Work Chronicles
• Work Chronicles
(comic) Remind yourself why you do this
America vs Europe: Two Ways to Build a City
Architect and urban & computational designer Abhinav Bhardwaj made this great set of slides comparing urban design in the US and Europe, peppered with pithy observations like:
European space is shaped on purpose: American open space is what’s left over.
Small blocks make more corners, more routes, more street life.
A fine grid offers hundreds of routes; the tree offers one way out.
(thx, meg)
Tags: Abhinav Bhardwaj · architecture · cities · design · urban planning
Longreads
• Krista Stevens
On Japan’s Post Office For Letters to the Dead
"Sally Hayden explores the ways we cope with loss in times of crisis."
Colossal
• Kate Mothes
Willie Cole Traverses ‘Mind, Body, and Soul’ in Expressive Mixed Media Assemblages
Cole's imaginative sculptures tap into environmentalism, consumerism, and global traditions and histories.
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 Willie Cole Traverses ‘Mind, Body, and Soul’ in Expressive Mixed Media Assemblages appeared first on Colossal.
Are You in the Weights? “LLMs encode their...
Are You in the Weights? “LLMs encode their knowledge and reasoning through billions of numbers called ‘the weights.’ ‘In the weights’ means that a model is able to recall someone without using tools like web search.”
Human brains were not designed to deal with an endless...
Human brains were not designed to deal with an endless supply of bad news. “We are the same species as we were thousands of years ago. What’s changed is the size of the world it’s asked to scan for threats.”
“Henry v Lalas Is the World Cup’s Most Compelling Battle”
Although I’ve seen a highlight or two, I have not overcome my FIFA+Fox+Trump disgust to watch any of the World Cup so far. MAGA dipshit Alexi Lalas is high on the list of reasons not to tune into any of Fox’s braindead coverage, but it sounds like he’s being dragged on the r...
Processed Food Won’t Kill You
From bread and yogurt to frozen vegetables, most of us eat processed food every day. The real story is more complicated than “processed = bad”, and some processing can even make food safer and more nutritious.
#kurzgesagt
#inanutshell #kurzgesagt_inanutshell #learnwithshort...
This is probably the definitive post about web browsers...
The Atlas Obscura Podcast
• SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura
Beyond the Game: Seattle’s Beacon Food Forest
Today, we step onto the four acres of Seattle’s Beacon Food Forest. And we learn how what started as a neighborhood project evolved into an open-source grocery store.
This episode is part of our ongoing coverage of the soccer world championship. In each episode, we take you beyond the stadium, and to a nearby wonder that’s off the beaten track.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
sqlite-utils 4.0rc1 adds migrations and nested transactions
sqlite-utils is my combined Python library and CLI tool for working with SQLite databases. It provides an extensive set of higher-level operations on top of Python's default sqlite3 package, including support for complex table transformations, automatic table creation from J...
sqlite-utils 4.0rc1
Temporary Cloudflare Accounts for AI agents
Temporary Cloudflare Accounts for AI agents
The announcement says this is "for AI agents" but (as is pretty common these days) the AI hook isn't really necessary, this is an interesting feature for everyone else as well.
Short version: you can now create a Cloudflare Workers...
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
Before and After: MacOS 27 Golden Gate Beta 1’s App Icons
basicappleguy.com/basicappleblog/macos-golden-gate-icon-comparison
Basic Apple Guy, back during WWDC:
WWDC always brings a torrent of new content, details, and
platform-wide changes. One of the first things I noticed after
installing the macOS Golden Gate beta was the updated icon design.
The colours are much bolder, several icons have ...
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
Mux — Video for Developers
My thanks to Mux for sponsoring Daring Fireball last week. Video is a boatload of data. Every video file in your product contains audio, objects, and scenes that most stacks can’t read or access.
Mux Robots turns that data into video intelligence. Configure your video workflows once, and they run automatically on every new upload: ask questions, summarize, find key moments, and more. No asset webhooks or self-hosted glue code needed.
Mux is video infrastructure for developers, trusted by Synthesia, Shopify, and the U.S. Soccer Federation. Start building for free. Use code FIREBALL at signup for an extra $50 credit.
The Spool Table is finally going worldwide
Side Effect
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
Another One for the ‘Sorry, We Used to Be Crap’ Truth-in-Advertising File: Carlsberg Beer
Ben Chapman, reporting for The Independent in 2019:
After 40 years of advertising its lager as “Probably the best beer
in the world”, Danish brewer Carlsberg has confessed that the
famous slogan may not be true. Reacting to falling sales and
increasingly harsh comments f...
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
‘What’s the Deal With Old Guys and Giant Glasses?’
Early adoption of new technology is generally considered a young-person thing, but maybe Snap Specs will turn that notion on its head. Direct sales in retirement homes?
Quoting Sean Lynch
The real valuable capability MCP offers over skills/CLI is isolating the auth flow outside of the agent’s context window, and potentially out of the harness completely. [...]
Maybe the idealized form of MCP is just an auth gateway for the API and nothing else. That’d still be a win.
— Sean Lynch, comment on Hacker News
Tags: model-context-protocol, llms, ai, generative-ai, skills