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 #

10 Typos — new daily game to spot typos in a news story every day as fast as possible (via) #

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) #

A Writer Used AI To Plagiarize Me. Now What? — expect to see a whole lot more of this #

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 #

RIP Jeff Beck — one of my all-time favorite musicians, I'm absolutely crushed #

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) #

omg.lol — surprising number of small but useful services for only $20/year, made by a single dev #

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) #

How human is your dog’s name? — "Andy is a mostly dog name" (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) #

picoSYNTH — modular synthesizer made in the PICO-8 fantasy console #

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" #