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) #

Connections with James Burke returns 45 years after it first aired — streaming now on Curiosity Stream #

Recursive Recipes — click ingredients to expand them, giving you instructions on how to make Eggs Benedict from scratch in a mere 17.5 years (via) #

G/O Media shutters Jezebel after 16 years, lays off staff — they should give the domain back to Heather Champ (via) #

Omegle shuts down after 14 years over sexual abuse litigation — it boomed during the pandemic for live performance and personal connection, but has always struggled with sexual predators #

Barack Obama talks to The Verge’s Nilay Patel — on AI regulation, free speech on social networks, and the future of democracy and the internet #

Ex-Kotaku staffers launch Aftermath, a worker-owned, reader-supported videogame news site — I love the trend of small journalist collectives going indie, like Defector, Hell Gate, and 404 Media #

When NYC Put a Celebrity in Every Taxi — David Friedman's outstanding oral history of NYC's Celebrity Talking Taxi program, also available in article form and on the Internet Archive #

Decker — heavily inspired by HyperCard, a free multimedia tool for making interactive documents on or off the web (via) #

DAK and the Golden Age of Gadget Catalogs — Cabel Sasser tells the history of a quirky 1980s electronics catalog, scanning 55 of them for the first time #

DreamerJazz covers “Now And Then” like the early Beatles — I think I like this one-man-band version better than the original song #

Making “Now and Then,” the final Beatles song — Peter Jackson's team used a voice separation model to isolate John's vocals from his muddy 1977 demo #

Muted.io — remarkable collection of interactive music theory tools #

Photo preservationist saves 4,000 glass plate negatives from the trash — selections from the archive documenting life in New England between 1850-1920 can be found on Cappucci's site, Facebook, and Instagram #

Let’s Get Creative — a growing collection of free online creative tools for all ages, open to submissions that meet the criteria (via) #

Blank Space (Johnny’s Version) — There I Ruined It delivers another voice-cloned masterpiece #

Searching for Humanity in Fortnite — playing a battle royale as a pacifist turns into a parable about survival in a world that discourages solidarity and mutual aid #

AI Seinfeld is broken, maybe forever — the stream is stuck in an endless glitchy loop #

CGP Grey’s interactive Rock, Paper, Scissors game on YouTube — deeper than it appears with over 100 unlisted videos and multiple secret endings #

Amiga ASCII Art — a 2015 thesis on the history of ASCII art focused on its use in the Amiga warez and BBS scenes, translated and updated for 2023 (via) #

Boston Dynamics turned its robot dog into a talking tour guide with ChatGPT — their autonomous murderbots are much more fun with a top hat, googly eyes, and British accent (via) #