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Timeline

  • Techdirt Techdirt remote

    RFK Jr. Goes Full Anti-Vaxxer Conspiracy Theorist Over 2 PA Measles Deaths

    When we just discussed the two recent deaths in Pennsylvania that came as a result of measles infections, we noted that there was very little information about the deceased. Some additional information has since been released, in particular the fact that one of those that died was a newborn child. This is the sort of […]
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  • Platformer Platformer remote

    The Hugging Face attack was worse than we thought

    The AI industry is begging for a slowdown. Maybe we should listen?
    Reply source
  • Techdirt Techdirt remote

    White Supremacists Spin DOJ’s SPLC Indictment To Legitimize Extremism & Expand Recruitment

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. In April 2026, a federal grand jury returned indictments charging the Southern Poverty Law Center with wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The indictment alleges the SPLC, a nonprofit legal advocacy group, secretly funneled more than US$3 million in donated funds to […]
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  • Techdirt Techdirt remote

    Administration Escalates Deportations To Haiti As Violent Gang Attacks Escalate In Haiti

    I can’t assume the Trump administration hoped this would happen. But I can’t believe no one in the administration (Trump, Stephen Miller, Tom Homan) isn’t secretly thrilled that this has happened. The administration managed to revoke temporary protected status for Haitian refugees in America, a decision that affects nearly 350,000 people. The revocation of this […]
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  • Techdirt Techdirt remote

    Would The Next George Floyd Video Survive Meta’s New Teen Safety Rules?

    Earlier this year, one of the smartest internet rights people around, Heather Burns, suggested the “Darnella Test” regarding any kind of “kid safety” rule online. It’s named after Darnella Frazier. You might not recognize her name, but you’ve seen her work. She was the 17-year-old who was walking to the corner shop when she happened […]
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  • Techdirt Techdirt remote

    Daily Deal: Ultrathin Sleep Aid Under Pillow Speaker

    Enjoy calming sounds, bedtime music, audiobooks, or podcasts without wearing headphones or disturbing a sleeping partner. The Ultrathin Sleep Aid speaker fits comfortably beneath or beside your pillow, delivering clear, localized audio while remaining virtually unnoticeable during sleep. Whether you’re winding down after a long day, taking a quick afternoon nap, or helping children drift […]
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    ICE Worked With Iran To Deport Iranians Back To A Country Trump Repeatedly Claimed Was Harming Iranians

    The Trump administration has been working steadily to remove protected status for asylum seekers that even Trump admits are deadly “shitholes.” Trump makes claims about countries that seem to indicate they’re too dangerous to live in, but then insists there’s no reason we shouldn’t be allowed to deport migrants to places where they’re likely to […]
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  • Scripting News Scripting News remote

    I've been watching The Pitt, but it can be a bit much, so I went looking for something a bit lighter, and found 9 to 5 on Amazon Prime. Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton are the stars, and Dolly's famous song with the same name is the theme. It's a perfect slice of the world I grew up in. I get it confused with Working Girl which came out eight years later, with a similar theme -- what if women ran the business world, how much better would that be? Working Girl also had a really good theme song, written and performed by Carly Simon.

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  • kottke.org kottke.org remote

    Google Maps Changes Lake Ontario to Lake America ....

    Google Maps Changes Lake Ontario to Lake America. Totally pathetic and stupid. Maps are wayfinding tools and this toadying political change will help no one find their way.

    Reply source
  • Techdirt Techdirt remote

    Texas Politicians Slowly Realize Elon Musk Hijacked Billions In Taxpayer Broadband Grants

    Back in June I wrote a feature for The Verge about how Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos had convinced Republicans to redirect billions in taxpayer money away from future-proof fiber optic upgrades, and toward their low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband networks they’d already planned to deploy. Curious behavior for two extremely-rich gentlemen who both repeatedly […]
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  • 404 Media 404 Media remote

    How Cyber Sleuths Tracked a Nigerian Scammer to His Doorstep

    Erin West and Paul Raffile went to Nigeria to track down a scammer. They found much more than just his identity.
    Reply source
  • Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries remote

    Understanding ChatGPT Work

    OpenAI announced ChatGPT Work on July 9th, and have been furiously iterating on it ever since. It is an extraordinarily confusing and very powerful product. Here's what I've figured out about it so far.

    ChatGPT Work is actually two products

    The more interesting version of ChatGPT Work is the one that runs in the cloud. This can be accessed via chatgpt.com or through the ChatGPT mobile apps. Let's call it Work Cloud.

    If you install the ChatGPT desktop app - the app that used to be called Codex - you gain access to a thing called ChatGPT Work that can access files and run programs directly on your computer. Let's call that one Work Local. This one feels more like regular Codex re-skinned to be less intimidating to non-software-developers.

    (Update: Work Cloud is also available from the ChatGPT desktop app, via a Where should this chat run? dropdown.)

    For the rest of this article I'm going to talk exclusively about Work Cloud.

    Work is for paid subscribers only

    Right now, ChatGPT Work (in both flavors) is available only to $20/month and up subscribers. Free users and $8/month Go users do not have access.

    Work has features that aren't available in Chat

    The interface for accessing Work is a tab selector, which presents it as an alternative to Chat:

    The obvious question is when should I use Chat, and when should I use Work?

    OpenAI's official answer to that question is:

    Use Chat when you want an answer, explanation, brainstorm, or short draft. Use ChatGPT Work when you want ChatGPT to complete a task with a clear outcome, such as a brief, deck, analysis, recurring update, workflow, or file you can review and use.

    I find that almost entirely useless, because I've been using regular ChatGPT Chat for all of those task categories for years!

    The better question then is what features does Work have that are missing from Chat?

    After extensive experimentation I think I've mostly figured that out:

    Model selection

    In Work, you get the option to pick GPT-5.6 Sol, Luna, or Terra, each with Light, Medium, High, Extra High, Max, or Ultra reasoning levels. You can also pick GPT-5.5 at Light, Medium, High, or Extra High.

    These look to be the same models that are available through the OpenAI API.

    Chat offers a different selection: 5.6 Instant, Medium, High, Extra High, and Pro (actually Extra High and Pro are only available for $100/month+ subscribers - $20/month subscribers cap out at High). It doesn't explain if those are Luna or Terra or Sol (I'm assuming Sol?). 5.6 Pro appears to be exclusive to Chat, with no equivalent in Work.

    My current understanding from using Codex is that Ultra is a special mode that more eagerly delegates to sub-agents.

    I believe ChatGPT Work sessions are billed against your Codex allowance, while ChatGPT Chat Sessions get their own, separate allowance. This may help explain the model availability differences.

    Code execution with Internet access!

    As a long-time fan of the Code Interpreter pattern - pioneered by OpenAI in 2023 - this is by far the most exciting feature of ChatGPT Work (Cloud) for me.

    The code execution environment can now talk to the rest of the internet!

    ChatGPT Chat can't do this - if you ask it to install additional software packages or interact with websites or APIs that access will be blocked by the container proxy.

    (Weirdly, back in January it grew the ability to install packages, but that doesn't seem to work any more. I wish they had better changelogs!)

    Claude's equivalent container has allowed restricted internet access since it launched last September. Claude can install packages from PYPI and NPM and clone repositories from GitHub. But that is about it: the allowlist of domains is very short.

    ChatGPT Work allows a whole lot more than that. It can be configured with a specific list of allowed domains, but the default appears to be open to all.

    This makes Work an incredibly useful tool. You can have it clone GitHub repositories, install their dependencies, then use them to interact with the rest of the web!

    A full, headless Chrome browser

    Another killer feature of ChatGPT Work is the browser tool. ChatGPT Work can launch a full Chrome instance, load websites, fill out forms, and take screenshots.

    If a site requires sign in the browser can prompt you to take over and enter both passwords and 2FA codes, without round-tripping those credentials through the model itself.

    It can even run JavaScript against the DOM of loaded pages. I prompted:

    Load simonwillison.net in your browser and extract the headings using JavaScript

    ChatGPT Work fired up a browser instance and ran the code:

    await tab.playwright.evaluate(() => {
  return Array.from(document.querySelectorAll("h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6"), heading => ({
    level: heading.tagName.toLowerCase(),
    text: heading.innerText.trim().replace(/\s+/g, " "),
    id: heading.id || null
  }));
});

    This feels a lot like my shot-scraper javascript tool, only now I can access it on my phone!

    A persistent, shared filesystem

    ChatGPT Chat gets a fresh filesystem for each chat session. These cannot be accessed from any other session.

    In ChatGPT Work each session gets its own scratch folder - named something like /workspace/scratch/e00a0a017944 - but each of those are persisted across sessions, so you can access files from previous chats. I have 171 folders in /workspace/scratch right now!

    As far as I can tell that /workspace volume is mounted to all Work sessions that are currently running - file edits from one can be instantly seen by the others. They don't seem to share the same process space though, and localhost servers running in one can't be accessed from another.

    ChatGPT Sites

    ChatGPT Work has the ability to build and deploy entire websites, using Cloudflare Workers. These can have HTML and JavaScript and can run server-side features too, including stateful features on top of Cloudflare D1 and R2.

    Here's a simple site I built with this feature:

    london-pelicans-in-her-piety.simonw.chatgpt.site

    My prompt was:

    Figure out all of the places in London with a pelican in her piety, then turn that into a JSON file and build a ChatGPT sites site about them

    (A pelican in her piety is a fascinating piece of medieval Christian imagery - once you know about them you'll find them all over the place.)

    These sites default to being private to the user that created them, but you can make them public and (on team plans) share them with other specific individuals.

    Sub-agents with Sol, Luna, and Terra

    There's not much to say about this one. ChatGPT Chat can't run sub-agents. ChatGPT Work can. This is very much a power-user feature: if you are running a complex project that can benefit from multiple parallel agents working together, Work can do that.

    Scheduled prompt automations

    Another feature that seems to have migrated from regular ChatGPT to ChatGPT Work at some point. You can prompt ChatGPT Work like this:

    run a search to see if Waymo have announced a launch date for Half Moon Bay every day at 8am

    This will schedule a prompt to run on that frequency. These prompts can decide that nothing interesting has happened, or they can decide to notify you of some new information.

    Update: Actually this seems to work in ChatGPT Chat as well.

    It's still worth noting here though, as it can be used in conjunction with other ChatGPT Work exclusive features. You can set a scheduled task to update a ChatGPT Site on an hourly basis, for example.

    Is this safe?

    An open question for me right now is how safe all of this stuff is.

    My lethal trifecta model warns about the risks inherent in any agent system that combines access to private data with exposure to untrusted content and a way to communicate stolen information back to an attacker.

    ChatGPT Work combines all three!

    I'd love to hear more from OpenAI about how they protect ChatGPT Work sessions against prompt injection attacks. I expect their answer is the same auto-review mechanism as Codex.

    OpenAI could make this a lot less confusing

    Figuring this all out took way more work than it should have.

    I think there are two key problems here:

    1. OpenAI explain Work in terms of what it's for, not what it actually does
    2. OpenAI still insist on hiding their system prompts and tools descriptions

    If the ChatGPT Work documentation included the exact system prompt and tool descriptions used by the agent I wouldn't have needed to write this post.

    A list of all the tools

    Shortly after publishing this article I had an idea. I started a fresh Work session and prompted:

    Build a site that lists every one of your tools - nearly grouped into categories - and for each one explain what it does. Try to exactly duplicate arguments and tool descriptions where possible. Design aesthetic should be technical docs, minimal flare

    Here's the site it built, which includes details of 223 registered tools - though 6 of those are from my own personal MCPs served via datasette-mcp.

    And a whole lot of Skills

    I noticed that the only browser-related tool in the list was web.run, which has methods for running searches, opening URLs, and clicking links, but didn't look like the full story in regards to headless browser automation.

    This made me suspicious that something was missing, so I told the ChatGPT Work session that built that tools reference site:

    Add full copies of every skill to the website (separate pages linked to from the homepage)

    It turns out ChatGPT Work uses a lot of skills - 44 in fact!

    The control-browser skill explains how the browser works:

    Run browser setup code through the Node REPL js tool. In this environment the callable tool id typically appears as mcp__node_repl__js. [...]

    The ability to interact directly with the browser is exposed through the browser-client runtime via the agent.browsers.* API. Before trying to interact with it, you MUST emit and read the complete documentation returned by await browser.documentation() in one go.

    So I told Work:

    Add the full output of await browser.documentation() to the bottom of the /skills/control-browser page

    And now you can read that on /skills/control-browser as well.

    A few more interesting Skills:

    You are only seeing the long-form articles from my blog. Subscribe to /atom/everything/ to get all of my posts, or take a look at my other subscription options.

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  • Techdirt Techdirt remote

    Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

    This week, MrWilson scores another double-win with both top spots on the insightful side. In first place, it’s a piece-by-piece response to a commenter who defended ICE’s failed illegal raid on an immigration law office: In second place, it’s a comment about the first two measles deaths of 2026: Then: “Nobody has died. It’s not […]
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  • 404 Media 404 Media remote

    Google's Calling Lake Ontario 'Lake America' Now

    Google Maps announced on Saturday it would start reflecting the change for U.S.-based users.
    Reply source
  • Scripting News Scripting News remote

    I've been watching Season 1 of The Pitt, and as its reviews said, it's great drama, and there are lots of episodes. I like shows like this because they're simulated communities, we come to know the characters, and think about them even when we're not watching. Before too long we'll have AI programming that makes these shows like software, the stories assemble around the characters, and then are generated the same way ChatGPT generates the art we call slop, which will someday not be a pejorative the same way sick and junk aren't negative terms today. So we'll be able to call up new episodes of The Wire or The Sopranos or The Pitt any time we like. We'd be missing the fun of discussing the latest episode with friends, or maybe we'll have bot-invented friends too who will simulate having watched the episode you just watched, which leads us to another masterpiece of entertainment, The Matrix. On the other hand, I've watched The Wire at least five times all the way through, and even though I know what they're about to say in a lot of places, I do forget the sub-plots so at least some of it can be new each time. And btw, finally an episode of Silo that's was surprising that I didn't see coming. I read the books, so I feel like I should watch the show, but until the latest episode I was uninterested in any of the characters. Finally there's a plot to think about!

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  • Scripting News Scripting News remote

    An absolutely delicious temperate cloud-free day in the Catskills, so I got up from the computer and enjoyed.

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  • kottke.org kottke.org remote

    Ahhh, relax with the sights and sounds of the Windows 98...

    Ahhh, relax with the sights and sounds of the Windows 98 Disk Defrag Simulator.

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  • Techdirt Techdirt remote

    This Week In Techdirt History: August 23rd – 29th

    This Week in 2016 This Week in 2011 This Week in 2006
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  • kottke.org kottke.org remote

    Voting is now open for the 2026 Tiny Awards , featuring...

    Voting is now open for the 2026 Tiny Awards, featuring 10 sites that celebrate “the best of the small, poetic, creative, handmade web”. You have until Sept 25 to vote.

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  • kottke.org kottke.org remote

    Heat waves are disproportionately harming people with...

    Heat waves are disproportionately harming people with schizophrenia. “The bodies of people with schizophrenia, especially those on medication, simply regulate temperature very differently than others do.”

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  • 404 Media 404 Media remote

    Thousands of Interstellar Objects May Be Lurking in Our Solar System

    The Sun has likely passed so close to other stars in the past that it captured thousands of small interstellar objects from alien systems, reports a new study.
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  • Techdirt Techdirt remote

    Buc-ee’s Decides The Right Response To Pushback On Its Trademark Bullying Is To Invoke Partisanship

    We’ve been detailing the trademark bullying ways of Buc-ee’s, famous gas station and convenience store chain in the American south and infamous IP bully, for over a year now. Buc-ee’s seems to think that any semi-related business that has branding that involves a cartoon animal or in any way references beavers somehow violates its trademark […]
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  • Techdirt Techdirt remote

    ‘Right To Repair’ State Laws Continue To Surge, But Enforcement Remains Nonexistent

    There’s still a massive effort afoot to implement statewide “right to repair” laws that try to make it cheaper, easier, and environmentally friendlier for you to repair the technology you own. All fifty states have at least flirted with the idea, though only Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado, California, Oregon, and Washington have actually passed laws. US PIRG […]
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  • Techdirt Techdirt remote

    Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Move Fast And Settle Things

    Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on […]
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  • Techdirt Techdirt remote

    Pete Hegseth And His Department Of Unconstitutional Revenge Lose Again In California

    When Pete Hegseth declared Anthropic a national security risk because it wouldn’t agree to his dangerously unethical demands for what Claude should be able to do, Anthropic sued to challenge the directives. One of the challenges was brought in the Northern District of California, where Anthropic has now notched another significant win. While the previous […]
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  • Techdirt Techdirt remote

    Daily Deal: Raspberry Pi Pico With Ultimate Starter Kit

    The SunFounder Raspberry Pi Pico With the Ultimate Starter Kit offers a rich IoT learning experience for beginners aged 8 and up. With over 450 components, 117 projects, and expert-led tutorials, this kit makes learning microcontroller programming and IoT engaging and accessible. It also features 27 video lessons by renowned educator Paul McWhorter, simplifying microcontroller programming […]
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  • Techdirt Techdirt remote

    School Asks Cops To Stop Using Stun Gloves On Its Students

    Compliant Technologies probably would have preferred to keep flying under the radar. But a gaudy new no-bid contract with ICE (worth up to $20 million!) made it impossible. Prior to ICE’s big purchase, it may as well have never existed. It only had a few clients, and those few clients purchased a few pairs for […]
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  • 404 Media 404 Media remote

    Behind the Blog: The Complete Idiot's Guide to Flamin' Hot Slop

    This week, we discuss cool old books, new toys for ICE, and a boardwalk slop invasion.
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  • 404 Media 404 Media remote

    ICE Plans to Spend Millions on Boston Dynamics Dog Robots

    ICE wants the robot dogs to improve “officer safety.”
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  • Scripting News Scripting News remote

    Manton wants to know why Marc Benioff chose the name Claudeforce for his brand-merge of Salesforce and Claude. My two cents. Claude is a great name. I think that’s ultimately what he bought. His customers just want to be able to check the box – we’re using AI. Boss is happy. When I was coming up as a young dude in tech, the old saying was “No one ever got fired for buying IBM.” Today, in 2026, it’s Claude in place of IBM. My father worked in marketing at IBM in Armonk, so I heard a lot about their strategies that meant the IBM brand would be kicking ass forever. All things must pass. But in the early days of the PC industry, IBM sure had the power. Kind of like the US going to war with Iran in 2026. In the end IBM wanted to get rid of Microsoft, but Billg had the last laugh.

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  • Techdirt Techdirt remote

    Republicans Stumble In Bid To Flood Midterm Airwaves With Discounted Ads

    Back in June, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission that federal limits on coordinated expenditures by political parties violate the First Amendment. Which is every bit as stupid and corrupt as it sounds. Previously, under the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), political parties were subjected to strict […]
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  • Techdirt Techdirt remote

    Irony: Catholic Bishops Tell FL Officials To Respect Its Religious Liberty To Not Accept Religious Exemptions For Vaccines

    The country is continuing to reel from multiple infectious disease outbreaks in America, even as childhood vaccination rates continue to fall. Measles, cyclosporiasis, whooping cough: you don’t actually need me to go on. With RFK Jr. using his position as Secretary of HHS to further muddy the waters on vaccines and their safety, some states […]
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  • Platformer Platformer remote

    How AI agents "radicalized" a top Meta exec into quitting her job

    Clara Shih on how AI will soon displace the first few rungs on the career ladder — and why she left Big Tech to do something about it
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  • Techdirt Techdirt remote

    Comparing Nixon’s Attacks On The Press To Trump’s

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. In his White House Correspondents’ Association dinner speech on July 24, 2026, President Donald Trump made his usual diatribes against the news media. He derided the “failing” New York Times and reiterated his complaint that CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins doesn’t smile enough. He […]
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  • Techdirt Techdirt remote

    LA Mayor Karen Bass The Latest Democrat To Wimp Out On Paramount Merger

    The unpopular Paramount Warner Brothers merger should have been a perfect opportunity for Democrats to demonstrate they are finally serious about stuff like media consolidation, right wing propaganda, media reform, and antitrust after decades of policy incoherence. Instead, numerous prominent California Democrats have been buckling to Paramount demands aimed at settling a 12-state antitrust lawsuit […]
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  • 404 Media 404 Media remote

    The AI ‘Ghosts’ Contaminating Academic Publishing

    “The academic record is being quietly haunted” by researchers with names like Elena Vasquez and Marcus Chen.
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  • Techdirt Techdirt remote

    Oracle Helped Kneecap Section 230, Then Bought 15% Of A Company That Needs It.

    Six years ago, when Trump first tried to force ByteDance to sell TikTok’s US operations to his billionaire buddy Larry Ellison at Oracle, we wondered if this would finally get Oracle to change its tune on Section 230. While not as widely known outside of Silicon Valley, Oracle has been a driving force behind the […]
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  • Techdirt Techdirt remote

    Daily Deal: The 2026 Canva Creator Mastery Bundle

    Take your design skills to the next level with the 2026 Canva Creator Mastery Bundle, a powerful all-in-one course for modern creators and business owners. This program teaches you how to use Canva effectively to produce professional-quality visuals for any purpose. You’ll explore practical design techniques, creative workflows and branding strategies that make your content […]
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  • Techdirt Techdirt remote

    Flock Claims It’s The First Company To Expose Police Misuse Of Surveillance Tech

    Flock Safety is hurting. It spent the early part of its career pitching plate reader tech to people who honestly didn’t need it: HOA supervisors and gated communities. Then it realized there was far more money to be made by courting governments, rather than the richest parts of the private sector. A few years later […]
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  • kottke.org kottke.org remote

    Emptying the Tabs…

    Ok, we’re gonna go a little old school today. I’m talking the late 1990s and early 2000s, back before permalinks (sorry), RSS, and social media turned blog posts & tweets into their own little discrete units packaged to be easily passed around and things were less homogeneous. Back then, blogs — at least the ones I loved — tended to be more of a stream of consciousness thing, just an unordered and uncurated list of whatever happened to pop into people’s heads or cross their screens.

    So, I’ve currently got at least 120 tabs across 20+ windows open in Chrome. I know, I know, I’ve gotta get a tab manager, but this is where I am right now. Each of these tabs contains something interesting and potentially bloggable, but some of them have been sitting there for months and with moving stuff consuming most of my days right now, I don’t have time to sit down and give them each even a Quick Links treatment. So I’m gonna do them rapid-fire in the hopes that you might find some of it interesting. Here we go, let’s empty some tabs!!

    The winners of the 2026 iPhone Photography Awards. Via my pal Jodi, I think. I love this one, which rhymes with this famous photo (Behind the Gare St. Lazare) by Henri Cartier-Bresson:

    Ways of Treeing, “Meditations on time and rebellion against the straight line”.

    The quiet grief of adult friendship. “Adult friendship became one of the most emotionally significant and least discussed losses of modern life.” (Via swissmiss; have I linked to this one before?)

    Hugh Howey (author of the Silo books) on how the self-publishing window has closed (or at least narrowed). “We had less than 20 years of writing being hard and publishing being easy, and we will never get that window back.”

    I haven’t done a media diet post since November (and may not again?) but I’ve been eagerly watching s03 of Silo, listening to Toni Morrison read Beloved (great book but what a fucking gift to hear Morrison read it), and enjoyed the new Spider-Man, a series that is at its best when the three leads just chill and talk.

    “Artist and researcher Maggie Coblentz fermented miso in orbit, chasing a deeper question: What makes a miso a miso—or a person a person—away from Earth?”

    Bye Bye Paywall.

    I Eat the Stars: How to Live Fully and Beautifully in a Collapsing World by Sarah Wilson.

    Messy Nessy’s Cabinet (always a good source of interesting links) redesigned recently.

    These Dutch strip islands are cool.

    How art invented humanity (instead of the other way around).

    I don’t watch enough videos by Phil Edwards these days: “Why are bowling alleys across America replacing 2,000-pound mechanical pinsetters with nylon strings?”

    Is democracy without elections possible? Could a lottery be better? I actually watched this a couple of months ago but never got around to writing it up. More on this from Alex Guerrero.

    I really wanted to get to this one but just never could find the time: Historia Civilis on The History of the City.

    This might be a minority view, but my YouTube algorithm is actually pretty good at showing me stuff I’m interested in. Case in point: when I was getting the link for the city video above, I noticed a newish video from Tom Scott about Bletchley Park and the secrecy of the Intelligence Factory.

    The Spectacle: Has Taking the Perfect Photo Ruined Tourism?

    Fordite is an artificial gemstone made up of dozens of layers of automotive paint that built up and hardered over time.

    This material is typically found in the paint booths of auto factories, where cars were spray-painted by hand. As the paint sprayed over vehicles, excess paint would build up on the equipment and surfaces around the painting area. Over the years, these layers of paint would harden, creating colorful, agate-like structures.

    Fordite is no longer being produced: “The switch from solvent-based paints to more environmentally friendly, quicker-drying paints in modern automotive plants has virtually ended the creation of new fordite, making it a finite material.”

    Infinite Digest: a collection of infographics about DFW’s Infinite Jest.

    Inge Druckrey: Teaching to See, “a 40-minute crash course in design thinking”. Found this via Edward Tufte.

    Debbie Millman on the fleeting euphoria of success (YouTube).

    March Forth is a feature-length documentary about Reginald Dwayne Betts, who was incarcerated at 16; “after his release, Betts went on to become an acclaimed poet, author, lawyer, activist and MacArthur Genius Award winner”. Trailer.

    The Professor Who Taught People How To Think (1962). This looks great; shades of Feynman.

    Screenshots of various operating systems (1983-2005). See also The Virtual OS Museum (“1,700+ pre-installed operating systems, ready to run”).

    The Unsolved Mystery of Lorem Ipsum. Got this from Andy so you know it’s good.

    Speaking of Andy, he recently posted about Amazon’s decision to shutter Mechanical Turk. Kinda shocked it was still going tbh.

    2018 PBS special hosted by Michael Keaton: Why Mister Rogers Still Matters Today. I’m gonna make some time to watch this one after my move is done.

    Love the premise of this: Mediocre Movies That Changed My Life. Eddie the Eagle!

    Visual Instruments: An Exploration of Making Music Out of Images. This is a fun little web toy to play with.

    I wanted to do a whole post on the artist’s palettes they have in the collection at the Met.

    A Living Museum of the Comic. “A living museum of where the comic came from — its Western and Eastern roots, the women who drew the early funnies, the Europeans who invented its grammar, and the golden age of the American color cartoon. Every artifact is public domain, restored by us, and free to explore.”

    From Kurzgesagt: The Impenetrable Barrier Trapping Us in the Solar System. “From the vast empty space to the laws of physics themselves, there are many reasons why the dream of space travel might stay just a dream.” Alt title: Why Humanity Will Never Leave The Solar System.

    The Dingo Fence | The Longest Fence in the World. “In the heart of Australia, the continent has been cut in two by the longest fence in the world in a bid to protect livestock from dingoes. Dingoes have divided the nation for the past 150 years, but with new research coming to light, is it time for this to change?”

    “I rebuilt 1901 by Phoenix from scratch to figure out what makes it so good.” I love this song and will make time to watch this soon.

    The Deadly Legacy of HIV Truthers (2015). “Even as the medical community reached a consensus that HIV caused AIDS, a counter-movement was emerging, claiming that HIV didn’t exist, or that the virus existed but was harmless. The symptoms of AIDS, according to some of these people, were actually caused by HIV therapies themselves.”

    Recent Howtown: So… did NASA find life on Mars? “Awkwardly, we’ve now collected the most promising extra-terrestrial biosignature in a tube that might spend the rest of eternity sealed inside a dead rover.”

    I love these little icon collages and creations from Font Awesome (FA serves the icons I use on KDO). Starry Night! Sudoku! Chef Vader! Business Fett!

    More than 200 Ansel Adams photos, mostly of National Parks, that are free to view & download. Via Open Culture, one of the gems of the open web.

    The Crazy History of the Shower. I think that’s self-recommending.

    Jamelle Bouie saw The Odyssey and shared his thoughts about it on YouTube. From his Letterboxd review:

    The Odyssey or, what if you did THE DARK KNIGHT in ancient Greece?

    This, to be clear, is not a bad thing. Nolan is covering the same thematic territory he did nearly 20 years ago and more recently with OPPENHEIMER. And it is compelling! A kind of Burkean liberalism that sees the heroism of “great men” as a necessary bulwark against disorder and chaos but understands the great men as merely men — who themselves bear some responsibility for the chaos — and sees heroism as a terrible burden to bear, more akin to a curse than a crown. There are no parades or honors. In the end you bear the scars and fade away, an exile remembered in legend.

    Anyway, I am glad Hollywood keeps giving the man hundreds of millions of dollars to make his didactic and idiosyncratic blockbusters. Keep ‘em coming!

    Yeah, exactly. I feel like most pans of The Odyssey fell into two main buckets: 1) it wasn’t long enough — pacing off, didn’t include my favorite scene, etc. — which was entirely due to 3-hour runtime constraints of IMAX projectors, and 2) I wish Christopher Nolan hadn’t made a Christopher Nolan movie.

    Debbie Millman again: Is the World Getting Uglier? First brand she mentions is a Tesla Cybertruck, a completely tasteless monstrosity designed by Elon Simpson that I still laugh at every time I see one on the road.

    Due to drought in Britain, you can see “gardens that disappeared hundreds of years ago starting to show themselves again through the grass”.

    Artisans make punchcards by hand for the looms that weave beautiful banarasi sarees.

    One of the Best Preserved Ancient Manuscripts of The Iliad Is Now Digitized: See the “Bankes Homer” Manuscript in High Resolution (Circa 150 C.E.)

    Ok, that’s all for now. I didn’t close all of the open tabs though…maybe I’ll do some more in a few days. How about you? Do you have anything interesting to share with the rest of the class that’s been languishing for a few weeks in a browser tab?

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    The Tragedy and Ecstasy of AI Companions (with Bridget Todd)

    In her new audiobook, Love at First Prompt: AI and the Future of Intimacy, Bridget Jones and Michael Amato unpack how real people are using chatbots to seek connection, in an era when tech companies are constantly trying to exploit our innermost worlds.
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    Cocomelon's Studio Tells Its Artists to Start Experimenting With AI

    Moonbug Entertainment, which makes Cocomelon, Blippi, and other popular content for children, says it will begin using AI but will always have a 'human in the loop.'
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    Businesses Go Viral for Making Signs Without AI

    In the wake of the ChatGPT flyer pandemic, some businesses are differentiating themselves by making signs the old school way.
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    Florida ‘Deputy of the Year’ Used Flock to Stalk Ex, Held Gun in Her Mouth, Did a Nazi Salute

    The deputy resigned after an investigation uncovered an alleged history of racism, stalking, and sexual abuse.
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  • Scripting News Scripting News remote

    My WordPress mirror site stopped updating on August 12. It's now updating once again. I'll try to watch it more carefully.

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    Iowa AG Brenna Bird Makes Silly, Empty Legal Threats To Try And Save Larry Ellison’s Paramount Merger

    As we’ve been noting, billionaire Larry Ellison’s effort to dominate what’s left of corporate media is facing some headwinds after 12 states filed an antitrust lawsuit against his planned $111 billion merger between Paramount and Warner Brothers. As we’ve also noted, this is a giant turd of a deal, the debt from which will indisputably […]
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    Two Die In Pennsylvania Of Measles Marking The First Deaths Of 2026

    Last year, as decades of work by RFK Jr. to undermine vaccines with false links to deaths and autism culminated in his appointment to lead HHS, America saw the largest resurgence of measles cases in something like three decades. Three people died, including two children, all unvaccinated. Kennedy mostly ignored the outbreak from the beginning […]
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    Meta settles with the states over child safety failures

    Will significant changes to Facebook and Instagram be enough to beat back a global wave of bans?
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    Meta Just Paid Nearly $17 Billion To Make Sure It Gets To Write The Kid Safety Rules For Every Other Social Media Platform

    By now you’ve almost certainly heard the news that Meta has settled with 52 state and local Attorneys General who had sued the company in some form or another over child safety on Meta’s platforms. The headlines are all covering the basics: the years-long case these states filed against Meta ends, and Meta pays somewhere […]
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    ICE Tries, Fails To Illegally Raid An Immigration Law Office; Settles For Empty Threats Instead

    The thing about raiding law offices is that they tend to be filled with people who actually know the law. A bunch of opportunistic ICE officers thought they might be able to talk their way into an illegal search, but that initiative (is that the word for this?) died out almost immediately when the interloping […]
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