Katie Notopoulos interviews bot creators about the Twitter API closure — the people behind @ca_dmv_bot, @oliviataters, @MakeItAQuote, @BigTechAlert, @_restaurant_bot, and more #

CatGPT — an AI chatbot that won't confidently lie to you #

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 #

Nothing, Forever, an endless livestreamed AI-generated episode of Seinfeld — Motherboard interviewed the creator #

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) #

Using Kid Pix to Recreate Caravaggio’s “Judith Beheading Holofornes” — Cat Graffam's followup to recreating "Saturn Devouring His Son" in Mario Paint #

MusicLM — new AI model from Google Research generates music from text prompts, like "accordion death metal" (via) #

Chronophoto, guess the year photos were taken — my best score is 3,164 4,009 (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 #

Wonders of Street View — explore weird and wonderful things on Google Street View #

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 #

1923 cartoon predicts AI art generators in 2023 — "Cartoon Dynamo (Pat. 2023)" #

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 #

10 Typos — new daily game to spot typos in a news story every day as fast as possible (via) #

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) #

A Writer Used AI To Plagiarize Me. Now What? — expect to see a whole lot more of this #

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 #

RIP Jeff Beck — one of my all-time favorite musicians, I'm absolutely crushed #

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 #

Identity thieves bypassed Experian security with simple URL change — it's patched now, but unclear how long the dead-simple security lapse existed (via) #

Merry Sky — with Dark Sky shuttered, here's a clean alternative built on Pirate Weather, a free and open compatible API #

Killings by U.S. police reach record high in 2022 — "Black people were 24% of those killed last year, while making up only 13% of the population" (via) #

omg.lol — surprising number of small but useful services for only $20/year, made by a single dev #

Jean-Michel Jarre’s “Oxygene Pt. 4” in 19kb of JS code — made with Dittytoy, a simple Javascript API for making generative music online #

Inspired by Office Space, software engineer embezzled more than $300k in Stripe transactions — sadly, his "OfficeSpace project" didn't try to transfer rounded down fractions of a penny #

ChatGPT in Dr. Sbaitso — Bert Fan upgraded Creative Labs' classic 1991 speech synthesis chatbot that shipped with Sound Blaster cards #

Amateur archaeologist helps crack Ice Age cave art code — a London furniture conservator suggested dots, lines, and symbols denote lunar months for tracking animal life cycles, making it the earliest writing in human history #

VICE on Neuro-Sama, a VTuber controlled entirely by AI — a large language model with text-to-speech output interacts with users in chat, while a separate AI plays games like Minecraft and osu (via) #

leaving.live — website that tells you how many people are also looking at it, when they leave, and that's it (via) #