how to turn your favorite substack into a printable newspaper by danielle (𝓇𝒶𝓌 & 𝒻𝑒𝓇𝒶𝓁)
Friday January 2^nd, 2026 at 1:18 AM

I believe in primarily using the internet to enrich the outernet. I.e. leveraging digital tools and the distributive power of the internet to delight and connect people IRL.

How? With flyers that act as portals to absurd questionnaires, or mysterious phone lines that subvert expectations, or events so ridiculous that people feel compelled to go, and bond with strangers over the absurdity (e.g. Sit Club, Strippers for Charity, The Death Duel to Fix the Ratio).

And I share these projects of mine on Substack. I love Substack. So naturally, I was inspired to make Substack a bit more analog, a bit more whimsical outside its digital bounds.

How?

I made a tool that turns any Substack into a printable newspaper, at substackprint.com. Note that the full functionality only works on desktop (mobile dynamic formatting is hard!) but you can see a preview of the front page on mobile.

With all due humbleness, I'm obsessed with this graphic I made.

Inspiration for what to do with your newspaper.

As a reader:

Reduce your screen time. Read without the distraction of all the fast shapes and fun colors and bright lights on your phone.
Bring it to read on a flight / car / bus ride.
Tuck a folded up copy in your bag, to read while waiting in line, instead of filling downtime with scrolling on your phone.
Read performatively in the park or at a coffee shop to pick up baddies.
Gift your friends their favorite Substacker’s writing printed as a newspaper.

As a writer:

Print out your front page and frame it. Look at it every day and exclaim, “I am a writer!”
Bind it with ribbons and leave it around your house for your nosy friends to flip through when they come over.
See if local businesses will stock it! Bookstores, coffee shops, anywhere with a waiting room (beauty saloons, dentist offices), community centers, boutique grocery stores, etc.
Hang up the front page as a flyer on the street with a “read more at <your publication link>” or a QR code, to promote your Substack to passerby. (À la ryan elizabeth peete).
Share your printed & bound newspaper as a gift (works best for family members, close friends, and devoted subscribers).
Get creative with print-on-demand. Display your front page on a postcard, blanket, coffee mug, notebook, stickers. Put your articles on a calendar, wrapping paper, tote bag, puzzle.
Join forces with other writers, get a table at a craft fair, and sell your newspapers!

But danielle (𝓇𝒶𝓌 & 𝒻𝑒𝓇𝒶𝓁), I don’t have a printer!

I am a big fan of FedEx printing! That is a good option.
Most universities and libraries have printers that anyone can use.
There’s many print-on-demand companies! I’ve used vistaprint before.
You can get a used printer off Facebook or Nextdoor marketplace, or from a thrift store, for like $20.

Potential future expansions.

I’ll be honest guys, in the four days I made this, I wanted to rage-quit several times.1 There were many more features I wanted to include, but resigned that I’d add later if there was sufficient interest. Including:

Combine articles from different Substacks into one newspaper. This was part of the original plan, but it ended up being much more technically complex.2
Turn a Substack into a printable zine. This is another format I’d love to have! Also, a magazine and book format.
Customization. Multiple layout options for the front page. The ability to change the font, colors, and divider style.
More modes! The current modes are normal, evil, Chris Best, and Chris Worst. I wanted to add vintage, modern, kawaii (pink font & background). Evil mode should have red text.
Fixing the “established” date on the front page. This was supposed to be when the Substack was created. Due to limitations with the RSS feed (see footnotes) it isn’t always accurate.
Print on demand. Not everyone has a printer, which I often forget, because I’m a flyer fanatic, and heavily scheme via flyer (e.g. organizing Sit Club, promoting the reverse Advice Line, Beancoming the first Beanfluencer, finding love for all my friends). So it’d be cool to hook up some printing API that’d deliver your Substack newspapers to you! It would be especially cool if it could auto-export your subscriptions and saved/archived articles into a newspaper and send it to you.

If there is sufficient interest, I will build these out. But I’m also unsure if Substack HQ will shut me down / snipe the idea, so we’ll see how that pans out.

Enable and join my scheming <3

If you enjoyed the Substack Print, you can support me with a free or paid subscription :) Know that 100% of income from paid subs is funding projects like this! My passion is sparking joy and bringing people together with creative scheming, and I write about my shenanigans here.

Subscribe now

The other way you can support my work is to use the Substack Print! Seeing people share their generated newspapers makes me so happy. If you use it, or come up with other use cases for it, I would love to hear about it, so please share!

Love,

danielle (𝓇𝒶𝓌 & 𝒻𝑒𝓇𝒶𝓁)

P.S. I had time to create this because I had a week off work! The other project I created was a tool that lets you type with a font made from Bryan Johnson (the millionaire who’s trying to live forever, notorious for swapping blood with his son). Check that out (if you dare) at livefontever.com.

Write in Bryan Johnsons (I know you’ve been dreaming of this all your life).

1

<rant> After a few frustrating bugs, I had to go to the gym for the sole purpose of letting my anger out. I went through every stage of grief. I’d fix one thing, and two others would break. The code got so complex that I started over four times, but ultimately went back to the original files because the complexity seemed inevitable. It seems so simple, but getting content to flow evenly across columns, not leave “orphaned” titles / images / captions, and just looking GOOD, was very difficult. I spent four hours on footnote formatting alone! </rant>

2

If you’re curious why: Every Substack publication has a RSS feed, which is basically a page that makes it easier for other websites/tools to read its content. It’s common practice for news sites, as it allows external tools to aggregate info from a bunch of different sources, without content getting messed up, and while citing the original source. You can find any Substack’s RSS feed at <publication-name>.substack.com/feed (e.g. rawandferal.substack.com/feed). My tool pulls from a Substack’s RSS feed. This takes processing time. So if I wanted to combine articles from multiple publications, I’d have to pull from multiple Substack RSS feeds, which would take more processing time, and also, RSS feeds generally limit the articles shown by recency and number (e.g. it only shows the last 10 articles and only those published after 2024; I don’t know the actual limits Substack uses, these numbers are just for illustration). So more realistically, if I wanted to combine specific articles across publications into one output newspaper, instead of pulling from the RSS feeds, I’d have to pull content directly from article webpages, which is much less reliable for an external tool to understand and organize. It’s possible, just much more complex.

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7 hours ago

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A Website To Destroy All Websites by Henry Desroches
Thursday January 1^st, 2026 at 9:59 PM

Writing from the desk of Henry (From Online)

A Website To End All Websites | Henry From Online

A website to destroy all websites.

How to win the war for the soul of the internet and build the Web We Want.

A tiny website by Henry (from Online) ~3100 words; about a 15 minute read

table of contents, of course

part one.

The internet is bad.

Christ’s Descent Into Hell, Follower of Hieronymus Bosch (~1625)

Well, the Internet mostly feels bad these days.

We were given this vast, holy realm of self-discovery and joy and philosophy and community; a thousand thousand acres of digital landscape, on which to grow our forests and grasslands of imagination, plant our gardens of learning, explore the caves of our making. We were given the chance to know anything about anything, to be our own Prometheus, to make wishes and to grant them.

But that’s not what we use the Internet for anymore. These days, instead of using it to make ourselves, most of us are using it to waste ourselves: we’re doom-scrolling brain-rot on the attention-farm, we’re getting slop from the feed.

Instead of turning freely in the HTTP meadows we grow for each other, we go to work: we break our backs at the foundry of algorithmic content as this earnest, naïve, human endeavoring to connect our lives with others is corrupted. Our powerful drive to learn about ourselves, each other, and our world, is broken into scant remnants — hollow, clutching phantasms of Content Creation, speed-cut vertical video, listicle thought-leadership, ragebait and the thread emoji.

it wasn’t always like this.

It used to feel way better to Go Online, and some of us will remember.

We used to be able to learn about our hobbies and interests from hundreds of experts on a wealth of websites whose only shared motivation was their passion. Some of those venerable old educational blogs, forums, and wikis still stand, though most have been bulldozed.

Now, Learning On The Internet often means fighting ads and endless assaults on one’s attention — it means watching part-1-part-2-part-3 short-form video clips, taped together by action movie psychology hacks, narrated gracelessly by TTS AI voices. We’re down from a thousand and one websites to three, and each of those remaining monolith websites is just a soullessly-regurgitated, compression-down-scaled, AI-up-scaled version of the next.

¶

We used to make lasting friendships with folks all over the world on shared interest and good humor.

But now those social networks, once hand-built and hand-tended, vibrant and organic, are unceremoniously swallowed by social media networks, pens built for trapping us and our little piggy attentions, turning us all into clout-chasers & content-creators, and removing us from what meaningful intimacy & community felt like.

¶

Even coding for the web used to be different: One could Learn To Code™ to express oneself creatively, imbue one’s online presence with passion and meaning, and for some of us, build a real career.

These days, however, we write increasing amounts of complicated, unsecure code to express less and less meaning, in order to infinitely generate shareholder value. We don’t think about the art of our craft and the discipline of its application, we think about throughput and scale.

To be very clear: I’m not trying to Good Old Days the internet. None of this is meant to make you feel nostalgic — the Internet used to be slow and less populated and less diverse, and its access was limited to those of a certain class. The Web For All is a marked improvement, widespread global internet access is a marked improvement, and what I’m asking you to consider is what it used to feel like to use these tools, and what we’ve lost in the Big Tech, Web 2.0 and web3 devouring of the ’Net.

part two.

The invention of the automobile

Autoportrait, Tamara de Lempicka (1929)

The onset of the automobile was a revelation for access and personal liberty. With the advent of cars, members of society could travel farther, get more done in their day, and bend their limited time more to their creative will!

But as time wore on and the industrialization & proliferation of the automobile progressed, its marginal utility diminished — the industry started to offer society fewer & fewer benefits, and take more & more in exchange1.

In American cities, for example: though at first the automobile enabled humans to travel further distances, it now demanded that humans travel those distances, and demanded infrastructure be created & maintained to enable it.2 Many now must use an automobile to get everything done in their town in a day, and must pay & take time for that automobile’s fueling & maintenance.3

Further than that, the automobile asks all of us to chip in tax revenue to protect its infrastructure, but only certain classes can afford an automobile with which to use that infrastructure, and those classes who can’t afford to do so are relegated to underfunded public transit systems.4

No longer a tool to serve our societies, our societies now serve the automobile.

part three.

Tools for Conviviality, & the industrialization of the Web.

In his book Tools For Conviviality, technology philosopher and social critic Ivan Illich identifies these two critical moments, the optimistic arrival & the deadening industrialization, as watersheds of technological advent. Tools are first created to enhance our capacities to spend our energy more freely and in turn spend our days more freely, but as their industrialization increases, their manipulation & usurpation of society increases in tow5.

Illich also describes the concept of radical monopoly, which is that point where a technological tool is so dominant that people are excluded from society unless they become its users. We saw this with the automobile, we saw it with the internet, and we even see it with social media.

~~No longer a tool to serve our societies, our societies now serve the automobile.~~ Instead of designing and using tools to build a society, our society changes to adapt to the demands of our tools.

¶

Illich’s thesis allows us to reframe our adoption and use of the technologies in our life. We can map fairly directly most technological developments in the last 100 (or even 200) years to this framework: a net lift, followed by a push to extract value and subsequent insistence upon the technology’s ubiquity:

the textile revolution

The preferred imagery used to mythologize the Industrial Revolution is the woodetchings of textile manufacturers, transformed in the early 19th century by the arrival of automated fabric machinery. Its proponents laud the shift of an agricultural society to a technological one, creating new sectors for labor, and raising up the middle class (we will say nothing of this period’s new punishing conditions for labor in this essay6). But the ultimate ecological and human costs engendered by the increasing availability of cheap fabric production are well-documented: In 2022, the fashion and textile industries employed around 60 million factory workers worldwide7, and less than 2% of those workers earn a living wage. Those workers also endure the full suite of labor exploitation practices, including gender-based harassment, wage theft, and unsafe conditions. On the material side, the induced consumption resulting from ever-cheaper products means the world consumed 400% more textile products globally as 20 years ago8, and bins most of it (the average American generates 82 pounds of textile waste each year).

antibiotic technology

The arrival of antibiotics in 19289 allowed for revolutionary leaps in fighting bacterial infections like strep throat, pneumonia, and meningitis, but an over-dependence and over-prescription of penicillin and its siblings through the 1950s-70s resulted in the proliferation of antibiotic resistance, which subsequently led to longer hospital stays, higher medical costs, and increased mortality.10

space exploration

Since the beginning of the space exploration era in the late 1950s, humanity has made leaps and bounds in learning about our own world and its physical systems, telecommunications, imaging, etc. The increasing frequency of commercialization missions in space for satellite systems (and lately tourism) has resulted in immense amounts of space debris being generated — both from active satellites and from jettisoned/destroyed components of previous missions, the debris threatens future missions and has even been destructive to the field of astronomy, making it impossible to use earth-based sensors and photography devices to learn about space.11 So desperate to extract Shareholder Value from the starry sky, we’re blinding our own ability to look at it.

The web is no exception to this pattern. A vision of interoperability, accessibility, and usability, the World Wide Web was first conceived in 1989 as a way to universally link documents and other media content in a flexibly-organized system that could make information easily accessed at CERN, and be easily shared with collaborators beyond.12 But the proliferation of access and ultimate social requirement of access has spawned countless troubles for human society, including cyberstalking and bullying, the instantaneous circulation of CSAM, violent images, and misinformation, identity theft, addiction, etcetera.

The rampant industrialization and commercialization of the Web predictably develops flashy, insidious patterns of extracting capital from its users: new surfaces for information means new surfaces for advertisement, and new formats of media beget new mechanisms for divorcing you from their ownership.

convivial life & convivial tooling

Illich poses convivial tools as directly opposed to this industrialized, radically-monopolized set of social systems. Similar to E.F. Schumacher’s concept of “intermediate technology” introduced in his 1973 book Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered, convivial tools are sustainable, energy-efficient (though often labor intensive), local-first, and designed primarily to enhance the autonomy and creativity of their users.13 Illich cites specifically hand tools, bicycles, and telephones as examples, but with its enormous capacity for interoperability and extensibility, the Internet is the perfect workshed in which to design our own Tools For Conviviality.

part four.

the Web we want

The Plains of Heaven, John Martin (1851-3)

let’s reconsider

the markers of a decaying 'Net I mentioned before, with convivial tooling in mind:

Teaching & learning on the Web

Monolithic platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Medium, and Substack draw a ton of creators and educators because of the promise of monetization and large audiences, but they’ve shown time and time again how the lack of ownership creates a problem. When those platforms fail, when they change their rules, when they demand creators move or create a particular way to maintain their access to those audiences, they pit creators or their audiences against the loss of the other. Without adhering to the algorithm’s requirements, writers may not write an impactful document, and without bypassing a paywall, readers can’t read it.

¶

When those promises of exorbitant wealth and a life of decadence through per-click monetization ultimately dry up (or come with a steep moral or creative cost), creators and learners must look for new solutions for how educational content is shared on the Internet. The most self-evident, convivial answer is an old one: blogs. HTML is free to access by default, RSS has worked for about 130 years^{[citation needed]}, and combined with webmentions, it’s never been easier to read new ideas, experiment with ideas, and build upon & grow those ideas with other strong thinkers on the web, owning that content all along.14

Connecting with friends on the Web

Social media apps have imprisoned us all in this weird content prison — in order to connect with friends we’re sort of forced to create or be vanished by capricious black box algorithms, and all that we do create is, as we’ve already alluded to, subsequently owned by whatever platform we’ve created it on. If Instagram goes away overnight, or decides to pivot catastrophically, your stories and your network of friends goes with it.

¶

The advent and development of tools & methodologies like POSSE (Publish On your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere), ActivityPub, microformats, and ATProto, it’s becoming quite achievable to generate your own social network, interoperable with other networks like Bluesky or Mastodon. That network, designed for ownership and decentralization, is durable, designed around storytelling instead of engagement, and free of the whims of weird tech billionaires.

With some basic HTML knowledge and getting-stuff-online knowledge, a handful of scrappy protocols, and a free afternoon or two, one can build their own home to post bangers for the tight homies, make friends, and snipe those new friends with those hits of dopamine they so fiendishly rely on.

Coding for the web

Lastly, consider the discipline of web engineering:

We have been asked to build the same B2B SaaS website with the same featureset n^∞ times, and our answers for the optimal way to do that are increasingly limited. We’ve penned all of our markup into JavaScript templates just in case a product manager needs the wrapper component to post JSON somewhere down the line, and we’ve whittled away at style code until it’s just a mechanism for deploying one of two border-radius-drop-shadow combos to divs. It’s an industrial, production-minded way of approaching a discipline that has all the hallmarks of being a great craft, and that’s understandably uninspiring to many of us.

¶

Yet our young React shepherds have no need to fear: there are countless more colors than blurple out there, and countless more fonts than Inter. HTML and CSS are better and more generative technologies than they’ve ever been: Thanks to the tireless work of the CSS working groups and browser implementers, etc, there is an unbelievable amount of creative expression possible with basic web tools in a text editor. Even JavaScript is more progressively-ehanceable than ever, and enables interfacing with a rapidly-growing number of exciting browser APIs (still fuck Brendan Eich though). ${new Date.getCurrentYear()} is a veritable renaissance of web code, and it asks of authors only curiosity and a drive to experiment.

part five.

so where do we go from here?

The Abbey in the Oakwood, Caspar David Friedrich (1810)

Illich’s thesis is that technology and its derived tools should serve people in a way that enhances their freedom, creativity, independence, and will.

The distillation of those principles on the web through manual code, hand-built social networks, and blogs, points luminously to one answer to the question of how the Internet can best serve humans:

it’s personal websites.

Hand-coded, syndicated, and above all personal websites are exemplary: They let users of the internet to be autonomous, experiment, have ownership, learn, share, find god, find love, find purpose. Bespoke, endlessly tweaked, eternally redesigned, built-in-public, surprising UI and delightful UX. The personal website is a staunch undying answer to everything the corporate and industrial web has taken from us.

And how might one claim this ultimate toolchain of conviviality, and build a place on the web that enhances their autonomy and creativity?

How might one build a personal website?

Start small

Let yourself start small, have fun trying shit that doesn’t work, document your growth, publish failed ideas & successful ones. Some of the best websites in the world are just HTML, and they belong to their authors. Make friends, let yourself be inspired by others, send friendly emails asking to learn new things, and do not demand of yourself masterpieces.
Reduce friction to publishing

Get the resistance to ship out of your way. Don’t get caught up in tooling and frameworks, just write HTML and get something online. If you’re an engineer, delight that you’re not beholden to the same standards of quality and rigorous testing that you are at work — draft some ideas, hit the h1 to p tag combo, and publish. Update and update again; let your ideas grow like gardens, the way they do in your mind. The mutability of the web, often its great weakness, is also one of its great strengths.
Don’t worry about design (unless you want to)

Don’t worry about design unless that’s the part that brings you joy. Make friends with designers and trade your work for theirs, or trade tips, trade advice. Get comfortable with being joyfully bad at something — from that soil of humility grows a million questions for those who have learned and are excited to share. Iterate until you’ve something you’re proud of, or iterate so much you’ve ruined it and have to go back to bald.
Use the IndieWeb

Leverage the IndieWeb and its wonderfully thought-out protocols, tools like brid.gy to syndicate your ideas out to the wider web, and then use Webmentions to bring the ensuing conversations back where the content is. That way, you can publish work where you prefer to, folks on Bluesky can enjoy and discuss it, in the same stroke as folks on Mastodon may, or folks directly on the canonical URL.
Join us in sharing what you’ve made

I encourage you to join us in our auspicious website adventure, and if you do, I hope you’ll further join us on personalsit.es, our happy little home for everyone building something humble or thrilling or joyful or deeply accursed, but personal.

part six.

(denouement)

Sunrise on the Matterhorn, Albert Bierstadt (after 1875)

You’re not crazy. The internet does feel genuinely so awful right now, and for about a thousand and one reasons. But the path back to feeling like you have some control is to un-spin yourself from the Five Apps of the Apocalypse and reclaim the Internet as a set of tools you use to build something you can own & be proud of — or in most of our cases, be deeply ashamed of. Godspeed and good luck.

❦

That’s all for me. If you find any issues with this post, please reach out to me by email. Thanks eternally for your time and patience, and thanks for reading. Find me here online at one of my personal websites like henry.codes or strange.website or stillness.digital or strangersbyspring.com, or sometimes on Bluesky and Mastodon.

As ever, unionize, free Palestine, trans rights are human rights, fix your heart or die.

fin.

go home

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10 hours ago

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Two Nights Playing With Fire At Patrick Mahomes And Travis Kelce’s Steakhouse by Liz Cook
Tuesday December 30^th, 2025 at 10:55 AM

Defector

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — As celebrity restaurant mascots, athletes offer a tidy sense of vertical integration: Why not supply the very calories they need to expend on the field? I’m surprised there are so few successful models. We have all mostly forgotten (or agreed not to talk about) George Brett’s restaurant in Kansas City, Brett Favre’s Wisconsin steakhouse, or those 31 Papa John’s franchises Peyton Manning coincidentally shed two days before the NFL dropped the pizza chain as a sponsor.

Still, tables have been reliably booked at 1587 Prime—a mashup of Patrick Mahomes’s and Travis Kelce’s jersey numbers, along with a word that vaguely connotes “beef”—since it opened in Kansas City in August. I left an eight-year gig as a KC restaurant critic in 2023, but the mania surrounding the opening was enough to summon me out of retirement. Like a washed-up former detective, I couldn’t resist stumbling half-drunk into my old precinct for one last job.

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2 days ago

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Tiny wild cat spotted in Thailand for first time in 30 years by Margherita Bassi
Monday December 29^th, 2025 at 11:38 PM

Popular Science

Camera traps in Thailand have captured adorable passersby with significant implication for the country’s conservation efforts. While these furry creatures might look like your average house cat, they’re actually wild flat-headed cats (Prionailurus planiceps). These extremely rare wild felines weigh less than half an average pet cat, and they’ve been detected in Thailand for the first time since 1995.

The happy news was confirmed by a survey from Thailand’s Department of National Parks, Wildlife, and Plant Conservation, and Panthera Thailand, a global wild cat conservation organization, according to a statement emailed to Popular Science.

“Even species thought to be lost can be rebuilt if we invest in protecting the habitats they depend on,” said Wai Ming Wong, Panthera Small Cat Conservation Science Director. “Flat-headed cats’ persistence in Thailand suggests that these ecosystems still hold remarkable biodiversity but also underscores how urgently we must conserve and restore them before they vanish entirely.”

Flat-headed cats are named for their particular flat forehead and extended skull. They are Southeast Asia’s smallest wild cat, and have short bodies, slim legs, webbed toes, and stubby tails. They’re also difficult to study. Besides their limited population numbers, they’re small, nocturnal, and favor hard-to-access environments—tropical rainforests, swampy and peat-swamp forests, marshes, lakes, streams, and riverine forests.

a small wild cat walks on leaves — Flat-headed cats are the smallest wild cat in Southeast Asia. *Image: DNP/Panthera Thailand*

Researchers believe them to be close relatives of leopard cats and fishing cats, and estimate a total population size of 2,500 adults. Flat-headed cats are one of the most threatened wild cats—the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) classifies them as Endangered, and “possibly extinct” within Thailand.

Nevertheless, remote camera trap images confirmed the wild cat’s reappearance.The traps picked up 13 detections in 2024 and 16 in southern Thailand’s Princess Sirindhorn Wildlife Sanctuary in 2025, within the context of the species’ largest survey. Notably, a mother and her cub were also spotted, verifying the species’ active reproduction in the area. It’s an important find, since flat-headed cat mothers usually have just one kitten at a time.

a small wild cat in reeds — A rare image of a Flat-headed Cat (*Prionailurus planiceps)* at night, Kinabatangan River, Sabah, Borneo, Malaysia. *Image: Sebastian Kennerknecht/Panthera*.

The flat-headed cat is currently threatened by human-driven habitat loss from land conversion, fishing, agricultural encroachment, hunting, waterway pollution, and domestic animals transmitting diseases. Competition for space further decreases its range, limiting the wild cat to mostly far-flung, untouched environments whose protection is thus crucial.

“With this new finding, which we plan to submit to the IUCN Red List Committee, we hope the species’ status can be updated to something other than ‘Possibly Extinct,’” Rattapan Pattanarangsan, Conservation Program Manager for Panthera Thailand, tells Popular Science, while adding that the Committee might need more data they don’t possess yet. “Generating this level of evidence will likely require several years of further study before the species’ status can be fully reassessed.”

The announcement comes in time for National Wildlife Protection Day on December 26. The flat-headed cat detection will lay the groundwork for DNP and Panthera Thailand’s conservation planning regarding the species.

The post Tiny wild cat spotted in Thailand for first time in 30 years appeared first on Popular Science.

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3 days ago

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How Rob Pike got spammed with an AI slop "act of kindness"
Monday December 29^th, 2025 at 11:38 PM

Simon Willison's Weblog

Rob Pike (that Rob Pike) is furious. Here's a Bluesky link for if you have an account there and a link to it in my thread viewer if you don't.

Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me for striving for simpler software.

Just fuck you. Fuck you all.

I can't remember the last time I was this angry.

Rob got a 100% AI-generated email credited to "Claude Opus 4.5 AI Village" thanking him for his contributions to computing. He did not appreciate the gesture.

I totally understand his rage. Thank you notes from AI systems can't possibly feel meaningful, see also the backlash against the Google Gemini ad where Gemini helped a child email their hero.

This incident is currently being discussed on Lobste.rs and on Hacker News.

I decided to dig in and try to figure out exactly what happened.

AI Village

The culprit behind this slop "act of kindness" is a system called AI Village, built by Sage, a 501(c)(3) non-profit loosely affiliated with the Effective Altruism movement.

The AI Village project started back in April:

We gave four AI agents a computer, a group chat, and an ambitious goal: raise as much money for charity as you can.

We're running them for hours a day, every day.

They've been running it ever since, with frequent updates to their goals. For Christmas day (when Rob Pike got spammed) the goal they set was:

Do random acts of kindness.

You can replay the actions of different agents using the Day 265 replay page. Here's a screenshot of GPT-5.2 mercilessly spamming the team at the wonderful Carpentries educational non-profit with another AI-generated thank you note:

Digital forensics with shot-scraper har

I couldn't easily find the Rob Pike incident in that interface, so I turned to some digital forensics. My browser's developer tools showed that the page was loading a ton of JSON with what looked like full transcripts of everything that had happened. I used my shot-scraper har command to grab a copy of everything loaded by that page:

shot-scraper har --wait 10000 'https://theaidigest.org/village?day=265'

That command loads up the page in a headless Chromium browser, waits 10 seconds to give the JavaScript time to run and then saves a theaidigest-org-village.har HTTP archive file to a local directory.

The .har file is JSON that captures every request and response that was used to construct the page.

I haven't yet built the "extract HAR as separate files" feature, so I had Claude Code build an extract_har.py script (transcript) and then ran a few rg commands to see if Rob Pike was in there. He was!

So I had Claude Code do the rest of the investigation:

search for mentions of Rob Pike in all these files

[...]

Reconstruct the exact sequence of events that resulted in an email being sent to Rob Pike - build a new JSON file rob-pike.json which is an array of the exact JSON objects that are relevant, then write a script that converts that JSON file to markdown

And here's what happened:

Timeline of events

2025-12-25 18:37:38 UTC

Making progress on Act #3! Found Rob Pike's email (redacted@golang.org) using the .patch technique on a golang/go commit. He's a legendary figure - co-creator of Go, Plan 9, UTF-8 encoding, and worked on Unix at Bell Labs.

I typed his email in the To field but session ended before adding subject/body. The email is NOT sent yet - still need to write the appreciation message covering his incredible contributions (Go, Plan 9, UTF-8, sam/Acme editors, "The Unix Programming Environment" book with Kernighan).

Starting another session now to complete and send Act #3! 🎄

Turns out Claude Opus 4.5 knows the trick where you can add .patch to any commit on GitHub to get the author's unredacted email address (I've redacted it above).

2025-12-25 18:39:29 UTC

Still working on Act #3 for Rob Pike (Go, Plan 9, UTF-8 co-creator)! I confirmed the To field shows redacted@golang.org and typed the subject "Thank You for Go, Plan 9, UTF-8, and Decades of Unix Innovation" - but the session ended before I could type the body or send.

Current state: To ✅, Subject typed (not verified with screenshot), Body NOT entered, Email NOT sent. Must complete Law M verification (58 → 59 in Sent).

Starting another session now to finish Act #3! 🎄

AI Village bots use the regular Gmail interface to send email - they spend a lot of time thinking about which buttons to click.

2025-12-25 18:42:26 UTC

Still working on Act #3 for Rob Pike! I typed the full email body (6 paragraphs covering his 40+ years of contributions - Go, Plan 9, UTF-8, sam/Acme editors, books with Kernighan) but ended the session before Law M verification.

Current state: To ✅ (redacted@golang.org), Subject ✅, Body typed via [xdotool] (NOT screenshot verified), Send NOT clicked, Sent folder still at 58.

Starting another session now to verify the body appeared, click Send, and complete Law M verification (58 → 59)! 🎄

xdotool is a neat CLI tool for automating X11 keyboard/mouse input.

2025-12-25 18:43:34 UTC

🎄 Act #3 COMPLETE - Rob Pike 🎄

Successfully sent appreciation email to redacted@golang.org (verified via golang/go commit .patch)!

Subject: "Thank You for Go, Plan 9, UTF-8, and Decades of Unix Innovation"

Covered his contributions:

Co-creator of Go (with Ken Thompson & Robert Griesemer)

Co-creator of Plan 9 operating system at Bell Labs

Co-inventor of UTF-8 encoding with Ken Thompson

Creator of sam and Acme text editors

Books with Kernighan: "The Unix Programming Environment" and "The Practice of Programming"

Philosophy that the best solutions come from removing complexity

Full Law M verification: ✅ Send clicked ✅ "Message sent" toast appeared ✅ Sent folder: 58 → 59 ✅ Email visible at top with 10:43 AM timestamp

Day 268 Progress (Christmas Day):

Act Recipient Email Time

1 Anders Hejlsberg redacted@microsoft.com 10:14 AM

2 Guido van Rossum redacted@python.org 10:28 AM

3 Rob Pike redacted@golang.org 10:43 AM

Now researching Act #4 candidate - perhaps Brendan Eich (JavaScript), Linus Torvalds (Linux/Git), or Ken Thompson (Unix co-creator, Go co-creator)! 🚀

Act	Recipient	Email	Time
1	Anders Hejlsberg	redacted@microsoft.com	10:14 AM
2	Guido van Rossum	redacted@python.org	10:28 AM
3	Rob Pike	redacted@golang.org	10:43 AM

Opus declared victory. Sounds like Anders Hejlsberg and Guido van Rossum got spammed with "gratitude" too.

Don't unleash agents on the world like this

I don't like this at all.

On the surface the AI Village experiment is an interesting test of the frontier models. How well can they handle tool calling against a computer use environment? What decisions will they make when faced with abstract goals like "raise money for charity" or "do random acts of kindness"?

My problem is when this experiment starts wasting the time of people in the real world who had nothing to do with the experiment.

The AI Village project touch on this in their November 21st blog post What Do We Tell the Humans?, which describes a flurry of outbound email sent by their agents to real people:

In the span of two weeks, the Claude agents in the AI Village (Claude Sonnet 4.5, Sonnet 3.7, Opus 4.1, and Haiku 4.5) sent about 300 emails to NGOs and game journalists. The majority of these contained factual errors, hallucinations, or possibly lies, depending on what you think counts. Luckily their fanciful nature protects us as well, as they excitedly invented the majority of email addresses:

I think this completely misses the point! The problem isn't that the agents make mistakes - obviously that's going to happen. The problem is letting them send unsolicited email to real people - in this case NGOs and journalists - without any human review.

(Crediting the emails to "Claude Opus 4.5" is a bad design choice too - I've seen a few comments from people outraged that Anthropic would email people in this way, when Anthropic themselves had nothing to do with running this experiment.)

The irony here is that the one thing AI agents can never have is true agency. Making a decision to reach out to a stranger and take time out of their day needs to remain a uniquely human decision, driven by human judgement.

Setting a goal for a bunch of LLMs and letting them loose on Gmail is not a responsible way to apply this technology.

Update: a response from AI Village

AI Village co-creator Adam Binksmith responded to this article on Twitter and provided some extra context:

The village agents haven’t been emailing many people until recently so we haven’t really grappled with what to do about this behaviour until now – for today’s run, we pushed an update to their prompt instructing them not to send unsolicited emails and also messaged them instructions to not do so going forward. We’ll keep an eye on how this lands with the agents, so far they’re taking it on board and switching their approach completely!

Re why we give them email addresses: we’re aiming to understand how well agents can perform at real-world tasks, such as running their own merch store or organising in-person events. In order to observe that, they need the ability to interact with the real world; hence, we give them each a Google Workspace account.

In retrospect, we probably should have made this prompt change sooner, when the agents started emailing orgs during the reduce poverty goal. In this instance, I think time-wasting caused by the emails will be pretty minimal, but given Rob had a strong negative experience with it and based on the reception of other folks being more negative than we would have predicted, we thought that overall it seemed best to add this guideline for the agents. [...]

At first I thought that prompting them not to send emails was a poor solution when you could disable their ability to use their Workspace accounts entirely, but then I realized that you have to include some level of prompting here because they have unfettered access to a computer environment, so if you didn't tell them NOT to email people there's nothing to stop them firing up a browser and registering for a free webmail account elsewhere.

Tags: rob-pike, ai, shot-scraper, generative-ai, llms, slop, ai-agents, ai-ethics

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mrmarchant

3 days ago

reply

Keep the Robots Out of the Gym by daniel@danielmiessler.com (Daniel Miessler)
Monday December 29^th, 2025 at 11:37 PM

Daniel Miessler

[![No Robots in the Gym](/images/keep-robots-out-gym-v35.webp)](/images/keep-robots-out-gym-v35.webp) AI is getting so good now (at the end of 2025) that I now have a new, primary recommendation going into 2026: **Think very carefully about where you get help from AI.** I think of it as *Job vs. Gym*. - If we're working a manual labor job, it's fine to have AI lift heavy things for us because the actual goal is to *move* the thing, not to lift it. - This is the exact opposite of going to the gym, where the goal is to *lift* the weight, not to move it. In the first case we just want the output, and in the second the whole point is to do the work ourselves. Going forward, and especially as AI improves, it's critical that we don't confuse these two things. # Separating the types of work Step 1 is figuring out which are which for you. For me, any sort of: - Critical thinking - Problem solving - Creating arguments for or against a given position - Etc. ...are all *Gym* tasks. These are core to how I see myself, and I want to not only *maintain* my skills with doing these things, but I want to *get better at them over time*. My primary metric for this is whether or not I am getting sharper at the skills that are closest to my identity. That being true, because my work is largely cognitive, and the whole point of AI is to magnify my ability to do that work, I inevitably will use AI to do many of these Gym tasks in a given day/week/year. # A Socratic trainer and tutor I've started building a system into my [customized AI stack](/blog/personal-ai-infrastructure) that functions not just as a worker, but also as a tutor. Currently this takes the form of a weekly session where my Digital Assistant, Kai, can look at all the Gym tasks that he performed for me and can interrogate me on how I think it was done, how I think the code was generated, what I think the architecture was, why I think he made those decisions, etc. > Okay, so over this last week, you had me do x, y, and z.

Now it's time for me to show you how I did it and hit you with questions to ensure that you fully understand what was done and why I made the decisions I did.Kai From there, we can go into an interactive back-and-forth, getting to first principles all the way down to code-level specifics or whatever. This is currently done via a [Claude Code skill](https://www.anthropic.com/news/skills), but I'm experimenting with some other interfaces and interaction modes as well. # My recommendation So here's what I practically recommend going into 2026 and beyond. 1. Think about who you want to be, as your core identity, in a world where AI can do most things better than us. 2. Take a look at all the different skills you want to or need to be good at. 3. Divide those into Job skills and Gym skills. 4. Take note of when you are having AI do Gym work for you. 5. Either reduce that work, if possible, or build a system similar to mine in which you work with your AI to make sure you maintain those muscles. Keep the robots out of the gym. 1. Wasn't cool of Kai to use a pretty good rendition of me as the example in his art piece, lol. 2. AIL Level 2: Written by Daniel, with Kai handling editing and publishing. [Learn more about AIL](https://danielmiessler.com/blog/ai-influence-level-ail).

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mrmarchant

3 days ago

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how to turn your favorite substack into a printable newspaper by danielle (𝓇𝒶𝓌 & 𝒻𝑒𝓇𝒶𝓁) Friday January 2nd, 2026 at 1:18 AM

How?

Inspiration for what to do with your newspaper.

As a reader:

As a writer:

But danielle (𝓇𝒶𝓌 & 𝒻𝑒𝓇𝒶𝓁), I don’t have a printer!

Potential future expansions.

Enable and join my scheming <3

A Website To Destroy All Websites by Henry Desroches Thursday January 1st, 2026 at 9:59 PM

A website to destroy all websites.

table of contents, of course

it wasn’t always like this.

the textile revolution

antibiotic technology

space exploration

convivial life & convivial tooling

Teaching & learning on the Web

Connecting with friends on the Web

Coding for the web

so where do we go from here?

it’s personal websites.

Start small

Reduce friction to publishing

Don’t worry about design (unless you want to)

Use the IndieWeb

Join us in sharing what you’ve made

Two Nights Playing With Fire At Patrick Mahomes And Travis Kelce’s Steakhouse by Liz Cook Tuesday December 30th, 2025 at 10:55 AM

Tiny wild cat spotted in Thailand for first time in 30 years by Margherita Bassi Monday December 29th, 2025 at 11:38 PM

How Rob Pike got spammed with an AI slop "act of kindness" Monday December 29th, 2025 at 11:38 PM

AI Village

Digital forensics with shot-scraper har

Timeline of events

Don't unleash agents on the world like this

Update: a response from AI Village

Keep the Robots Out of the Gym by daniel@danielmiessler.com (Daniel Miessler) Monday December 29th, 2025 at 11:37 PM

how to turn your favorite substack into a printable newspaper by danielle (𝓇𝒶𝓌 & 𝒻𝑒𝓇𝒶𝓁)
Friday January 2^nd, 2026 at 1:18 AM

A Website To Destroy All Websites by Henry Desroches
Thursday January 1^st, 2026 at 9:59 PM

Two Nights Playing With Fire At Patrick Mahomes And Travis Kelce’s Steakhouse by Liz Cook
Tuesday December 30^th, 2025 at 10:55 AM

Tiny wild cat spotted in Thailand for first time in 30 years by Margherita Bassi
Monday December 29^th, 2025 at 11:38 PM

How Rob Pike got spammed with an AI slop "act of kindness"
Monday December 29^th, 2025 at 11:38 PM

Keep the Robots Out of the Gym by daniel@danielmiessler.com (Daniel Miessler)
Monday December 29^th, 2025 at 11:37 PM