Twitter starts blocking links to many popular Mastodon instances — links in tweets, DMs, and profiles are all now blocked, and clicking links in existing tweets are blocked for being "unsafe" #

Twitter starts banning high-profile journalists with no explanation — reporters from NYT, WaPo, CNN, Mashable, and The Intercept, plus Aaron Rupar, Keith Olbermann, and the official Mastodon account #

Inside the world’s biggest tech bazaars — from Bengaluru to Tokyo, pictorial reporting on how eight major tech districts fared during the pandemic (via) #

Benj Edwards on ArtStation’s anti-AI artist revolt — the ArtStation homepage has looked like this for days #

Databots and Silverstein’s Fake Feelings — 26-hour, 1,000-song album of "AI emo" trained with permission on a post-hardcore emo band's discography #

The Luddite Club, a group of NYC teens opting out of smartphones and social media — “I still long to have no phone at all… My parents are so addicted. My mom got on Twitter, and I’ve seen it tear her apart.” #

The Doors of McMurdo Station — from the excellent Brr.fyi, a Bay Area IT contractor blogging about life in Antarctica #

Ghostwriter, a haunted AI-powered typewriter — hacking an Arduino and Raspberry Pi into a Brother AX-325 to make a typewriter that replies to you #

“Just Go to Work” — props to the foley artist on this (via) #

Apple orders Mythic Quest spinoff based on its bottle episodes — I loved "A Dark Quiet Death" more than the rest of the series, so excited to hear this #

Riffusion — open-source AI music generator powered by fine-tuning Stable Diffusion on spectrogram images (via) #

Life Universe — infinitely-recursive Game of Life (via) #

Web Yule Log — reminiscent of Yule Log 2.0, an annual project where artists animated a yule log for a looping website #

Nilay Patel interviews Matt Mullenweg on how the Tumblr acquisition is going — great conversation about ownership and moderation, contrasting Automattic's thoughtful approach vs. the Twitter garbage fire #

Genders.wtf — growing collection of absurd, but real, gender form fields #

Tumbleword — Jer Thorp's challenging new daily word game, built around a letter tumbling mechanic #

STRG.SNEK — outstanding free VVVVVV-esque game that controls like Snake (via) #

The history of Christmas kiddie monorail rides in U.S. department stores — Peter Dibble does a thorough deep dive into a quirky holiday tradition I've never heard of #

Benj Edward’s secret life as an 11-year-old BBS sysop — this feels like it's ripped from the pages of Incredible Doom #

Internet Archive Scholar — launched in 2021, a new-to-me project indexing 25 million research documents from the 18th century to today #

A year of new avenues — Robin Sloan pens a call to arms for online experimentation and invention in 2023 #

Animated timeline of most popular social networks from 2003-2022 — ballpark estimate of monthly active users over time #

Level, a clever one-screen puzzle game — the first day of this year's Confounding Calendar, an advent calendar of tiny puzzle games #

Polygon reviews Dwarf Fortress’ graphical update, out now — one of the most complex games ever made is more approachable, without sacrificing depth or difficulty #

Building a virtual machine inside ChatGPT — hallucinating fake virtual machines inside fake virtual machines on fictional internets #

Inventing a new language with ChatGPT — a progressively wild case study making a fictional language for slime people #

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s conversational AI model — free to play with, it can "answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests" #

mindmelt.party — "real-time hallucinatory music visualizer and networked culture explorer" from Nullsleep and friends (via) #

Vanity Fair interviews Billie Eilish for the sixth year — this will be her last annual video for a while, she plans to keep recording them but stagger the releases (via) #

Movetodon, find your Twitter friends on Mastodon — new tool with a streamlined UI; I'm [email protected], if you want to join me #

Why Japanese web design looks different from the rest of the world — don't miss Sabrina's accompanying article and resources #

The Barnacle Goose Experiment — Everest Pipkin's latest is an "abiogenesis body horror idle clicker" (via) #

Marine Beaufils’ videogame needlepoint — especially love the series inspired by The Sentinel (via) #

C64 2FA — who needs SMS? use a Commodore 64 for generating two-factor authentication codes (via) #

Stable Diffusion 2.0 released — trained from their new OpenCLIP encoder, with higher resolution, a 4x upscaler, and a new depth-guided img2img model #

Defunctland’s documentary on who wrote the Disney Channel theme — Kevin Perjurer solves a mystery with impeccable production values and a meditation on legacy #

Last.fm turns 20 — The Verge quoted my 2003 post about Audioscrobbler #

Meta made an AI that can win at Diplomacy — building extremely persuasive AIs that are more effective negotiators than humans, what could go wrong #

Taylor Lorenz interviews @Dril — a rare interview, showing his willingness to commit to the bit until the cleansing fire burns it all down #

Can AI generate the perfect Thanksgiving? — Priya Krishna makes GPT-3 generated recipes and it goes about as well as you'd expect (via) #

ooh! directory — Phil Gyford made a wonderful categorized directory of 852 (and growing!) active blogs #

A Letter Groove — another gorgeous NaNoGenMo entry from Liza Daly #

Interactive Fiction Competition 2022 winners announced — 70% of the top 20 are choice-based instead of parser-based, continuing the trend of the last few years (via) #

Corridor Crew on neural radiance fields and the future of 3D scanning for video — NeRFs are neural networks that can generate complex 3D scenes from 2D photos (via) #

Tim Molloy’s production stills for TV shows that never existed — profoundly weird generations made with Midjourney v4 #

Twitter employees resign en masse, refusing to sign Elon Musk’s “hardcore” pledge — 🫡 #

Floor796 — "an ever-expanding animation scene showing the life of the 796th floor of the huge space station" #

Ask My Book — Sahil Lavingia made an experiment where you talk to a vocalized AI of him about his book #

The Verge’s deep dive into the murky waters of copyright and fair use in AI — I talked to the reporter for this piece, which does a good job covering some of the complex questions around legality #

Bureau of Multiversal Arbitration — multiplayer Discord game tasking you with finding objects in the multiverse with an AI image generator #