Making a jigsaw puzzle solving robot in 15 months
— the technical details behind Mark Rober's latest video #
Weird Al’s Polkamania!
— Al teamed up with 12 different animators for a new polka medley of #1 hits from the 10 years since the release of his last album #
Christina’s Bliss
— using MS Paint for Windows XP, Cat Graffam mashed up the Bliss wallpaper with Andrew Wyeth's "Christina's World" #
Follow the Crypto
— Molly White's new project tracks crypto PAC spending on the 2024 elections; FairShake is the #2 most-funded super PAC #
Hackers steal text and call records of “nearly all” AT&T customers
— the data leaked from Snowflake includes every number their customers called/texted for six months in 2022 #
Exploring an old computer store that shuttered in 2001, frozen in time
— the tech time capsule sits in a strip mall in Norman, Oklahoma, stuck in legal battles after the owner went bankrupt #
MetaFilter owner Jessamyn West interviewed on the community’s evolution and moderation challenges
— it turns 25 (!) on Sunday with big changes in the works, including a full code rewrite and converting to a nonprofit (via) #
Priscila, Queen of the Rideshare Mafia
— fascinating story of a Brazilian woman who built a business renting fake gig economy accounts made with stolen identities out to undocumented workers (via) #
Internet Phone Book
— an open call for website submissions for "a physical printed directory for the vast poetic web" #
TUAW relaunched as zombie content farm with AI articles under the names of its old staff
— the new domain owners even generated AI photos for each author, despite not buying rights to any of the content #
Ironic Sans on StripWare, short-lived 1980s method of scanning code from paper
— the Cauzin Softstrip was like a giant CueCat, used for scanning in BASIC programs from books #
Ghost federates its first newsletter
— they also open-sourced their ActivityPub server built with Fedify #
shindigs’ thread of unique vtubers
— some people doing incredibly creative things on Twitch, from watercolor worlds to playing with CRTs #
Scalpers work with hackers to reverse-engineer Ticketmaster’s “non-transferable” tickets
— to defeat their 2FA-like revolving barcodes, the scalpers can now generate a valid token for any ticket #
Anna’s Archive faces millions in damages and a permanent injunction
— the shadow library is incredibly well-run, recently changing domains to stay out of U.S. jurisdiction #
Scientific American podcast on Cleo, the Mysterious Math Menace
— the anonymous math genius who haunted Math Stack Exchange with enigmatic answers before disappearing in 2015 (via) #
Lindsay Ellis on Yoko Ono and the Beatles
— Lindsay Ellis has been active on Nebula, but this is her first new video essay on YouTube in nearly three years #
Chappell Roan spent 7 years becoming an overnight success
— I wonder how the Atlantic Records rep that dropped her from the label after "Pink Pony Girl" feels about that decision now #
What should an electric car sound like?
— interesting Vox video on the sound design for the hidden speaker systems that replace engine sounds #
Kowloon Walled City cross-section illustration
— click/hover to read the English annotations for Terasawa Hitomi's stylized panoramic drawing from 1997 (via) #
Cloudflare launches one-click button to block known AI scrapers and crawlers
— they'll also try to block AI companies using spoofed user agents like Perplexity #
In defense of an old pixel
— tremendous Marcin Wichary talk on pixel fonts, complete with a new full-featured pixel font editor for the web #
Pikimov, free web-based motion design and video editor
— the lightweight 5MB After Effects alternative was built by a single dev and processes everything locally with no signups or cloud uploads #
Perplexity’s grand theft AI
— Elizabeth Lopatto doesn't hold back against AI search vampires trying to suck value out of the open web #
Examining Jane Appleseed’s emails from an Apple Store demo computer
— Apple is missing an opportunity to build an immersive ARG inside all the messages, photos, files, and apps #
One Million Checkboxes
— "checking a box checks it for everyone," like a one-bit version of Reddit Place #
Recreating Georg Nees’s “Schotter,” iconic generative art from 1968
— don't miss part two where Zellyn finds the artwork's original seed from a billion possibilities (via) #
Major record labels sue AI music generators Suno and Udio for mass copyright infringement
— this is a big case to watch, the largest group to try to set a precedent that training AI on copyrighted works for profit isn't fair use #
NYT Magazine profiles Trevor Rainbolt, professional GeoGuessr champion
— after memorizing the world from his desk, he started exploring it in late 2022, staying in a different country every month (via) #
How small claims court became Meta’s customer service hotline
— some are finding success recovering their hacked or disabled accounts in court, and in at least one case, financial damages (via) #
Chris Fenton made a 1/25-scale Cray Supercomputer wristwatch
— it displays a simulation of Jupiter and 63 of its moons; all his other projects are great, but especially the Electromechanical Lunar Lander (via) #
How will your city feel in the future?
— The Pudding explores the changing climate zones of 70 global cities over the next 50 years #
Fast Crimes at Lambda School
— Ben Sandofsky's long deep dive into the collapse of a predatory coding bootcamp and its narcissistic founder (via) #
500,000 books removed from the Internet Archive’s lending library after publisher lawsuit
— ebook licensing for libraries continues to be far too expensive and restrictive #
Ars Technica’s oral history of text games and interactive fiction
— interviews with Andrew Plotkin, Emily Short, Graham Nelson, Lizy Daly, Chris Klimas, and more #
Anil Dash on the “New Alt Media”
— a generation of writer-owned reader-funded indie publications emerging from the ashes of digital media brands #
FromSoft Word
— "The Dark Souls of word processors" deletes your document if you make a single typo (via) #
1,500 videos of someone quietly flipping through old magazines, cover to cover
— I didn't know this was a thing (via) #
Duran Duran’s Rio cover model identified 42 years later
— Patrick Nagel based his iconic 1980s illustrations on photos found in fashion magazines (via) #
Moondrop Isle
— nine authors each wrote sections of a sprawling interactive fiction game with a shared inventory between them (via) #
Probabilistic Tic-Tac-Toe
— Tic-Tac-Toe reimagined as a game of chance, with probabilities for different outcomes on each square (via) #
Louie Mantia on designing icons for dark mode
— interesting exploration of using color creatively for richer icons than just swapping in a black background #
Crying About My Cancer Comedy
— a behind-the-scenes of Hank Green's upcoming standup special, which will be the thing that finally gets me to sign up for Dropout on June 21 #