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) #
Tapbots releases Ivory, a polished Mastodon app for iOS
— if you can't swallow the subscription fee, Ice Cubes is free and open-source #
Inside the world of retail shoplifting
— professional fences profit from desperation and addiction, outsourcing theft to boosters for pennies on the dollar (via) #
TET
— a short free game about cooking Vietnamese food from Swiss-Vietnamese illustrator Charlotte Broccard #
Summer Afternoon
— charming short multiplayer WebGL experiment, try to find the five secrets (via) #
Copy Dennis
— a fed-up web designer publicly shames the people who cloned his distinctive portfolio site (via) #
U.S. airline accidentally exposes TSA No Fly List on unsecured server
— the discoverer blogged about how she used Shodan to find the exposed server, AWS credentials, and S3 buckets #
Inside CNET’s AI-powered SEO money machine
— the private equity firm who bought it in 2020 is racing to the bottom with automated content farming #
After 16 years, Twitterrific is discontinued
— killed by an unannounced and undocumented policy change from a company no developer should ever trust again #
The many ingenious ways people in prison use forbidden cell phones
— connecting with others, side hustles, exposing inhumane conditions, and taking Harvard's free online comp sci classes (via) #
Comparing ChatGPT to Claude, Anthropic’s new AI chatbot assistant
— I love that both models are just as confused about what happened on Lost's later seasons as I am #
Hampster Invaders
— Matt Round fused the Hampster Dance with Space Invaders, with the Cuban Boys' remix used by permission #
Waxy.org is now on Mastodon
— all links and posts are now automatically posted, just follow @[email protected] #
Getty Images suing Stable Diffusion for scraping their images
— separate from the class action lawsuit led by three artists announced a few days ago #
Inside the “extremely hardcore” first 90 days of Twitter under Elon Musk
— outstanding reporting covering a truly terrible acquisition; love the "Elon net worth-o-meter" #
The Garden of Blogs
— charming reimagining of an RSS reader as a little garden; Waxy is the eyeglasses #
Peasant’s Quest VGA
— celebrating Trogdor the Burninator's 20th birthday; the original game is playable again with Flash emulation #
KC Green on the 10th anniversary of his “This Is Fine” comic
— "When a work gets as big as this has, is it still yours?" (via) #
Building a meme search engine using a stack of old iPhones for OCR
— indexing 18 million memes with iOS's Vision API was cheaper than paid cloud OCR services #
Microsoft’s VALL-E can simulate anyone’s voice with three seconds of audio
— they aren't releasing the code because of the obvious potential for misuse, but the samples are wild #
The DIY Scientist, the Olympian, and the Mutated Gene
— remarkable 2016 article about a woman who self-diagnosed her rare genetic mutation and spotted it in others #
Identity thieves bypassed Experian security with simple URL change
— it's patched now, but unclear how long the dead-simple security lapse existed (via) #
Merry Sky
— with Dark Sky shuttered, here's a clean alternative built on Pirate Weather, a free and open compatible API #
Killings by U.S. police reach record high in 2022
— "Black people were 24% of those killed last year, while making up only 13% of the population" (via) #
Jean-Michel Jarre’s “Oxygene Pt. 4” in 19kb of JS code
— made with Dittytoy, a simple Javascript API for making generative music online #
Inspired by Office Space, software engineer embezzled more than $300k in Stripe transactions
— sadly, his "OfficeSpace project" didn't try to transfer rounded down fractions of a penny #
ChatGPT in Dr. Sbaitso
— Bert Fan upgraded Creative Labs' classic 1991 speech synthesis chatbot that shipped with Sound Blaster cards #
Amateur archaeologist helps crack Ice Age cave art code
— a London furniture conservator suggested dots, lines, and symbols denote lunar months for tracking animal life cycles, making it the earliest writing in human history #
VICE on Neuro-Sama, a VTuber controlled entirely by AI
— a large language model with text-to-speech output interacts with users in chat, while a separate AI plays games like Minecraft and osu (via) #
leaving.live
— website that tells you how many people are also looking at it, when they leave, and that's it (via) #
Event series Pop-Up Magazine calls it quits
— they cite the pandemic, but also went through a painful acquisition breakup in 2020 #
Joni Mitchell’s full catalog is now on YouTube
— her six-album run from 1970-1976 is basically flawless (via) #
The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI
— easily capable of outposting every human on earth, ChatGPT and LLMs like it will flood the web with a neverending tsunami of SEO bullshit #
LOL Verifier
— Brian Moore made a device that only lets you type "lol" if you're actually laughing #
Shift Happens
— excellent site promoting Marcin Wichary's upcoming book about keyboards; don't miss the interactive 3D view at the top #
The Strangest Computer Manual Ever Written
— the only manual that references The Dukes of Hazzard, meatloaf, and the territorial imperatives of trumpeter swans #
Why Not Mars
— Maciej Ceglowski returns from hiatus with the first in a series on why sending humans to Mars is a bad idea #
Tom Scott debunks an urban legend about 18th century firefighters letting buildings burn
— he hired a historical researcher to uncover the real history of a subject he covered in 2021 #
As of today, copyrighted works from 1927 enter the U.S. public domain
— Sherlock Holmes, Metropolis, The Jazz Singer, Puttin’ on the Ritz, My Blue Heaven, and so much more #
Draw SVG rope with Javascript
— even if I never implement it, I love interactive explainers like these that explain how something's made (via) #
The Professional
— ridiculous pay-what-you-like game for Windows/Mac/Linux that's like QWOP attempting a jewelry heist #
Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things
— Catherynne M. Valente penned a barnburner about the cycle of value extraction and destruction of popular online social platforms #
Ars Technica on Mastodon, ActivityPub, and the pros and cons of open decentralized social networking
— "the dreams of the 90s are alive in the Fediverse" #