“If Artemis II is successful, the astronauts will be the first humans to reach the moon’s orbit in more than 50 years, and their path around its far side will take them farther into the universe than any human being has previously traveled.”

Well, I’m back from my west coast trip, but I came home totally sick, the SSL cert for KDO wasn’t automatically renewed¹ so the site was down for several hours this morning, and my car has decided it’s suddenly out of brake fluid? Oh and I haven’t even seen Project Hail Mary yet. (I know, right?!??!??!!!)

*sigh*

I know when I’m beaten. It’s gonna be KDO Lite for a few more days while I get my life in order. In the meantime, talk amongst yourselves…

1. A missed checklist item from when the site moved servers a few months ago.↩

“ICE Tours VT provides guided bus tours to many of these facilities, where you will learn about the scope, scale, and history of DHS in Vermont. Think Hollywood star tours, but instead of celebrity mansions you get federal surveillance infrastructure.”

“LLM-generated passwords…appear strong, but are fundamentally insecure, because LLMs are designed to predict tokens – the opposite of securely and uniformly sampling random characters.”

This has been out in the world for a while, but I just ran across it the other day: Bloody Murder is an unreleased track recorded during the studio sessions for Good Kid, M.A.A.D City. It samples Radiohead’s Everything In Its Right Place and it’s gooood. Available on YouTube and Soundcloud.

See also Dwells’ mashup of Everything In Its Right Place and N95.

Tags: Kendrick Lamar · music · Radiohead · remix · video

From Heatmap News & MIT, the Electricity Price Hub is “a new public data platform that provides monthly, utility-level estimates of residential electricity rates and bills across the United States going back to 2021…”

Scientists have genetically engineered tobacco plants to produce five psychedelic compounds, including psilocybin, DMT, and psychedelic compounds secreted by the Sonoran Desert toad.

I was thankful to read Marcin Wichary’s review of Stewart Brand’s Maintenance: Of Everything. I first heard about the book months and months ago; it sounded potentially interesting but I was afraid it was going to suffer from a now-familiar myopia of the “tech” old guard. Wi...

Not sure what level of prank/gag/stunt this is (note today’s date), but this is supposedly a fully functional compass that only points to the Olive Garden in Times Square.

The Pioneering Coffee House Serving Since 1645. “In Oxford, ‘runners’ would go from coffee house to coffee house, picking up all the best news and delivering it back to customers, said Garner. You’re talking human wi-fi.”

After two years off, Tom Scott is back with a new YouTube series: “I took a road trip through every county in England, and filmed something interesting in each of them.”

Tech investor and billionaire Marc Andreessen has many bad opinions (as evidenced by his investment portfolio). On a recent podcast, he shared a real boner: that he isn’t introspective, that people 400 years ago weren’t at all introspective, and that introspection was a cons...

Nothing Works in Trump’s America — Except Racism. “Trump is objectively bad at running the government, but he’s objectively good at running a Klan rally, and his supporters value the latter so much that they forgive the former.”

The 2026 issue of the HTML Review, “an annual journal of literature made to exist on the web”.

Mark Simonson reminisces about when he discovered type design. “The idea of coming up with an original alphabet design fired my imagination. And learning that it was possible to design type professionally was a revelation.”

“By focusing its narrative on the tech industry itself, Halt and Catch Fire’s staying power has only increased. The story it tells still has something to say about our present-day reality.”

For the latest episode of Design Matters, Debbie Millman interviews Timothy Snyder about “how we misunderstand freedom, why truth and empathy are under threat, and what this political moment asks of us”. Millman is an *excellent* interviewer.

Endgame for the Open Web, brought on by LLM bots, content summarizing while driving no traffic, increasing paywalls for information of all kinds, locking down APIs (due to AI abuse), attacks on Wikipedia, disruption of open source communities, etc.

NASA’s LRO found a new crater on the Moon…it’s 225 meters across and 43 meters deep. “According to predictions based on other lunar landmarks, a crater that big should form only once in 139 years.”

In a conversation with economist Paul Krugman, climate journalist David Roberts asserts that the United States and China are going in different directions in energy, one forwards and one back. One of the grand international stories right now — though it’s very hard when yo...

Help! My Favorite Athlete Is an Idiot (Alt headline: When Sports Heroes Have Terrible Opinions). “Just root for the jersey and not necessarily the nitwit wearing it?”

Astronaut Michael Fincke was rendered unable to speak while on the ISS, prompting an evacuation to Earth. “We’re almost 100% sure that this is a space-related thing.” Uh, I’ve been reading a lot of sci-fi recently; this is *exactly* how It starts.

A new study shows that since 1990, the United States has caused $10 trillion in global climate damages. China is responsible for $9T. “Our emissions have caused damage not only to ourselves, but pretty substantial damage in other parts of the world.”

Jesus Clarifies Return Will Be Strictly Limited To Carpentry Business. “My sole focus during this Second Coming will be various woodworking projects and not the establishment of a messianic kingdom.”

I love these looping GIF animations from perfectl00p that use Windows 3.1 elements (Minesweeper, Solitaire, SkiFree, Notepad).

For his recent London run of shows, Fred Again coaxed Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter out of his helmet and in front of the decks for a 2-hour collaborative DJ set. And you can watch the whole thing on YouTube.

Tags: Daft Punk · Fred Again · music · Thomas Bangalter · video

Test footage from a slime simulator game made by former Epic Games employee Asher Zhu. You try to stay hydrated in the hot Tokyo summer by showering and drinking beverages from vending machines.

A list of chain restaurants whose names contain unusual structures, presented in decreasing order of how appealing it would be to eat in such a structure. (White Castle, Waffle House, etc.)

There’s an upside-down “H” on the facade of a Frank Lloyd Wright building in Illinois. Here’s a deep dive into how it got there.

A comparison of different sorting algorithms (bubble, merge, heap, timsort). You can run them one at a time or race all seven.