Max Woolf experiments with AI code generation with GPT-J
— "So can GPT-J write code to decide who lives and who dies in the robot uprising?" #
GPT-J, an open-source 6 billion parameter NLP AI model
— fast, free, and performs nearly as well as OpenAI's 6.7B GPT-3 model #
Instagram banning-as-a-service
— for $60, scammers will copy the target's profile info with a verified account and report them for impersonation (via) #
How the founder’s toxic culture tore apart Fullbright, the studio behind Gone Home
— at least 10 women quit in the last couple years, including co-founder Karla Zimonja #
Garbage Day interviews DashCon’s creator
— seems like a group of adults mismanaged the event and left a 17-year-old girl to deal with the fallout #
Hacked Facebook users buying Oculus headsets to try to get priority support
— Oculus has its own customer support, but this desperate attempt at restoring accounts has mixed results #
Alien Dreams
— an overview of the emerging art scene using AI to generate surreal imagery from text prompts (via) #
paint everything everywhere
— a brilliantly elegant PuzzleScript game by increpare and pancelor (via) #
First “time crystal” built using Google’s quantum computer
— the paper's completely incomprehensible to me, but it all sounds suitably sci-fi #
RP-FX, the Reese’s Puffs drum machine
— printed on the back of cereal boxes, make beats with cereal and an AR web app #
World Record Domino Robot
— I love how Mark Rober and friends perform remarkable feats of engineering for delightfully silly ends #
Highlights from Annapurna Interactive’s game showcase
— so many great games, I'm most excited for the Outer Wilds expansion, Stray, and Storyteller #
How furries are making VR actually worth visiting
— Coopertom is continually doing something great in VRChat #
Discord adds threads
— badly needed, but Slack's implementation feels far more frictionless and natural #
Natsukashii, a nostalgic tile drawing tool
— made for the TIC-80 fantasy computer; F6 to disable the CRT effect, K to corrupt (via) #
VICE talks to the Parkland shooting survivor whose QAnon dad thinks it was a hoax
— another family torn apart by the conspiracy cult #
Sun, Sand, and Spaghetti
— the Dominican tradition of empaguetadas, which I first learned about from Desus & Mero #
Space Invaders meets Kubernetes
— elaborate satirical project to emulate an 8088 microprocessor with cloud microservices at 1/2000ths its original speed #
Designing 2D graphics in the Japanese videogame industry
— deep dive into the tools used by Japanese game artists in the '80s and '90s #
Zeynep Tufekci on the U.S. dysfunction hindering response to the delta variant
— not just politicization and anti-vaccine sentiment, but slow FDA approval and confused CDC guidance #
Connoisseur CAPTCHA
— try to guess the difference between art priced under $25 and over $4,000 on eBay (via) #
Researchers show malware can be hidden in neural network models
— undetectable by current systems, the network continues to function normally with up to half of neurons affected #
Brewster Kahle on the Internet Archive turning 25
— "We may not have achieved Universal Access to All Knowledge yet, but we still can." #
The inevitable weaponization of app data is here
— a Substack newsletter outed a priest using location data tying him to Grindr and gay bars, leading to his resignation (via) #
Serial swatter who caused death of QWK packet creator gets five years in prison
— Jason Scott gives more context about Mark Herring's contributions to BBS history #
Metafilter goes deep on Bo Burnham’s Inside
— intensely-annotated post about every aspect of the "one-man/one-room pandemic comedy masterpiece" #
DeepMind releasing structures for almost every sequenced protein
— "today we’re sharing high-quality predictions for the shape of every single protein in the human body" #
Sonic Half-Remembered
— musician tries to recreate the Sonic the Hedgehog soundtrack from memory 30 years later (via) #
WSJ investigation into the TikTok algorithm
— good demo of how it can send you down extremely specific rabbit holes #
Coconut Kitty and the complexities of sex workers editing themselves to look underage
— critics allege Diana Deets is "pedobaiting," she says it's for privacy and a form of performance art #
Old Vidme embeds turn into porn after domain sale
— waiting for dead video sites like Viddler, LiveLeak, and blip.tv to meet the same fate #
Twitch streamers make millions promoting shady crypto gambling
— lucrative sponsorship deals from crypto casinos let them quietly play with free house money #
Ars Technica previews Playdate
— Engadget, The Verge, and Eurogamer also previewed the little handheld, with preorders opening next Thursday #
Tumblr lets writers offer paid subscriptions
— the Automattic-owned platform will take a 5% fee, half of Substack's fee #
The Jessica Simulation
— very mixed feelings about this story of a guy using Jason Rohrer's OpenAI chatbot project to simulate his dead fiancée #