Imagen Video
— impressive output, but I'm increasingly skeptical that Google will ever release any of this work #
New Yorker profiles the creator of NTP and its evolution
— deep dive into its transition from benevolent dictatorship to open-source consensus #
The Pandemic’s Legacy Is Already Clear
— Ed Yong is taking a six-month sabbatical because of burnout from pandemic reporting #
For once, the hurricane shark is real
— after a decade of "street shark" hoaxes, the AP confirmed this one was real #
Louie Zong’s “Business!”, an album of retro corporate music
— commissioned by Brian David Gilbert for his "terrible guide to the terrible terminology of U.S. health insurance" #
Teenage Engineering’s PO-80 Record Factory
— a recreation of Gakken's Toy Record Maker, make your own lo-fi 5" vinyl records #
Google is shutting down Stadia
— predicted by virtually everyone since it launched, it'll close in mid-January #
Meta announces Make-A-Video, a text-to-video AI generator
— like Google's Imagen, I expect an open-source model to come out before this is public #
The Guardian interviews one of the admins keeping Discworld MUD going
— online for over 30 years, the community has created over 20,000 detailed rooms with 12 million lines of code #
Matt Mullenweg on the challenges of hosting adult content in 2022
— like Matt, I'd also love to understand why Twitter and Reddit are an exception to Apple's anti-porn policies #
Folding Ideas on “passive income” con artist entrepreneurs
— Dan Olson wrote a 25,000 word book in 25 days to fully understand how one ghostwritten audiobook grift worked #
Darth Vader’s Voice Emanated From War-Torn Ukraine
— James Earl Jones signed over rights to Darth Vader's voice, replaced by AI from a Ukrainian startup #
webЯcade
— impressive open-source web frontend for 20+ emulated game systems and support for custom feeds #
How platforms turn boring
— Russell Brandom on the "Bootleg Ratio," the ratio of original to freebooted content #
OpenAI open-sources Whisper, a speech recognition and translation system
— this will be life-changing for many podcasters, journalists, and anyone else who needs transcription #
Making Minecraft in Minecraft
— runs at 0.1 fps using MCHPRS, which runs redstone 10-20,000x faster (via) #
Snap shuts down Zenly instead of selling it, fearing competition
— the social mapping app has 40 million monthly active users globally #
Return to Monkey Island is out now
— 13 years since the last game, and the return of series creators Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossman #
After 23 years in prison, Serial’s Adnan Syed freed after judge vacates murder conviction
— "the state no longer has confidence in the integrity of the conviction" #
Resurrecting “Ugly Sonic” with Stable Diffusion’s Textual Inversion
— Max Woolf doing the important work #
Simon Willison on GPT-3 prompt injection attacks
— the raid on the Remoteli bot was hilarious, demonstrating its potential for exploits #
Wikipedia Speedruns
— compete with others to get from one article to another in the shortest time using only article links #
Satanic panic is making a comeback, fueled by QAnon believers and GOP influencers
— previously: Aja Romano on the homophobic/transphobic "grooming" panic (via) #
Have I Been Trained?
— Holly Herndon and Mat Dryden are working on tools to help artists opt in or out of AI training data #
The Enduring Allure of Choose Your Own Adventure Books
— charming New Yorker profile of the series' legacy, barely touching on its recent litigation and takedowns (via) #
The Follower
— artist Dries Depoorter used AI on video from public webcams to figure out when geotagged Instagram photos were taken (via) #
Behind the scenes of Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared’s new TV series
— it was set to debut today but was delayed to late September because of the Queen's death #
Vulture profiles Kate Beaton on the release of her new graphic memoir
— her 900-page book explores her two years working at the Alberta oil sands, "the world's most destructive oil operation" #
Lexica, search 10M+ Stable Diffusion images and prompts
— now using CLIP embeddings for search, click any image to explore similar styles #
Lunar Lander playable in Windows file copy dialogs
— never be bored again while waiting for huge files to copy (via) #
The Humiliating History of the TSA
— part of The Verge's Homeland series on two decades of American life under the DHS (via) #
ProPublica exposes a million-dollar Instagram verification scheme exploiting music platforms
— the investigation was top-notch, but seeing the two scammers rat on each other is pure gold (via) #
Leonardo DiCaprio Refuses to Date a Woman Over 25
— updated for 2022, a very good chart made in Excel/Powerpoint #
Know Your Meme’s analysis of meme origins by platform from 2010-2022
— TikTok is now fully half of new memes tracked on the site #
Retrospective of Medium’s first ten years
— curious to see where it goes next under its new CEO, Tony Stubblebine (via) #