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 #

7 Months Inside an Online Scam Labor Camp — NYT investigation into a Chinese human trafficking operation powering "pig butchering" confidence scams (via) #

Mickey, Disney, and the Public Domain — after 95 years of copyright, the earliest version of Mickey Mouse will enter the public domain on January 1 while remaining trademarked #

Facebook is being overrun with stolen, AI-generated images people think are real — 404 Media's Jason Koebler digs into yet another flood of generative AI chum content and the people trying to track it #

Minesweeper Twist — if it's too easy, try it on expert (via) #

How much Hank Green makes from Shorts, Reels, and TikTok — fascinating inside baseball breaking down the CPMs and conflicting incentive structures for each short-form video platform #

The ’90s art collective that smuggled subversive art into episodes of Melrose Place — Decoder Ring's podcast version of this story is also great (via) #

After 22 years, Google Groups ending support for Usenet — probably for the best since they've allowed it to become a major source of newsgroup spam #

Pipe Dreams: The Life and Times of Yahoo! Pipes — Glenn Fleishman interviewed the original team, among others, for this beautifully-designed history of the Web 2.0 app (via) #

E3 is officially dead — I'll always remember it as the place I first played Katamari in 2004 and Okami and Shadow of the Colossus in 2005 #

The Great Scrollback of Alexandria — a preserved collection of thousands of funny, weird, and notable tweets, some deleted and reconstructed from screenshots #

The Year Twitter Died — a special series from The Verge with contributions from Sarah Jeong, Zoe Schiffer, Nilay Patel, and an archive of thousands of Good Tweets #

Animation vs. Physics — Alan Becker's interstellar follow-up to Animation vs. Math #

Hiding a Mike Wazowski shrine in a public library — the latest meme art stunt from Sunday Nobody #

Ed Yong on how reporting on long Covid made him a better journalist — "How could so many people feel so thoroughly unrepresented by an industry that purports to give voice to the voiceless?" #

The Pudding Cup 2023 — The Pudding's picks for the best visual and data-driven stories of the year #

Motion Extraction — meditative video about a simple technique for spotlighting motion in video from Posy (via) #

Pee-wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special’s HD remaster is now free on YouTube — one of the greatest and weirdest holiday TV specials ever, made by a cast and crew of oddball geniuses #

Big Walk — "a cooperative online walker-talker" from the creators of Untitled Goose Game #

World of Goo 2 — the classic physics puzzler is getting a sequel 15 years after the original (via) #

Tom Whitwell’s 52 things I learned in 2023 — his annual post is always an interesting and entertaining collection of facts and discoveries (via) #