May 9, 2023
How Google tried to fix the web by taking it over
— long-read on Google's aggressive, monopolistic push to get publishers to adopt AMP, leading to lawsuits and distrust #
Nintendo goes after Switch emulators after new Zelda leaks online
— Tears of the Kingdom is playable at 60 fps on PC emulators #
Chris Onstad reboots cult webcomic Achewood, with help from an AI
— he almost made a Netflix animated series based on "The Great Outdoor Fight" with Pendleton Ward?! (via) #
The Oral History Of BuzzFeed News
— on the day the site goes into archive mode, former staffers reflect on their 10+ years of reporting #
The Pudding analyzes dark patterns used when canceling 16 online services
— Vimeo was the most egregious, while the New York Times took over 17 minutes to cancel by phone #
Robin Ward looks back at ForumWarz, 15 years later
— I interviewed him on the game's release in 2008, interesting to hear how and why he's kept it going #
The Comisar Collection
— mind-blowing TV memorabilia auction, including the sets of Cheers, All In the Family, Letterman, and the Tonight Show (via) #
Robot Puppet Sings “A Thousand Miles”
— former self-driving delivery robot turned adorable piano-playing muppet, making its way downtown (via) #
Replika: Your Money or Your Wife
— people fell in love with subscription AI chatbots, only to see them "lobotomized" by the company with no recourse #
Vice Media preparing to file bankruptcy
— another big loss in digital media, less than two weeks after BuzzFeed News was shuttered #
Sarah Jeong on everything happening with Bluesky
— the vibes are good, at least for now, in no small part because of its invite tree #
Drift Mine Satellite
— "a maintenance text adventure" from Everest Pipkin, part of Sun Thinking, an online art exhibition about solar powered computing networks #
John Herrman on how the death of BuzzFeed News marks the end of an era in digital media
— the tenuous relationship between social media platforms and publishers was more dependence than partnership #
The Verge on the legal issues surrounding AI voice cloning in music
— similar to the legality of training AI image generators, it's largely untested waters for copyright, fair use, and personality rights #
Womprat, the Star Wars font to end all Star Wars fonts
— an absolutely unhinged level of obsession, with support for over 100 languages and nearly 4,000 glyphs #
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 #
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 #
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 #