Billionaires gifted Clarence Thomas at least 38 vacations, 26 private jet flights, box seats, and more — ProPublica continues their investigation into undisclosed gifts to Supreme Court justices #

CNET deletes thousands of old articles to try to game Google search rankings — nuking their history with questionable results, while moving towards AI-generated articles #

The Nib made all 15 issues free for PDF download this month — you can donate to keep the archives alive or buy print copies before it closes this summer #

AI Boyfriend — the latest from nerd sketch comedy duo KRAZAM #

LCD, Please — for its 10th anniversary, Lukas and Keiko Pope demade "Papers, Please" as a Game & Watch-style LCD game #

Feuds amplified on social media may be fueling homicides among young Americans — ProPublica digs into a possible factor in rising homicides, beyond the obvious proliferation of guns (via) #

Tom Scott on the Swiss town that banned all private cars — a small wealthy resort that outsources its parking to a nearby town, but still, living the dream #

Cabel Sasser on “Turn-On,” a hyperactive 1969 sketch comedy show unseen for 54 years — "the first computerized TV show" from the creator of Laugh-In was cancelled after the first episode, decades ahead of its time #

Mayerle’s Lithographed International Test Chart — reprints of these stunning 1907 multilingual eye charts are for sale at 20x200 #

Myst demake for the Atari 2600 — the same creator also made a complete version of Myst for the Apple II #

Kagi Search Stats — the top domains their users block and promote in search results; they really hate Pinterest! (via) #

Adam Savage tours the prop house that makes Hollywood’s printed products — The Earl Hayes Press has printed fake newspapers, magazines, product labels, and more for films and TV shows since 1918 (via) #

New Word Order — addictive little web game to try to put words/phrases in the order they first appeared (via) #

The Life and Death of an Internet Onion — "a perennial website about the possibility of love online" only accessible for five weeks, the shelf life of an onion (via) #

Casey Newton on how the Kids Online Safety Act puts us all at risk — "Lawmakers are quickly advancing an anti-sex, anti-speech agenda in which every adult user of the internet could soon find themself entangled." #

Paul Reubens Never Got the Critical Reappraisal He Deserved — if Pee-Wee's Playhouse came out today, it'd be maligned by conservatives for its playful diversity and queerness #

It’s So Over/We’re So Back — Max Read on the bullwhip effect applied to sentiment on social media, wildly swinging with every new update about the room-temp superconductor #

AI Concerts remixes songs with deepfake AI cartoon voices — every one of these is gold, from Squidward covering Creep to Gary the Snail covering Landslide #

Catching up on the weird world of LLMs — Simon Willison gave an approachable and interesting talk that covers "the last few years of LLM developments in 35 minutes" #

Infinite Mac adds CD-ROM Library, external discs, and custom instances — just start any version and click the tab at the bottom of the screen #

EXP TV — launched in 2020, a 24/7 "endless stream of obscure media and video ephemera" a la Everything Is Terrible! #

Anita Sarkeesian closing Feminist Frequency after 15 years — a powerful force in raising awareness of systemic sexism and harassment in the games industry #

Paul Reubens dies at 70 after private bout of cancer — Pee Wee Herman brought so much joy into the world #

NYT profiles Keita Takahashi, 20 years after Katamari Damacy — everything he's made since then is great too, I especially loved Crankin's Time Travel Adventure for Playdate (via) #

Mastodon is easy and fun except when it isn’t — Erin Kissane surveyed people on Bluesky who bounced off Mastodon and her write-up is excellent #

CrowdView — search engine that exclusively searches discussion forums (via) #

Wordward Draw — very clever letter-substitution puzzle game from Daniel Linssen (via) #

Arcade collector rescues a roadside Discs of Tron — imagine keeping a pristine arcade game in your garage for decades and then just dumping it with the weekly garbage (via) #

The little search engine that couldn’t — The Verge profiles Neeva, a well-funded startup that tried and failed to take on Google (via) #

Large language models, explained with a minimum of math and jargon — excellent plain-language primer on how transformer-based LLMs like ChatGPT work #

You Are Atlas — "If no one is on this page, the sky will fall." (via) #

snes.party — play SNES games with instant online multiplayer in the browser; also: nes.party #

Arc browser for Mac now available publicly — I have friends that swear by it, but I found it too hard to get used to #

Notes on Everything — David OReilly breaks down what went into making his universe simulation #

Sinéad O’Connor dead at 56  #

I’m a Luddite (and So Can You!) — the misunderstood history of the Luddite movement and what they can teach us about resisting an automated future (via) #

Attenzione, Pickpocket! — the NYT profiles the woman going viral on TikTok for outing pickpockets on the streets of Venice #

Google’s nightmare “Web Integrity API” wants a DRM gatekeeper for the web — Apple shipped attestation in Safari last year, but Chromium-based browsers are ~70% of the internet usage #

Gwern’s Internet Search Tips — advanced tips and tricks for searching hard to reach archives #

Textual Paint — MS Paint clone in the terminal, made with Textual and Python (via) #

The World’s Last Internet Cafes — Rest of World visits some of the last remaining cafes in Uganda, Nepal, Nigeria, Mexico, Argentina, and Hong Kong #

A brief tour of South Pole Station through signage — brr.fyi continues their wonderful documentation of "routine, mundane activities and infrastructure in extraordinary contexts"  #

Redditors prank AI-powered news mill with “Glorbo” in World of Warcraft — "Time is a flat circle, and so is self-referential AI-generated content." #

Nikolas Bentel makes wallets that look like Mac/Windows folders — my brain won't accept these are physical objects (via) #

identiFIVE — incredibly annoying daily puzzle, try to find the only five-letter word in a 9x9 grid of letters (via) #

Geoguessr expert Rainbolt shows how he geolocates a photo in minutes — he uses Overpass Turbo to search OpenStreetMap data; related: Bellingcat's powerful OSM Search Tool #

Human Shader — over 1,500 people have manually calculated RGB values to collectively make a shader with human brain power #

Reddit brought back r/Place and it’s going as well as expected — as of this moment, a good chunk of the pixel art canvas is devoted to messages urging the CEO to fuck himself #

Quiznos brings the Spongmonkeys back — resurrecting an unhinged 2003 meme from b3ta is the least confusing thing about this campaign #

The Pudding’s analysis of hit songwriters by gender over the last 64 years — only three top 5 hits in the last decade were written entirely by women, and one of those was Kate Bush #