How platforms turn boring
— Russell Brandom on the "Bootleg Ratio," the ratio of original to freebooted content #
OpenAI open-sources Whisper, a speech recognition and translation system
— this will be life-changing for many podcasters, journalists, and anyone else who needs transcription #
Making Minecraft in Minecraft
— runs at 0.1 fps using MCHPRS, which runs redstone 10-20,000x faster (via) #
Snap shuts down Zenly instead of selling it, fearing competition
— the social mapping app has 40 million monthly active users globally #
Return to Monkey Island is out now
— 13 years since the last game, and the return of series creators Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossman #
After 23 years in prison, Serial’s Adnan Syed freed after judge vacates murder conviction
— "the state no longer has confidence in the integrity of the conviction" #
Resurrecting “Ugly Sonic” with Stable Diffusion’s Textual Inversion
— Max Woolf doing the important work #
Simon Willison on GPT-3 prompt injection attacks
— the raid on the Remoteli bot was hilarious, demonstrating its potential for exploits #
Wikipedia Speedruns
— compete with others to get from one article to another in the shortest time using only article links #
Satanic panic is making a comeback, fueled by QAnon believers and GOP influencers
— previously: Aja Romano on the homophobic/transphobic "grooming" panic (via) #
Have I Been Trained?
— Holly Herndon and Mat Dryden are working on tools to help artists opt in or out of AI training data #
The Enduring Allure of Choose Your Own Adventure Books
— charming New Yorker profile of the series' legacy, barely touching on its recent litigation and takedowns (via) #
The Follower
— artist Dries Depoorter used AI on video from public webcams to figure out when geotagged Instagram photos were taken (via) #
Behind the scenes of Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared’s new TV series
— it was set to debut today but was delayed to late September because of the Queen's death #
Vulture profiles Kate Beaton on the release of her new graphic memoir
— her 900-page book explores her two years working at the Alberta oil sands, "the world's most destructive oil operation" #
Lexica, search 10M+ Stable Diffusion images and prompts
— now using CLIP embeddings for search, click any image to explore similar styles #
Lunar Lander playable in Windows file copy dialogs
— never be bored again while waiting for huge files to copy (via) #
The Humiliating History of the TSA
— part of The Verge's Homeland series on two decades of American life under the DHS (via) #
ProPublica exposes a million-dollar Instagram verification scheme exploiting music platforms
— the investigation was top-notch, but seeing the two scammers rat on each other is pure gold (via) #
Leonardo DiCaprio Refuses to Date a Woman Over 25
— updated for 2022, a very good chart made in Excel/Powerpoint #
Know Your Meme’s analysis of meme origins by platform from 2010-2022
— TikTok is now fully half of new memes tracked on the site #
Retrospective of Medium’s first ten years
— curious to see where it goes next under its new CEO, Tony Stubblebine (via) #
How Twitter’s child porn problem ruined its plans for an OnlyFans competitor
— scoop from Zoe Schiffer and Casey Newton; Elon Musk's buyout attempt shifted their focus to spam bots #
The Big [Censored] Theory
— Manyun Zou digs into Chinese censorship of the Big Bang Theory for The Pudding #
An Oral History of Tim Curry’s Escape to the One Place Uncorrupted by Capitalism
— among the interviewees, two NASA astronauts, an astrophysicist, and a former Greek Minister of Finance #
NYT profiles Michael Heizer’s “City”
— 50 years in the making, a massive 1.5 x 0.5 mile land art installation in the Nevada desert (via) #
Making an Internet Time Machine
— a Raspberry Pi-based plug-and-play box running Wayback Proxy to browse the old web on old computers #
New World Unlocked
— GLASYS drew pixel art frame-by-frame for the first single off his upcoming 8-bit album #
Stable Diffusion public release
— open-source text-to-image AI model that runs on your own GPU, similar quality as DALL-E 2 without content filters #
Profile of Stable Diffusion, the open-source text-to-image AI model without content filters and safeguards
— new Pandora's box just dropped #
John Deere tractors jailbroken at DefCon, allowing farmers to repair their own equipment
— and yes, this means you can play Doom on them #
How magicians made a fortune on Facebook
— the industry best suited to deceiving people for fun and profit; see Ryan Broderick's earlier reporting on Rick Lax and friends #
The Verge profiles Archive of Our Own for its 15th birthday
— interesting read on the origins of the fan-run fanfic community and its issues addressing racism #
The Biggest Deal in Climate History Almost Didn’t Happen
— Hank Green's excellent explainer on the details of the confusingly-named Inflation Reduction Act #
Life on the Internet
— charmingly naive 13-part TV series from 1996, captures footage of sites that predate the Internet Archive (via) #
Physically simulating an entire car engine for realistic audio
— it needs to run at 80,000 FPS to remain stable #
The Kubrick Times
— using GPT-3 and DALL-E 2 to make full articles for the future NYT headlines written in 1965 by Kubrick's team for 2001: A Space Odyssey #