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Niche Museums: The Museum of Jurassic Technology

I finally got to check off the museum that's been top of my want-to-go list since I first started documenting niche museums I've been to back in 2019.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology opened in Culver City, Los Angeles in 1988 and has been leaving visitors confused as to what's real and what isn't for nearly forty years.

Tags: museums

Beautiful machines from a beautiful country

Agentic coding tools are dramatically reducing software development costs. Here's why 2026 is going to catch a lot of people off guard.

Using LLMs at Oxide

Thoughtful guidance from Bryan Cantrill, who evaluates applications of LLMs against Oxide's core values of responsibility, rigor, empathy, teamwork, and urgency.

Via Lobste.rs

Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, oxide, bryan-cantrill

Now I want to talk about how they're selling AI. The growth narrative of AI is that AI will disrupt labor markets. I use "disrupt" here in its most disreputable, tech bro sense.

The promise of AI – the promise AI companies make to investors – is that there will be AIs that can do your job, and when your boss fires you and replaces you with AI, he will keep half of your salary for himself, and give the other half to the AI company.

That's it.

That's the $13T growth story that MorganStanley is telling. It's why big investors and institutionals are giving AI companies hundreds of billions of dollars. And because they are piling in, normies are also getting sucked in, risking their retirement savings and their family's financial security.

— Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI

Tags: cory-doctorow, ai-ethics, ai

What to try first? Run Claude Code in a repo (whether you know it well or not) and ask a question about how something works. You'll see how it looks through the files to find the answer. The next thing to try is a code change where you know exactly what you want but it's te...

A sprawling academic cheating network turbocharged by Google Ads that has generated nearly $25 million in revenue has curious connections to a Kremlin-connected oligarch whose Russian university builds drones for Russia's war against Ukraine.

These are my notes and expanded thoughts from this month’s Space News segment on ABC Radio Hobart and ABC Northern Tasmania. Every month I join Lucie Cutting on Sunday mornings to chat about what’s happening above and beyond.

Here’s what we discussed, plus some of my notes, and expanded thoughts from this edition of the programme:

Moss Survived Nine Months in Space, and Scientists Are Stunned

Japanese researchers strapped moss spores to the outside of the International Space Station for 283 days. Not inside. Outside. Direct exposure to vacuum, cosmic radiation, UV bombardment up to 1,000 times stronger than Earth’s surface, and temperature swings that would kill almost anything.

Way back (well, six months ago, anyway), when I was wiring up a Gremlin Blasto arcade board, we talked at length about this 1978 arcade game's history and its sole official home computer port by Milton Bradley to the Texas Instruments 99/4A. In the single player mode you r...

Today's links Metabolizing the theory of "political capitalism": How many $TRUMP coins should your company buy? Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: NZ doesn't want US-style copyright; Tron: Reloaded; Mass shootings and gun profits; Descartes God has fa...

The Unexpected Effectiveness of One-Shot Decompilation with Claude Chris Lewis decompiles N64 games. He wrote about this previously in Using Coding Agents to Decompile Nintendo 64 Games, describing his efforts to decompile Snowboard Kids 2 (released in 1999) using a "matchin...

If you work slowly, you will be more likely to stick with your slightly obsolete work. You know that professor who spent seven years preparing lecture notes twenty years ago? He is not going to throw them away and start again, as that would be a new seven-year project. So he will keep teaching using aging lecture notes until he retires and someone finally updates the course.

— Daniel Lemire, Why speed matters

Tags: productivity

It’s absolutely vital to be able to communicate effectively and efficiently to large groups of people. I’ve been lucky enough to get to refine and test my skills in communicating at scale for a few decades now, and the power of talking to communities is the one area where I’...

Today's links The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI: My speech for U Washington's Neuroscience, AI and Society lecture series. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Pac Man ghost algorithms; The US wrote Spain's copyright law; Illinois makes pris...

Twelve years (and one day) since launching Have I Been Pwned, it's now a service that Charlotte and I live and breathe every day. From the first thing every morning to the last thing each day, from holidays to birthdays, in sickness and in heal... wait a minute

TIL: Subtests in pytest 9.0.0+ I spotted an interesting new feature in the release notes for pytest 9.0.0: subtests. I'm a big user of the pytest.mark.parametrize decorator - see Documentation unit tests from 2018 - so I thought it would be interesting to try out subtests an...

Thoughts on Go vs. Rust vs. Zig

Thoughtful commentary on Go, Rust, and Zig by Sinclair Target. I haven't seen a single comparison that covers all three before and I learned a lot from reading this.

One thing that I hadn't noticed before is that none of these three languages implement class-based OOP.

Via Hacker News

Tags: go, object-oriented-programming, programming-languages, rust, zig

The Resonant Computing Manifesto Launched today at WIRED’s The Big Interview event, this manifesto (of which I'm a founding signatory) pushes for a positive framework for thinking about building hyper-personalized AI-powered software. This part in particular resonates with m...

Django 6.0 released Django 6.0 includes a flurry of neat features, but the two that most caught my eye are background workers and template partials. Background workers started out as DEP (Django Enhancement Proposal) 14, proposed and shepherded by Jake Howard. Jake prototype...

China-based phishing groups blamed for non-stop scam SMS messages about a supposed wayward package or unpaid toll fee are promoting a new offering, just in time for the holiday shopping season: Phishing kits for mass-creating fake but convincing e-commerce websites that convert customer payment card data into mobile wallets from Apple and Google. Experts say these same phishing groups also are now using SMS lures that promise unclaimed tax refunds and mobile rewards points.