Squares in Squares
— trying to optimally pack squares into a square leads to some surprisingly deranged results via Nelson Minar #Bing’s ChatGPT-powered AI casually threatens early users
— someone at Microsoft forgot to add Asimov’s Three Laws to the prompt #Colin Meloy asked ChatGPT to write a Decemberists song, and then recorded it
— “For the record, this is a remarkably mediocre song. I wouldn’t say it’s a terrible song, though it really flirts with terribleness.” #Double Fine PsychOdyssey
— new documentary series follows seven years of Psychonauts 2 development, 6,000 hours of footage edited down to 32 episodes #Shift Happens live on Kickstarter
— years in the making, Marcin Wichary’s exhaustively-researched book about keyboards hit the goal in under two hours #AI-generated Seinfeld banned from Twitch after transphobic standup
— less than a month after AI VTuber Neuro-Sama was banned for two weeks for denying the Holocaust #Mastodon Flock, find your Twitter friends on Mastodon
— even better than Movetodon before Twitter revoked its API access via @nelson #Katie Notopoulos interviews bot creators about the Twitter API closure
— the people behind @ca_dmv_bot, @oliviataters, @MakeItAQuote, @BigTechAlert, @_restaurant_bot, and more #DONKS
— new animation from Felix Colgrave, “an exploration of ocean plastic, avatars and adaptive bottom feeders” via Belong.io #Twitter announces the end of free access to its APIs in one week
— this will kill every free bot, tool, and service built on its API, including my own Belong.io aggregator #Platformer exclusive on Artifact, the personalized news feed from Instagram’s cofounders
— unfortunately it’s only news articles from big publishers, so resembles a less personal version of Google News’ For You #Ars Technica’s overview on the state of generative AI
— a readable high-level primer on the foundational models that made recent breakthroughs possible #broider
— Max Bittker made a tool for making 9-patch quilt-like borders in CSS using inline data URIs via @mattround #MusicLM
— new AI model from Google Research generates music from text prompts, like “accordion death metal” via Web Curios #Drayk It
— make an AI Drake write and perform a song about blogs, Scooby Doo, or anything else via Web Curios #Measuring the cultural weirdness of Avatar
— analyzing Avatar fanfic, memes, and lyric mentions to gauge whether it’s a cultural outlier relative to other blockbusters #Macroeconomic Changes Have Made It Impossible for Me to Want to Pay You
— “The fact is, if I wanted to pay you, I could. I could even give you raises. But once again, that is not the economic reality we face.” #jwz on Mozilla’s 25th anniversary
— Jamie reconstructed some early Mozilla websites not captured by Wayback via Nelson Minar #Tapbots releases Ivory, a polished Mastodon app for iOS
— if you can’t swallow the subscription fee, Ice Cubes is free and open-source #Lost Media: Finding Bill Clinton’s “Boxers or Briefs” MTV Moment
Yesterday, I saw a tweet that seemed so obviously wrong, it made me wonder if it was just clickbait.
But after digging through Google, YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, C-SPAN, and the Twitter archives myself, it seemed to be true: an iconic moment of ’90s political pop culture appeared to be completely missing from the internet.