September 2025 blend of links
Some links don’t call for a full blog post, but sometimes I still want to share some of the good stuff I encounter on the web.
Maria Ressa talks with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show・A video featuring Maria Ressa and Jon Stewart is bound to be brilliant, but this one is especially quotable and bookmark-worthy. The parts on ultra-processed foods/information and “apocalypse or Armageddon” are very powerful and insightful moments that made pause the video for a moment just to appreciate them fully.
I’m a High Schooler. AI Is Demolishing My Education・“The trouble with chatbots is not just that they allow students to get away with cheating or that they remove a sense of urgency from academics. The technology has also led students to focus on external results at the expense of internal growth.”
Is the ability to think going to become a rare and valuable skill?・At first, I thought this was another very interesting post on how A.I. turns people into overconfident software operators, until it became a very relatable post as the same thing happened to me this week at work: “Indeed, ChatGPT agrees with you, so you must be right.”
Clues by Sam・Just in case you fear that your ability to think is slipping away, this neat little daily game should keep you covered for a while. (via Kottke)
Yr Weather・I recently realised that Apple’s weather app is not very efficient at displaying information at a glance: when I look at the forecast, let’s say to see if it will be a sunny weekend or not, Apple’s weather app just uses one symbol per day. “Rain cloud” for Saturday. There goes my plan for a barbecue on the balcony. Yet, on that Saturday, it was only raining in the morning, so the forecast was pretty much useless. Hey Apple, we don’t all live in a place which has Californian weather all year long. Yr is a Norwegian application, and the forecast doesn’t show only one symbol, but four: morning afternoon, evening, night. Excellent so far, and the widget is exactly what I want in a weather widget. Oh my, did I just write extensively about weather apps?
Merlin's Wisdom Project, or: “Everybody likes being given a glass of water.”・I thought I had already shared this, but it turns out I didn’t. This Blend of links collection cannot pretend to call itself a worthwhile collection of links without the URL to this absolute, precious internet gem from Merlin Mann: “It's only advice for you because it had to be advice for me.” So many great lines in this.
Moomintroll Coffee Wild Blueberry・This coffee seems to be out of stock most of the time, but this is only proof that this is the good stuff. I first tried it years ago after a trip to Finland: it tastes great and unlike any coffee I’ve tried before. Sure, this is only “flavoured” coffee and rather expensive, but it’s a nice treat (Moomin branded products are usually very good): the perfect mid-morning coffee for October. (Sorry to readers living in the USA, South American countries, and Australia: you apparently can’t get it.)
When All You Have Is a Robots.txt Hammer・Excellent post by Nick Heer, reacting to a good post by Mike Masnick around the idea that closing your site to A.I. bots could mean the end of an open internet. This topic is more layered than I expected, and both of their perspectives are eye-opening. Reading Masnick’s I reopened my site to Google and Bing crawlers, and reading Heer’s, I reduced the list of blocked bots in my robots.txt file. I know, it’s all meaningless for such a website, but I like to tune every detail in a way I’m comfortable with, even if it doesn’t affect me.
Explaining, at some length, Techmeme's 20 years of consistency・Speaking of the effects of blocking website access: “Unfortunately for us, an array of trends has made this consistency quite challenging to maintain. Foremost among these is that crawling news sites has become much more difficult in recent years. Scanning the full text of news articles is important for us because the algorithms that alert our editors to news and organize our home page rely on analyzing that text. While it's challenging enough that a great deal of news is now paywalled, a more serious challenge is that with the rise of LLMs, many websites now simply block all bots except for a small number of search engines.”
Physics for Cats・New Tom Gauld comic book coming very soon (and already available in French).
More “Blend of links” posts here