The AI hater’s guide to code with LLMs. This is an interesting and thoughtful read.

Recently released: Super Nintendo: The Game-Changing Company That Unlocked the Power of Play. “What magical mushroom could have turned an unassuming playing card company into one of the dominant cultural forces of the twenty-first century?”

A molly guard is a safety cover that you need to move out of the way before pressing an important button. “Anecdotally, this is named after Molly, an engineer’s daughter who was invited to a datacenter and promptly pressed a big red button…”

Polar explorer and scientist Felicity Aston shares her beauty uniform. “When I come back from an expedition, my hair is in the GREATEST shape. That whole thing about washing your hair less frequently? It’s true.”

Food Is Love is a collection of essays about “how memory, food, and love are all intertwined”. “We are reminded that food is an expression of love, and sometimes the only way people who loved us were capable of showing it.”

14-year old Miles Wu recently won the top prize at a junior innovators competition for an origami shape that can hold 10,000 times its own weight “that could be used to build deployable shelters for emergency situations like natural disasters”.

The 50 Most Underappreciated Movies of the 21st Century. I’ve only seen a few of these; I’ve added a bunch to my to-see list. Any particular faves? Or additions to the list?

As I mentioned previously, comments have been unavailable on the site for the past few weeks: There was a rise in casual negativity that felt too close to how social media feels, i.e. a place where even well-meaning folks are not incentivized to think “this isn’t for me” an...

Fun fact of the day: at the height of his quadruple axel, Olympic figure skater Ilia Malinin is spinning at 350 rpm, “about the same as a kitchen stand mixer”.

If you haven’t seen this or heard about it (or even if you have), the full story of this McDonald’s mural is well worth your time. “Giving that talk…was one of the greatest moments of my life. Bar none.” (Don’t skip the video!)

As you know, I love me some Lego engineering builds. This one is pretty fun: using a large syringe, a Raspberry Pi, neodymium magnets, a controller scavenged from a toy submarine, and a bunch of Lego pieces, Brick Experiment Channel built a remote-controlled submarine. And it works so well! They even tested it by navigating 200 meters in a real stream.

Tags: Lego · video

Spider-Noir is an upcoming live-action series starring Nicolas Cage as his noir Spider-Man character from Spider-Verse. The trailer is available in color and black & white.

The Track is a documentary film about a group of athletes training in post-war Bosnia to make the Olympics in luge. The Track is a coming-of-age journey of three friends chasing their improbable Olympic dreams in post-war Bosnia. Training on a crumbling track left behind...

Fun word search game from Slate: Pears. (I love any Boggle-esque sort of game. Got 433 today.)

“‘CEO said a thing!’ journalism generally involves a press outlet parroting the claims of a CEO or billionaire utterly mindlessly without any sort of useful historical context as to whether anything being said is factually correct.”

“Our Milky Way galaxy may not have a supermassive black hole at its centre but rather an enormous clump of mysterious dark matter exerting the same gravitational influence.”

The Origins of One of the Most Beloved Video Games of All Time. “Something I’ve heard from every Mario developer I’ve ever spoken to over the years is this: Whenever you press a button, something fun should happen.”

Michelle Zauner (Crying in H Mart) on the 30th anniversary of Infinite Jest. “If you allow yourself to trust-fall into the barbed intricacies of the writing, you will discover soft, exquisite humanity as its perennial landing.”

Sara Hussain for Vogue India: In 2026, I’m No Longer Interested in ‘Working on Myself’, aka the exhausting “hyper-policing [of] our thoughts and language until having a personality feels like a risk assessment exercise”. Everything began to feel like a diagnostic exercise....

“Any serious push to account for the actions of this government — to abolish the president’s private army, restructure immigration enforcement and punish anyone responsible for wrongdoing — must include recompense and repair for its victims.”

When Gmail was released as a public beta in 2004, it “ran on three hundred old Pentium III computers nobody else at Google wanted”.

Actor-style headshots from the 80s of artists like Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, Jenny Holzer, and Robert Longo.

The Merchant’s House Museum was NYC’s first landmarked building, but until this year, the function of a small hidden passageway in the house was unknown. When historians and preservationists examined it in detail, they found that it was built by the first owner of the hous...

AI Is Getting Scary Good at Making Predictions. “From this point on, for as long as we exist, we might be asking AIs what comes next. We won’t always understand how they arrived at their predictions.”

Sleeping cleans your brain. Research suggests that zoning out, daydreaming, and being bored can perform a similar function without the need for deep sleep. So put down that phone occasionally and let your brain chill for a bit.

Tags: neuroscience · science · sleep · video

In case you didn’t realize, ICE is still terrorizing communities, kidnapping people off the streets, and destroying property in Minnesota. “The target of the kidnapping was taken away by ambulance.”

Fontemon is the world’s first video game in a font. “The entire game is enclosed in fontemon.otf, no javascript, no html, all font.”

The GOP goal of destroying the post office is coming along: the USPS is now so unreliable that newspaper delivery is delayed across the country. (My mail delivery is currently one bundle every week or two.)

Hey gang. I took a couple of days off at the beginning of the week to visit some colleges with my daughter. She found a potential contender, one that was just fine, and a school that isn’t going to work for her — we both independently zoned out listening to the presentation ...

Everyone’s living a life you know nothing about. Be kind.