Subscribe
Jason Kottke's weblog, home of fine hypertext products since 1998
Steve Jobs famously said that computers are a bicycle for the mind. What does that make LLMs? An e-bike for the mind? A car for the mind? A jet plane for the mind?
LLMs are getting pretty good at unmasking pseudonymous users — their success rate is “far greater” than humans alone can manage.
“Imagine what it was like for women in colonial North America. Life was different depending on where you lived, your background, and how much money you had.”
This video traces the history of Apple’s HyperCard from Vannevar Bush’s idea of the Memex to the Mother of All Demos to the Xerox PARC Alto to Bill Atkinson, the inventor of HyperCard, who said:
HyperCard is a software erector set. It lets people put things together without having to know how to solder.
There’s a ton of information about HyperCard at hypercard.org, including this HyperCard simulator that runs in your browser.
Tags: Apple · Bill Atkinson · computing · HyperCard · Vannevar Bush · video
Does Your Country Need Regime Change? A Quiz. “Is your country a notorious bad actor in the Middle East? Has your leader deployed the country’s military domestically against civilians who were protesting peacefully?”
Remember the “scroll lock” key on your keyboard? What the heck was it for? And why is the same scrolling mechanic showing up in streaming service interfaces?
Per Betteridge’s law of headlines and also the map above, my answer is clearly no. You can try it yourself here…you draw them one at a time and it adds them to the map automagically. I’m going to blame my trackpad use a little, but I’m not sure I would have done much better had I drawn with a pencil and looked a map beforehand.
Update: Your periodic reminder that Senator Al Franken can draw all 50 US states from memory with astonishing accuracy.
(thx, eric)
[This is a vintage post originally from Jul 2017.]
Tags: Al Franken · geography · maps · timeless posts · USA · video
Recent advances in science have revolutionized our understanding of the Maya, e.g. there’s evidence that “more people lived in the classic-era Maya lowlands than on the Italian peninsula during the peak of the Roman empire…”
“Boredom is the price we pay for a life rich with meaning. Recognizing this makes the feeling more endurable.”
When lit up at night, this badminton academy in Bhubaneswar, India looks like a shuttlecock.
“Supercharged” solar activity and the equinox effect, which “doubles the chance of auroral activity around the spring and fall equinoxes”, could make March 2026 the best month for the northern lights until the mid-2030s.
Last week, Nine Inch Nails released an album of remixes and unreleased session music from their Tron: Ares score called Tron Ares: Divergence. I’m listening to it now; pretty good so far.
Tags: movies · music · Nine Inch Nails · Tron · video
“A long dive into the features that make my ideal music app, and why nothing currently fulfills the brief.”
This is the most 2026 thing I’ve ever heard: Sigmund Freud’s great-granddaughter Bella Freud has a video podcast on YouTube where she interviews people (Cate Blanchette, Lorde, Graydon Carter) while they lie on a psychiatrist’s couch.
A Boston man discovered a document passed down through his family: his ancestor’s freedom papers. “When he touched that paper he was touching the same place his relative touched in 1834.”
Astrophysicist Cosimo Bambi proposes sending a tiny spacecraft to study nearby black holes. “Earth-based lasers would blast the [light] sail with photons, accelerating the craft to a third of the speed of light.”
“Novartis has settled a lawsuit by the estate of Henrietta Lacks that alleged the [company] unjustly profited off her cells, which were taken…without her knowledge in 1951 and reproduced in labs to enable major medical advancements…”
“For months, callers to the Washington state Department of Licensing who have requested automated service in Spanish have instead heard an AI voice speaking English in a strong Spanish accent.”
A 2-hour mix of music compiled by Thom Yorke that plays before Radiohead’s European shows.
Ann Ballentine bought an old candy factory building in Brooklyn in 1979. She filled it with working artists and became something of a fairy godmother to them all.
It entails someone who’s not as money driven, because you’re not gouging people for huge rents, and it requires being determined to do that over a long stretch of time.
This is a lovely little short film.
Tags: Ann Ballentine · art · NYC · real estate · video
Do people still worship the ancient Greek gods? “Hellenism – also called Hellenic ethnic religion, or Dodekatheism – which is the practice of worshipping ancient gods, has been growing in popularity since the 1990s.”
Jimi Hendrix Was a Systems Engineer. “Hendrix’s mission was to reshape both the electric guitar’s envelope and its tone until it could feel like a human voice.”
Marks found on 40,000-year-old artifacts might be a proto-language. “They found that these sign sequences displayed an information density very similar to the earliest examples of the cuneiform forerunner called proto-cuneiform.”
The aluminum soda can is a humble testament to the power and scope of human ingenuity. If that sounds like hyperbole, you should watch this video, which features eleven solid minutes of engineering explanation and is not boring for even a second.
More science/engineering programming like this please…I feel like if this would have been on PBS or Discovery, it would have lasted twice as long and communicated half the information. For a chaser, you can watch a detailed making-of from an aluminum can manufacturing company:
[This is a vintage post originally from Apr 2015.]
Tags: Bill Hammack · design · timeless posts · video
Pope Leo XIV to his priests: stop using AI to write sermons. “‘To give a homily is to share faith,’ he said, and AI ‘will never be able to share faith.’”
