Hank Green has some good news
— Johnson & Johnson will allow generic versions of its life-saving TB drug in lower-income countries, and Hank's cancer is responding well to treatment #
Anil Dash on the radicalization of tech tycoons
— VCs and big tech CEOs are living together in a reactionary bubble, insulated from people who might call them out (via) #
Legal Lullabies
— it takes over 50 minutes to read the Instagram Terms of Use out loud, an extremely effective sleep aid (via) #
Super Aja 64
— my new jam is MIDI versions of Steely Dan's Aja, but with every instrument replaced by the Mario 64 soundfont #
The Free Movie
— MSCHF made a site to "crowd pirate" a hand-drawn frame-by-frame recreation of The Bee Movie #
Rest of World talks to outsourced workers forced to adopt generative AI to stay competitive
— they commissioned work made with and without AI from freelancers in Nigeria, Mexico, China, and the Philippines #
Windows Defender
— elegantly designed free browser game, like Vampire Survivors but a group of windows defending a desktop (via) #
Tiny Awards finalists announced, public voting open until July 20
— I helped narrow down the 300+ nominees to 16 charming websites representing the "small, playful and heartfelt web" #
Supreme Court’s ruling on online harassment outrages victims, advocates
— Taylor Lorenz reports on how "giving First Amendment protection to online abuse will make a growing problem worse" #
Jelani Cobb on the End of Affirmative Action
— though affirmative action for white college applicants still exists, in the form of legacy admits, children of donors, and other VIPs #
Same-sex marriage website request at center of just-decided Supreme Court discrimination case was fabricated
— Melissa Gira Grant talked to the man listed in the filings; he's straight, married to a woman, and designs his own websites (via) #
The Verge on who killed Google Reader, and what might have been
— I knew much of this history, but not how horribly Google execs treated the Reader team #
Reddit is forcing protesting moderators to reopen private subreddits
— I'm sure all those unpaid volunteers will take the news well #
After 15 years, pulsar timing yields evidence of cosmic gravitational wave background
— Hank Green posted a quick high-level overview of the five papers on TikTok #
How retro computer fans revived the NABU, an obscure ’80s Canadian PC and network service
— one man finally sold his horde of 2,200 machines for dirt cheap on eBay, held in storage for 33 years, inspiring a preservation effort #
AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born
— generative AI's capacity for consuming content and generating low-quality noise is forcing platforms to reconsider the open web #
Backstage Disneyland
— Cabel Sasser scanned his entire collection of rarely-seen newsletters for Disneyland employees, 28 issues from 1962-1980 #
Inside the AI Factory
— investigation into the distributed anonymous workforce getting paid to annotate training data and align AI models (via) #
Hank Green on your obligation to your former self
— a beautiful reflection on the words he said on stage at XOXO nearly ten years ago #
My Father’s Death in 7 Gigabytes
— Paul Ford archived all his father's writing and uploaded it to the Internet Archive in his memory #
Architectural Digest’s tour of the Barbie Dreamhouse set
— incredible craftsmanship and attention to detail #
A storefront for robots
— Mia Sato on how Google's failure to punish SEO tactics, instead promoting their low-quality garbage, has made the web immeasurably worse #
Max Read on MrBeast’s clickbait altruism
— feels like the YouTube version of The Ellen Show's charitable giveaways, totaling $450M over 19 years, all backed by sponsors #
Bad Waitress
— Becca Schuh writes about her experience being a writer in the food service industry #
Psynwav’s Musical Tangents
— new deranged mashup album from the creator of Slamilton: A Basketball Musical #
Byline
— new online magazine with a playful design from the creators of now-defunct hyperlocal NYC paper The Drunken Canal #
Jason Scott is scanning Computer Shopper
— help him out by donating missing issues, using the scans for research/analysis, and sharing the results #
b3ta’s Expand Art image challenge
— "help us to grab the AI by the Jackson Pollocks and expand classic works of art to show how it should be done" (via) #
Tiny Awards
— I'm a judge for this showcase of the small, playful, heartfelt web; nominations are open until June 14 #
Computers that live two seconds in the future
— it sounds like Apple created Ted Chiang's Predictor for the Vision Pro #
Day of the Devs Summer Game Fest 2023
— amazing showcase of upcoming indie games, personal highlights include Viewfinder, Summerhill, and Simpler Times #
The Origins of the Right’s War on Target
— Melissa Gira Grant on how extremist influencers invented an anti-LGBTQ moral panic turned terror campaign #
The Last Egg
— what happens when fresh food runs out for the season at a South Pole research station #
Supreme Court unexpectedly rejects racially gerrymandered maps
— a surprising 5-4 ruling reaffirming the Voting Rights Act for disenfranchised Black voters in Alabama (via) #
Apollo for Reddit is shutting down
— a growing list of over 3,100 subreddits is going dark on June 12 to protest the API changes (via) #
Mineplacer
— place all the mines in a Minesweeper game; this one's a brain melter, click the question mark for help (via) #
Redditor creates working anime QR codes using Stable Diffusion
— hard to believe these all scan, but they do #
New Yorker on the Ed Sheeran/Marvin Gaye “Let’s Get It On” copyright suit
— musicians are increasingly being sued over vibe infringement #
Fast Company on the rise, fall, and rebirth of Snopes
— co-founder David Mikkelson drove it off a cliff with a series of terrible managerial and ethical decisions #
Vision Pro is Apple’s new $3,499 AR headset
— a big bet on the fidelity of their passthrough cameras, trying to normalize wearing ski goggles around others with a front-facing display #