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January 25, 2024
— Google Research’s new text-to-video diffusion model can also handle inpainting, cinemagraphs, and converting still images to video #
— from Ecovacs’ surveillance vacuum and Instacart’s AI shopping carts to BMW’s AR goggles and Sennheiser’s $300 disposable earbuds #
— mapping 18,359 public works and artworks funded by the New Deal, with tens of thousands still to be added via Chris Glass #
— a failure of content moderation, federal legislation, and basic human decency, the images originated in a Telegram group for non-consensual AI-generated porn #
— this little indie publication has been killing it, happy to be a supporter since launch #
— their stock is down 98% since going public, they need to repay $150 million in debt by late 2024, and are looking to sell off assets to stay alive #
— a modern update of Keaton Patti’s old “I forced a bot” schtick, but tacky and unfunny #
— a multi-billion dollar immersive role-play sensation that doubles as a way to make friends and meet new people #
January 24, 2024
— a growing collection of beautiful art/code math visualizations with P5.js, try Pong B&W in fullscreen via @lefredj #
— Lyle Drescher found an online audience livestreaming conversations with anonymous strangers in a gecko costume #
— “never miss a spot again” via @documentingmeta #
— not only for its for-profit arm, but for the 501(c)3 nonprofit parent organization as well #
— 60 FOIAed pages from the NSA’s ban on the toy in the late ’90s #
— free two-player local multiplayer game in the browser, take out your enemy in a field of randomly-roving NPCs a la Hidden in Plain Sight #
— an extension of the free vs. paywall news gap, quality journalism is expensive to produce compared to polarizing clickbait #
January 23, 2024
— new-to-me search engine for blog posts and podcasts, with an RSS feed for every search and a solid trending posts list #
January 21, 2024
— offline since June, the semantic search engine for thousands of vintage shareware/compilation CD-ROMs is back online #
January 19, 2024
— launched in 2021, a search engine indexing early personal websites plus Yahoo directory listings from 1996 to 2003 via MetaFilter #
— a modern orchestral arrangement of the 56k dialup modem handshake, paired with unrelated ’90s film footage via b3ta #
January 18, 2024
— Casey Newton on the challenging environment it faced, from the ad market to personalized algorithmic recommendations #
— its editor-in-chief, Puja Patel, was also laid off from the 28-year-old music magazine #
January 16, 2024
— “Search engines seem to lose the cat-and-mouse game that is SEO spam” via Paul Bausch #
— Jessamyn West wrote 16 quirky stories about some of the lesser-known images from their vast photo collection via @jessamyn #
January 15, 2024
— Geoff Edgers writes about a workaholic audiophile whose obsession consumed his life and everyone around him #
— find comparable neighborhoods in two cities #
January 13, 2024
— not for the faint-hearted or non-technical, but gives her far more control than any other platform #
January 12, 2024
— a promising idea, but for me, the recommendations were generally worse than Google News’s For You #
— disappointed to learn Will Sasso of MADtv and lemon Vine fame was responsible for this mess #
— over half of all Mastodon users are on an instance hosted by Hetzner via Simon Willison #
— 366k mixtapes saved, over 50 terabytes of music, from 18 years of the site’s history via Garbage Day #
— Tae Young’s bittersweet animated short about a girl trying to reconnect with an old friend #
January 11, 2024
— extensive notes and thoughts from a small meeting with the Threads team about their federation plans #
January 10, 2024
— using the amazing Ruffle Flash emulator, naturally #
January 9, 2024
— is this the end for the best blog ever written about life in the South Pole? stay tuned for part two #
— Bellingcat made a lightweight tool for scraping current and historic Google Analytics data #
January 8, 2024
— The Verge’s Mia Sato breaks down, step by step, the homogenizing effect of optimizing for search traffic #
January 7, 2024
— an incomplete map to regions of the handmade, personal, indie internet via Naive Weekly #
January 6, 2024
— entertaining stories from working as an Apple subcontractor in Chicago doing on-call repairs in the late 2000s #
— Cory Doctorow coined the perfect word for the lifecycle of online platforms, from rapid growth to extractive death via Nelson Minar #
— the jankiest homebrew gore I’ve ever seen, courtesy of a twisted genius with an angle grinder, drill, and a whole lot of hot glue #
January 5, 2024
— after 350,757 coin tosses, partly livestreamed on Twitch by volunteers, the researcher found a slight bias toward the same side facing up #
— Belgian dancer Ed People travels the world recording people teaching him dance moves with charming results #
January 4, 2024
— Stanford researchers open-sourced a spendy robotics kit made with off-the-shelf parts that can perform complex tasks like cooking and cleaning #
— there’s a reason my logo is a Vectrex; it’s a weird and beautiful console, a commercial failure but wildly innovative via Kottke #
— Ivan Miranda’s four-part series is worth watching from the beginning as he iterates and improves the design #
January 2, 2024
— weirdly addictive, my high score is 2,689 #
— Matt Round’s latest is a deep multiuser simulation of a fictional Cold War-era computer network and hardware, currently £10.02 to join #
— don’t miss the video where he hits the kill screen after 38 minutes of play and nearly passes out #
— Simon Willison writes about using streaks in life and work, but they’re at their best when they leave room for iterative improvement #
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