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.

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:

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

1. 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. ↩

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.

The author of a nonfiction book about the effects of artificial intelligence on truth acknowledged on Monday that he had included numerous made-up or misattributed quotes concocted by A.I.

The author, Steven Rosenbaum, whose book “The Future of Truth” was released this month to great fanfare, incorporated more than a half-dozen misattributed or fake quotes in sections of the book reviewed by The New York Times.

The Times asked Mr. Rosenbaum about the quotes on Sunday and Monday. On Monday night, Mr. Rosenbaum acknowledged in a statement that the book had “a handful of improperly attributed or synthetic quotes” and said that he had started his own investigation.

Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk Apparently Used AI to Write Her Latest Novel:

In a recent interview (conducted and published in Polish), Nobel Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk admitted to using AI in her creative process.

The writer Maks Sipowicz, who drew attention to the interview on Bluesky, translated a few of salient bits: “When writing my latest novel… I asked this advanced model what kind of songs my protagonists would be listening to at a dance, a few dozen years ago, and AI gave me a few titles,” Tokarczuk told the interviewer. “Often I just ask the machine, ‘darling, how could we develop this beautifully?’ Even though I know about hallucinations and many factual errors in the algorithms in terms of economics and hard data, I have to add that in literary fiction this technology is an advantage of unbelievable proportion.”

Google Search As You Know It Is Over:

At its Google I/O conference on Tuesday, Google unveiled an AI-powered overhaul of Search centered around a reimagined “intelligent search box” — what the company describes as the biggest change to this entry point to the web since the search box debuted more than 25 years ago.

Instead of returning a simple list of links, Google Search will drop users into AI-powered interactive experiences at times. Google is also introducing tools that can dispatch “information agents” to gather information on a user’s behalf, along with tools that let users build personalized mini apps tailored to their needs.

The resulting experience will no longer look much like how people envision Google Search, which has long been defined by ranked links to websites that have the information you need.

Gemini Is in Danger of Going Full Copilot:

Gemini has a creep problem.

A few years ago, that little sparkle icon started showing up in all of our Google apps. Gemini in your inbox! Gemini in your Google Drive! It was slow at first, and easy enough to tune out, but something has changed in the past few months. Gemini is creeping. It’s showing up in all kinds of places at a relentless pace, and personally, it’s starting to really cheese me off.

An actual screenshot from Google just now (a la Charlie Jane Anders):

Commencement speakers at recent graduations get booed for casting AI in a positive light:

And that’s just today. 😰

There’s something so relaxing about watching art conservator Julian Baumgartner restore this damaged painting, a self-portrait by Italian painter Emma Gaggiotti Richards. I love how he paints tiny cracks in the damaged areas to match those in the rest of the painting.

There are many more videos and photos of Baumgartner’s restoration process on Instagram and YouTube. (via the kid should see this)

I am not what you would call a dedicated home cook. But every once in a while, I get a bee in my bonnet and make something from my small cache of recipes or from something I saw online that looked good. Some of my go-tos include:

Rigatoni With White Bolognese (PDF)
Orecchiette with Sausage and Broccoli
Pressure Cooker Mushroom Risotto
Caldo Verde (Portuguese Potato and Kale Soup With Sausage)
Smoked Haddock Chowder (April Bloomfield)
The World’s Best Pancakes
Smoky Corn Chowder

Some of these aren’t particularly easy to make, but the flavors created with the extra time are worth it.

What are some of your favorite recipes?

(I don’t have any good photos of any of the above recipes, so I included one of some avocado toast I made: mashed avocado with evoo, tomatoes + balsamic vinegar, fried egg (crispy w/ runny yolk), chili oil, toast, lots of salt on everything.)¹

1. Not sure where I learned this, but when making food, I salt everything separately. That way, each flavor gets accentuated on its own — even in soups or casseroles — instead of the whole thing just being vaguely salty. The main purpose of salt is not to make food salty, it’s to heighten the flavors already present. ↩

The Night Witches were an all-female Soviet bomber regiment that attacked Nazi forces during World War II.

An attack technique of the night bombers involved idling the engine near the target and gliding to the bomb-release point with only wind noise left to reveal their presence. German soldiers likened the sound to broomsticks and hence named the pilots “Night Witches”.

Some of the aviators were Jewish, like Polina Gelman:

She would be among a half-million Jews who are believed to have served in the Red Army, according to Yad Vashem. They fought not only for the survival of the Soviet Union, but also against the annihilation of their people in Nazi death camps in Poland.

“I have decided to go to the front,” Gelman wrote to her mother, adding, “I am a daughter of the Jewish people” with “a particular account” to settle with Hitler.

The women were barely given proper aircraft — crop dusters! — but they were quiet & maneuverable, ideal for night attacks:

The regiment flew in steel-and-canvas Polikarpov U-2 biplanes, a 1928 design intended for use as training aircraft (hence its original uchebnyy designation prefix of “U-“) and for crop dusting, which also had a special U-2LNB version for the sort of night harassment attack missions flown by the 588th. The plane could carry only 350 kilograms (770 lb) of bombs, so eight or more missions per night were often necessary. Although the aircraft was obsolete and slow, the pilots took advantage of its exceptional maneuverability; it also had a maximum speed that was lower than the stalling speed of both the Messerschmitt Bf 109 and the Focke-Wulf Fw 190, which made it very difficult for German pilots to shoot down…

This World History Timeline (2016) shows how nations, empires, and ruling groups shifted and evolved across the globe from 3000 BCE to the present. It takes a second to understand what you’re looking at — I thought it was a sort of stretched geographical map at first. Get your own here.

The chart is based on Joseph Priestley’s A New Chart of History (1769):

Priestley is best known for his co-discovery of oxygen.

One of the biggest assholes in the Trump regime is Russell Vought — and that’s really saying something; it’s a fierce competition. He’s the guy who said in 2023 that he wanted to put federal workers “in trauma”. ProPublica produced a video in Oct 2025 about how Vought is acting as a shadow president in his drive to dismantle the US federal government.

Russell Vought is one of the most powerful people in the Trump administration. For almost three decades, he worked in Congress and held prominent roles at conservative think tanks. But he was little known outside of political circles. He’s now the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget and the chief architect of President Donald Trump’s campaign to radically reduce the size of the federal bureaucracy.

In this video, ProPublica reporter Andy Kroll tells the story of Vought’s rise from a young staffer for Texas Sen. Phil Gramm to his role as the driving force behind Trump’s plan to dismantle the so-called “administrative state.” Vought declined to be interviewed. Kroll’s account is drawn from dozens of interviews, thousands of pages of documents and hours of videos and recordings of Vought’s briefings to supporters, including one where Vought says he wanted to put federal workers “in trauma.”

ProPublica and the New Yorker co-published a lengthy companion article as well.

During the Biden years, Vought labored to translate the lessons of Trump’s tumultuous first term into a more effective second presidency. He chaired the transition portion of Project 2025, a joint effort by a coalition of conservative groups to develop a road map for the next Republican administration, helping to draft some 350 executive orders, regulations and other plans to more fully empower the president. “Despite his best thinking and the ­aggressive things they tried in Trump One, nothing really stuck,” a former OMB branch chief who served under Vought during the first Trump administration told me. “Most administrations don’t get a four-year pause or have the chance to think about ‘Why isn’t this working?’” The former branch chief added, “Now he gets to come back and steamroll everyone.”