Eternal Wanderer — a bot generating videos from old websites and media files in the Wayback Machine, favoring pages with animations and sound (via) #

Blue skies over Mastodon — Erin Kissane on the recent rise of Bluesky and Mastodon's cultural resistance to criticism of its obvious pain points (via) #

The Pudding’s Map of Places with the Same Name — they made an interactive explainer breaking down the ranking factors they used #

Four-Byte Burger — Ahoy's Stuart Brown painstakingly recreates a piece of 1985 pixel art from a printed photo of an Amiga screen #

Employees begged Google not to launch Bard AI — a "pathological liar" that's "worse than useless" #

xkcd’s Escape Speed — a charming space exploration game that's much deeper than it appears #

Imgur is banning porn and purging old anonymous uploads on May 15 — the default image host for Reddit's early years, this will damage the archives like the yfrog/tinypic shutdowns did to Twitter #

Buzzfeed News is shutting down, laying off 15% of staff — this is a big loss, they did some amazing journalism in an unlikely place #

WaPo analysis of websites in Google’s C4 dataset, used by several LLMs — a massive swath of the web derived from Common Crawl data, including my own site, ranked 169,716th (via) #

This Mom Didn’t Know She Was In A $250K Candy Crush Tournament, But She’s Killing It — the 48-year-old Columbus, Ohio mother of three is "one of the most successful esports athletes in the entire country" #

AI Drake just set an impossible legal trap for Google — must-read Nilay Patel post about the copyright conflict between Google's AI efforts and YouTube's relationships with publishers #

Where In the USA Is This? — guess the spot where five different photos were taken in The Pudding's new daily guessing game (via) #

The Internet Is Suddenly Full Of AI-Generated Hip-Hop — Chris Stokel-Walker on so-vits-svc, the singing voice conversion AI model behind Ghostwriter, the "lost" Oasis album, and many more #

Space Elevator — another delightful long scrolling single-serving site from Neal.fun #

Aaron A. Reed on The Gostak — a fascinating 2001 interactive fiction game where you slowly learn an invented language #

Ghostwriter’s AI-voiced Drake/The Weeknd song is going viral — hiding their identity is a good idea, makes it harder for labels to serve the subpoena #

Montana House votes to completely ban TikTok in the state — the first U.S. state to pass legislation banning TikTok on all personal devices #

Doogie Typer — like Hacker Typer, but for Doogie Howser's journal entries; don't miss the settings (via) #

Substack CEO Chris Best Doesn’t Realize He’s Just Become The Nazi Bar — "When you’re a private centralized company and you don’t deal with hateful content on your site, you’re the Nazi bar." #

Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500,000 group chat messages — fine-tuning LLaMa's privacy-friendly uncensored model on messages stored in iMessage's SQLite db (via) #

The Ringer interviews Paul Dochney, the Los Angeles writer behind Twitter legend Dril — his first interview not in character #

Mad Magazine’s Al Jaffee, creator of the Fold-In, dies at 102 — from April 1964 to April 2013, only one issue of Mad was published without new material from the comics legend #

Last Squeak Tonight — John Oliver's web-only episode about the seedy underbelly of Chuck E. Cheese (via) #

Garbage Day on the rise of TikTok bait videos — satirical or not, it's staged content optimized to annoy people into engaging with it to game the algorithm #

Pentagon’s Ukraine war plans leaked on Minecraft Discord before Telegram and Twitter — related: classified military documents have repeatedly leaked on the War Thunder forums #

Big Tech’s big downgrade — Google, Meta, and Amazon are focused on chasing trends to appease Wall Street, while letting their core products wither #

The history of Easter eggs in software — the earliest known is an anti-war message in a text editor for the PDP-6, hidden in 1968 but only discovered in 2021 #

Restoring the original Wilhelm Scream recording session — audio preservationist Craig Smith had to bake the Ampex tapes in an oven to make them stable enough to transfer (via) #

“There was no up, there was no down, there was no side to side” — a little poem about the universe before the Big Bang; don't miss the remix #

Chasing rainbows — for The Verge, I wrote about my personal experience being colorblind and they did a beautiful job on the design #

Twitter cuts off Cheap Bots Done Quick, Substack, Feedbin, Thread Reader, and others from API — CBDQ was responsible for over 58,000 joyfully weird Twitter bots during its eight year run #

Dan Gillmor on why (and how) journalists should leave Twitter for Mastodon — Elon Musk despises journalists, as his recent targeting of the NYT and NPR demonstrates, but the inertia is real #

ChatGPT invented a sexual harassment lawsuit about a real law professor — the tendency for LLMs to generate fake facts, and fake sources to back it up, can have devastating real-world consequences #

Clarence Thomas secretly accepted luxury trips from major GOP donor — ProPublica exposes his clear violations of disclosure laws, but Supreme Court justices can only be removed by impeachment #

Feedly launches strikebreaking as a service — sad to learn the RSS reader that I happily paid for since 2013 decided to pivot to shameful enterprise surveillance tools #

AI and the American Smile — "AI dominated by American-influenced image sources is producing a new visual monoculture of facial expressions" #

the html review, issue 02 — "an annual journal of literature made to exist on the web," my personal fave is Grid World #

bbs.bert.org — Bert Fan made a lovely web-based BBS to play Legend of the Red Dragon; desktop browser recommended (via) #

Copyright lawsuits pose a serious threat to generative AI — for his new newsletter, Timothy B. Lee wrote a great overview of the complex fair use questions at the heart of the Stable Diffusion lawsuits (via) #

Ice Ice Matrix — Auralnauts started messing around with deepfake voices and lip syncing #

Interactive explainer of the physics of a bicycle — Bartosz Ciechanowski has made a bunch of these interactive essays, and they're all great #

Jesse Thorn converts Maximum Fun podcast network into an employee-owned co-op — rather than seek an acquirer, he worked with Project Equity, which helps companies move to employee ownership #

The TikTok ban is a betrayal of the open internet — this should be addressed with consumer data privacy legislation, not a Great Firewall of America #

The Future is a Dead Mall — Dan Olson takes on Decentraland and the amorphous "metaverse," the natural followup to his prescient video essay on the NFT bubble #

MSCHF’s Tax Heaven 3000, the dating sim that does your taxes — I trust MSCHF more than Intuit, a predatory company that tricks customers with dark patterns and lobbies to stop improvements #

Recreating Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawings with GPT-4 — artist Amy Goodchild compares its generated output to earlier versions made with GPT-3 #

Microsoft laid off one of its responsible AI teams — as competition heats up, I suspect more companies will treat ethics as disposable #

The Secret of Joe Biden’s Empty Picture Frame — one of my favorite blogs, Ironic Sans, is now a video series! #

OpenAI announces GPT-4 — all the visual input examples are wild, it scores 90% on the Bar Exam compared to 10% for GPT-3.5 with less hallucination #

Kottke.org turns 25 — I'm wearing my official Kottke.org t-shirt to celebrate #