cascoly/iStock/Getty Images Plus Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET key takeaways The Linux desktop has continued its slow growth.Linux has been making gains in no small part because of Microsoft Windows' blunders.Users and governments have been losing trust in Windows and…

Opening Hours Today: 4pm–3am Wed: 4pm–3am Thurs: 4pm–3am Fri: 4pm–4am Sat: 4pm–4am Sun: 4pm–3am Mon: 4pm–3am Location 79 East 7th Street Contact 917 400 3380 Categories Neighborhoods “By 1958, it was a social club. My grandfather's friends from Ukraine — everyone who had survived WWII — were…

ai llm thoughts Author Wes McKinney Published December 1, 2025 This text of this post was written without AI assistance or editing. Wes does vibe coding Up until about March of this year, I regarded AI-assisted development with skepticism, avoiding LLM-powered autocomplete or “AI IDEs” like Cursor…

Cool Finds From the 1950s to the 1970s, researcher John Calhoun gave rodents unlimited food and studied their behavior in overcrowded conditions A picture of Calhoun in a mouse utopia in 1970 Yoichi R Okamoto, White House photographer, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons What does utopia look like…

Black Friday is usually when ecommerce sets new records. This has certainly been true for Shopify through most of its existence. So much so that the company spends months in advance preparing for The Big Day(s). You'd think after more than twenty years, though, that things would have leveled out.…

I’m building Nixiesearch, a S3-based search engine - think Elasticsearch, but without the operational nightmares. I often end up arguing with strangers online that while “decoupling storage and compute” sounds amazing in theory, in practice it’s a massive pain in the ass for low-latency workloads.…

“We don’t sell loneliness. Please don’t come alone.” That message from a Chinese restaurant in South Korea, posted on social media on Nov. 10, has stirred the pot among would-be customers, according to a report by Korea JoongAng Daily. The restaurant put up a notice with a number of rules for…

Joan Didion, author, journalist, and style icon, died today after a prolonged illness. She was 87 years old. Here, in its original layout, is Didion’s seminal essay “Self-respect: Its Source, Its Power,” which was first published in Vogue in 1961, and which was republished as “On Self-Respect” in…

x LESSWRONG LW Claude 4.5 Opus' Soul Document — LessWrongClaude 4.5 Opus' Soul Document 28th Nov 2025 52 min read 413 New Comment 40 comments, sorted by Click to highlight new comments since: Smaug12312d10416 The document of which this is a reflection is confirmed to exist by Amanda Askell, by the…

Introduction When was the last time you had a good day of work? The kind where you got into flow and stayed there long enough to think deeply about a problem? Paul Graham wrote about this in 2009: a single meeting can wreck an entire half-day for someone who needs uninterrupted time to build…

Is it right to be happy in a world that’s broken? That’s the question Simone de Beauvoir went to Albert Camus with. Beauvoir was worrying that being focussed on one’s own happiness meant one had to detach themselves from the political reality around them. But as long as our happiness isn’t born out…

Spring 2020 Thoughtful Americans are realizing that the pervasive IT-revolution devices upon which we are increasingly dependent are affecting our society and culture in significant but as yet uncertain ways. We are noticing more in part because, as Maryanne Wolf has pointed out, this technology is…

FacebookTwitterLinkedIn Last month, two of my colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute (Brad Wilcox and Lyman Stone), along with co-authors from the Wheatley Foundation and the Institute for Family Studies, published an important new paper on the state of family formation in the wake of the…

I remember walking through the doors on the first day of my internship feeling so excited to finally start working a company I had always dreamed of. I sat at reception waiting for my manager to come get me and introduce me to my team, already convinced that I would be handed my project on day one.…

For much of the world, technology has become so intertwined with our day-to-day lives that it influences everything. Our relationships, the care we seek, how we work, what we do to protect ourselves, even the things we choose to learn and when. It would be understandable to read this as a dystopian…

“Developing superintelligence is now in sight,” says Mark Zuckerberg, heralding the “creation and discovery of new things that aren’t imaginable today.” Powerful AI “may come as soon as 2026 [and will be] smarter than a Nobel Prize winner across most relevant fields,” says Dario Amodei, offering the…

“Don’t make stuff because you want to make money — it will never make you enough money. And don’t make stuff because you want to get famous — because you will never feel famous enough,” John Green advised aspiring writers. “If you worship money and things … then you will never have enough. Never…

Ever present in my mind is The List: the countries I still haven’t gone to that I most want to visit. Ethiopia is on The List. So is Indonesia. And South Korea. And Madagascar. And Taiwan. Early on, my wife and I pledged to visit two new countries every year, and we mostly pulled it off. Then came…

The beautiful, brushed dial is catching the light perfectly, creating a subtle sunburst effect as a simple spar sweeps round to 12. Not 12 o'clock, but a 12 set at 1 o'clock. A crucial 12, though, because it marks the time to change. It signals the zenith of a screaming crescendo that began mere…

The editors at The Baffler want me to talk about my job. They want me to humiliate myself in the pages of this magazine. Very well: I am a podcaster. What is a podcaster? It’s someone who makes money from talking, often by means of selling dick pills. I don’t do that part, but I still obscure what I…

In 1905, a designer named Eleisha Pechey created a playful serif font called Windsor for the British type foundry Stephenson Blake. Exactly 70 years later, legendary type designer Ed Benguiat, who has created or redesigned logotypes for The New York Times, Coca-Cola and Ford, would run into Woody…

I love my job. I make a great salary, there’s a clear path to promotion, and a never-ending supply of cold brew in the office. And even though my job requires me to commit sociopathic acts of evil that directly contribute to making the world a measurably worse place from Monday through Friday, five…

Intro Let’s explore and deobfuscate the input stack on Linux. Our aim is to understand its components and what each does. Input handling can be divided into two parts, separated by a common layer: Kernel-level handling: It deals with what happens in the kernel and how events are exposed to…

Stoatphoto, Shutterstock The purpose or meaning of holiday traditions, rotely handed down from a distant past, can often be elusive. Halloween for example: We need the help of historians, to say nothing of psychologists, to understand the things we do on that day. But the same would not seem to be…

Sometimes you need to set environment variables with secrets, API keys or tokens, but they can be susceptible to exfiltration by malware, as seen during the recent Shai-Hulud attack. For publishing to PyPI, it’s strongly recommended to use Trusted Publishing rather than managing long-lived tokens on…

If you use AI coding agents, you face the same challenge: how do you give them enough context to understand your architecture, conventions, and workflows without repeating yourself? The problem compounds as your codebase grows. Complex module relationships, domain-specific patterns, and team…

Every once in a while, the curtain of the ordinary parts and we touch the miraculous — the sense that there is another world not beyond this one but within it, a mirror-world any glimpse of which returns our own more luminous and full of wonder. This can never be willed, but one can be willing for…

It might surprise you to hear that one of this year’s awards season contenders is a Norwegian film. But it’s not the first time. In 2022, Joachim Trier’s sly, POV-shifting relationship drama The Worst Person in the World snuck into the Academy Awards with nods for Best International Film and Best…

Since Google introduced Pixel VIPs in June, the widget has become the primary way I message and call people. I use it multiple times throughout the day and it’s close to entering my first homescreen. 9to5Google has a rebooted newsletter that highlights the biggest Google stories with added…

In a photo industry of ever-increasing prices, it’s refreshing to see optics that supply exceptional value for the dollar. The new Canon RF 45mm f/1.2 STM made the entire industry double-take upon seeing an f/1.2 optic for only $479. Surely, there must be a catch, so I took the handy little 45mm to…

There was a time when culture gestured outward toward shared experience, toward the new, toward some horizon of possibility. Now, it stares inward, fragmented, homogenized, and devoid of collective significance. The internet, once mythologized as the great democratizer of creativity, has instead…

THE NOTIONAL VALUE TRAP Foreword Just as growth in the “real” economy of material products and services has been decelerating towards contraction, so aggregates of financial wealth have carried on increasing relentlessly. Since the widening disequilibrium between the monetary and the material must…

I don’t remember when I first started noticing that people I knew out in the world had lost their sense of erotic privacy, but I do remember the day it struck me as a phenomenon that had escaped my timeline and entered my real, fleshy life. It was last year, when I was having a conversation with a…