xkcd’s Machine, a community-contributed mega Rube Goldberg device
— a belated interactive April fools in the spirit of last year's brilliant Escape Speed game #
The wi-fi only works when it’s raining
— I love a good debugging story; this one's part of April Cools' Club, an open challenge to publish something unexpected on April 1 #
CARS
— Playables surprise-launched their followup to Plug & Play and KIDS, another delightfully weird monochrome art game #
Hidden Agenda, an effects pedal for your mouse and keyboard
— fun open-source hardware/software project imagines reverb, delay, tremolo, and distortion beyond the guitar (via) #
a proper cup of tea
— Terry Cavanagh made an interactive Downpour tutorial for making the perfect S Rank cuppa #
NYC’s AI chatbot tell businesses to break the law
— "Yes, you can take a cut of your worker's tips." #
American Prospect on how Boeing execs drove out longtime engineers for short-term profit
— centered around the whistleblower who died of apparent suicide before the last day of his deposition against the company #
8BitDo’s new C64-inspired mechanical keyboard
— I don't want or need a new keyboard, but haven't felt this targeted since LEGO's Atari 2600 set #
Two-thirds of NYT articles on anti-trans legislation quoted zero trans people, 18% contain misinformation
— Media Matters and GLAAD report the numbers behind the last 12 months of the Times' transphobic fearmongering #
Models All The Way Down
— Christo Buschek and Jer Thorp dig deeper into LAION-5B, the massive dataset used to train image generators like Stable Diffusion #
How Bellingcat geolocated fugitive U.S. militant Ammon Bundy to southern Utah
— if you're on the run and don't want to be found, maybe don't post videos of yourself on YouTube #
John Herrman investigates the origin of X’s pornbot reply spam deluge
— in short, black hat spammers are paid a commission every time a horny dude signs up for a Dutch "flirt site" with paid chat operators (via) #
404 Media adds full-text RSS feeds for subscribers
— more importantly, other publications on Ghost can now do the same thing #
Infinite Mac adds NeXT emulation
— making an important part of computer history easily accessible, go try out Tim Berners-Lee's original WorldWideWeb browser #
Dog Poo Golf
— Matt Round made a very silly browser game inspired by Wii Sports with the music to match; can you beat my score of 5? #
Google starts pushing AI-generated text above search results without an opt-in
— a truly terrible idea, but given their new head of Search led SGE's development, it's only getting worse from here #
Nilay Patel interviews Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on federation and the future of social media
— I agree with the general sentiment, but as much as I enjoy the current vibes of Bluesky, I think their future business prospects are grim #
Making a Macintosh Studio
— Scott Yu-Jan makes an iPad mini dock on a Mac Studio inspired by the original Macintosh (via) #
Online age verification laws are dragging us back to the dark ages of the internet
— as 404 Media points out here, they hurt sex workers while doing nothing to help minors but drive them to unregulated, unmoderated alternatives #
15 Note Poly Tempo Pendulum
— Canadian composer/percussionist Jérémie Carrier plays 15 different notes at 0.2 bpm differences to create hypnotic changing polyrhythms (via) #
In a twist ending, the final uncleared Super Mario Maker level revealed to be a tool-assisted run
— that means that Team 0%'s work is done, and the game is officially beaten #
Hank Green announces We’re Here, a weekly newsletter of “good and cool stuff from around the internet”
— sounds like my cup of tea and probably yours too #
PencilBooth
— interesting new independent app for "visual email newsletters" targeting artists, free up to 100 subscribers (via) #
The Brewintosh
— Kevin Noki 3D printed his own working full-size Macintosh, detailed in an extremely chill voiceless video (via) #
The Oral History of Pitchfork
— a good companion to Elizabeth Lopatto's piece about the life and death of Pitchfork in The Verge #
Threads rolls out one-way fediverse sharing
— nice to see, but I'll be shocked if this ever extends to account portability or access to the Threads social graph #
U.S. sues Apple for illegal monopoly over smartphones
— The Verge is pulling all the news and updates into a single stream #
The HTML Review 03
— third issue of the tremendously good experimental webzine, "an annual journal of literature made to exist on the web" #
Researching a bizarre 2000s sitcom with ChatGPT
— Ironic Sans' David Friedman has started making video essays, which are predictably great #
Is Mario Maker Beaten Yet?
— the servers shut down on April 8, and only two one level remains unbeaten after tens of thousands of attempts (via) #
Moses Supposes
— dancing couple Trevor Tordjman and Jordan Clark get drawn into a musical number from 1953's "Singin' in the Rain" #
Michael Tan plays a palindromic duet with himself
— shot in one take and exactly the same when played backwards (via) #
The Pudding analyzes how Rolling Stone’s Top 500 album list changed over two decades
— a third of the albums from 2003 didn't make the 2020 list, affected by popularity, streaming availability, and the voting pool #
Drawing for Nothing
— free fan-made e-book compiling art from cancelled/unfinished animated films, 470 pages and growing (via) #
After 28 years, UbuWeb is no longer active
— started in 1996, Kenneth Goldsmith's indescribably amazing archive of esoteric avant-garde media is now an archive "preserved for perpetuity" (via) #
New York Times files copyright takedowns against hundreds of Wordle clones
— aside from some App Store profiteering, all the remixes and variations complemented the original, but the NYT's lawyers just see them as a threat #
Why Line Chart Baselines Can Start at Non-Zero
— I wrote about this back in 2015 and it's still true today #
The Life and Death of the Bulbdial Clock
— Ironic Sans shows how publishing your ideas, even in half-baked form, can lead to surprising results #
Google is starting to squash more spam and AI in search results
— a long-overdue change, presumably in response to excellent reporting from The Verge, Wired, and 404 Media #
Inside the world of AI TikTok spammers
— low-effort content is taking revenue from real creators, pairing stolen YouTube clips with synthetic voices reading Reddit posts #
Dinosaurs Park
— masterful editing from the Bell Brothers, mashing up Jurassic Park, Dinosaurs, and Jay-Z #
Hank Green interviews Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge
— interesting conversation about online community, platforms, the fediverse, and "revolutionizing the media with blog posts" #
Behind F1’s Velvet Curtain
— Road & Track deleted this outstanding story by McMansion Hell's Kate Wagner shortly after publication, with no explanation (via) #