Neon Knives — free two-player local multiplayer game in the browser, take out your enemy in a field of randomly-roving NPCs a la Hidden in Plain Sight #

90% of top news outlets now block AI bots, right-wing sites mostly allow them — an extension of the free vs. paywall news gap, quality journalism is expensive to produce compared to polarizing clickbait #

Feedle — new-to-me search engine for blog posts and podcasts, with an RSS feed for every search and a solid trending posts list #

Discmaster rises again — offline since June, the semantic search engine for thousands of vintage shareware/compilation CD-ROMs is back online #

Old’aVista, a guide to the old internet — launched in 2021, a search engine indexing early personal websites plus Yahoo directory listings from 1996 to 2003 (via) #

Ode to Internet — a modern orchestral arrangement of the 56k dialup modem handshake, paired with unrelated '90s film footage (via) #

How platforms killed Pitchfork — Casey Newton on the challenging environment it faced, from the ad market to personalized algorithmic recommendations #

Conde Nast is folding Pitchfork under GQ, with layoffs — its editor-in-chief, Puja Patel, was also laid off from the 28-year-old music magazine #

Researchers find Google search really has gotten worse — "Search engines seem to lose the cat-and-mouse game that is SEO spam" (via) #

Sixteen Stories for Flickr Commons’ Sixteenth Birthday — Jessamyn West wrote 16 quirky stories about some of the lesser-known images from their vast photo collection (via) #

Ken Fritz spent years building a $1 million stereo, but the real cost was unfathomable — Geoff Edgers writes about a workaholic audiophile whose obsession consumed his life and everyone around him #

From-To — find comparable neighborhoods in two cities #

Molly White’s guide to migrating from Substack to self-hosted Ghost — not for the faint-hearted or non-technical, but gives her far more control than any other platform #

Instagram co-founders shutting down Artifact after less than a year — a promising idea, but for me, the recommendations were generally worse than Google News's For You #

George Carlin’s daughter seeking legal action against voice cloned “comedy” special — disappointed to learn Will Sasso of MADtv and lemon Vine fame was responsible for this mess #

Who hosts the fediverse? — over half of all Mastodon users are on an instance hosted by Hetzner (via) #

Internet Archive now hosts DatPiff’s hip-hop mixtape collection — 366k mixtapes saved, over 50 terabytes of music, from 18 years of the site's history (via) #

Seen — Tae Young's bittersweet animated short about a girl trying to reconnect with an old friend #

Tom Coates on how Threads will integrate with the Fediverse — extensive notes and thoughts from a small meeting with the Threads team about their federation plans #

Why Platformer is leaving Substack — every newsletter I love, from Garbage Day and Today In Tabs to Citation Needed and Ironic Sans, are moving off the Nazi-friendly platform #

NYT’s Flash visualizations are working again — using the amazing Ruffle Flash emulator, naturally #

brr.fyi goes home — is this the end for the best blog ever written about life in the South Pole? stay tuned for part two #

Using the Wayback Machine and Google Analytics to uncover disinformation networks — Bellingcat made a lightweight tool for scraping current and historic Google Analytics data  #

How Google’s search algorithms reshaped the web — The Verge's Mia Sato breaks down, step by step, the homogenizing effect of optimizing for search traffic #

diagram.website — an incomplete map to regions of the handmade, personal, indie internet (via) #

Fixing Macs Door to Door — entertaining stories from working as an Apple subcontractor in Chicago doing on-call repairs in the late 2000s #

American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year is “enshittification” — Cory Doctorow coined the perfect word for the lifecycle of online platforms, from rapid growth to extractive death (via) #

Making a Nintendo PlayStation — the jankiest homebrew gore I've ever seen, courtesy of a twisted genius with an angle grinder, drill, and a whole lot of hot glue #

New study finds coin flips aren’t 50/50 — after 350,757 coin tosses, partly livestreamed on Twitch by volunteers, the researcher found a slight bias toward the same side facing up #

“Can you teach me your favorite dance move?” — Belgian dancer Ed People travels the world recording people teaching him dance moves with charming results #

Mobile ALOHA — Stanford researchers open-sourced a spendy robotics kit made with off-the-shelf parts that can perform complex tasks like cooking and cleaning #

Ars Technica on the Vectrex’s cult following and newly-discovered games — there's a reason my logo is a Vectrex; it's a weird and beautiful console, a commercial failure but wildly innovative (via) #

Building A Marble Clock — Ivan Miranda's four-part series is worth watching from the beginning as he iterates and improves the design #

Paku Paku, one-dimensional one-button Pac-Man — weirdly addictive, my high score is 2,689 #

arcc, the Apocalypse Recovery Computing Cluster — Matt Round's latest is a deep multiuser simulation of a fictional Cold War-era computer network and hardware, currently £10.02 to join #

13-year-old becomes first person to ever “beat” Tetris for the NES — don't miss the video where he hits the kill screen after 38 minutes of play and nearly passes out #

Tom Scott and the formidable power of escalating streaks — Simon Willison writes about using streaks in life and work, but they're at their best when they leave room for iterative improvement #

Portal demake for the Nintendo 64, now out of beta — the first 13 test chambers are playable with source code and ROM patcher available (via) #

Mickey-1928 — fine-tuned image model trained on newly-public domain images of Mickey Mouse from 1928 #

After 10 years, Tom Scott quits making weekly videos — an amazing run of thoughtful work, ending on his own terms and with tremendous style #

uBlacklist — browser add-on for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari to block websites and entire domains in Google, Bing, and other search engines (via) #

The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again — with decentralization and fragmented platforms, Anil Dash is optimistic for a revival of the personal, human web #

New York Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft for training AI models on their work — the suit goes beyond copyright claims to accuse Bing of damaging their brand with hallucinated citations #

The best articles Rest of World didn’t publish in 2023 — like the Bloomberg Jealousy List, their staff picks the best global tech stories they wish they'd written this year #

How Big is YouTube? — estimating the number of YouTube videos and other metadata from random sampling of video IDs #

Untangling Threads — Erin Kissane breaks down the benefits, risks, and risk mitigations of Threads joining the fediverse #

Substack embraces Nazis — Hamish McKenzie's letter makes it clear they're not only committed to platforming bigotry, but funding and profiting from it #

Kurzgesagt’s Ultimate Size Comparison — love how they frame each comparison with human scale in the middle, with you in between a single DNA strand and the Sun (via) #

Largest dataset powering AI images removed after discovery of child sexual abuse material — what does this mean for Common Crawl, the source that the LAION datasets were derived from? #

Clickbait Remover for YouTube — replaces ridiculous thumbnails with an image from the video, open-source and available for Firefox #