America’s Greatest Hot Dog
The price and quality of the $1.50 Costco frank haven’t budged in 40 years. It’s the last—and best—deal in the country.
AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible
The problem
The Hierarchy of Money
Qwen-Image-2.1: Compact, Efficient, and Unified Image Creation
GITHUB HUGGING FACE MODELSCOPE We are excited to open-source Qwen-Image-2.1, an image model in the Qwen family that balances generation quality, inference efficiency, and cost. Qwen-Image-2.1 unifies text-to-image generation and image editing in a single model, with just 7B…
System Design In Depth
Deep system design curriculum — 18 modules, 200 units, 118 architecture diagrams, from-scratch algorithm builds, and curated video walkthroughs for senior engineers.
All Images | Public Domain Image Archive
Your very own art history cheat sheet
Everything you need to know in 5 minutes
An introduction to Jazz in 25 records
The following list offers an excellent starting point for any music enthusiast seeking exploration
A new cookbook pays tribute to two New Orleans staples — 'Rhythm & Roux'
At Bayou Bar, music and food go hand in hand. Which is why a new cookbook from chef Brian Landry and bandleader Peter Harris has recipes from the menu and stories from the musicians who play there.
In New Orleans, an empty building becomes a free store — and roller skating rink
In the Lower Ninth Ward, an old Family Dollar stands covered in graffiti. It looks abandoned. But inside, it's a treasure trove — clothing, home goods, toys and books. And everything is free.
The AI Bubble Fault Line May Run Through SoftBank’s Balance Sheet
And How Athene Quietly Bet 50% of its Surplus on Softbank’s OpenAI stake
Alibaba Qwen Team Releases Qwen3.8-LiveTranslate: A Real-Time Interpretation Model That Cuts Average Lag to 2.3 Seconds Across 60 Languages…
Qwen3.8-LiveTranslate cuts average lag to 2.3 seconds across 60 languages, adding speaker diarization, bilingual display, and translation.
Terraform Industries
Sunlight into methane for fracking prices
Japan’s Quiet Monopoly Inside Every Robot Joint
Two Japanese companies control roughly half the market for the mechanism that lets robots move, and Chinese suppliers are closing in fast.
6 Famous Artworks That Are Lost Forever | TheCollector
Six masterpieces lost to history—from Van Gogh to Rembrandt—surviving only in fragments, photographs, and archival records.
5 Levers Drive CAC, Says Ad Pro - Practical Ecommerce
Hal Smith of H Street Digital says lowering customer acquisition cost on Meta and Google starts with the offer.
No, But | Dennis M. Hogan
Love it or hate it, improv comedy is neither dead nor dying.
We Bought a $500 Counterfeit Rolex So Good, Even Rolex Didn’t Spot It
The replica watch industry is in its “super clone” era. Following tips from murky internet forums, we bought three budget fakes that were good enough to pass as real—but ultimately disposable.
5 Prompt Optimization Strategies That Actually Improve LLM Output
This article covers five prompt optimization strategies such as: prompt optimization, prompt engineering, LLM output quality, few-shot prompting, chain-of-thought, structured outputs.
The Gas Turbine Supply Chain
Look into how gas turbines work, the challenges, the manufacturing process, and the supply chain involved.
How Thermals Constrain Robots, Chips, and Space Datacenters
Two general principles to help understand and defeat overheating
Antimony
Three countries mine about 85% of the world's antimony: China, Russia and Tajikistan. The United States imports 91% of what it uses, more than half of it from China, which banned antimony exports to the US in December 2024. The metal goes into ammunition, lead-acid batteries and…
The Dark Year
EMPs, solar storms and the forces that could switch off civilization.
The Variety Trap
Why Margins Collapse Where Product Variety Explodes, And How Assembly Can Win Them Back
In much of the West, the importance of these close relationships was lost, with competitive bidding and more transactional relationships becoming the norm.
In this model, vertical integration is not about owning everything. It is about owning the layers of the stack where outsourcing would slow learning, limit final integration or affect product performance.
Barge capacity
One 15-barge tow on the lower Mississippi holds about 875,000 bushels of grain, the load of almost 216 rail cars or 1,000 trucks. Source: USDA Agricultural Marketing Service: https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/ReliableWaterwaySystem042025.pdf
Graphite Electrodes: The Six-Month Carbon Behind Electric Steel and Lithium Batteries
Electric furnaces make 30% of the world's steel, 46% of the EU's and 71% of the US's, every tonne burns through a graphite column that takes half a year to produce, and battery anodes are made from the same coke in the same furnaces.
The vacant building everyone complains about is cheaper to keep empty.
Have you talked about why?
My Descent Into Mah-Jongg
The game seems to be everywhere, all at once.
youtube coke and mentos
How To Write With An LLM
Thomas Ptacek on using LLMs as copyeditors, not as writing assistants: Rule Number One: You may not use a single word an LLM suggests to you. [...] I think that …
GraphViz Examples and Tutorial
An interface as well as documentation to the GraphViz program and DSL
Infleqtion And Nvidia Reduce Physical-to-Logical Qubit Ratio in Quantum Computers
A lot of advancements are being made in quantum computing that move beyond the basics of quantum pro ...
The Permission Gap: Why Data Doesn't Fix Coordination
The permission gap is the distance between the part of a system that sees a local problem and the part allowed to fix it. More data does nothing to close it.
In the industry, waiting for a town to grow is called land banking.
That land isn’t waiting for a decision to build. It’s waiting for a decision about what kind of store to build.
US Energy Data: a new platform to explore American energy, state-by-state
Trying to make some of the richest energy data in the world accessible and understandable.
How the world was welded
Let's all join together, now...
China massively overbuilt high-speed rail, says leading economic geographer
Lu Dadao of the Chinese Academy of Sciences warns that oversized, underused HSR infrastructure has ignored basic economic logic, weakened public finances, and derailed regional planning.
Is Beef the Next Internal-Combustion Engine?
Bill McKibben on beef consumption in the U.S., R.F.K., Jr.,’s recent recommendations, and the environmental harms of the cattle industry.
Landing the Space Shuttle — An Incredible Flying Machine and the Thrill of a Lifetime
This was my first landing at the controls of Atlantis, and it was the culmination of a 10-day mission to the Russian Mir to deliver supplies and a fresh crew for the space station. In just about th…
The most important product decision is what you don’t build
Ask a team what they shipped this year and you’ll get a list. Ask what they killed and the room goes quiet.
asciimoo/hister: Your own search engine
Your own search engine
13 of the coolest neighbourhoods in the world are in Europe
The hottest area in Athens – Neos Kosmos – claimed first in Europe and third place in the overall ranking.
The Next Gene-Editing Technology May Also Be the Oldest
Scientists have discovered a powerful gene-targeting system in viruses. Billions of years old, VIPR seems to predate CRISPR and may be even more powerful.
The American Religion of Self-Storage Facilities
David Owen on our obsession with putting our belongings in metal boxes and then never looking at them again.
How SpaceX Streamlined the Raptor Engine
If you’re reading this, there’s a very good chance you’ve seen this famous image of three iterations of SpaceX’s Raptor rocket engine.
The Side Door · Solstice No. 10
Nobody stops the barrels now.
The "Grit" Myth: Why Internal Drive Predicts Zero Percent Of Founder Success - Dataconomy
Back in 2018, I watched the tech ecosystem break in real time. Over the course of twelve months, I lost
arnegiacomo/fugleramme: E-ink bird frame for Raspberry Pi - real-time bird detection by audio using BirdNET-Go
E-ink bird frame for Raspberry Pi - real-time bird detection by audio using BirdNET-Go - arnegiacomo/fugleramme
Reversing Factorio's RNG
This post details how Factorio's random number generation works, how it can be reversed and how I used that knowledge to predict and manipulate the RNG with pure in‑game mechanics.
How is it possible for a deterministic game like Factorio to have a random mechanic?
PRNG
Nginx Cheatsheet
Nginx directives at a glance: server blocks, location matching, reverse proxy headers, TLS, redirects, rate limits, caching, and log formats.
Cloudflare Just Gave AI Training Bots the Middle Finger
Cloudflare just gave website owners a new weapon against AI crawlers: keep the search traffic, block the AI training. After years of watching bots consume the web’s content, publishers finally have an easier way to tell AI companies where to go.