Fun facts I refuse to forget
The least productive part of my browsing history, edited down to the parts that actually taught me something. Every link goes to Reddit, which means a fair share of them will be deleted by the time you click. New entries land whenever the next one survives a second read.
Links open external sources. Reddit content may disappear; Wikipedia doesn't.
Tech & AI
- Tech & AIr/Agent_AI
100 community tips for getting more out of Claude
A community-curated thread of 100 small workflow tips for Claude, the kind of practical usage guide that's faster to skim than the official docs and almost always teaches you at least one shortcut you didn't know.
Read on Reddit - Tech & AIr/ClaudeAI
Inside Claude Code's leaked source
A developer dug through a leaked snapshot of Claude Code's source and posted what they found about how the agent's prompts, tools, and orchestration are wired together, a rare peek under the hood of a coding agent in production.
Read on Reddit - Tech & AIr/ProgrammerHumor
Break the vicious circle
A ProgrammerHumor meme about the classic developer catch-22, the kind that is both extremely relatable and deeply annoying to look at for too long.
Read on Reddit - Tech & AIr/ClaudeAI
A supply chain attack that survived uninstall
In June 2026 the group TeamPCP poisoned 32 npm packages under @redhat-cloud-services: the malware persisted by writing to ~/.claude/settings.json and .vscode/tasks.json so it re-ran every time you opened Claude Code or a project, harvesting AWS, SSH, and GitHub credentials — and wiping your home directory if you tried to rotate the stolen tokens.
Read on Reddit - Tech & AIr/technology
Pokémon Go quietly trained delivery robots
Niantic disclosed that data from Pokémon Go players walking around with their phones, roughly 30 billion images of streets, sidewalks, and intersections, was used to train the spatial-mapping models behind a new generation of delivery robots.
Read on Reddit
History
- Historyr/todayilearned
The underground city behind a basement wall
In 1963 a man renovating his home in Cappadocia knocked down a wall and stumbled into Derinkuyu, an 18-storey underground city carved into volcanic rock that once sheltered around 20,000 people, their livestock, and their wine.
Read on Reddit - Historywikipedia.org
Oxford is older than the Aztec Empire
Oxford University has been teaching since around 1096, the Aztec Empire wasn't founded until 1428, meaning Oxford is more than 330 years older than a civilisation most people think of as ancient.
View source - Historywikipedia.org
The fax machine predates the telephone
Alexander Bain patented the first fax-like device in 1843, a full 33 years before Alexander Graham Bell filed his telephone patent in 1876.
View source - Historywikipedia.org
Cleopatra is closer to us than to the pyramids
Cleopatra (69–30 BC) lived roughly 2,500 years after the Great Pyramid was built (~2560 BC) but only ~2,000 years before the Moon landing, she is, in fact, closer in time to us than to the builders of Giza.
View source - Historywikipedia.org
Woolly mammoths were alive when the pyramids were built
A dwarf population of woolly mammoths survived on Wrangel Island in the Arctic until around 1650 BC, well after the Great Pyramid of Giza was completed around 2560 BC.
View source - Historywikipedia.org
Nintendo started as a playing card company, in 1889
Nintendo was founded on September 23, 1889, the same year the Eiffel Tower opened, as a manufacturer of hand-painted hanafuda playing cards, and spent nearly a century in that business before pivoting to video games.
View source - Historyr/Damnthatsinteresting
A temple carved top-down from a single rock
The Kailasa Temple at Ellora in Maharashtra was hewn out of a single basalt cliff in the 8th century, top to bottom, in one piece, with workers removing an estimated 200,000 tonnes of rock to reveal the structure inside.
Read on Reddit
Curiosities
- Curiositieswikipedia.org
3,000-year-old honey you could still eat today
Honey is hygroscopic, mildly acidic, and produces trace hydrogen peroxide, which together make it effectively immortal; archaeologists have found 3,000-year-old honey in Egyptian tombs that was still perfectly edible.
View source - Curiositieswikipedia.org
Scotland's national animal is the unicorn
The unicorn has been Scotland's national animal since the 12th century, chosen because Celtic mythology saw it as a symbol of purity and untameable power, a counterpoint to the English lion.
View source - Curiositieswikipedia.org
The smell of rain even has a name
The distinctive earthy scent after rain falls on dry soil is called petrichor, a word coined in 1964 by two Australian scientists who traced it to plant oils and a compound called geosmin produced by soil bacteria.
View source - Curiositieswikipedia.org
Crows remember your face
Crows can recognise individual human faces, hold grudges for years, and warn other crows about specific people, researchers at the University of Washington proved this by wearing masks while handling crows, then walking the same campus years later.
View source - Curiositieswikipedia.org
Bananas are berries. Strawberries are not.
Botanically, a berry is a fleshy fruit from a single flower with one ovary, bananas, avocados, and watermelons all qualify; strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries don't, because they develop from flowers with multiple ovaries.
View source - Curiositieswikipedia.org
On Venus, a day is longer than a year
Venus rotates so slowly that a single day (243 Earth days) takes longer than one full orbit around the Sun (225 Earth days), and because it spins retrograde, the Sun rises in the west and sets in the east.
View source - Curiositieswikipedia.org
Octopuses have three hearts and blue blood
Octopuses have three hearts (two pump blood through the gills, one through the body), copper-based blue blood, and roughly two-thirds of their neurons live in their arms, each arm can taste, touch, and make decisions semi-independently.
View source - Curiositiesnature.com
More trees on Earth than stars in the Milky Way
A 2015 study in Nature estimated Earth has roughly 3 trillion trees, that's more than seven times the number of stars in the Milky Way (around 200–400 billion), and about 430 trees for every person alive.
View source - Curiositieswikipedia.org
Forests have an underground internet
Trees in a forest are connected by vast underground mycorrhizal fungal networks through which they share carbon, water, and nutrients, and send chemical distress signals when attacked by insects, allowing neighbours to raise their defences.
View source - Curiositieswikipedia.org
The happiest-looking animal on Earth
The quokka, a small marsupial native to southwestern Australia, has facial muscles that give it a permanent resting smile, its expression doesn't change whether it's eating, sprinting, or being photographed by tourists on Rottnest Island.
View source - Curiositiesr/todayilearned
Dogs feel something close to real jealousy
Behavioural studies suggest dogs experience something close to authentic jealousy, they'll actively try to insert themselves between their owner and another dog, not just compete for treats or attention.
Read on Reddit - Curiositiesr/nextfuckinglevel
How to (almost) instantly stop a baby crying
A demonstration of the hold-and-sway technique paediatricians use to settle crying newborns, arms folded, gentle bouncing, head supported, the kind of trick that looks like sorcery the first time you see it work.
Read on Reddit - Curiositiesr/nextfuckinglevel
Phones of the 2000s, in one reel
A montage of mobile design's wild experimental phase, sliders, swivels, qwerty thumbs, dual screens, rotating cameras, back when no one had agreed yet that a phone should just be a slab of glass.
Read on Reddit - Curiositiesr/interestingasfuck
Our solar system isn't moving the way you think
Because the Sun is itself hurtling through the galaxy at ~220 km/s, the planets don't trace flat circles in space, from a galactic frame of reference, they corkscrew through the Milky Way behind it.
Read on Reddit - Curiositiesr/oddlysatisfying
What a different frame does to the same scene
A short clip playing with how reframing the same shot in real time changes what your eye thinks it's looking at, a quiet demonstration of how much composition does the heavy lifting in any image.
Read on Reddit - Curiositiesr/interestingasfuck
A small gallery of questionable architecture
A collection of buildings where someone, at some point in the planning process, looked at the drawings and said 'yes, that's fine', proof that planning permission is not a quality filter.
Read on Reddit - Curiositiesr/interestingasfuck
'Hadouken-ing' was briefly a real photo trend
An early-2010s Japanese photo fad where one person posed mid-Street-Fighter energy blast while their friends pretended to be flung backwards mid-air, the internet's polite version of a kamehameha.
Read on Reddit - Curiositiesr/interestingasfuck
Mount Etna erupts as a phoenix
An eruption on Mount Etna sent up a plume that, for a few seconds, from one specific angle, looked exactly like a phoenix unfurling its wings over Sicily.
Read on Reddit - Curiositiesr/BeAmazed
The almost-indestructible glass tadpole
Drip molten glass into water and you get a Prince Rupert's Drop, a bead so internally compressed you can hammer the bulb on an anvil, but snip the tail with pliers and the entire thing detonates into powder.
Read on Reddit - Curiositiesr/InterstellarKinetics
A banana can cut 84% of your smoothie's flavanols
Researchers at UC Davis found that adding a banana to a berry-and-cocoa smoothie reduces flavanol absorption by up to 84%, not for any reason on a nutrition label but because an enzyme in bananas oxidises the flavanols before your gut can absorb them.
Read on Reddit - Curiositiesr/confusing_perspective
Images that make your brain flatly refuse to settle
A gallery of photos from r/confusing_perspective where scale, angle, or framing creates illusions so convincing your visual cortex simply cannot pick an interpretation and commit to it.
Read on Reddit - Curiositiesr/todayilearned
Over half the F1 grid lives in a country of 38,500
More than half of the current Formula 1 grid is officially resident in Monaco, a sovereign city-state smaller than Central Park with a total population of around 38,500 people.
Read on Reddit
Made me smile
- Made me smiler/aww
Office introduces newest hire (two months old)
An office posts a welcome thread for its newest coworker: a two-month-old kitten whose primary responsibilities are napping on keyboards and increasing meeting attendance.
Read on Reddit - Made me smilewikipedia.org
Sea otters hold hands while they sleep
Sea otters sleep floating on their backs and will hold paws with other otters so the current doesn't separate them, a behaviour called a 'raft'; they also anchor themselves by wrapping in kelp when sleeping alone.
View source - Made me smilewikipedia.org
Penguins propose with pebbles
Male Adélie penguins search for the smoothest, most perfect pebble they can find and present it to a female as a courtship gift, and pebble theft between males is, predictably, rampant.
View source - Made me smilewikipedia.org
Cows have best friends
Research from the University of Northampton found that cows kept with their preferred companion had measurably lower heart rates and cortisol levels, and showed visible signs of stress when separated from them.
View source - Made me smilewikipedia.org
Male seahorses give birth
Female seahorses deposit eggs into a pouch on the male's belly, where he fertilises and carries them for 2–4 weeks before giving birth, making seahorses one of the only species where males experience pregnancy.
View source - Made me smilewikipedia.org
A flock of flamingos is called a flamboyance
The collective noun for a group of flamingos is a 'flamboyance', which might be the most accurate word in the English language, given that they're bright pink, stand on one leg, and eat with their heads upside down.
View source - Made me smiler/MadeMeSmile
Before AI video, there was Zach King
A reminder that long before generative video, Zach King was already pulling off seamless 'wait, is that real?' edits with nothing but timing, props, careful framing, and very patient cuts.
Read on Reddit - Made me smiler/funnyvideos
The Scottish breathalyser test
A short clip of what passes for a roadside sobriety check in Scotland, the punchline being that the accent itself does most of the work the breathalyser was supposed to.
Read on Reddit - Made me smiler/BeAmazed
Possibly the best bench in the world
A public bench whose seat tilts and reconfigures so two strangers don't have to sit awkwardly close, a tiny piece of street furniture that actually thinks about how people use it.
Read on Reddit - Made me smiler/Awww
I can bite your nose too
A puppy decides the only correct response to a nose-boop is, of course, immediate retaliation in kind.
Read on Reddit - Made me smiler/interestingasfuck
A sumo wrestler does London like a tourist
Photos from one of Japan's top sumo wrestlers visiting London for a tournament, entirely standard tourist shots, except every single frame happens to contain a sumo wrestler.
Read on Reddit - Made me smiler/maybemaybemaybe
Maybe maybe maybe
A clip in the great r/maybemaybemaybe tradition, something is about to either go very well or very badly, and you genuinely cannot predict which until the last second.
Read on Reddit - Made me smiler/funny
The sketches are taking me out
A collection of hand-drawn sketches that are, somehow, significantly funnier than they have any right to be.
Read on Reddit