Links Archives – Waxy.org

July 13, 2020

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

Our Ghost-Kitchen Future — The New Yorker's Anna Wiener digs into Reef, a parking lot company that raised $900M from SoftBank

MrBeast ends Finger on the App after 70 hours — the remaining four players got $20,000 each, while several others are claiming foul

Siddhant Adlakha on watching Hamilton on film, five years after its Broadway debut — "It was made for a different America, and today, it’s easy to wonder whether that America ever existed at all."

Black Lives Matter may be the largest movement in U.S. history — between 15 to 26 million Americans participated in protests

June 30, 2020

Josh Gad reunites Ferris Bueller cast — don't miss the John Hughes tribute at the end

The Verge on the fight for control over The Nod — like Another Round, the show's hosts/creators are now trying to get the rights to their work by going public

June 29, 2020

Reddit bans /r/The_Donald, /r/ChapoTrapHouse, and 2,000 other subreddits — also: YouTube banned Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer, and more, while Twitch temporarily banned Trump

June 25, 2020

Verizon joins Facebook/Instagram ad boycott over hate speech — companies are pulling ads over their failure to moderate misinformation and hateful content

Guardian investigation into how QAnon conspiracies thrive on Facebook — more than just a platform, Facebook's algorithms actively amplify and recruit through recommendations

Katalog — Belgian artist Barbara Iweins photographed and categorized all 10,352 objects in her house (via)

Amazon Honeycode — jumping on the NoCode bandwagon, along with tools like Webflow, Bubble, Zapier, and Airtable

Apple reverses ban on Struck, a clever astrology dating app for iOS — starting in March, Apple declared "fortune-telling" and "dating" were oversaturated, spammy categories

Animal Talking debuts second season with Sting — Gary Whitta's late-night talk show recorded in Animal Crossing is getting some big names

How the Virus Won — impressive NYT data visualization of the spread of Covid-19 in the U.S.

The Dixie Chicks rename, dropping the “Dixie” — learning from Lady Antebellum's mistake, the Chicks cleared the new name with an existing band first

Walt Disney World and Disneyland retheming Splash Mountain to “Princess and the Frog” — the 1989 ride was based on the 1946 film Song of the South, known for its racist stereotypes and glorified plantation setting

June 24, 2020

Wesley Lowery on the reckoning over objectivity in newsrooms led by Black journalists — the illusion of fairness vs. telling hard truths (via)

No-coding SMS bots with Google Sheets and Twilio — useful hack by the always-brilliant Nicole He (via)

NASA names headquarters after “Hidden Figure” Mary W. Jackson — Jackson was NASA’s first Black female engineer, portrayed by Janelle Monáe in the film adaptation of the book

Straight 2 Spam — add invisible text to deliberate get caught in spam filters (via)

Finger On The App — MSCHF and MrBeast's real-time contest to see who can keep their finger on their phone the longest with a prize up to $25k

McSweeney’s catalog of Trump’s worst cruelties, collusions, corruptions, and crimes — a categorized collection of this president's lowlights, 759 and counting

Wrongfully Accused by an Algorithm — lazy cops using flawed facial recognition targeted a Black man in Michigan for a crime he didn't commit

June 23, 2020

Brooklyn Nine-Nine rewriting new season from scratch — nobody's really in the mood for a wacky show about the NYPD right now

Immersive Light Field Video — don't miss the full-motion video demos at the bottom of the page

ProPublica editor tries to investigate an NYPD car that hit a Black teen on Halloween — "Instead, the episode crystallized all of the ways in which the NYPD is shielded from accountability."

Hot Pod on the public dispute over Another Round’s archives — Heben and Tracy have tried to get the show back from Buzzfeed for years, and it may finally happen