The Read, Write, Own Web of the 1990s
— Olia Lialina highlights examples from the Geocities archives of the web before platformization (via) #
I Hope This Email Finds You
— Waldo Jaquith made a clever, sometimes poetic, new Mastodon bot that finds sentences in Google Books #
2024 AI Elections Tracker
— Rest of World is tracking AI-generated election misinformation in this year's global elections (via) #
Post.News shutting down
— one of the many Twitter clones to pop up in the wake of the Elon acquisition calls it quits (via) #
Lola Dupre
— love the work of this collage artist who primarily works with paper and scissors (via) #
Hands-on with Delta, the first console emulator officially allowed on the Apple App Store
— free with support for the NES, SNES, N64, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, and Nintendo DS #
We Need To Rewild The Internet
— antitrust enforcement, open standards, public funding, and collective governance (via) #
404 Media on Spy Pet, an underground service secretly scraping thousands of Discord servers
— they sell access to scraped user messages and activity to anyone with cryptocurrency #
On Opening Essays, Conference Talks, and Jam Jars
— Maggie Appleton tries to understand what makes a good opening for non-fiction writing #
The Cloud Under the Sea
— beautiful Verge feature on the invisible seafaring industry that maintains internet cables at the bottom of the ocean (via) #
Molly White on generative AI
— a thoughtfully nuanced take that weighs their limited benefits against the outsized human cost #
Tavi Gevinson’s “Fan Fiction: A Satire”
— Rookie's founder made a 75-page zine about her relationship with Taylor Swift and her music, blurring the lines between fiction and reality #
Early 1990s clip art captured an era
— Benj Edwards goes spelunking in CD-ROM clip art collections, and you can too now that DISCMASTER is back online #
The Markup investigates sites blocked by school web filters, finds gross overreach
— they requested lists of blocked sites from 26 school districts across 14 states, 11 refused on "cybersecurity" grounds #
20 years and a million postcards later, a reflection on PostSecret
— opened last July, their Digital Museum of Secrets is worth checking out (via) #
One Minute Park
— virtually spend 60 seconds in a random park or add your own to the growing collection (via) #
The Playdate Story
— Cabel Sasser's GDC talk is a logistical and emotional rollercoaster of highs and lows, highly recommended #
The Verge reviews the Humane AI Pin
— feels like this entire class of AI gadget will be outmoded as soon as Apple integrates the useful bits into iOS #
Dark Visitors
— a list of known AI data scrapers and agents, plus an API/WordPress plugin for keeping your robots.txt updated if you want to block them #
How OpenAI, Meta, and Google cut corners to harvest training data
— the irony of YouTube scolding OpenAI for transcribing their user's videos when Google did the exact same thing #
Corridor Crew recreates the sodium vapor process, a proto-greenscreen used in Mary Poppins
— Disney won a visual effects Oscar in 1965 for the effect, but lost the custom prism they made to make it possible #
xkcd’s Machine, a community-contributed mega Rube Goldberg device
— a belated interactive April fools in the spirit of last year's brilliant Escape Speed game #
The wi-fi only works when it’s raining
— I love a good debugging story; this one's part of April Cools' Club, an open challenge to publish something unexpected on April 1 #
CARS
— Playables surprise-launched their followup to Plug & Play and KIDS, another delightfully weird monochrome art game #
Hidden Agenda, an effects pedal for your mouse and keyboard
— fun open-source hardware/software project imagines reverb, delay, tremolo, and distortion beyond the guitar (via) #
a proper cup of tea
— Terry Cavanagh made an interactive Downpour tutorial for making the perfect S Rank cuppa #
NYC’s AI chatbot tell businesses to break the law
— "Yes, you can take a cut of your worker's tips." #
American Prospect on how Boeing execs drove out longtime engineers for short-term profit
— centered around the whistleblower who died of apparent suicide before the last day of his deposition against the company #
8BitDo’s new C64-inspired mechanical keyboard
— I don't want or need a new keyboard, but haven't felt this targeted since LEGO's Atari 2600 set #
Two-thirds of NYT articles on anti-trans legislation quoted zero trans people, 18% contain misinformation
— Media Matters and GLAAD report the numbers behind the last 12 months of the Times' transphobic fearmongering #
Models All The Way Down
— Christo Buschek and Jer Thorp dig deeper into LAION-5B, the massive dataset used to train image generators like Stable Diffusion #
How Bellingcat geolocated fugitive U.S. militant Ammon Bundy to southern Utah
— if you're on the run and don't want to be found, maybe don't post videos of yourself on YouTube #
John Herrman investigates the origin of X’s pornbot reply spam deluge
— in short, black hat spammers are paid a commission every time a horny dude signs up for a Dutch "flirt site" with paid chat operators (via) #
404 Media adds full-text RSS feeds for subscribers
— more importantly, other publications on Ghost can now do the same thing #
Infinite Mac adds NeXT emulation
— making an important part of computer history easily accessible, go try out Tim Berners-Lee's original WorldWideWeb browser #
Dog Poo Golf
— Matt Round made a very silly browser game inspired by Wii Sports with the music to match; can you beat my score of 5? #
Google starts pushing AI-generated text above search results without an opt-in
— a truly terrible idea, but given their new head of Search led SGE's development, it's only getting worse from here #
Nilay Patel interviews Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on federation and the future of social media
— I agree with the general sentiment, but as much as I enjoy the current vibes of Bluesky, I think their future business prospects are grim #
Making a Macintosh Studio
— Scott Yu-Jan makes an iPad mini dock on a Mac Studio inspired by the original Macintosh (via) #
Online age verification laws are dragging us back to the dark ages of the internet
— as 404 Media points out here, they hurt sex workers while doing nothing to help minors but drive them to unregulated, unmoderated alternatives #
15 Note Poly Tempo Pendulum
— Canadian composer/percussionist Jérémie Carrier plays 15 different notes at 0.2 bpm differences to create hypnotic changing polyrhythms (via) #