Dan Gillmor on why (and how) journalists should leave Twitter for Mastodon — Elon Musk despises journalists, as his recent targeting of the NYT and NPR demonstrates, but the inertia is real #

ChatGPT invented a sexual harassment lawsuit about a real law professor — the tendency for LLMs to generate fake facts, and fake sources to back it up, can have devastating real-world consequences #

Clarence Thomas secretly accepted luxury trips from major GOP donor — ProPublica exposes his clear violations of disclosure laws, but Supreme Court justices can only be removed by impeachment #

Feedly launches strikebreaking as a service — sad to learn the RSS reader that I happily paid for since 2013 decided to pivot to shameful enterprise surveillance tools #

AI and the American Smile — "AI dominated by American-influenced image sources is producing a new visual monoculture of facial expressions" #

the html review, issue 02 — "an annual journal of literature made to exist on the web," my personal fave is Grid World #

bbs.bert.org — Bert Fan made a lovely web-based BBS to play Legend of the Red Dragon; desktop browser recommended (via) #

Copyright lawsuits pose a serious threat to generative AI — for his new newsletter, Timothy B. Lee wrote a great overview of the complex fair use questions at the heart of the Stable Diffusion lawsuits (via) #

Ice Ice Matrix — Auralnauts started messing around with deepfake voices and lip syncing #

Interactive explainer of the physics of a bicycle — Bartosz Ciechanowski has made a bunch of these interactive essays, and they're all great #

Jesse Thorn converts Maximum Fun podcast network into an employee-owned co-op — rather than seek an acquirer, he worked with Project Equity, which helps companies move to employee ownership #

The TikTok ban is a betrayal of the open internet — this should be addressed with consumer data privacy legislation, not a Great Firewall of America #

The Future is a Dead Mall — Dan Olson takes on Decentraland and the amorphous "metaverse," the natural followup to his prescient video essay on the NFT bubble #

MSCHF’s Tax Heaven 3000, the dating sim that does your taxes — I trust MSCHF more than Intuit, a predatory company that tricks customers with dark patterns and lobbies to stop improvements #

Recreating Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawings with GPT-4 — artist Amy Goodchild compares its generated output to earlier versions made with GPT-3 #

Microsoft laid off one of its responsible AI teams — as competition heats up, I suspect more companies will treat ethics as disposable #

The Secret of Joe Biden’s Empty Picture Frame — one of my favorite blogs, Ironic Sans, is now a video series! #

OpenAI announces GPT-4 — all the visual input examples are wild, it scores 90% on the Bar Exam compared to 10% for GPT-3.5 with less hallucination #

Kottke.org turns 25 — I'm wearing my official Kottke.org t-shirt to celebrate #

Chuck E. Cheese still uses floppy disks for distributing shows — related: Why the Floppy Disk Just Won’t Die #

How long does Twitter have left? — whether it's months or years, the only safe bet is that he'll blame its failure on someone else #

Weezer’s Blue Album but it’s me and my friend trying to sing everything from memory (via) #

Writeout, free audio transcription and translation — powered by the free and excellent Whisper speech-recognition model, but this is much faster for me than running it locally #

Gourdlets — charming free city-building sandbox (via) #

Geolocating a Vine-famous road in 15 minutes — the Geoguessr god walks through his process (via) #

Val Town — write snippets of JS that runs on their servers; Simon says it reminds him of "Yahoo! Pipes but with a code-first interface" (via) #

Rotating Sandwiches — best of the web, right here (via) #

yeah yeah yeah — another gem from There I Ruined It #

Lander — perfect little browser-based Lunar Lander clone, add flips for a higher score or try getting the most spectacular crash (via) #

“Shift Happens” Typewriter Simulator — Marcin Wichary added tons of tips, tricks, and hidden options in the sidebar (via) #

Grands Canons d’Alain Biet — hypnotic animation of hand-painted everyday objects #

Cloud Nine: A Game of Wonderful Things — Ami's new game is funding on Kickstarter, completely charming, and really close to hitting the goal #

Dark Side of the Moon turns 50 today — an irreverent look back at the album's legacy from The Ringer #

Parker Molloy on the 4chan campaign tied to Scott Adams’ racist rant — embracing ambiguity can be an effective tactic for spreading propaganda with plausible deniability #

tldraw — instantly syncing collaborative whiteboard/drawing app with no logins #

Godot 4 released — over three years in the making, the list of improvements to the free 2D/3D game engine is intense #

OpenAI adds ChatGPT and Whisper APIs — the ChatGPT API is 10x cheaper than their existing GPT-3.5 models, and Whisper's audio transcription/translation costs $0.36/hour #

The cursed universes of Dana Sibera — Marcin Wichary rounds up some of @nanoraptor's parallel-world computer and keyboard renderings (via) #

Recreating ANSI Art from a screenshot — loading the image into a canvas and iterating through every background color, foreground color, and character to find the right combo #

The Case for Shunning — "Speak bravely. Own what you say. Prepare to be understood." (via) #

A 24/7 Twitch stream of AI-generated deepfake celebrities is even weirder than it seems — it's made by volunteer members of a crypto-shilling singularity cult in a German commune, run by a streamer accused of emotional abuse #

The Courtyard — Cabel Sasser shines a light on a neighborhood artist's quiet handiwork #

The Confessions of Marcus Hutchins, the Hacker Who Saved the Internet — Wired interviews the security researcher who, at age 22, found and activated a kill switch in the WannaCry ransomware attack before being arrested by the FBI (via) #

On the internet, nobody knows you’re a human — the rise of machine-generated content is also increasing suspicion that human creators are actually AI #

After a decade tracking politicians’ deleted tweets, Politwoops is no more — "the platform has disabled the function we used to track deletions and the new method that Twitter says should identify them appears to be broken" #

Reactions to the Face Age filter on TikTok — related: The Atlantic on why adults over 40 typically feel 20% younger than they really are #

Everything Everywhere All at Once props auctioned for charity — hot dog hands (and gloves), Auditor of the Month trophy, Raccacoonie, Waymond's chapstick, and much more #

Scribble Diffusion turns scribbles into detailed images — made with ControlNet, a powerful new technique for controlling diffusion models #

The Morioka Experience — Craig Mod returns to the mid-sized Japanese city after his nomination led to the NYT placing it #2 on their 52 Places to Go list #

The mystery of the cancelled Twin Peaks NES game, solved 30 years later — I've wondered about this for years, amazing that they were looking to Maniac Mansion for inspiration #