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) #

Psychedelic Cryptography, making messages only visible to people on psychedelics — relies on people seeing persistent afterimages/tracers, try increasing YouTube playback speed to 2x to see them (via) #

Google launches Gemini, the AI model it hopes will take down GPT-4 — they claim their most powerful model beats GPT-4 in most benchmarks, but it won't be available until next year #

Twitter users solve a 25-year-old mystery about a country song from the X-Files — a wholesome Twitter thread these days feels like a glimmer of light from a dying star #

First trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI — despite leaking early on X/Twitter, it broke YouTube records for most views in 24 hours for a non-music video #

Plantarium — an open-source tool for growing 3D procedural plants in the browser with nodes #

Plagiarism and You(Tube) — Hbomberguy's excellent four-hour exposé on video essayists passing off others' work as their own #

draw fast — tldraw's latest experiment generates images as you draw on a canvas in real-time #

The 88×31 GIF Collection — a collection of 4,210 classic 88x31 buttons, a standard started by the Netscape Now! campaign in 1996 (via) #

Paste Magazine acquires Jezebel after G/O closure — they plan to resume publishing right away #

AI Garage Sale, haggle with AI personalities to buy real products — test your prompt injection skills in this ridiculous project from BRAIN, the internet weirdos behind GEN-Z-SPAN #

Brickception — control two games of Breakout at once using a popup browser window #

It’s Black Friday, Charlie Brown! — Louie Zong made a soundtrack for a fictional TV special in the style of early '70s Vince Guaraldi #

Vector to 3D — free browser-based tool to convert SVG to a raytraced scene (via) #

Source code for Infocom’s original interpreters released — with little fanfare, Andrew Plotkin uploaded a trove of newly-discovered source code for various 1980s computers to GitHub #

Dr Ludwig and the Devil — make a deal with the devil in this clever game that won this year's Interactive Fiction Comp #

Inside the Chaos at OpenAI — Karen Hao and Charlie Warzel's deeply-reported piece about the events leading up to this weekend's drama; paywall-free link #

Half-Life celebrates 25th anniversary with new documentary and big updates — the game's free on Steam right now for PC/Mac with new maps, restored content, and… Too Much Coffee Man!? #

Tumblr is betting big on going small — kudos to Matt Mullenweg for talking openly about these changes, and continuing to maintain it while avoiding layoffs #

TikTok teens aren’t stanning Osama bin Laden — Garbage Day's Ryan Broderick digs into what seems to be a moral panic inflamed by the media #

Vivaldi’s Summer on Commodore-based instruments — Linus Åkesson created each instrument, wrote all the software, and plays every part #

draw my ui — sketch a UI, which is then sent to GPT-4's vision model and converted to working code; note: OpenAI API key required #

Ferrofluid Synth — the latest project from Swedish audiovisual artist/mad scientist Love Hultén (via) #

Gwern searches Wikipedia for unused three-letter acronyms — a case study of coding with GPT-4 with interesting visualizations of the resulting dataset #

Simon Willison explores OpenAI’s new GPTs — great breakdown of its capabilities and caveats #

Jeff Bezos Rowing Boat — instead of a miniature diorama, Bobby Fingers goes supersize for his latest unhinged video #

GitHub releases Monaspace font family — monospace OpenType fonts that intelligently adjust glyphs and kerning to improve readability while staying in the grid #

A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft — James Somers reflects on the changing nature of programming with AI assistance (via) #

YouTube will require labeling “realistic” AI-generated content, let music partners request removal of deepfake vocals — it's like they've created their own parallel version of fair use's balancing test #

Internet sleuths search for a mystery pop song from a 17 second clip — Miles Klee on another low-stakes unsolved internet mystery, like Celebrity Number Six (via) #

NailStudio — paint your nails in a retro website heavily inspired by MacPaint and Kid Pix (via) #