There are no lightsabers in The Mandalorian and Grogu, a first for Star Wars films. There are also no Wilhelm screams in the movie, which is weird because I thought I heard snippets of it everywhere (even Mando’s blaster sounded a little Wilhelm-ish).
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100 Iconic Moments From Sir David Attenborough
Let’s the keep the David Attenborough love going: this is a six-hour video featuring 100 of the most iconic moments from the famed naturalist’s work. I got this via Enrique, who rightly asserts that “There’s no such thing as too much David Attenborough.”
See also Three Hours of Unbelievable Moments From Nature, Narrated by David Attenborough.
Consider the Sister: an interview with Amy Wallace. “It was hard work being David Foster Wallace’s little sister. It still is. The job of preserving the memory of her brother as a complex, vibrant, often joyful person has fallen to her.”
KDO Rolodex a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
refresh
see full listI, Sisyphus, Am Ninety-Five Percent of the Way There. “Honestly, folks, we are so, so close. The summit is largely visible. It is nearly visible. There is a concept of visibility at play here that is impossible to ignore.”
Make Way for Beavers
A Tube station in West London used to have a flooding problem. Instead of opting for an expensive reworking of the landscape via reservoir & levee, local officials reintroduced a family of beavers into the area.
The beavers are part of an unlikely effort to bring back a vanished species and help Britain adapt to a very modern problem: climate change.
Britain is famous for drizzle, but climate change is making rainfall heavier and more erratic. Places that didn’t used to flood are now waterlogged. So scientists have enlisted some of the animal kingdom’s best flood engineers — beavers — to help.
In West London, conservationists got a government license to resettle a family of five beavers in a 20-acre urban park near the Greenford Tube station. It used to be a golf course, with a creek running through it. Within weeks, the beavers dammed up the creek, creating a pond that holds water and stops it from spilling into the city. They also diverted the creek’s flow into smaller tributaries, creating a wetland that better absorbs heavy rainfall — mitigating the risk of flooding downstream.
“They effectively turned this site into a giant sponge that can take heavy rainfall and slowly release water back into the landscape, creating a lot more resilience for flooding,” explains Sean McCormack, a local veterinarian who started the Ealing Beaver Project, named for the London borough of Ealing, where it’s located.
The beaver-engineered landscape has attracted other animals, increasing the area’s biodiversity:
“By felling trees, they’ve also opened up the canopy, and we’ve seen an abundance of biodiversity,” McCormack says.
Freshwater shrimp have appeared in the creek, he says, plus eight new species of birds, two types of bats and rare brown hairstreak butterflies, which lay their eggs on blackthorn branches nibbled by beavers.
American Wealth, Sliced Up
Using the Federal Reserve’s Distribution of Household Wealth in the U.S. since 1989 data, Ryan Thorpe imagines a pizza party with 100 guests and 100 slices of pizza as a stand-in for the United States:
We’re having a pizza party with 100 guests! Let’s divvy up the slices the way wealth is divided among American households:
• 1 person gets 30 slices
• 9 people get 3.7 slices each
• 40 people get 0.75 slices each
• 50 people get 0.05 slices eachDig in! But watch out for “those people” trying to steal your 0.05.
I checked the math and it’s not quite 100 slices…it’s ~96.1 I whipped up a pizza pie chart (embedded above) so you can visualize how much each person gets. Is this the kind of party we Americans want to attend on a daily basis?
I imagine Thorpe rounded off some numbers for clarity. ↩
As part of the Ocean Census project, “scientists have discovered 1,121 marine species in a single year”. Discoveries include “a new species of deep-sea ghost shark, a symbiotic bristle worm…as well as corals, crabs, shrimps, sea urchins, and anemones”.
Caught In Joy: Music for Flow, Rest, and Reset
The moment I clicked through to the Caught In Joy YouTube channel, I knew I was going to love it. The description:
Over 80 albums designed to focus, flow and reset. Instrumental electronic music for you brain to wander.
And from the website:
Caught In Joy (Karol Pokojowczyk) is a multi-instrumentalist based in Florida, passionately dedicated to live composing, hardware synthesizers, and tape recording - a completely independent music project. I strive to create four albums and visual performances every month, entirely by myself.
I started my professional life as a software engineer and later became a serial entrepreneur, with a few successes along the way. After more than 30 years of working, I saved enough to fund my dream: building a home studio where I could finally focus fully on music.
In the past three years, he’s released 80+ albums and other performances, which are available for purchase on BandCamp. I’ve only had time to listen to bits and pieces of a few albums & videos, but I know a bunch of them are going into my Underscore collection very soon.1 (via johnny decimal)
Underscore is one of my favorite things I’ve ever built because it’s simple, it does exactly what I want, and I use it every day. ↩
A recent study of 2.5M scientific papers found ~146,900 fake citations, presumably hallucinated by AI. The fake citations “were not limited to a handful of bad apples but appeared across many papers, each containing a small number of fake references.”
To Land a Job in AI, Try Reading Kant. “If a for-profit AI company signs your paycheck, might that compromise your research? By playing Aristotle to AI Alexander, do you risk your work becoming an instrument for hype-building and myth-making?”
“Observe the moth in its monumental fight for life, and do likewise. We gain life’s powers by knowing that eventually they will be taken away. There is beauty in this struggle. Murmurations of starlings occur only in the evening.”
Going Focaccia Crazy
I have a pizza oven and baked very underwhelming bread twice during the pandemic, but I’ve found it difficult to fall into a proper rabbit hole when it comes to dough-making. Focaccia might do it for me.
My daughter and I had been wanting to experiment with focaccia (and schiacciata) and so I suggested we make this Bon Appetit recipe that Alana recommended in this recent KDO recipe thread — it’s tough to resist “I am mildly famous for this focaccia. It’s bread for lazy people who love hot bread.” It’s me. I am lazy. I love hot bread.
We made it yesterday and it came out well: very delicious right out of the oven. And it was really the first time I’ve made dough where I’ve been like, “oh, I finally get why people say pizza/bread dough is a living thing”. Today we made sandwiches (mortadella, prosciutto, burrata, arugula) and they were quite good — but the focaccia crumb was pretty dense. Which sent me on a little bit of a research expedition, during which I found this video on YouTube:
Wow! Check out all those bubbles…ours didn’t look anything like that. I actually squealed when she pressed down on the bread and it sprung right back — that focaccia might be able to replace my car’s suspension. This recipe results in a more hydrated dough than the BonApp recipe does. And you work it more and it has different flour (00 instead of all-purpose). And the process looks only a little bit less lazy…manageable for me, I think. Looking forward to trying this out next!
My Son’s Math Homework Is Essentially Just Pokémon. “As I watched my son play Prodigy, it became clear there wasn’t much learning happening. In about 10 minutes of gameplay, he spent less than 30 seconds answering math questions.”
The first-ever Enhanced Games (open to those using performance-enhancing drugs) featured 42 athletes, three of whom were competing clean. All three won their respective events.
Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence
Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical letter yesterday; it’s entitled Magnifica Humanitas Of His Holiness Pope Leo XIV On Safeguarding the Human Person In the Time of Artificial Intelligence. It is very long and I haven’t been able to read the whole thing; here’s a taste:
It is not possible to provide a single, comprehensive definition of AI. What can be stated, however, is that we must avoid the misconception of equating this type of “intelligence” with that of human beings. These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence. In doing so, they often surpass human intelligence in speed and computational capacity, offering tangible benefits across many fields. Yet this power remains entirely tied to data processing. So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. Even when these tools are described as capable of “learning,” their way of doing so is different from that of a human person. It is not the experience of those who allow themselves to be shaped by life and grow over time through choices, mistakes, forgiveness and fidelity. Rather, it is a form of statistical adaptation based on data and feedback, which can be very effective, but does not imply inner growth.
You can replace “AI”, “tools”, and “systems” in that paragraph with “a certain sort of amoral tech billionaire like Musk, Andreessen, and Thiel” or “a data-driven business focused solely on maximizing shareholder value” and it’s no less true. (“It’s just business.”)
Simon Willison’s notes on the encyclical are interesting; he calls it “some of the clearest writing I’ve seen on the ethics of integrating AI into modern society”. I noted this part as well while skimming through:
For individuals as well as for nations, development is both a duty and a right. Minimum conditions are required for enabling every person and people to flourish in accord with their dignity, without being kept in a state of dependence or excluded from access to necessary goods. Development is truly human when it places people at the center instead of the accumulation of wealth, and when it concerns peoples as well as individuals. Justice demands the recognition of the rights of society and the rights of peoples, and includes a responsibility toward future generations. Development is not truly human if it increases consumption for some while shifting costs and burdens onto others, or relegates entire regions to subordinate roles, preventing them from realizing their full potential.
And:
The use of AI is never a purely technical matter: when it enters processes that affect people’s lives, it touches on rights, opportunities, status and freedom. Important and sensitive decisions — concerning employment, credit, access to public services or even a person’s reputation — risk being fully delegated to automated systems that do not know “compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and above all, the hope that people are able to change,” and can therefore give rise to new forms of exclusion.
The Catholic Church is the Catholic Church, but plain language with some real thought and tradition behind it is welcome in the AI discussion. As Tim Carmody says:
I’ve said it before but it’s something else to watch a gifted author (with a team of talented researchers) discuss AI with the weight of a 2000-year intellectual and moral tradition behind them, both reckoning with that tradition and trying to project far into the future. Very different from “how will this affect Nvidia’s stock price”.
And Chris Xu:
Skimmed the encyclical and was repeatedly struck by how shocking (good) it feels to read a coherent institutional vision / strategy for how to maneuver through These Times rooted in common sense and firm principles. We have been intellectually failed and starved by so many other institutions.
You can read the whole thing in English (and nine other languages) on the Holy See’s website or read a summary.
250 to 250. We Are America.
The 250th birthday of the United States is coming up and I know many of us are having a tough time feeling celebratory because *waves hands around at everything*. To mark the occasion in a decidedly non-jingoistic manner, historian Heather Cox Richardson is producing a series of one-minute videos, each featuring one of “the many people, places, and events that have built our country and remind us of the power of each person to make history”. From the introductory video above:
From the time of our country’s founding 250 years ago, the story of America has been one of the constant efforts of Americans — from all races, ethnicities, genders, and abilities — to make real the belief that we are all created equal and have a right to have a say in our democracy.
Among the first group of videos are those about the AIDS Memorial Quilt (narrated by founder Cleve Jones), the battles of Lexington and Concord (narrated by Massachusetts governor Maura Healey), John Peter Zenger (narrated by Jelani Cobb), and the Erie Canal (narrated by Pete Buttigieg).
You can find the rest of the videos, as well as future installments, in this playlist on YouTube. Richardson wrote about the project for her newsletter:
We designed the videos to emphasize the agency of Americans—mostly everyday Americans—to change the country. Each falls into a category that defines what it means to be an American, including community, democracy, innovation, mobility, civil rights, education, conservation, and creativity.
Tenderly Tracking My Husband. “Knowing when to step in and tell a loved one with [Alzheimer’s] that they can no longer do something because it’s too risky is a game of chance we caregivers hate to play.” Lovely & heartbreaking.
Great title for a book: Fascist Yoga. “Ever since, the world of yoga has been full of grifters, occultists and white supremacists, all out to exploit and recruit via the medium of exercise.”
Pinterest Has Become Unusable. “When I started painting again in January, I went back to Pinterest and found it overrun with AI slop. It’s continued to get worse and worse, and it’s now basically unusable.”
Stephen Colbert Hosts Only in Monroe
The day after ending his run on The Late Show, Stephen Colbert hosted a show called Only in Monroe on a Michigan public access channel. His musical director for the show was Jack White, nestled onstage between a boombox and a reel-to-reel recorder. His guests included Byron Allen, Jeff Daniels, Steve Buscemi, and Eminem.
He told viewers during his final Late Show monologue that they might next find him in Monroe:
At the top of his final CBS monologue Thursday night, Colbert paused to mark the occasion: “Tonight is our final broadcast from the Ed Sullivan Theater.”
When the audience booed, Colbert waved them off.
“No, no, we were lucky enough to be here for the last 11 years, all right? Can’t take this for granted,” he said. “Though technically our first show in July of 2015 was from a public access station in Monroe, Michigan for an audience of 12 people. Show business being what it is these days, that’s probably where you’ll see me next.”
Colbert had hosted Only in Monroe once before, about two months out from starting at The Late Show. His special guest that night was Eminem.
Stephen Colbert? The man knows how to commit to the bit.
An unusual new-to-me animal: the aardwolf. It’s a hyena but it eats insects like an aardvark. The cubs are incredibly cute.
Essential summertime reading: Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning. “Drowning is almost always a deceptively quiet event. The waving, splashing, and yelling that dramatic conditioning (television) prepares us to look for, is rarely seen in real life.”
Eric Rodenbeck on AI as a Design Medium. “In my class, the first principle is simple: Do not take what comes back from prompts at face value. Interrogate it. Iterate on it. Stay with it longer than feels efficient.”
Art But Make It Sports is now available in book form. “Epic moments in modern sports are masterfully paired with their fine art doppelgangers…”
“A woozle effect…occurs when frequent citation of previous publications that lack evidence misleads individuals, groups and the public into thinking or believing there is evidence, and non-facts become urban myths and factoids.”
“A three-month national investigation by Beyond Plastics found that not a single tracked Starbucks cold-beverage cup ended up at a recycling facility — even when the cups were placed in clearly marked recycling bins inside Starbucks stores.”
Water World
Water World, created by Seán Doran from imagery captured by a NASA/NOAA weather satellite, is a gorgeous, swirling, painterly portrait of the Earth’s dynamic atmosphere. Doran calls it “a meditative slow gaze at Earth’s atmosphere, revealing the hidden depths of activity in the water-filled skies of planet Earth”. It’s 4K, so put it on the biggest screen you can find and just sit back and watch.
The Secret to Winning on Jeopardy. “To win on Jeopardy, you don’t need to learn everything. You just need to learn one thing about everything.” As an proficient player of Yell Answers At The TV Jeopardy in my teen years, I can confirm this strat.
Paul Brown’s iPod. This is a lovely remembrance & time capsule: a playable iPod emulator of “the music on the iPod my dad had in 2018 before he died”. Click wheel works and everything.
What Number Was Stephen Colbert Thinking Of?
One of the questions on The Colbert Questionert that Stephen Colbert would administer to his celebrity guests was “What number am I thinking of?” As you can see from this compilation, his answer was often, but not always, “no”.
A few of the guests said “42” but none ever said “69”?
So anyway, the Late Show is coming to an end tonight, a casualty of CBS’s newfound fealty to the Trump regime, and Stephen Colbert finally took the questionert himself. And yes, at last, he revealed the number that he was thinking of…to Robert De Niro no less:
This is impressive: an AI model has disproved an 80-year-old conjecture by Paul Erdős. “The proof came from a new general-purpose reasoning model, rather than from a system trained specifically for mathematics.”
Three Hours of Unbelievable Moments From Nature, Narrated by David Attenborough
Wow, BBC Earth has posted this three-hour-long video to YouTube of David Attenborough narrating Unbelievable Moments From Nature. I’ve had it on in the background for the last little while as I’m working and it’s great.
“US is ‘simply choosing not to stop’ Ebola outbreak after massive public health cuts.” Just so fucking stupid and maddening and wasteful and dangerous and callous and evil.
Trump Destroyed USAID. Now People Are Dying. “Everyone, especially in South Sudan, wanted to know if the US really had cut off aid. It was easier for them to believe that the aid organizations were lying to them than to think that the US would do this.”
Free admission to Canadian national parks this summer! “From June 19 to September 7, no fees apply for: admission for all visitors to all national historic sites, national parks, and national marine conservation areas operated by Parks Canada.”
At Long Last, I Have Maxximized My Looks. “Apparently, eating a fistful of iguana tranquilizers for breakfast every morning has turned me cold-blooded, and I am no longer appropriately adapted for life on the Earth’s surface.”
What If Lock-In Doesn’t Matter So Much Anymore?
Interesting observation by Mitchell Hashimoto (creator of Vagrant and Ghostty) on how a company’s or product’s choice of programming language matters less in the age of agentic programming:
On the interesting side is how fungible programming languages are nowadays. Programming languages used to be LOCK IN, and they’re increasingly not so. You think the Bun rewrite in Rust is good for Rust? Bun has shown they can be in probably any language they want in roughly a week or two. Rust is expendable. It’s useful until it’s not then it can be thrown out. That’s interesting!
Hashimoto is talking about this complete rewrite of Bun (a Javascript/Typescript toolkit that’s owned by Anthropic and includes “a fast JavaScript runtime designed as a drop-in replacement for Node.js”) in a completely different programming language (Rust) in just 6 days.
6,755 commits, branch name claude/phase-a-port, PR opened May 8th, merged May 14th.
Six days. A full rewrite of a production-grade JS runtime, merged in six days.
Let that number sit in your mind for a second.
Whether or not you think that taking this six-day-old code completely rewritten & tested mostly by LLMs and deploying it in production is a good idea, it’s something that many more companies are comfortable doing. Simon Willison riffing on Hashimoto’s thoughts:
I was talking to someone who worked for a medium sized technology company with a pair of legacy/legendary iPhone and Android apps.
They told me they had just completed a coding-agent driven rewrite of both apps to React Native.
I asked why they chose that, given that coding agents presumably drive down the cost of maintaining separate iPhone and Android apps.
They said that React Native has improved a lot over the past few years and covered everything their apps needed to do.
And… if it turned out to be the wrong decision, they could just port back to native in the future.
This also applies to other layers of the tech stack (database, etc.) to various extents as well as to some other types of software, e.g. it’s trivial to export your bookmarks from one bookmark manager to another if they both have APIs or import/export capabilities — or, with a bit more effort, you can write your own.
BTW, this also goes for the big AI companies — it’s pretty easy to switch between different flagship models or to the increasingly powerful local models.
All the Star Wars Lightsaber Designs
This scan isn’t very good (best I could find), but these are all the lightsabers used by Jedi and Sith in the various Star Wars shows and movies. I think this is from a few years ago, so I’m not sure how up to date it is.
In the SW universe, making your own saber is a Jedi and Sith rite of passage, which accounts for the diversity in design. No shortcuts allowed…Babu Frik wasn’t out there selling Ancient Laser Sword™ kits to young padawans (kyber crystal sold separately). (via dennis crowley)
My friend Adriana wrote about her story game based on Dante’s Inferno. “In Vya, I modeled Pom after the poet Alice Notley, whose Descent of Alette (1996) is one of the great contributions to the literature of katabasis.”
How to Make a Living as an Artist
Contemporary pop artist fnnch’s essay on How to Make a Living as an Artist is pretty great. Lots in here that resonates with my experience of turning a creative hobby (KDO) into a business.
Most people who enjoy making art should not try to make it their full time job. When you turn an avocation (hobby) into a vocation (job) you have to do new things you do not enjoy. Emails, events, meetings, accounting, and more. These are not only a drag but can actually strip the joy from the rest of your art practice.
Even the work itself can become a burden because you now have to make it. Amateurs can wait for inspiration; professionals must create every day.
If you enjoy making art, ask yourself why that is not enough? Why do you need to make money from this activity? Why do you need to do it with more of your time? Can it not perhaps give you more joy remaining a hobby?
I have played the drums for many years, and while I was once tempted to go pro, I have always resisted. Drumming is a refuge for me. A joy. An escape. I play when I want. I don’t play when I don’t want. This is no longer true for my painting. Beware. Think hard.
And:
Making your challenge more difficult is that artists are usually not just entrepreneurs but solopreneurs. There is rarely enough money in art to support even a single person, so we do not get to specialize as one might in high tech entrepreneurship, in which it is totally common to have one co-founder focus on product and another on sales. Most people, at least at first, must do it all. Most artists do not want to do it all. They want to just make art. I am sorry. Some people have a gallery or life partner who acts as a business partner. But most of the time, there is no one to help you. You must think about your art practice as a business.
Image: paintings of various honey bears by fnnch.
From Universe Today, an ongoing series of articles on A Brief-ish History of SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). Part I is entitled “Where is Everybody?”
You Can Make an App for That. “The most important thing you’ll need is taste. Not objectively good taste, necessarily, so much as a keen sense of your own.”
Our Mob Boss President
Jamelle Bouie writes that each US president molds the presidency in his own image and Trump has constructed a “government as protection racket and the president as mob boss”.1
So what manner of presidency has Trump devised for himself?
You could call it the pecuniary presidency, a presidency not devoted to the public good or to the preservation of the union or even to some narrow ideological crusade, but to the quest for personal enrichment. A presidency devoted to the aggrandizement of a single person, not to satisfy a grand design for the nation but to squeeze a few million here and a few billion there out of the public coffers for your own benefit.
This isn’t the “honest graft” of Tammany Hall — corruption as the price paid for public improvement. It is petty theft. It’s stealing from the Treasury and using your authority, enhanced by the baroque theories of your allies on the Supreme Court, to make yourself unaccountable. It is government as protection racket and the president as mob boss (a role that Trump has clearly embraced).
As I wrote last month:
I’ve found it useful to think of DJT’s 2nd term primarily as a heist: a theft of money & power from the American people by a con man who finally found the perfect score.
Trump feels like he’s running the largest casino in the world and he’s gonna take his deserved cut.
I love Bouie but “pecuniary presidency” isn’t going to catch fire in the public’s imagination. But I also do not have a better suggestion beyond “mob boss presidency”. And maybe it doesn’t matter much anyway. Even “liberal” Americans are still hesitant to believe that the high office of the US presidency, the duly elected “leader of the free world”, could be corrupted so completely that you can plainly and factually refer to him as a thief and mobster. ↩
Mariame Kaba’s letter to young activists: “I don’t know how things will turn out, but I am committed to something other than this — the current structure and state of this world. We can live differently.”
A pep talk in the face of despair. “Things can always get better, but it doesn’t happen via inertia. It happens because a lot of people tried.”
Our World in Ten Buildings: How Architecture Defines Who We Are and How We Live. Among the buildings are a school in Mass., a hospital in Rwanda, a prison in Norway, and a lighthouse in Maine. Intriguing!
India’s Hottest District Shuts at 10 AM as Mercury Breaches 48 Degrees Celsius Mark. “After 10am, Banda becomes deserted. At first, you see one or two people outside. Then, as the day rises, there is only silence.” (48C = 118F)
New-to-me vocabulary: oneshotted, “a term that means, roughly, to be destroyed and subsequently remade by a single experience”.
Cookie Queens
Cookie Queens is a feature-length documentary film that follows four Girl Scouts as they navigate the big business & big feelings of Girl Scout Cookie season.
“Cookie Queens” is a coming-of-age story about the joys, pressures, and pain points woven into one of America’s most cherished rituals: Girl Scout Cookie season. Captivating, candid, and full of heart, the film follows four girls ages 5-12 as they navigate the annual whirlwind of selling, striving, and succeeding. For these Girl Scouts, selling cookies isn’t just about Thin Mints and sisterhood — it’s a crash course in commercialism. Behind the smiles lie real pressure: long hours, ambitious goals, and weighty expectations. With humor, warmth, and a keen eye for small moments revealing big truths, “Cookie Queens” shows how growing up is shaped by tensions between community and capitalism.
My favorite and also, when I think about it too much, least favorite trailer moment: “There’s no stopping point.” Amen, sister. Opens August 7 in theaters.
Interview with the guy behind the great Art But Make It Sports social accounts. “When he sees a sports photograph, he can recall, off the top of his head, a pose, or a style, or even just a figure or a form, from a painting or a sculpture.”
Socials & More