Mad Magazine’s Al Jaffee, creator of the Fold-In, dies at 102 — from April 1964 to April 2013, only one issue of Mad was published without new material from the comics legend #

Last Squeak Tonight — John Oliver's web-only episode about the seedy underbelly of Chuck E. Cheese (via) #

Garbage Day on the rise of TikTok bait videos — satirical or not, it's staged content optimized to annoy people into engaging with it to game the algorithm #

Pentagon’s Ukraine war plans leaked on Minecraft Discord before Telegram and Twitter — related: classified military documents have repeatedly leaked on the War Thunder forums #

Big Tech’s big downgrade — Google, Meta, and Amazon are focused on chasing trends to appease Wall Street, while letting their core products wither #

The history of Easter eggs in software — the earliest known is an anti-war message in a text editor for the PDP-6, hidden in 1968 but only discovered in 2021 #

Restoring the original Wilhelm Scream recording session — audio preservationist Craig Smith had to bake the Ampex tapes in an oven to make them stable enough to transfer (via) #

“There was no up, there was no down, there was no side to side” — a little poem about the universe before the Big Bang; don't miss the remix #

Chasing rainbows — for The Verge, I wrote about my personal experience being colorblind and they did a beautiful job on the design #

Twitter cuts off Cheap Bots Done Quick, Substack, Feedbin, Thread Reader, and others from API — CBDQ was responsible for over 58,000 joyfully weird Twitter bots during its eight year run #

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) #