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 #

Tux and Fanny — finally played through this Instagram series-turned-videogame and it's brilliant #

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" #

BDG shutters Input Mag — huge bummer, Input was always doing something interesting (via) #

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) #

xkcd’s Rotation — after 25 screenshot rotations, the original image is smaller than an atom #

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 #

Kiwi Farms is effectively offline — good riddance #

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) #

C64 Theremin — Linus Åkesson's latest amazing instrument built with a 40-year-old computer #

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 #

’90s Cursor Effects — that clock takes me back (via) #

The Big [Censored] Theory — Manyun Zou digs into Chinese censorship of the Big Bang Theory for The Pudding #

Nutshell — Nicky Case made a charming little tool for making "expandable explanations" #

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 #

Simone Giertz made a bubble wrap music box — this thing was made to play Hot Butter's "Popcorn" #

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 #

Paint with Music — turn paint brushes into looping musical soundscapes (via) #

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) #

Timelooper — cooperate with your past selves in this browser game made in three days (via) #

Every Internet Video From 2003 — Alasdair Beckett-King revisits the Albino Blacksheep aesthetic #

Physically simulating an entire car engine for realistic audio — it needs to run at 80,000 FPS to remain stable #

Pass the Wine — Joseph's Machines made a Rube Goldberg machine with comic timing #

U1KE, a playable ukulele in 1KB of JS — use mouse to strum, keys to fret notes #

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 #