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 #
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) #
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 #
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) #
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) #
Event series Pop-Up Magazine calls it quits
— they cite the pandemic, but also went through a painful acquisition breakup in 2020 #
Joni Mitchell’s full catalog is now on YouTube
— her six-album run from 1970-1976 is basically flawless (via) #
The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI
— easily capable of outposting every human on earth, ChatGPT and LLMs like it will flood the web with a neverending tsunami of SEO bullshit #
LOL Verifier
— Brian Moore made a device that only lets you type "lol" if you're actually laughing #
Shift Happens
— excellent site promoting Marcin Wichary's upcoming book about keyboards; don't miss the interactive 3D view at the top #
The Strangest Computer Manual Ever Written
— the only manual that references The Dukes of Hazzard, meatloaf, and the territorial imperatives of trumpeter swans #
Why Not Mars
— Maciej Ceglowski returns from hiatus with the first in a series on why sending humans to Mars is a bad idea #
Tom Scott debunks an urban legend about 18th century firefighters letting buildings burn
— he hired a historical researcher to uncover the real history of a subject he covered in 2021 #
As of today, copyrighted works from 1927 enter the U.S. public domain
— Sherlock Holmes, Metropolis, The Jazz Singer, Puttin’ on the Ritz, My Blue Heaven, and so much more #
Draw SVG rope with Javascript
— even if I never implement it, I love interactive explainers like these that explain how something's made (via) #
The Professional
— ridiculous pay-what-you-like game for Windows/Mac/Linux that's like QWOP attempting a jewelry heist #
Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things
— Catherynne M. Valente penned a barnburner about the cycle of value extraction and destruction of popular online social platforms #
Ars Technica on Mastodon, ActivityPub, and the pros and cons of open decentralized social networking
— "the dreams of the 90s are alive in the Fediverse" #
Recreating Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son” in Mario Paint
— fascinating and funny process video from the very talented Cat Graffam #
Ted Gioia on Barnes & Noble’s surprising turnaround
— he attributes it to the new CEO's decision to drop paid placement deals and give more control to the stores #
Erik Grankvist spent three years alone building a log cabin
— a wordless, serene 90-minute compilation of going off the grid in a Swedish forest, reminiscent of Primitive Technology's videos (via) #
Tom7’s PAC·TOM Project
— very entertaining video documenting a 16-year-long project to run the length of every street in Pittsburgh, over 3,600 miles #
Where are the pirated movie screeners this year?
— no screeners have leaked this awards season, unconfirmed rumors of a pirate group bust are swirling #
The LastPass disclosure of leaked password vaults is being torn apart by security experts
— The Verge rounds up reactions to their deceptive statement, including one from 1Password's security architect #
Reverse engineering the prompts for every Notion AI feature
— entertaining post explaining creative techniques for getting GPT-3 to leak its source prompts (via) #
Mastodon founder rejected multiple six-figure investment offers to preserve nonprofit status
— building on decentralized protocols makes the network more resilient than any centralized platform #
Atlas of Blobs
— Zach Lieberman asked ten writers, artists, and researchers to pick one of his blob forms, then give it a name and describe it (via) #
The Originals
— wonderful animated short where five old friends recount life growing up in Brooklyn in the 1970s #
NYT on Steamboat Willie entering the public domain in 2024
— the early version of Mickey Mouse will be theoretically free for reuse, but still trademarked and actively policed by Disney (via) #
Why The Super Rich Are Inevitable
— The Pudding's visual explanation of how our current economic policies inevitably created massive income inequality (via) #
Jealousy List 2022
— the stories that Businessweek writers wished they'd written, a roundup of some of the year's best journalism #
Productivity Blocker
— instead of blocking online distractions, this Chrome add-on only blocks websites that help you get work done (via) #
Tom Lehrer releases discography into public domain
— he donated all his lyrics/music in 2020, but at age 94, just added all recording/performing rights (via) #
Jacked directly into the feed
— "Twitter is currently doing to one man’s psyche what it has done to countless societies around the world" #