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Jason Kottke's weblog, home of fine hypertext products since 1998
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The Case for Quitting: The Surprising Benefits of Opting Out by Lindsay Crouse. “When perseverance turns against us, quitting isn’t just a way out. Often, it’s the first step to something better. A pivot. A break. A chance to go further — or be free.”
“If a human did this, it would be an instant Fields Medal, no questions asked.” OpenAI recently released 350+ proofs of mathematical theorems, all in one go. “I imagine many mathematicians, like me, felt like they got punched in the stomach yesterday,”
The first trailer for Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew. I love Gerwig and I know this will be good, but I’m cautiously optimistic that it will be great. (I still forever have “Chronicwhatcles of Narnia” stuck in my head tho…)
Girls is coming back to HBO for a 5-episode run. Lena Dunham, Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke, Zosia Mamet, and Andrew Rannells are all returning. I loved this show and will tune in for sure.
ArtCraft is building open source versions of what looks like most of Adobe’s Creative Cloud apps. Oh, and a word processor and a spreadsheet app because why not?
Thing I am going to make time for in the next few days: Harry Styles and Thom Yorke in conversation. “My laptop has been dead for about 6 years. I don’t know where my charger is.” There’s an accompanying Rolling Stone cover story.
The People Holding Up the Internet. Amazing to see how much of the modern internet still depends on the volunteer work of individual people. 4 billion phones rely on the time zone database, a text file edited by just two people in their spare time.
Overdose Offsets: Why Every Bag of Fentanyl I Sell Is Net Life-Positive. “Every death on my corner is offset, with a third of a toddler left over, and I’d like that number in the conversation the next time somebody calls me a murderer…”
“I’m forced to admit that these AI-decompiled web browser ports of Call of Duty: Black Ops, Halo: CE, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Skate 3, and The Simpsons: Hit and Run actually seem to run very well.”
Prompting as Self-Portrait. “We need the blank page and the silence to go deeper into our thoughts and our understanding of ourselves and of the world.”
Nearly 4M Records of Enslaved People in 20 Former British Colonies Now Searchable Online. “The Former British Colonies Enslavement Registers contains about 300,000 pages recording enslaved people across former British colonial dependencies…”
Why I Did Not Leave Nazi Germany in Time. “Many of us feared the shock of being uprooted and tried to avoid it if at all possible. But to understand this reaction…I say that nobody could possibly have foreseen the ‘final solution.’”
The Worst Way To Get To Space. I’d never heard the story of the manhole cover possibly propelled into orbit by a nuclear blast — it was estimated to be moving at ~42 miles/sec. “Some speculated it became the first manmade object to enter Earth’s orbit.”
I 100% love this video of every time someone says a percentage on Star Trek: The Next Generation. And the word “percent” has lost all of its meaning due to semantic satiation. (thx, caroline)
My friend Matt was recently here for a week in Tokyo and wrote up his experience and observations. “I don’t think humans were ever meant to experience that many eyes and faces at once, so it was a unique experience.”
Crossword Clues Where It’s Clear the Puzzle’s Creator Got Themselves into a Jam Letter-wise. Incl. “Could be found on the second to last line of an optometrist’s vision chart” and “The sound a cow might make when spanked”.
Unseen Places: Rediscovering the Art of Observation by Anna Kodé. Looking forward to this one…Kodé is one of my favorite journalists covering urban culture. “Observation…is not a passive act, but a powerful and radical way of connecting…”
This video from Practical Engineering was very illuminating to me, a naive person who thought there were only three types of electrical outlets used in the US — the two-prong, the three-prong, and the 240V — and not the real number, which is more than 35 types of electrical outlets! Oh and “two-prong”? Not that plug’s actual name! (via unsung)
Tags: electricity · engineering · video
Japanese book rave. A club in Tokyo spread carpets on the dance floor, played ambient music, and invited daytime clubgoers to chill out and read. Would 100% frequent a bookstore/cafe that did this regularly.
Weball allows you to roll up websites into a Katamari ball. You can even roll up KDO. This is too much fun. See also Destroy Any Website.
I just went down a rabbit hole of incense seals. So cool.
Bill McKibben: I’m Exhausted. You’re Demoralized. We Weren’t Built for a World Like This. The human nervous system wasn’t designed for the polycrisis. “Among all the other dangers these developments represent, they’re simply wearing us out.”
In 1996, the Blondin family drove all around the US, blogging about it all before “blog” was even a word. “We were doing something that had no name and no manual, and we were doing it over a dial-up modem while living in a motorhome.”
Abolish Frat Culture. “This is going to be uncomfortable for anyone with a kid in a fraternity to hear: If your son finds himself in a group that would send a ‘free pussy’ text, it’s too late. The group is the disease, the text is the symptom.”
