It Is Journalism’s Sacred Duty To Endanger The Lives Of As Many Trans People As Possible
— The Onion satirizes a damaging trend, exemplified by the NYT's ongoing transphobic coverage #
Squares in Squares
— trying to optimally pack squares into a square leads to some surprisingly deranged results (via) #
Bing’s ChatGPT-powered AI casually threatens early users
— someone at Microsoft forgot to add Asimov's Three Laws to the prompt #
Colin Meloy asked ChatGPT to write a Decemberists song, and then recorded it
— "For the record, this is a remarkably mediocre song. I wouldn’t say it’s a terrible song, though it really flirts with terribleness." #
Double Fine PsychOdyssey
— new documentary series follows seven years of Psychonauts 2 development, 6,000 hours of footage edited down to 32 episodes #
Shift Happens live on Kickstarter
— years in the making, Marcin Wichary's exhaustively-researched book about keyboards hit the goal in under two hours #
AI-generated Seinfeld banned from Twitch after transphobic standup
— less than a month after AI VTuber Neuro-Sama was banned for two weeks for denying the Holocaust #
Mastodon Flock, find your Twitter friends on Mastodon
— even better than Movetodon before Twitter revoked its API access (via) #
Katie Notopoulos interviews bot creators about the Twitter API closure
— the people behind @ca_dmv_bot, @oliviataters, @MakeItAQuote, @BigTechAlert, @_restaurant_bot, and more #
DONKS
— new animation from Felix Colgrave, "an exploration of ocean plastic, avatars and adaptive bottom feeders" (via) #
Twitter announces the end of free access to its APIs in one week
— this will kill every free bot, tool, and service built on its API, including my own Belong.io aggregator #
Platformer exclusive on Artifact, the personalized news feed from Instagram’s cofounders
— unfortunately it's only news articles from big publishers, so resembles a less personal version of Google News' For You #
Ars Technica’s overview on the state of generative AI
— a readable high-level primer on the foundational models that made recent breakthroughs possible #
broider
— Max Bittker made a tool for making 9-patch quilt-like borders in CSS using inline data URIs (via) #
Drayk It
— make an AI Drake write and perform a song about blogs, Scooby Doo, or anything else (via) #
Measuring the cultural weirdness of Avatar
— analyzing Avatar fanfic, memes, and lyric mentions to gauge whether it's a cultural outlier relative to other blockbusters #
Macroeconomic Changes Have Made It Impossible for Me to Want to Pay You
— "The fact is, if I wanted to pay you, I could. I could even give you raises. But once again, that is not the economic reality we face." #
jwz on Mozilla’s 25th anniversary
— Jamie reconstructed some early Mozilla websites not captured by Wayback (via) #
Tapbots releases Ivory, a polished Mastodon app for iOS
— if you can't swallow the subscription fee, Ice Cubes is free and open-source #
Inside the world of retail shoplifting
— professional fences profit from desperation and addiction, outsourcing theft to boosters for pennies on the dollar (via) #
TET
— a short free game about cooking Vietnamese food from Swiss-Vietnamese illustrator Charlotte Broccard #
Summer Afternoon
— charming short multiplayer WebGL experiment, try to find the five secrets (via) #
Copy Dennis
— a fed-up web designer publicly shames the people who cloned his distinctive portfolio site (via) #
U.S. airline accidentally exposes TSA No Fly List on unsecured server
— the discoverer blogged about how she used Shodan to find the exposed server, AWS credentials, and S3 buckets #
Inside CNET’s AI-powered SEO money machine
— the private equity firm who bought it in 2020 is racing to the bottom with automated content farming #
After 16 years, Twitterrific is discontinued
— killed by an unannounced and undocumented policy change from a company no developer should ever trust again #
The many ingenious ways people in prison use forbidden cell phones
— connecting with others, side hustles, exposing inhumane conditions, and taking Harvard's free online comp sci classes (via) #
Comparing ChatGPT to Claude, Anthropic’s new AI chatbot assistant
— I love that both models are just as confused about what happened on Lost's later seasons as I am #
Hampster Invaders
— Matt Round fused the Hampster Dance with Space Invaders, with the Cuban Boys' remix used by permission #
Waxy.org is now on Mastodon
— all links and posts are now automatically posted, just follow @[email protected] #
Getty Images suing Stable Diffusion for scraping their images
— separate from the class action lawsuit led by three artists announced a few days ago #
Inside the “extremely hardcore” first 90 days of Twitter under Elon Musk
— outstanding reporting covering a truly terrible acquisition; love the "Elon net worth-o-meter" #
The Garden of Blogs
— charming reimagining of an RSS reader as a little garden; Waxy is the eyeglasses #
Peasant’s Quest VGA
— celebrating Trogdor the Burninator's 20th birthday; the original game is playable again with Flash emulation #
KC Green on the 10th anniversary of his “This Is Fine” comic
— "When a work gets as big as this has, is it still yours?" (via) #
Building a meme search engine using a stack of old iPhones for OCR
— indexing 18 million memes with iOS's Vision API was cheaper than paid cloud OCR services #
Microsoft’s VALL-E can simulate anyone’s voice with three seconds of audio
— they aren't releasing the code because of the obvious potential for misuse, but the samples are wild #
The DIY Scientist, the Olympian, and the Mutated Gene
— remarkable 2016 article about a woman who self-diagnosed her rare genetic mutation and spotted it in others #