RIP Sockington
— at his peak, Jason Scott's adorable cat had over 1.5M Twitter followers and was in the top 100 most-followed accounts #
Anil Dash talks about his violent assault at a California coffee shop
— "Our institutions have no capability for responding to crisis with compassion." #
Doom running inside Doom II
— Doom for DOS exploit lets you run Doom and Heretic as animated textures (via) #
Replicating the styles of well-known portrait photographers with DALL-E 2
— this is going to end up in court some day soon and it's going to be wild #
Matt Levine breaks down Twitter’s Elon Musk lawsuit
— Twitter's now in the bizarre position of trying to force Musk to buy a company he's trying to destroy #
How the YouTube Creator Economy Works
— a good companion to Hank Green on the issues with the TikTok Creator Fund vs. YouTube revenue sharing #
Spotify buys Heardle daily music game
— they already switched from SoundCloud to Spotify in several countries #
After 10 years, Ev Williams steps down from CEO role at Medium
— he'll remain chairman, Tony Stubblebine is taking over #
Ed Yong on BA.5
— what we know and don't yet know about transmissibility, immune evasion, and long-term effects from the latest surge #
Pokemon-inspired cellular automaton battle
— more interesting and beautiful experiments in the replies #
Ravel
— Everest Pipkin's simple no-code tool for making unfolding stories like Soft Corruptor without logic #
NYT profiles competitive GeoGuessr players
— don't miss @georainbolt's intense Google Maps mastery (via) #
Midjourney temporarily opens for beta access
— a surreal text-to-image model run entirely in Discord channels #
James Webb Space Telescope delivers deepest infrared image of universe yet
— thousands of galaxies in one image, more images coming tomorrow morning #
Lyrical Garfield
— Twitter bot that detects Garfield dialogue and replaces it with song lyrics (via) #
The Uber Files, massive exposé from 124,000 leaked internal documents
— a lobbyist turned whistleblower reveals how they exploited drivers, pressured politicians, and used covert tech to thwart government raids #
The Atlantic launches digital archive
— 165 years of journalism from 1857 to today, with features on 25 writers that shaped the publication #
After losing his taste and smell to covid, Hank Green tries foods he hates
— pickles, black licorice, blue cheese, anchovies, and lots of olives #
FCC orders carriers to stop delivering auto warranty robocalls
— one group of scammers is responsible for more than 8 billion calls since 2018 #
Elon Musk officially tries to bail on Twitter deal
— Twitter has every right to sue him into the ground #
Absurd Trolley Problems
— see how you compare to 750k others in Neal Agarwal's series of increasingly-absurd ethical dilemmas #
Netflix Doesn’t Want to Hear It Anymore
— Zoe Schiffer digs into Netflix's internal cultural shift away from open feedback #
Ryan Broderick on schizoposting and the Highland Park shooter
— related: Odette Yousef on nihilistic online subcultures that embrace mass shooter aesthetics #
How Primitive Building Videos Are Staged
— the success of Primitive Technology spawned dozens of over-the-top knockoffs based in SE Asia; related: footage of abandoned sites and Coconuts' 2019 exposé #
The modifiers vs. the keepers
— another charming Marcin Wichary post about an obscure footnote in keyboard history #
How a fake job offer led to Axie Infinity’s $540M crypto heist
— multiple rounds of phony interviews helped convince a senior engineer to open a malware PDF with the fake compensation package (via) #
Making a virtual retro PC in Godot that plays Sierra games
— related: Robin Ward's deep-dive into Sierra graphics and attempts to upscale them #
Book Exploder
— Song Exploder expands to literature on August 3 with host Susan Orlean interviewing authors about their work #
The Terror of Everything Everywhere All At Once
— Thomas Flight ties the film to hypermodernity, Bo Burnham's Inside, and the feeling of being extremely online #
An oral history of Contact on its 25th anniversary
— in development hell for 20 years, it's sort of amazing it was ever made #
cohost
— intriguing new microblogging service with flexible formatting; see Everest Pipkin's Twine-esque editor #
Jia Tolentino on the death of Roe
— "we are entering an era not just of unsafe abortions but of the widespread criminalization of pregnancy" #
Where to Send Your Money (That Isn’t Planned Parenthood)
— you can make a big impact giving to local abortion funds and other support groups #
Liberal justices deliver blistering joint dissent on Roe
— "From the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of." #