“Descartes Against Humanity” and Other Games Designed by Famous Philosophers.
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Chipotlai Max is an AI agent that runs on “stolen compute” from Chipotle’s AI chat bot. They are looking to borrow from bots from Ikea, Expedia, Home Depot, and others.
The Life and Death of Sports Fans
Team Spirit is a wonderful short film for ESPN by Errol Morris about the funerals of die-hard sports fans.
I love the Steelers fan laid out in a recliner under a Steelers blanket in front of a television with a Steelers game on as if “he just fell asleep watching the game”.
KDO Rolodex a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
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see full listThe official trailer for season three of Silo. Looks like we finally get some origin story stuff (well, more than a brief scene at least).
On this date in 2004, the Killdozer rampage took place. “The bulldozer effortlessly demolished cars and buildings, including the home of a former mayor, the office of a newspaper that had sided against him in an editorial…”
Jamelle Bouie: The cruelty is still the point of the Trump regime. “This isn’t a border security policy. It’s cruelty as governance — directed at people this administration has decided don’t deserve dignity.”
We Are Manipulating the Weather Every Day
Throughout most of human history, the weather has resisted humanity’s desire to change it.
For thousands of years, we have sacrificed children, sung songs and danced, brewed alchemical concoctions, chanted prayers, fired cannons, and made many other futile efforts in the attempt to somehow change the weather a little more to our liking.
And then, with the Industrial Revolution, all that changed. Humans modified the weather on a planet-wide, unpredictable scale.
Climate change is an enormous accomplishment. From an engineering perspective, the ability to coordinate activities to modify the average temperatures of an entire planet, change the pH of deep oceans, and cause vast shifts in the distribution of arable land across continents is a realization of powers as considerable as anything humanity has achieved before. It rewrites the core story of our origins, in which we are powerless before the forces that have made us. The fact that this discovery of our powers—that we can modify the weather on a planetary scale—was more or less accidental only puts it more firmly in the canon of scientific revelations. We are also, as with our other emergent powers, quite apparently terrible at it.
The innumerable crises prompted by our moment—the desertification of arable land, increasingly catastrophic storms, the deadly rise in temperatures in previously habitable regions—are nothing if not urgent incentives to grasp hold of what we have already done. After millennia of reaching up toward the sky, the levers just out of reach, the consensus on climate change indicates that we are, in fact, already manipulating the weather every day.
All of which suggests a new question: Are we ever going to get good at it?
The rest of the piece is about efforts to “get good at” weather modification. (via longreads)
As time passes, efforts to document the Tiananmen Square protests intensify. “History cannot only be written by officials. If you don’t have real information, it’s difficult for you to have independent thought.”
“Cameron’s World is a web-collage of text and images excavated from the buried neighbourhoods of archived GeoCities pages (1994–2009).”
USPS Reissues Popular Mister Rogers Stamps
Every so often, the US Postal Service reissues old stamps. This time around, they polled the public about which past stamp they’d like to see reissued and the results were decisive: the people love Mister Rogers.
The Mister Rogers stamp, originally released in 2018, is new again in 2026!
In national Stamp Encore polling, the stamp honoring the television host beloved by generations rose to the top spot from a varied ballot of 25 previous stamp issuances. Americans were asked to celebrate 250 years of postal delivery by choosing among favorite stamps of the last few decades. By the deadline last fall, the Postal Service was flooded with nearly 600,000 total ballots.
The Mister Rogers stamps are out now — you can check out a list of the available purchases here. There’s even a set of Field Notes notebooks.
Mister Rogers is a natural fit for a postage stamp; he was a “prolific letter-writer”.
Fred Rogers had a great appreciation for communication by mail, so the popularity of his stamp in 2018 and the esteem reflected by Stamp Encore ballots seem especially fitting. A prolific letter-writer, sometimes replying to 100 letters per day, Rogers never resorted to form-letter responses. He expressed his sentiments in simple terms: “There is still a place for the written letter.”
In a book recalling mail he had received and sent, Rogers wrote, “One of the first things I do each day is to work on the letters that have arrived from the children and adults who have written to us. I care deeply about sending a personal response.” Rogers added, “It gives me a way to know my television neighbors as real people and to make a more personal connection with them. Just as our program is a ‘television visit,’ “the mail is a ‘letter visit.’ A personal note is still far more valuable than shooting off an email or text,” he said.
(thx, caroline)
Ted Chiang is emphatic: LLMs are nowhere close to being conscious. “We don’t need to fully understand the nature of consciousness to definitively say that certain things are not conscious, and conversational transcripts fall in that category.”
Marjane Satrapi, author of the excellent Persepolis, has died at age 56. Friends said she “died of sadness a little over a year after the death of Mattias Ripa, her husband and the love of her life”.
Can you go 82-0? “The objective of 82-0 is to construct a historical NBA roster capable of achieving a perfect undefeated season.” You get to “draft” 5 players from randomly chosen teams & decades, then that team plays a simulated season.
Early Live Performance by Talking Heads (1976)
In March 1976, Talking Heads played a show at The Kitchen in NYC; you can watch the entire show recorded from two angles in this video. The band had formed the year before and was more than a year away from recording and releasing their debut album.
It’s a great insight as to what these early Talking Heads shows were like, and with it also being in color, being good quality, and having two angles for most of the show, this is a must-watch.
The band played for about 90 minutes (2 sets plus an encore), working through tracks like Psycho Killer, Thank You For Sending Me An Angel, and Love → Building On Fire. (via open culture)
Paul Giamatti appears on The Tommy Tiernan Show. Here’s the catch: “Each episode Tommy welcomes mystery guests and interviews them without any preparation or knowledge of who will be joining him until they meet in studio.”
Haiku is a generative music album for MacOS. “Haiku is a work of generative music that builds its own sound from nothing each time you open it, and never plays the same way twice — a record that exists only while it is playing.”
Tony Gilroy Accepts Award for Andor: “Fuck the Empire!”
Now that Andor has been out for a while, showrunner Tony Gilroy is free to speak his mind on what the show was all about. I mean, it was pretty clear to the audience, but now he can say his piece. Andor won a Peabody Award and at the awards ceremony, Gilroy gave the following acceptance speech:
We spent six years contemplating a fascist takeover of a galaxy far, far away. Six years thinking about what happens to ordinary beings when an authoritarian, insane, unchecked regime comes into the deal, and the show is really kind of what we learned.
If you’re not willing to fight for the things that you love — your family, community, your culture, your planet, your truth, freedom — there’s an asshole ready to come in and take it away. We learned that bravery and sacrifice and resistance comes in all shapes and sizes, and we learned that courage is contagious.
There’s so much is happening, it’s a fire hose of crap that you just can’t get through. And here we are. There isn’t a new cycle that goes by right now that doesn’t contain a variety of outrages that in any other time in our history in America wouldn’t be grounds for treason.
Please do not stop. Please do not turn out the lights until we can kill this nightmare. And fuck the Empire!
Gilroy also recently appeared on Peabody’s podcast We Disrupt This Broadcast where he talks about the show’s prescience regarding the current political moment. From the transcript:
So any really specific prescient coincidence, and there probably will be some, they’re not intentional. They weren’t intentional at the time. They’re sadly what they are. And we were not looking at the newspaper when we wrote this. It doesn’t behoove me to do that. It’s incredibly, almost narcissistic how people feel that they’re always living at the edge of history in a way that’s just so unique. We feel so special.
And the sad truth is that, you know, we are just in another wheel of history. And I must admit that after 9/11 and Vietnam and Covid and Watergate and all the things I’ve grown up, I’m 68. I kind of thought, well, I’ve seen all the history I’m gonna see. I don’t feel that way anymore. I don’t feel so special anymore as a human who’s lived on the planet and lived in something called civilization. I think sadly, it’s sort of a Catherine Reel of repetitive stupidity.
See also Andor Creator Tony Gilroy Is Free to Speak About Fascism Now and An Interview With Andor’s Creator, Tony Gilroy.
“As far as artist signatures go, Jan van Kessel’s seventeenth-century painting in which he spells out his own name with caterpillars and snakes must be up there with the best of them.”
Good news! As of June 1, a transmission line is delivering hydro-generated electricity into NYC: “1,250 megawatts of clean energy directly into New York City’s power grid”. That’s around 20% of the city’s total electric load, now clean.
The Three Ways to Make a Living
Well, this is kinda depressing, courtesy of Jason Zweig’s father:
There are three ways to make a living:
1) Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich.
2) Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living.
3) Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.
I aim for #2. But maybe society needs more of #3 and, it goes without saying, a whole lot less of #1. (via df)
TIL that Muji once sold a car. “The Muji Car 1000 was a debadged and stripped down 2-door version of the Nissan March, with the smallest engine, an automatic, steel wheels, and A/C, available in one color: white.”
The 100 Greatest Bird Names of All Time, including Inaccessible Island Rail, Macaroni Penguin, Morepork, Chocolate Boobook, Dickcissel, Carunculated Caracara, and Resplendent Quetzal.
The Best Thing About The Satanic Panic. “There’s a phenomenon called the rhyme-as-reason effect that says people are more likely to believe something is true if it rhymes.”
JS Crossword. “This crossword uses some lesser-known and cursed JS features, so I’d recommend it for people already somewhat familiar with JavaScript.” Diabolical.
Daft Punk, Medieval-Style
Watch and listen to bardcore trio Courseval play a cover version of Daft Punk’s Veridis Quo, a track from Discovery. This is lovely. And a banger.
Courseval have covered other popular music in medieval style, including Rihanna’s Umbrella, Take On Me by A-Ha, Bad Romance by Lady Gaga, and Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive.
Frozen To -22 Degrees, BYD’s New EV Just Charged To 97% In Only 12 Minutes. This is genuinely impressive — charging and driving an EV in subzero winter weather is just brutal (ask me how I know).
They’re doing a film adaptation of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. Daisy Edgar-Jones will play Sadie (perfect choice) and the director is Oscar-winner Siân Heder (Coda).
The Birds of Palestine
Illustrator John Rooney has teamed up with the Middle East Children’s Alliance to produce and sell this Birds of Palestine print. Rooney on Instagram: “All profits will be going towards providing emergency assistance to children and families in what is still a dire situation in Palestine.”
TIL that Andreessen Horowitz owns/runs the NYC Tech Week event. Among other things, A16Z made Daniel Penny a partner in the firm despite no investing experience after he killed a homeless Black man on the NYC subway.
If You Take the Weasel Job Then You Must Be the Weasel. “Bilton reveals himself as a goon, a soft-peddler, a PR man, an obfuscator; the opposite of everything that 60 Minutes is supposed to be”.
Re the Patagonia vs. Pattie Gonia case: the company should sponsor her environmental efforts and part of that is a trademark agreement where each side compromises a little bit; Pattie can keep doing her thing and Patagonia is seen as an ally again.
Why Wildfire Experts Are So Worried About This Year’s Fire Season. “Key environmental indicators show that the nation is a tinderbox, gripped by widespread drought and with a light snowpack in the mountains.”
I’ve probably featured this before but always worth a re-up: “A Books Unbanned library card gives teens across the United States free digital access to ebooks and digital resources, including banned and challenged books — no matter where they live.”
Star Wars Influences: Dam Busters
The original Star Wars movie was a mashup. George Lucas and his collaborators pulled from everywhere: westerns, samurai movies, Flash Gordon, and a 1955 war film called The Dam Busters. This video shows just how closely the attack on the Death Star mirrors a scene from The Dam Busters of a group of bombers attacking a dam. The dialogue is identical in places. From the Dam Busters Wikipedia page:
Director George Lucas hired Gilbert Taylor, responsible for special effects photography on The Dam Busters, to be the director of photography for the film Star Wars. The attack on the Death Star in the climax of Star Wars is a deliberate and acknowledged homage to the climactic sequence of The Dam Busters. In the former film, rebel pilots have to fly through a trench while evading enemy fire and fire a proton torpedo at a precise distance from the target to destroy the entire base with a single explosion; if one run fails, another run must be made by a different pilot. In addition to the similarity of the scenes, some of the dialogue is nearly identical. Star Wars also ends with an Elgarian march, like The Dam Busters.
You can also watch Star Wars footage with Dam Busters audio and Dam Busters footage with Star Wars audio to see just how closely the two scenes match.
Given modern IP concerns and stakes, it’s difficult to envision this type of homage working today. Star Wars came out just 22 years after The Dam Busters, which is a beloved & acclaimed movie in Britain…it’s not obscure. Imagine a movie released in 2026 by a young Academy Award-nominated director that lifts a scene wholesale from a 2004 film like The Notebook, The Incredibles, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, or Million Dollar Baby — it just wouldn’t happen without a lot of lawyerly conversation. I mean, maybe Lucas had those convos with The Dam Busters filmmakers… 🤷♂️
“Hackers say that they used Meta’s AI support chatbot to break into a host of high-profile Instagram profiles by asking the support bot to change the email address associated with the target account.” And the bot just went ahead and did it.
In Post-War Japan, the US Used Quiz Culture to Help Democratize the Country. TV quiz shows “normalized participation, merit-based competition, and equal opportunity — values that contrasted sharply with the hierarchical structures [of] prewar Japan”.
Meet the Ukrainian Stunt Pilot Who Shoots Down Russian Drones
Timur Fatkullin is a Ukrainian flying ace who uses his acrobatic flying skills honed before the war to shoot down Russian drones.
When I fly close to the target, I can’t engage because there’s houses or infrastructure underneath. So we keep flying, keeping it in the searchlight, in the spotlight. And we’re not even, because it’s like 200 kilos target and we’re six tons, and it’s black Shahed in the black night. But from my aerobatics, I brought formation flying. You have to be professional, you have to be confident, practice a lot, anticipate a lot, and trust completely each other. There’s no other way. So these skills help enormously, and with this aircraft, we can stay in the air up to 4.5 hours. It’s my devotion, not just to my country, but to aviation. That’s the truth.
As you can see in this video from the NY Times, planes like these shoot the drones down using low-fi techniques: with machine guns mounted in the planes’ doorways.
One of the drone-hunting pilots, who are civilian volunteers: “Standing aside and doing nothing is impossible. For our team, it’s impossible.”
And from a different perspective, here’s a WSJ video profile of a Ukrainian drone pilot:
Power Lines: Maps That Shaped the Way We See the World. “A collection of the greatest political maps in history and how these images have an unmatched power to influence our thinking — and our world.”
“Serena Williams has announced her sensational return to professional tennis at 44 years old next week at the Queen’s Club in London.” Yessss.
The Illuminated Windows of NYC
For his project Windows, Dave Krugman took photos of hundreds of NYC apartment windows at night and stitched them together into ever-shifting typologies. What’s going on in each of those apartments?
Legendary film editor Marcia Lucas died last week. Lucas edited Star Wars (won an Oscar for it), Taxi Driver, Return of the Jedi, and American Graffiti. It was Marcia that suggested to George Lucas that Darth Vader kill Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Roost is a messaging app where messages aren’t instant; they travel between users at the speed of whichever bird they use to send it. Note sending is limited by the # of birds in your rookery…if they’re all out, you have to wait until one returns.
Slow blogging day today; I spent some time on the KDO undercarriage and a new little members-only feature for the Rolodex: a simple list of links to the latest posts from Rolodex sites. (Click on “Latest Posts”; like I said, it’s a wee feed reader.)
Pope Releases Encyclical On Perils Of Disney’s ‘Star Wars’ Strategy. “I fear for what horrors the fan base might soon endure, but I would be negligent not to give Andor its flowers.”
Radiohead’s OK Computer reimagined as Nintendo 64 songs, featuring reworked sounds from Mario Kart, Super Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, Goldeneye 007, and more.
Andor Gave Us One Of TV’s Best Monologues
Andor loves a good monologue. Among the best of them is Nemik’s Manifesto:
Remember this, Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy.
And Kino Loy’s speech to his fellow prisoners on Narkina 5:
There is one way out. Right now, the building is ours. You need to run, climb, kill! You need to help each other. You see someone who’s confused, someone who is lost, you get them moving and you keep them moving until we put this place behind us.
In this just-released episode of Nerdwriter, Evan Puschak breaks down Luthen Rael’s “extraordinary” monologue about what he’s sacrificed for the cause.
Here’s the original scene and a transcript of the speech:
Calm. Kindness. Kinship. Love. I’ve given up all chance at inner peace. I’ve made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago from which there’s only one conclusion, I’m damned for what I do. My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight, they’ve set me on a path from which there is no escape. I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost and by the time I looked down there was no longer any ground beneath my feet. What is my — what is my sacrifice? I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else’s future. I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see. And the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror or an audience or the light of gratitude. So what do I sacrifice? EVERYTHING!
The great thing about Luthen’s monologue, which Puschak doesn’t really get into, is that it makes the viewer rethink the entire basis of the show — and of Star Wars in general. Instead of Good Guys and Bad Guys, you’re asked to consider shades of gray. These blurred lines are hinted at before, mostly through individual character arcs (Han, Anakin, Lando, Rey, Kylo), but Luthen plainly lays out the moral complexity involved: revolutions and rebellions are led by and made up of flawed people who do harmful things for the right reasons…or at least, that’s what they tell themselves, what they need to tell themselves.
Luthen, Mon Mothma, Cassian — there’s no solution to their personal trolley problem, except that they somehow have to keep living after condemning others to suffering and death. Viewed through that lens, the rest of Star Wars reads quite differently.
Infinite Jeffs is an actual physical book you can buy in which “every one of the ~550,000 words in Infinite Jest [is replaced] with ‘Jeff’ while preserving punctuation, line breaks, etc.”
How Should a Book Sound? And What About Footnotes? Footnotes present “kind of a nasty problem for an audiobook: where do the footnotes go? There is no bottom of the page in an audiobook, obviously.”
From The Mandalorian and Grogu, an extended loop of Shakari, a synth-y track from composer Ludwig Göransson. See also Niamos from Andor (composed by Nicholas Britell).
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