Teachable Machine 2.0 launches — dead simple tool to train a machine learning model entirely in the browser

Mysterious text messages from Valentine’s Day were received late last night — upsetting texts from ex-partners, dead friends, and family members

State-of-the-art language processing with ten lines of TensorFlow 2.0 — Hugging Face's Transformers library had me generating text with GPT-2 on my laptop in about five minutes

Airbnb promises to verify all 7 million listings after VICE report exposes scam — a surprising response to Allie Conti's outstanding exposé

Uber’s self-driving car involved in fatal crash couldn’t detect pedestrians outside of crosswalks — reminder that the crime of "jaywalking" was invented by automakers

Rating every horse emoji — "Pasterns and fetlocks appear abnormal, suggest radiographs before purchase."

Drum machine in Excel — download it for Excel 2019/Office 365

Blot — incredibly minimalist file-based blog service, actively developed in public (via)

Light Commands — inject unauthorized voice commands into Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple voice assistants with lasers! (via)

Sephora Reviews that Mention Crying, Sobbing or Tears — a useful dataset from Connie Ye (via)

Reporter writes about getting fired by the Des Moines Register — cowardly behavior from the paper, withering under a firestorm of criticism fueled by bad-faith actors

Polygon’s 100 Favorite Videogames of 2010s — it's been a very good decade for games

Bijan Stephen profiles Hot Ones for The Verge — the chicken wing gimmick is silly but effective, Sean Evans is a remarkable interviewer, and I love every episode

VICE’s Allie Conti investigates an Airbnb scammer — lax verification enables large-scale hosts to exploit their platform

Blade Runner intro but it’s actually Los Angeles in November 2019

Kotaku’s Death Stranding review — the first reviews for Hideo Kojima's new game are dropping, and it looks both audacious and agonizing

Untitled Goose Costume — in a year of amazing goose costumes, Cabel's is tough to beat

Websocket Ouija Board — feel spirits move your cursor planchette from the great beyond! (via)

Hellvetica.ttf — for designers, a typeface scarier than Comic Sans and Papyrus (via)

Ugly Gerry — typeface made from gerrymandered districts

Chris Wetherell reflects on building the Retweet for Twitter — Chris previously started and ran Google Reader, a product sorely missed by everyone who used it (via)

Robin Sloan on the scale and feedback of social media platforms — interesting twigbunch on Rosegarden

Run Your Own Social — Darius Kazemi's guide to running a small social network for your friends; emphasis on "small"

User Inyerface — frustrating and funny interactive dark patterns (via)

Profile of 8chan creator, Frederick Brennan — he should have let it die instead of selling it to this asshole

Mike Davidson on Superhuman’s creepy email tracking — and more generally, about ethics in technology (via)

Using machine learning to find public domain Krazy Kat comics — novel use of AI to search newspaper archives with solid results

How The Shawshank Redemption Humanizes Prisoners — stunning video essay from Pop Culture Detective's Jonathan McIntosh on America's shifting perceptions of the prison-industrial complex

The Guardian’s Silicon Valley dictionary — sharply-written modern descendant of Devil's Dictionary 2.0 (via)

The New Yorker goes on the road with Mitski — great profile of a spectacular artist

First Look Media ends funding for The Nib, shuts down Topic — The Nib is going independent, and you can support it here

Flappy Royale — compete against 99 other birds; open-source, and free for web, iOS, and Android

How Lil Nas X used the meme ecosystem to make a #1 hit — even Taylor Swift can't top Old Town Road on the charts

Kickstarter turns 10 — with a retrospective and a bunch of easter eggs across the site

Neuhaus — participatory music video where visitors upload images that make up the world

GB Studio — a free visual game builder for making Game Boy games

Source code released for 45 Infocom games — critical gaming history including unreleased and unfinished prototypes; more context from Jason Scott (via)

Beto O’Rourke was in Cult of the Dead Cow — writing gems like this under the handle "Psychedelic Warlord"

The Christchurch attack was made to go viral — Charlie Warzel writing for the NYT

Spotify files antitrust complaint against Apple — they make a strong case

Baba Is You — the IGF-winning puzzle game is out today for PC/Mac/Switch, and it's stunning

Chart Party’s search for the saddest punt — somehow, against all odds, Jon Bois finds a way to make me interested in football

This Person Does Not Exist — reload for a new GAN-generated face; see also: This AirBNB Does Not Exist (via)

Endless Jeopardy — a new Twitter bot/game from Neil Cicierega

Netflix launches new podcast with Another Round’s Tracy Clayton — Strong Black Legends is an instant subscribe

Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company — remarkably unusual story of how Gumroad's founder turned a VC-funded startup into a "lifestyle" business (via)

Holly Wood’s mega-thread of anonymous dirty secrets in various professions — fascinating to see people spilling dirt about their respective industries (via)

Simone Giertz’ brain tumor is back — Burn Brian 2019

Guess the most expensive domain name — I'm disturbingly good at this (via)

Bird Scooters threatens Boing Boing over Cory Doctorow post — laughable legal claim, with a great response from the EFF