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We Are Losing the Ability to Discover What We Didn’t Know to Ask. “Scientific breakthroughs, artistic leaps, technological innovation — these rarely emerge from efficient retrieval of known information.”
Do you believe that everybody should have fun or that only a few people should have fun? “This is what it means to be entertained in the United States of America in 2026. Want to have fun? Like, the most fun? Get rich, or die trying.”
KDO Rolodex a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
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see full listStacks: “Run HyperCard stacks directly on your modern Mac. No emulator required!”
XKCD: What if chess included the offside rule? (If someone hasn’t done one already, I’d guess at least one person is working on a playable Football Chess game rn.)
This is a fun and really well-done triple mashup of Outkast’s B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad), Hitchcock’s The Birds, and Sesame Street.
A sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. NES cartridge recently sold at auction for $3 million. “It bears the coveted gloss sticker seal affixed to the top lid, identifying it as a second-production example.”
This is neat: Robin Sloan is rewriting his 2009 short story, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. “The interplay between books and technology has changed since I wrote them…but also that I have become a different writer, and a better one.”
Stop chasing life goals and start trying tiny experiments to learn from instead. “Chasing goals doesn’t work for life’s most important questions — career, relationships, health. It’s like locking in your answer before you have understood the question.”
What’s the Point of Sex, Anyway? “There is yet another kind of male, known among ichthyologists as a ‘sneaky mater.’ This type dispenses altogether with nest-building and partnering and simply darts around squirting.”
How a Differential Gear Works
I’ve posted this before, but it’s so good, here it is again: a super-simple explanation of why differential gears are necessary in cars and how they work.
(via @stevenstrogatz)
The Open Source AI Gap Map shows the current capabilities of open source AI tools with an eye toward answering an important question: “What building blocks are missing for creating completely open source AI products?”
The End of Reading Is Here. “The decline of reading will bring about changes of the same magnitude. It will affect our innermost thoughts, our society’s politics and culture, and how we tell the history of our civilization.”
Why The Best Player Alive Barely Runs
David Epstein, author of the recent Inside the Box (a book about the value of constraints), did a fascinating video on “anticipatory skill” and “chunking” and how players like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo (who can accurately head the ball even in the dark) use them to slow down a fast, complex game.
And this is the skill that Messi, Ronaldo, and Pujols all share. They’re chunking positions of people and angles of legs and spins of balls in order to understand immediately what’s going on and what might happen next. The more patterns you absorb in any domain, the less effort it takes to read what’s happening and to predict what’s coming next.
So when Messi walks, he’s not resting. He’s chunking the entire field. Every position, every shift, every gap in the backline is feeding a pattern library that he’s been building since he was 5 years old. By the time he decides to move, the map is already drawn. And when Ronaldo heads a ball into the net in total darkness, it’s because he’s seen that angle of another player’s leg and that ball’s trajectory a hundred times over and knows the pattern it follows.
I love this kind of thing and even though I am not a world-class boxer or football player, I can see it in action as I’ve gotten better over the years downhill mountain biking (where I’m able to go faster on the bike while still being able to react to terrain in what feels like the same amount of time), playing Fortnite (which I’m still not great at, but the game seems to move at a much slower pace, allowing me to keep up), or doing the crossword puzzle (you get an instinctive feel for answers just by how questions are posed). I’m sure this shows up in my work too — I read so damn much online that sometimes it takes me only 2-3 seconds to figure out if something is worth my while — but it’s easier to observe in sports or gaming.
BTW, Epstein just started his YouTube channel a few months ago, but it’s already filled with great stuff like Why The Fastest Way To Improve Is To Subtract, Why The Smartest People I Know Set Constraints, Not Goals, and Why The Best Kids Are Rarely The Best Adults. I’ve got some catching up to do.
Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI. “This book presents the rediscovered original source code of ELIZA alongside previously unseen scripts…, revealing a far more sophisticated system than previously documented.”
British political news: Nigel Farage is facing competition for his parliamentary seat from “a man with a trash can on his head, better known as Count Binface”. From the country that brought you Boaty McBoatface…
City’s Beautification Initiative Hamstrung By Commitment To Local Artists. “I’m pretty sure when the mayor promised residents a revitalized arts district, he didn’t mean a couple of wonky fish sculptures haphazardly nailed to a tree…” Bwhahaha.
Medieval Wound Man
From The Public Domain Review, The Many Lives of the Medieval Wound Man, a diagram found in many medical texts beginning in the early 1400s.
Living on today in libraries from Copenhagen to Munich, the strange figure of the Wound Man gives modern viewers a glimpse of the worrying injuries that the medieval body could receive through war, accident, and epidemic. But at the same time, it shows that medieval people did not think of themselves as helpless victims in the face of these assaults. Far from reinforcing the common perception of the European Middle Ages as a backwards and bloody period of human history, the Wound Man reminds us that it was in fact a period busy with innovative medical treatments, a vital link between the long-standing cures of the classical world and developments that were to follow in early Renaissance medicine.
If Only There Had Been a Sign That the Face-Melting Nazi from Indiana Jones Wouldn’t Make a Good Senator. “Marion Ravenwood said he trapped her in a room and physically assaulted her. But I decided to keep supporting Toht anyway.”
Interviews with some of the dwindling number of survivors of World War II Japanese American incarceration camps, including George Takei.
World Cup Wallpapers for Your Phone
Marcos Paulo has been making all sorts of phone-sized wallpapers for the World Cup and posting them to Threads. You have to poke around to find them in his account, but here are a few direct links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.
How to talk about “AI” without adding to the anthropomorphization. Suggestions: “artificial intelligence → probabilistic automation” & “AI agent → probabilistic, unverified software manipulator”. Seems like the horse is out of the barn on this though…
Mister Rogers visits Eric Carle’s studio and paints with him (full episode). Carle wrote and illustrated The Very Hungry Caterpillar and other children’s books.
Over the past few centuries, humans have decimated bird populations — you can hear it in the thinning of the dawn chorus — but it’s difficult to notice sometimes because of shifting baseline syndrome.
Hans Zimmer: Live in Concert
Martin Timko (aka matogolf) cut this video of the best musical moments from Hans Zimmer & Friends: Diamond in the Desert. He plays a number of pieces from various soundtracks, including Dunkirk, Gladiator, Interstellar, Dune, and The Dark Knight. Great to hear live performances of these iconic pieces.
Sloan on Fable: “This is literally the core muscle of any/every language model: ‘I need to quickly and accurately understand what kind of document I am inside.’ Yet the sensitivity of that orienteering, the subtlety of it, has gotten so much better.”
New Patricia Lockwood for the London Review of Books: A Tradcath Wedding. “He pronounced the word ‘nuptial’ as noopt-see-all. If that’s correct, never tell me.”
Just dropped a couple of days ago: Lane 8’s Summer 2026 Mixtape (4 hours long). Also available on Soundcloud.
Our Lives Are “an Orchestrated Shuffle of Technology”
If you are anything like me, your soul let out a big “oooooof” while reading this: The Year Is 2063 and You Were Never Interesting.
But wait. You are 70 years old. You’re sitting in your home. Your grandchildren ask you what your 20s were like, and you honestly can’t tell them. You have no heirlooms; Temu doesn’t last. You never moved to Paris or quit the toxic job or booked the Spanish lesson. You were too nervous to get that tattoo, never went back to school. You were too awkward to go to the nude drawing class, you never did learn how to make dumplings. Your feed was so full of people living lives so full you never stopped to consider yours.
The great love affair of your life is… this. Sitting in the dark, your nose 6 inches from the screen. You have never separated, never taken a break. It started slowly, rockily. But by 25, it had its claws in you. By 30, it fills the dead spaces in your life. And you’ve never relented. It has consumed you wholly and the math has compounded. By this age, at 7 hours a day, 15 years of your life has been a screen.
👀 Craig Mod interviewed by Debbie Millman on Design Matters. (I guess those eyes should be ears but an ears-bugging-out emoji doesn’t exist.)
The (Mostly) True Story of Hobo Graffiti
TIL that the hieroglyphic hobo code probably wasn’t used as extensively as the internet suggests. However, hobos and tramps did tag bridges, water towers, and train cars with tramp writing, which usually consisted of their moniker (i.e. their hobo name), the date, and the direction they were heading in.
Hobos, or tramps, were itinerant workers and wanderers who illegally hopped freight cars on the newly expanding railroad in the United States in the late 19th century. They used graffiti, also known as tramp writing, as a messaging system to tell their fellow travelers where they were and where they were going. Hobos would carve or draw their road persona, or moniker, on stationary objects near railroad tracks, like water towers and bridges.
More on hobo graffiti from CityLab.
Traces of hobo graffiti from the early 20th century have become almost totally obliterated, destroyed by natural forces, torn down along with old buildings, or painted over with new graffiti. So when anthropologist Susan Phillips came across a rare one scribbled underneath a bridge near the Los Angeles River, she knew it was a remarkable discovery.
(via open culture)
The Fun Shortage Is Real, and It’s Making America Miserable (gift link). “With fewer places to relax and socialize, and steeper prices for entry, having fun is quantifiably harder than it used to be.”
I love this short little video montage of actresses during Charlie Rose interviews. No dialogue, just quiet reactions. Musical accompaniment by Laurie Anderson (O Superman).
One of the great things about the World Cup and the US: In the United States, Every World Cup Team Is a Home Team. “Soccer fans from all over the world, many now making their homes in America, have packed bars, restaurants, living rooms…”
America: Birth Of A Nation
To celebrate the 250th anniversary of our great nation, The Onion has produced a Ken Burns-esque film called Birth of a Nation (“the only movie ever named this”).
250 years ago, a group of illiterate men would gather in these hallowed halls to scribble down what historians can now only assume were words. Words that would one day be assigned meaning. Words and pictures. Pictures mostly. That would serve as the founding principles for a grand new experiment that would forever change the course of human history. An experiment that would produce a monstrosity so powerful it would soon be known to the whole world by just one name. America.
In 1937, the NYT ran a piece about the last living son of a Revolutionary War soldier. “Many times Constant said his father spoke of meeting George Washington…” The Great Span in action.
Openish Thread (Testing a New Feature…)
Hey all. It’s Sunday afternoon of a holiday weekend and the weather is glorious here, so what better (worse) time to unleash a new feature on KDO? I’ve been working on a new wysiwyg comment editor for the past few days and it’s finally ready to go. Asking you folks to deal with HTML while leaving a comment was always a bit of a kludge, but now you can include links, blockquoted text, lists, and bold/italic text formatting in your comments and know exactly what it’s going to look like before posting.
You can try it out by sharing something worthwhile you’ve seen, heard, or learned recently. Feedback and bug reports welcome!!
As it was foretold: the Trump regime gutted the NOAA and now weather forecasts are less accurate. An atmospheric scientist: “The forecasts I’m able to offer you are less accurate than they would otherwise be.”
Something for the digital crate-diggers: The 40 Best Albums From the Last 40 Years That You Probably Didn’t Hear (But Should’ve). I’d only heard of one or two these…
“Dictionary of the Illegible proposes illegibility as a strategy for navigating a world increasingly governed by visibility, efficiency, and total surveillance.”
“The average paid newsletter costs $10 per month or $100 per year, according to analysis of thousands of publications hosted on Beehiiv.” KDO memberships start at $3/mo. and I haven’t raised prices since 2016. You folks are getting an incredible deal!
Hank Green interviews Ze Frank, who kind of invented the modern YouTube format (aka vlogging). “At the episode’s end, Ze lays down some of the best advice Hank’s ever heard.”
Parker Molloy on why the panic about trans women in sports is not actually about fairness or protecting women & girls (in the similar way Gamergate was not about “ethics in games journalism”).
Will America Ever Give White-Man Rights to Everyone Else? “These documents…were written by rich white men for the benefit of rich white men, and this country has never for a day recovered from their failure.”
The US Constitution Is for Simple Folk Still Burdened by the Belief That Words Have Meaning. “The true Constitution is not a document. It’s more of a gut feeling. It is a shimmering legal gas that settles wherever conservatives need it most…”
Rebecca Solnit: What Is the United States of America Now? “The United States of America is a truck that has driven into a ditch. The United States of America is a program that has been hacked.” But also: “It is the country that gave the world jazz…”
Report from a cruise full of celebrity impersonators. “A woman sat a toddler down beside us, while another, larger toddler tugged at her capris. At this point, every child was starting to look like Wallace Shawn.”
Erling Haaland “brings the intensity of a raiding party to the sport”. And: “Haaland can call to mind a shark circling dark waters.”
My Family Has Been Here Since 1621. That Is Not What Makes Me American. “We are a nation of immigrants that has watched as immigrants arrive, assimilate and begin pulling the ladder up behind them.”
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