Drayk It — make an AI Drake write and perform a song about blogs, Scooby Doo, or anything else (via) #

Measuring the cultural weirdness of Avatar — analyzing Avatar fanfic, memes, and lyric mentions to gauge whether it's a cultural outlier relative to other blockbusters #

Macroeconomic Changes Have Made It Impossible for Me to Want to Pay You — "The fact is, if I wanted to pay you, I could. I could even give you raises. But once again, that is not the economic reality we face." #

jwz on Mozilla’s 25th anniversary — Jamie reconstructed some early Mozilla websites not captured by Wayback (via) #

Tapbots releases Ivory, a polished Mastodon app for iOS — if you can't swallow the subscription fee, Ice Cubes is free and open-source #

Wonders of Street View — explore weird and wonderful things on Google Street View #

Inside the world of retail shoplifting — professional fences profit from desperation and addiction, outsourcing theft to boosters for pennies on the dollar (via) #

TET — a short free game about cooking Vietnamese food from Swiss-Vietnamese illustrator Charlotte Broccard #

Summer Afternoon — charming short multiplayer WebGL experiment, try to find the five secrets (via) #

Copy Dennis — a fed-up web designer publicly shames the people who cloned his distinctive portfolio site (via) #

U.S. airline accidentally exposes TSA No Fly List on unsecured server — the discoverer blogged about how she used Shodan to find the exposed server, AWS credentials, and S3 buckets #

Inside CNET’s AI-powered SEO money machine — the private equity firm who bought it in 2020 is racing to the bottom with automated content farming #

After 16 years, Twitterrific is discontinued — killed by an unannounced and undocumented policy change from a company no developer should ever trust again #

1923 cartoon predicts AI art generators in 2023 — "Cartoon Dynamo (Pat. 2023)" #

The many ingenious ways people in prison use forbidden cell phones — connecting with others, side hustles, exposing inhumane conditions, and taking Harvard's free online comp sci classes (via) #

Comparing ChatGPT to Claude, Anthropic’s new AI chatbot assistant — I love that both models are just as confused about what happened on Lost's later seasons as I am #

Hampster Invaders — Matt Round fused the Hampster Dance with Space Invaders, with the Cuban Boys' remix used by permission #

Waxy.org is now on Mastodon — all links and posts are now automatically posted, just follow @[email protected] #

Getty Images suing Stable Diffusion for scraping their images — separate from the class action lawsuit led by three artists announced a few days ago #

Inside the “extremely hardcore” first 90 days of Twitter under Elon Musk — outstanding reporting covering a truly terrible acquisition; love the "Elon net worth-o-meter" #

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 #