Now add a walrus: Prompt engineering in DALL-E 3 — fascinating post by Simon Willison with details about how ChatGPT was instructed to use DALL-E 3 #

This woman on TikTok is building a tunnel system under her house — her side quest is building a castle from the stone she's quarried, I just wonder what her neighbors think #

Separating fact from fiction on social media in times of conflict — Bellingcat's tips for spotting misinformation and disinformation using real, recent examples #

The restaurant nearest Google — Mia Sato investigates whether the SEO-driven trend of naming your business "X Near Me" actually works #

Neal.fun’s Internet Artifacts, an online museum of artifacts from the early internet — including the first spam email, first MP3, first livestream, and dozens of notable early websites with a working browser and Flash emulation #

SANANDREAS.TXT — a GTA V mod that lets players leave floating persistent messages anywhere in the game world for others to find #

Simon Willison’s primer on embeddings — a great overview for the technically-minded about a powerful tool for search, recommendations, and classification #

subpar pool — obsessed with this chonky pool game from the creator of Holedown, out now for iOS/Android, Switch, and Windows #

Comic Anhs — a charming personal website with each section introduced by four-panel comics (via) #

An art critic reviewed TikTok’s most-followed visual artist, spawning a parasocial pile-on — the original review is worth reading, a thoughtful and nuanced take that makes the subway artist's reaction even more bizarre #

Puzzmo — Zach Gage launched a puzzle game community with 500 invite codes released every day by, of course, solving a puzzle #

Tom Cardy and Brian David Gilbert’s Beautiful Mind — two of my favorite internet weirdos joined forces to make musical madness #

Trust & Safety Tycoon — the followup to the equally-challenging Moderator Mayhem from Techdirt's Mike Masnick #

Katie Notopoulos on how decentralized federated networks can rebuild the social internet — "my toxic trait is I can’t shake that naïve optimism of the early internet"; same here, Katie #

Ghost Swing — Louie Zong is back with his annual Halloween ghost jam #

What the deal with juggling in animation? — Jasper's spreadsheet collects over 200 examples from 1919 to today, ranked by accuracy and difficulty (via) #

Meta in Myanmar — Erin Kissane completed her four-part series about the role of Meta and Facebook in the Rohingya genocide #

Whole Earth Index — a near-complete archive of the Whole Earth Catalog and related publications from 1970 to 2002 (via) #

QX82 — a tiny JS library for making retro games and experiences inspired by the ZX Spectrum and QBasic #

Satoshi Kon: The Lost Interview — Mark Slutsky interviewed the visionary director in 2007 about Paprika, published here in full for the first time #

Is Laufey jazz? — Adam Neely's fascinating breakdown of her musical influences, appeal to young audiences, and the modern state of jazz #

Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival — open until Halloween, explore a spooky multiplayer world where a thousand ghosts have shared their pumpkin designs #

The Great Zelle Pool Scam — yet another Zelle horror story, this time with scammers hacking contractors' email accounts to solicit payments from their customers #

Control Panel for Twitter — browser add-on that reverses many of the most annoying changes under Musk, including yesterday's removal of link titles #

31 Days of Halloween — for the ninth year, Laura E. Hall's popup daily newsletter of spooky stuff is posting every day of October #

HONK — Cyriak made a new animation, his first in two years #

Rolling Stone’s oral history of School of Rock — charming inside story of making the movie from the cast and crew #

The Curse of Dialup World — inside story of a wildly mismanaged dialup ISP in the late '90s , the billing process alone made me scream (via) #

Songs That Stop on the Word “Stop” — Todd in the Shadows made a perfect supercut, over 30 minutes long! (via) #

Folding Ideas’ “This Is Financial Advice” — Dan Olson's new video essay is a 2.5-hour epic about the apocalyptic doomsday cult of GameStop short sellers #

Restoration Magic — love this channel pointlessly "restoring" used objects, from old pencils and dollar bills to crumpled paper and Coke cans #

Epic Games sells Bandcamp amid 16% workforce layoff — definitely worried about the future of the singular indie music platform, a lifeline for many artists #

On its 5th anniversary, Dropout drops the CollegeHumor brand — amazingly, they've managed to make a subscription streaming video business that's independent and sustainable (via) #

24 hours in the loneliness epidemic — The Pudding visualizes social isolation in a sample from the American Time Use Survey #

The new WGA contract will change how Hollywood works — raises, new limits on AI-generated content, transparency around streaming data, and a whole lot more #

Eternal September — from the creators of Incredible Doom, a new serialized comic about proto-blogging teens #

Wired on the cottage industry of YouTube obituary reading videos — these are embarrassingly low-quality, we're moments away from someone automating this with AI avatars flatly voicing them (via) #

404 Media on a viral TikTok account doxing random people with facial recognition for clout — unlike TikTokers using OSINT techniques to identify people with consent, all this takes is a $30 Pimeyes account and no ethics #

Conlextions — if NYT's Connections game is too easy for you, try all of Lex Friedman's devious puzzles instead #

The world’s oldest active torrent turns 20 this week — I'm seeding The Fanimatrix, so if you download it, you might get part of it from me #

There I Ruined It deepfakes Red Hot Chili Peppers — continuing their series of delightfully cursed AI remixes #

Legal Eagle on the copyright issues with reaction streamers — some of the most popular streamers are freeloading off other creators' videos with little original commentary for views and cash (via) #

Photographing NYC’s singular independent storefronts — James and Karla Murray have been photoblogging over on Blogspot for ten years this December #

Surviving and Dying in the Comics Industry — Heidi McDonald writes about Peepshow creator Joe Matt, who died suddenly this week from a heart attack at his writing desk #

Mastodon releases major improvements to search, onboarding, and more — finally, full-text searching posts from accounts who opt into indexing #

Sept 21 — that's today #

Why Scalpers Can Get Olivia Rodrigo Tickets and You Can’t — interesting look at all the ways scalpers win at presale lotteries, from specialized web browsers to black market verified accounts #

Twitter’s former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth on being targeted by Trump and Musk — a strategic effort to erode the safety and integrity of online platforms, with employees bearing the brunt of the consequences #

10 Years of Emulation at the Internet Archive — The Emularity project became a ridiculous success, making vast collections of software and systems instantly available to millions in the browser #

How facial recognition apps are used to identify sex workers with little recourse — an excerpt from Kashmir Hill's new book investigating the invasive history of Clearview AI (via) #