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