Links Archives – Waxy.org

April 22, 2021

longARcat — iOS app to make extremely long cats with augmented reality #

Aaron A. Reed on Judy Malloy’s Uncle Roger — completely new to me, a pioneering work of interactive fiction on the WELL that predates games like Her Story by 30 years #

Join my birthday paste party — last year, I wrote about why I love these and their long history online #

April 21, 2021

Ed Zitron on the misplaced wrath directed at social media managers — "the average social media manager has very little power over any of the decisions but all of the consequences" (via) #

Charlie Warzel on Facebook’s worrying embrace of the creator economy — I expect these monetization tools will be a hit for Dan Bongino, Ben Shapiro, and their other biggest pages #

IRS estimates tax cheats are costing the U.S. $1 trillion a year — offshore tax evasion, cryptocurrency, and other methods allow the richest 1% to hide 20% of their income #

Crypto casino apps on iOS are masquerading as children’s games — like backdoor speakeasies, they only appear if you're in certain countries or on a VPN #

The Guardian on India’s devastating virus surge — they're nearly one-third of all new cases worldwide, with nearly 300k yesterday #

April 20, 2021

Derek Chauvin found guilty on all counts of George Floyd’s murder — not justice, but a rare moment of accountability after a year of protests #

The war between McDonald’s and a startup trying to fix their unreliable ice-cream machines — they sold a device to monitor and repair the notoriously finicky hardware and ended up in court #

Zoom Jeopardy! — amazing TouchDesigner mod to play archival or custom Jeopardy! games with friends over Zoom, get it before it's C&Ded #

April 19, 2021

OpenAI-powered Linux shell — pretty useful when it's not completely hallucinating answers #

April 17, 2021

The Nothings Suite — Pippin Barr's collection of "hello world" anti-games in 14 engines #

April 16, 2021

GANcraft — generate photorealistic imagery from Minecraft worlds #

Google Earth Timelapse — a global zoomable video of 37 years of satellite imagery #

April 15, 2021

The Story of “A Thousand Miles” — VICE interviewed virtually everyone involved with Vanessa Carlton's 2002 hit, including Terry Crews #

April 14, 2021

NYPD deploys Spot Mini to public housing complex — creepy authoritarian surveillance just got more dystopian #

Discord will block NSFW servers on iOS — did Apple require this change or is this Discord's attempt to get their 12+ rating back? #

Yamauchi No.10 Family Office — every homepage should have a theme song #

Just One Day – 2winz² — the only thing better than Brian David Gilbert is four Brian David Gilberts #

April 13, 2021

Visualizing the risk-reward of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine — the risk is so absurdly small, it seems inevitable that many more people die as a result of halting distribution (via) #

Charlie Warzel on Twitter and context collapse — the first issue of his new Galaxy Brain newsletter on the attention economy #

Murder Offsets — "paying for the right to do wrong" (via) #

Officer who fatally shot Daunte Wright resigns, as does Brooklyn Center police chief — yet another racist killing of an unarmed black man, 15 miles from where George Floyd was killed #

April 12, 2021

Teaching a Spot Mini to pee beer — Michael Reeves is like the edgelord version of Simone Giertz (via) #

Patrick Klepek on Cruel World, a multiplayer game designed to degrade as people play it selfishly — it originated as a commentary on NFTs, but evolved beyond the creator's expectations (via) #

Guardian investigation finds Facebook ignored “Page abuse” loophole used for political manipulation by world leaders — they prioritized enforcement for rich countries and their adversaries, while internal reports about abuse elsewhere languished for months #

April 11, 2021

Ben Smith on Substack — big scoops in here including Daniel Lavery's deal, Charlie Warzel leaving the NYT, the Sidechannel Discord, and a Gawker revival?! #

What was the original URL for Yahoo before it was called Yahoo? — a simple question from Joanne McNeil sent me on a rabbit hole through Usenet, listservs, and the Internet Archive #

The Cursed Computer Iceberg Meme — every link is clickable, lose yourself in cursed computer lore #

Rocky Horror played to an empty theater for 54 weeks. Now, audiences return to Portland’s longest-running movie — "I was in a position to keep a flame burning, to keep a torch lit." #

April 9, 2021

Pocari Sweat commercial’s astounding in-camera effects — watch the behind-the-scenes video to see the rolling walkways in more detail (via) #

DMX, dead at 50 — rest in peace #

Google blocks advertisers from using social/racial justice keywords for ad targeting on YouTube — "Black Lives Matter" and "Black power" were blocked, but "white lives matter" and "white power" were allowed #

April 8, 2021

Fyre Fest attendee auctioning viral tweet for a new kidney on Ja Rule’s NFT platform — this entire story is a sad sandwich #

Justin McElroy’s loving ode to Yahoo! Answers — for over a decade, My Brother, My Brother and Me turned its silliest questions into comedy gold #

April 7, 2021

NYT analyzes restrictions in Georgia’s new voting law — Republicans are working overtime to make sure fewer people can vote to regain control (via) #

Leaked internal database of police departments using Clearview AI — provided to Buzzfeed News from an anonymous source, as of February 2020 #

The Hidden Game Within Microsoft Flight Simulator — using the photo mode to turn it into a walking simulator, exploring the glitchy planet from ground level #

April 6, 2021

Lauren Goode on algorithms that won’t let her forget her canceled marriage — six years ago, Eric Meyer wrote about inadvertent algorithmic cruelty (via) #

New Yorker’s Rachel Aviv profiles memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus — her controversial research on false memories made her a popular expert witness casting doubt on claims of sexual assault (via) #

Have I Been Zucked? — check if your personal info was among 533 million Facebook accounts leaked #

April 5, 2021

Yahoo Answers shutting down on May 4 — just like Yahoo to delete 16 years of community-contributed content with 30 days' notice #

NYT on the Trump campaign’s dark design patterns for fundraising — they tricked donors into emptying their bank accounts with automatic weekly donations (via) #

StyleCLIP, manipulating StyleGAN imagery with text — don't miss the absurdly impressive demo video (via) #

April 2, 2021

Anil Dash on inventing NFTs with artist Kevin McCoy in 2014 — their haha-just-serious Seven on Seven presentation is worth watching, if you've never seen it (via) #

April 1, 2021

How QAnon Is Tearing Families Apart — VICE interviewed three dozen people about their QAnon family members of widely-varying backgrounds #

Wormhole — free blazingly fast web app to send files with end-to-end encryption, up to 10GB #

Reddit’s Second — try to guess the second-most voted picture, or wait to see vote counts for fewer points #

March 31, 2021

itslennnie — I love this supportive little ghost #