Jelani Cobb on the End of Affirmative Action
— though affirmative action for white college applicants still exists, in the form of legacy admits, children of donors, and other VIPs #Same-sex marriage website request at center of just-decided Supreme Court discrimination case was fabricated
— Melissa Gira Grant talked to the man listed in the filings; he’s straight, married to a woman, and designs his own websites via Nelson Minar #The Verge on who killed Google Reader, and what might have been
— I knew much of this history, but not how horribly Google execs treated the Reader team #Reddit is forcing protesting moderators to reopen private subreddits
— I’m sure all those unpaid volunteers will take the news well #After 15 years, pulsar timing yields evidence of cosmic gravitational wave background
— Hank Green posted a quick high-level overview of the five papers on TikTok #How retro computer fans revived the NABU, an obscure ’80s Canadian PC and network service
— one man finally sold his horde of 2,200 machines for dirt cheap on eBay, held in storage for 33 years, inspiring a preservation effort #AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born
— generative AI’s capacity for consuming content and generating low-quality noise is forcing platforms to reconsider the open web #Backstage Disneyland
— Cabel Sasser scanned his entire collection of rarely-seen newsletters for Disneyland employees, 28 issues from 1962-1980 #Inside the AI Factory
— investigation into the distributed anonymous workforce getting paid to annotate training data and align AI models via Today in Tabs #Hank Green on your obligation to your former self
— a beautiful reflection on the words he said on stage at XOXO nearly ten years ago #My Father’s Death in 7 Gigabytes
— Paul Ford archived all his father’s writing and uploaded it to the Internet Archive in his memory #Architectural Digest’s tour of the Barbie Dreamhouse set
— incredible craftsmanship and attention to detail #A storefront for robots
— Mia Sato on how Google’s failure to punish SEO tactics, instead promoting their low-quality garbage, has made the web immeasurably worse #Max Read on MrBeast’s clickbait altruism
— feels like the YouTube version of The Ellen Show’s charitable giveaways, totaling $450M over 19 years, all backed by sponsors #Bad Waitress
— Becca Schuh writes about her experience being a writer in the food service industry #Psynwav’s Musical Tangents
— new deranged mashup album from the creator of Slamilton: A Basketball Musical #Byline
— new online magazine with a playful design from the creators of now-defunct hyperlocal NYC paper The Drunken Canal #Jason Scott is scanning Computer Shopper
— help him out by donating missing issues, using the scans for research/analysis, and sharing the results #b3ta’s Expand Art image challenge
— “help us to grab the AI by the Jackson Pollocks and expand classic works of art to show how it should be done” via b3ta #Tiny Awards
— I’m a judge for this showcase of the small, playful, heartfelt web; nominations are open until June 14 #Computers that live two seconds in the future
— it sounds like Apple created Ted Chiang’s Predictor for the Vision Pro #Day of the Devs Summer Game Fest 2023
— amazing showcase of upcoming indie games, personal highlights include Viewfinder, Summerhill, and Simpler Times #The Origins of the Right’s War on Target
— Melissa Gira Grant on how extremist influencers invented an anti-LGBTQ moral panic turned terror campaign #The Last Egg
— what happens when fresh food runs out for the season at a South Pole research station #Supreme Court unexpectedly rejects racially gerrymandered maps
— a surprising 5-4 ruling reaffirming the Voting Rights Act for disenfranchised Black voters in Alabama via MetaFilter #Apollo for Reddit is shutting down
— a growing list of over 3,100 subreddits is going dark on June 12 to protest the API changes via Nick Heer #Mineplacer
— place all the mines in a Minesweeper game; this one’s a brain melter, click the question mark for help via MetaFilter #Miniatua’s tiny handcrafted replicas of vintage computers
Under the moniker Miniatua, Montreal designer Nicolas Temese makes hyperrealistic scale replicas of vintage computers, real and fictional, in stunning detail with animated displays and period-accurate LED lights.
His latest project is a scratch-built 1:12 model of David Lightman’s bedroom from 1983’s WarGames, complete with IMSAI 8080 microcomputer, 8″ inch floppies, Epson RF 80 FT dot matrix printer, JVC model HR-3300 VHS VCR, and 1960s Naugahyde Steelcase Armless chair, among dozens of other smaller props.
