The Bumpin’ Sticker
— Guy Dupont made a "Keep Honking! I'm Listening to…" bumper sticker-sized LCD display that updates in real-time #
404 Media on the anarchist collective teaching people to DIY expensive medicine
— the course of medication that cures Hepatitis C costs $84,000 at $1,000/pill, but can be produced for only $700 or $0.83/pill #
TechDirt’s Mike Masnick on the Internet Archive decision
— the ruling is "a knife in the back of libraries," claiming that authors won't write new books if libraries lend digital books for free #
Internet Archive loses its appeal against book publishers
— the appeals court ruled that, despite being a nonprofit and no evidence of market harm, its implementation of Controlled Digital Lending isn't fair use #
Song Pong
— open-source music visualizer that synchronizes MIDI to bouncing balls in a modified game of Pong (via) #
The rise and fall of OpenSea
— the SEC notified them last week that NFTs on the struggling platform are unregistered securities #
The Pentium as a Navajo weaving
— 1994 replica of a printed circuit board handmade on an upright wooden loom (via) #
The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
— Nolen Royalty tells the story of how a group of teens were writing secret binary messages on the Tiny Award-winning multiplayer experiment #
Shutterbug
— free desktop-only browser game where you photograph bugs by resizing and moving the browser window (via) #
Where Facebook’s AI Slop Comes From
— Facebook is paying bonuses for viral content, no matter how terrible, while laying off the content moderators who can prevent it #
One Million Screenshots
— a zoomable explorable rendering of 1M+ homepage screenshots, updated monthly (via) #
La Sentinelle
— French embroidery artist Marine Beaufils finished her needlepoint project recreating screenshots from The Sentinel #
Tulip Creative Computer
— The Echo Nest's Brian Whitman new project is a $59 portable computer for creative coding, first batch is sold out with more shipping in late August (via) #
The Mystery of Detective Barbie’s Audio
— can any audio codec nerds out there help extract the staggering 9,342 sound clips of girls' names from a 1999 Barbie game #
Beyond the C
— Louie Zong used Melodyne to change every note of Bobby Darin's "Beyond the Sea" to C (via) #
Destroying LEGO Towers
— the amount of effort that goes into every Brick Technology video is staggering #
Adding humans to Minecraft
— Dream spent a year making an elaborate rig for inserting real-time full-motion video of people into multiplayer games #
How Portland’s Sports Bra kicked off a women’s sports bar movement
— opened in 2022, Jenny Nguyen proved that a sports bar could succeed showing only women's sports, inspiring others across the country (via) #
The AI Keeps the Score
— long Verge feature on the development of AI-assisted aids for judging gymnastics #
Public Work
— a nicely-designed visual search engine for public domain images, but they could do a better job linking to sources #
The Many Lives of Null Island
— I never knew the shape of the in-joke for geospatial data geeks was based on the island from Myst #
Scaling One Million Checkboxes to 650,000,000 checks
— wild story of scaling a ridiculous side project #
Generating sudokus for fun and no profit
— interactive explainer for the various ways to code a Sudoku solver (via) #
The best video game documentary ever just got better
— the excellent Double Fine PsychOdyssey just got a surprise 90-minute epilogue and a limited Blu-ray release #
Imitating the surreal transitions of AI-generated videos in real-life
— I love watching a new subgenre of shitposting appear in real-time (via) #
Crawlspace
— an experimental web journal akin to the html review, view source on each piece to read an interview with the artist (via) #
The bizarre secrets found investigating corrupt Winamp skins
— photos, memories, sound clips, and 56 previously unknown Winamp skins hidden inside other Winamp skins #
Aggressive AI crawlers leads to surprise bandwidth bills
— related: Anthropic's crawler hit iFixit's site a million times in 24 hours #
NYPD Coppelgänger
— Sam Lavigne's used facial recognition on an archive of 10,000 publicly-available photos of NYC police #
Prompt Airlines
— practice AI prompt injection with a series of challenges breaking a fictional airline's customer support chatbot #
Elizabeth Lopatto on the moral bankruptcy of Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz
— they're happy to trade human rights and personal liberty for favorable crypto/AI/tax policies that benefit their bottom line #
Reddit blocks all crawlers in robots.txt, gives exclusive access to Google with AI deal
— this means they're blocking the Internet Archive and every other search engine, a huge over-reaction ostensibly to stop AI training (via) #
Tiny Awards finalists announced
— like last year, a charming selection of oddball web pages; you have until August 11 to vote for your favorites #
Making a jigsaw puzzle solving robot in 15 months
— the technical details behind Mark Rober's latest video #
Weird Al’s Polkamania!
— Al teamed up with 12 different animators for a new polka medley of #1 hits from the 10 years since the release of his last album #
Christina’s Bliss
— using MS Paint for Windows XP, Cat Graffam mashed up the Bliss wallpaper with Andrew Wyeth's "Christina's World" #
Follow the Crypto
— Molly White's new project tracks crypto PAC spending on the 2024 elections; FairShake is the #2 most-funded super PAC #
Hackers steal text and call records of “nearly all” AT&T customers
— the data leaked from Snowflake includes every number their customers called/texted for six months in 2022 #
Exploring an old computer store that shuttered in 2001, frozen in time
— the tech time capsule sits in a strip mall in Norman, Oklahoma, stuck in legal battles after the owner went bankrupt #
MetaFilter owner Jessamyn West interviewed on the community’s evolution and moderation challenges
— it turns 25 (!) on Sunday with big changes in the works, including a full code rewrite and converting to a nonprofit (via) #
Priscila, Queen of the Rideshare Mafia
— fascinating story of a Brazilian woman who built a business renting fake gig economy accounts made with stolen identities out to undocumented workers (via) #
Internet Phone Book
— an open call for website submissions for "a physical printed directory for the vast poetic web" #
TUAW relaunched as zombie content farm with AI articles under the names of its old staff
— the new domain owners even generated AI photos for each author, despite not buying rights to any of the content #