Kottke.org Posts and Links for Jul 5, 2024

Hi, Jason here. This newsletter is a digest of posts and links from kottke.org, published every Tuesday and Friday. It's not absolutely everything from the site, but it's durn close. Unsubscribing is easy if you'd like to get off this ride. As always, you can read kottke.org on the web, via RSS, on Bluesky, on Mastodon, and in several other ways. Ok, onto the links!

Here's what the web looked like in 1994, including the likes of Yahoo!, GNN, Pathfinder, IBM, The Amazing FishCam, and Pizza Hut. [fastcompany.com]

Interesting convo about AI. "Working with AI has made me even more impressed with the kinds of things that every two-year-old is doing. It has also made the intelligence of octopuses, brine shrimp, and all the other creatures around us more vivid." [lareviewofbooks.org]

Diary comics, in which Edith revels in her appearance in the local paper. [kottke.org]

Archaeologists have discovered that Denisovan humans survived for at least 100,000 years on the Tibetan plateau. And they may have survived there as late as 32,000 years ago, meaning they could have mixed with modern humans. [nature.com]

Season three of The Bear "struggles to make its point about the abuses and toxicity of the restaurant industry because it is willing to absolve the real-life chefs who have actually engaged in that kind of demeaning behavior." [eater.com]

Mary H.K Choi: What My Adult Autism Diagnosis Finally Explained. "By my late 30s, I'd concluded I was simply bad at people. I was also indescribably lonely." [kottke.org]

A 4000-year-old Minoan structure with labyrinthine walls has been uncovered in Crete. (Could this be the legendary maze of King Minos? (Probably not...wrong location.)) [livescience.com]

Wells Fargo analysts ordered 75 identical burrito bowls from 8 different Chipotles and found that portion sizes varied wildly. The biggest bowl was almost 2x heavier than the smallest. Wild that they don't standardize this from a cost perspective. [qz.com]

The Last Rave, an excerpt of Emily Witt's new book, Health and Safety. "In the summer of 2020, I felt as if I'd entered the wrong portal, out of the world I knew and into its bizarro twin." [kottke.org]

Ohhhhh coooool, a grinning foreskin robot. A team recently "unveiled a technique for creating lifelike robotic skin using living human cells". Don't watch the video if you ever want to sleep again. [arstechnica.com]

Historian Heather Cox Richardson: "Today the United States Supreme Court overthrew the central premise of American democracy: that no one is above the law." Historian David Blight: "Today six people on the Supreme Court amended the Constitution." [kottke.org]

Supreme Court Rules That Presidents Have Absolute Immunity for "Core Constitutional Powers". From Sotomayor's dissent, a line that will reverberate for decades: "With fear for our democracy, I dissent." [kottke.org]

Tantalizing speculation: the "Untitled WB/Legendary/Denis Villeneuve Event Film in IMAX" now scheduled for release in Dec 2026 is Dune: Part Three. [indiewire.com]

Oooooh! For their fiction issue, the New Yorker has an exclusive excerpt from Sally Rooney's forthcoming book, Intermezzo. There's an audio version of Rooney reading it as well. [kottke.org]

👀 👋 🎉

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