apple’s Vehicle Motion Cues work like a charm for him too. What a great feature.

Link: theverge.com/tech/942854/apple-vehicle-motion-cues-review…

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention Valid
Text

GLM-5.2 is probably the most powerful text-only open weights LLM

Chinese AI lab Z.ai released GLM-5.2 to their coding plan subscribers on June 13th, and then yesterday (June 16th) released the full open weights under an MIT license. Similar in size to their previous GLM-5 and GLM-5.1 releases, this is 753B parameter, 1.51TB monster - with...

kottke.org Valid
Text • Jason Kottke

Full set of Underworld playing live at EDC Las Vegas...

Full set of Underworld playing live at EDC Las Vegas back in May.

kottke.org Valid
Text • Jason Kottke

A digital clock where the numbers are made from dozens...

A digital clock where the numbers are made from dozens of analog clock hands. Hard to describe…just go take a look.

kottke.org Valid
Text • Jason Kottke

Book 1 of the Iliad, Read in Ancient Greek

On his YouTube channel, Thomas Whichello reads interesting literature aloud, often in the original languages, dialects, or accents, with the goal of making “classic works intelligible and enjoyable to everybody”. One of his most popular videos is his recitation of book 1 o...

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention Valid
Text

Quoting Charity Majors

What happened in 2025 was this: the economics of code production were turned upside down. Instead of being very hard, time-consuming, and expensive to generate code, it became effectively free and instant. Lines of code went from being treasured, reused, cared for and carefully curated, to being disposable and regenerable, practically overnight.

— Charity Majors, AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

Tags: charity-majors, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, ai, llms

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention Valid
Text

datasette 1.0a34

Release: datasette 1.0a34

Quoting the release notes:

The big feature in this alpha is tools to insert, edit and delete rows within the Datasette interface. These features are available on table pages, and edit and delete are also available as action items on the row page.

The inspiration for this feature - which is long overdue - was Datasette Agent. I added SQL write support to that the other day which highlighted how absurd it was that you could insert and edit ties via the chat interface but not in the regular Datasette UI!

Tags: projects, datasette, annotated-release-notes

kottke.org Valid
Text • Jason Kottke

The Black Jeopardy Misses YouTube channel catalogs just...

The Black Jeopardy Misses YouTube channel catalogs just how little Jeopardy contestants know about Black history, culture, and celebrities. (See also, of course, Black Jeopardy, which drives home a similar point in a different way.)

Longreads Valid
Text • Krista Stevens

What Remains

"We may know that nothing lasts forever, but this knowledge doesn’t alleviate the loneliness of grief."

Simone Giertz Updates instantly via WebSub
Video

The productivity hack you didn’t know you needed

Full video on my channel!

xkcd.com Valid
Text

Messi

Commentators agree that this will probably be the last World Cup in which Messi faces serious competition.

Longreads Valid
Text • Cheri Lucas Rowlands

How to Hack a Superyacht

"GPS is critical to everything from shipping to warfare. Tricking it is ridiculously easy."

kottke.org Valid
Text • Jason Kottke

Two Huge Collections of Leonardo’s Codexes Digitally Reunited After 400 Years

For the first time in hundreds of years, two collections of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks have been brought together online at the Leonardotheka. In some cases, pages that were cut apart centuries ago have been digitally joined so we can see the full pages again,...

Work Chronicles Valid
Text • Work Chronicles

(comic) Adding more people to a project

Simone Giertz Updates instantly via WebSub
Video

An apology to our puzzle customers

Colossal Valid
Text • Kate Mothes

‘State Fairs: Growing American Craft’ Surveys Agriculture, Ingenuity, and Community

‘State Fairs: Growing American Craft’ Surveys Agriculture, Ingenuity, and CommunityFrom cows sculpted out of butter to seed art and crazy foods, ingenuity is as much a part of the tradition as showcasing time-honored practices.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article ‘State Fairs: Growing American Craft’ Surveys Agriculture, Ingenuity, and Community appeared first on Colossal.