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 #
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 #
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 #
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) #
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 #
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 #
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) #