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May 1, 2023
— Erin Kissane on the recent rise of Bluesky and Mastodon’s cultural resistance to criticism of its obvious pain points via @kissane #
April 26, 2023
— they made an interactive explainer breaking down the ranking factors they used #
April 22, 2023
— Ahoy’s Stuart Brown painstakingly recreates a piece of 1985 pixel art from a printed photo of an Amiga screen #
April 20, 2023
— a “pathological liar” that’s “worse than useless” #
— a charming space exploration game that’s much deeper than it appears #
— the default image host for Reddit’s early years, this will damage the archives like the yfrog/tinypic shutdowns did to Twitter #
— this is a big loss, they did some amazing journalism in an unlikely place #
April 19, 2023
— a massive swath of the web derived from Common Crawl data, including my own site, ranked 169,716th via Simon Willison #
— the 48-year-old Columbus, Ohio mother of three is “one of the most successful esports athletes in the entire country” #
— must-read Nilay Patel post about the copyright conflict between Google’s AI efforts and YouTube’s relationships with publishers #
— guess the spot where five different photos were taken in The Pudding’s new daily guessing game via @kottke #
— Chris Stokel-Walker on so-vits-svc, the singing voice conversion AI model behind Ghostwriter, the “lost” Oasis album, and many more #
— another delightful long scrolling single-serving site from Neal.fun #
April 18, 2023
— a fascinating 2001 interactive fiction game where you slowly learn an invented language #
April 17, 2023
— hiding their identity is a good idea, makes it harder for labels to serve the subpoena #
April 14, 2023
— the first U.S. state to pass legislation banning TikTok on all personal devices #
— like Hacker Typer, but for Doogie Howser’s journal entries; don’t miss the settings via b3ta #
— “When you’re a private centralized company and you don’t deal with hateful content on your site, you’re the Nazi bar.” #
April 13, 2023
— fine-tuning LLaMa’s privacy-friendly uncensored model on messages stored in iMessage’s SQLite db via Simon Willison #
— his first interview not in character #
April 10, 2023
— from April 1964 to April 2013, only one issue of Mad was published without new material from the comics legend #
— John Oliver’s web-only episode about the seedy underbelly of Chuck E. Cheese via MetaFilter #
— satirical or not, it’s staged content optimized to annoy people into engaging with it to game the algorithm #
— related: classified military documents have repeatedly leaked on the War Thunder forums #
— Google, Meta, and Amazon are focused on chasing trends to appease Wall Street, while letting their core products wither #
April 8, 2023
— the earliest known is an anti-war message in a text editor for the PDP-6, hidden in 1968 but only discovered in 2021 #
— audio preservationist Craig Smith had to bake the Ampex tapes in an oven to make them stable enough to transfer via @wildtrax1 #
April 7, 2023
— a little poem about the universe before the Big Bang; don’t miss the remix #
— for The Verge, I wrote about my personal experience being colorblind and they did a beautiful job on the design #
April 6, 2023
— CBDQ was responsible for over 58,000 joyfully weird Twitter bots during its eight year run #
— Elon Musk despises journalists, as his recent targeting of the NYT and NPR demonstrates, but the inertia is real #
— the tendency for LLMs to generate fake facts, and fake sources to back it up, can have devastating real-world consequences #
— ProPublica exposes his clear violations of disclosure laws, but Supreme Court justices can only be removed by impeachment #
April 4, 2023
— sad to learn the RSS reader that I happily paid for since 2013 decided to pivot to shameful enterprise surveillance tools #
April 3, 2023
— “AI dominated by American-influenced image sources is producing a new visual monoculture of facial expressions” #
— “an annual journal of literature made to exist on the web,” my personal fave is Grid World #
— Bert Fan made a lovely web-based BBS to play Legend of the Red Dragon; desktop browser recommended via @bert #
— for his new newsletter, Timothy B. Lee wrote a great overview of the complex fair use questions at the heart of the Stable Diffusion lawsuits via Simon Willison #
March 30, 2023
— Auralnauts started messing around with deepfake voices and lip syncing #
March 28, 2023
— Bartosz Ciechanowski has made a bunch of these interactive essays, and they’re all great #
March 27, 2023
— rather than seek an acquirer, he worked with Project Equity, which helps companies move to employee ownership #
— this should be addressed with consumer data privacy legislation, not a Great Firewall of America #
— Dan Olson takes on Decentraland and the amorphous “metaverse,” the natural followup to his prescient video essay on the NFT bubble #
March 22, 2023
— I trust MSCHF more than Intuit, a predatory company that tricks customers with dark patterns and lobbies to stop improvements #
March 17, 2023
— artist Amy Goodchild compares its generated output to earlier versions made with GPT-3 #
March 14, 2023
— as competition heats up, I suspect more companies will treat ethics as disposable #
— one of my favorite blogs, Ironic Sans, is now a video series! #
— all the visual input examples are wild, it scores 90% on the Bar Exam compared to 10% for GPT-3.5 with less hallucination #
— I’m wearing my official Kottke.org t-shirt to celebrate #
March 9, 2023
