Links Archives – Waxy.org

July 24, 2020

Tedium on the history of RIP graphics — a doomed graphical innovation for BBSes in the early '90s, released just before the web made every BBS feel obsolete

How Flash Games Shaped the Videogame Industry — a visual essay and remembrance from a bunch of Flash game creators (via)

Good Sudoku — Zach Gage and Jack Schlesinger's new iOS app takes the tedium out of Sudoku and teaches you advanced strategy while you play

Friends intro recreated as stock footage — several more in the Twitter thread

Racial demographic dot-density map — Observable continues to be an incredible tool for live coding and visualization

Defining the ’90s Music Canon — part of The Pudding's series on identifying generation gaps in music memory

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World Reunion Table Read — the instant cult classic is 10 years old next month

July 23, 2020

Hurting People at Scale — BuzzFeed News investigation on employee dissent inside Facebook based on dozens of internal documents

July 22, 2020

On Lacework — Everest Pipkin watched 1 million three-second videos from an MIT dataset for a project and wrote about how it affected them (via)

The Endless Doomscroller — perfectly healthy and normal

July 21, 2020

Twitter finally cracks down on QAnon — better late than never?

The Daily Beast on local police unions colluding with federal law enforcement — police unions enable and conceal abuse of power and fight reform efforts

Judge won’t free Michigan teen in juvenile detention for not doing online schoolwork — don't miss the original ProPublica investigation

July 19, 2020

Gotta Eat the Plums! — William Carlos Williams meets RPG Maker (via)

July 17, 2020

Federal law enforcement use unmarked vehicles to grab protesters off Portland streets — despite objections from city/state leaders, the DHS is escalating force in what looks like a trial run for other cities

July 16, 2020

Giving GPT-3 a Turing test — the AI will never say "I don't know," so just ask it nonsense questions

Solving the Mask Shortage in Huntington Beach — two surfer dudes try to hand out free masks in Orange County, and it doesn't go well

Minimum wage workers cannot afford rent in any U.S. state — there was a housing crisis before the pandemic, and now it's a coming apocalypse

rev-ind, reverse indent your code — cursed energy

Yale Union transfers land and historic building to Native American arts nonprofit — the YU was the home for the early years of XOXO, and this is incredible news

July 15, 2020

Biden, Gates, Musk, Bezos, Apple, Uber, and others hacked in unprecedented Twitter attack — a Bitcoin scammer apparently got access to internal Twitter tools

ProPublica investigates a Black teen sent to juvenile detention for not doing her online homework — she attended a predominantly white school that shifted to remote learning during the pandemic

NYT investigates NYPD violence during protests — the Washington Post found eight people blinded by police munitions nationally in a single day

AI Dungeon upgrades to GPT-3 — like so much of GPT-3's output, this hurts my brain

July 14, 2020

“Palm Springs” breaks Hulu records — it's a very fun take on the time loop rom-com, I recommend it

Influencer Pay Gap surfaces pay disparities between Black and non-Black influencers — Mikai McDermott's Instagram account lets influencers anonymously share what they make

July 13, 2020

Tom Scott visualizes a million vs. a billion dollars — using a GPS to turn distance to money

Bohemian Rhapsody in Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 — weirdly hypnotic, reminiscent of Line Rider music videos

Kaitlin Tiffany on celebrity baby conspiracy theorists — part of The Atlantic's Shadowland project about conspiracy thinking in America

GPT-3 layout generator — describe a layout and the AI generates (mostly) working code in whatever format you like

July 10, 2020

Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango, Broken Age free on Mac App Store this weekend — excellent LucasArts remasters with commentary from the devs

American Passports Are Worthless Now — most of the world is now off-limits to the U.S., if you can get a passport at all

Super You — free iOS AR app to do playful body-tracking transformations (via)

July 9, 2020

The U.S. Army’s Twitch channel is banning people for asking about war crimes — people are speedrunning getting banned from their official Discord

How the Trump administration could “ban” TikTok — TikTok teens are already retaliating

Samplr — free music sampler for the MacBook Touch Bar

July 8, 2020

mmhmm — clever upcoming Mac app to make video presentations more interesting

Techdirt’s Mike Masnick on the ridiculous Harper’s open letter — "we want to present bad ideas without losing our readers or our jobs"

July 6, 2020

NYT on the racial inequity of coronavirus — new federal data shows Black and Latino people disproportionately affected nationally

Is Anyone Watching Quibi? — New York Magazine feature on the streaming platform, with plenty of cringe from Whitman and Katzenberg

July 3, 2020

Motto — an interactive novella played on your phone using thousands of tiny videos

Checkboxland — render anything as HTML checkboxes (via)

Vanity Fair talks to comedian Ziwe Fumudoh about her IG Live show — as Joe Berkowitz wrote, her show is "a bit like Between Two Ferns, if it had a racism fixation and the intensity of a Scientology audit"

Poynter on how the move to capitalize “Black” happened at the AP and in many newsrooms — the New York Times announced the style change on Tuesday

Websites That Look Like Desktops — a curated list from Simone (via)

Gwern’s experiments in creative writing with GPT-3 — in the examples, human-written text is bold, everything else was written by the AI

Responsively — free browser to make responsive web app development easier

Silicon Valley elite discuss journalists having too much power in private app — in response to the leak, Srinivasan started offering Bitcoin bounties for memes mocking Taylor and other journalists

91-DIVOC adds new graphs, reports, and additional data options — easily the best visualization tool I've found to track the epidemic globally or down to the county level

OpenAI’s GPT-3 model generating Python code from natural language — this is absolutely mind-blowing