Tree Talk — scroll up to read this animated comic about two trees talking to each other (via) #

For once, the hurricane shark is real — after a decade of "street shark" hoaxes, the AP confirmed this one was real #

AudioGen — text-to-audio model, love the nonsensical speech #

Elon Musk’s text exchanges — so many sycophants #

Community movie is finally happening — the "six seasons and a movie" prophecy will be fulfilled #

Louie Zong’s “Business!”, an album of retro corporate music — commissioned by Brian David Gilbert for his "terrible guide to the terrible terminology of U.S. health insurance" #

Phenaki — another text-to-video model announced today that can handle long videos with multiple prompts, check out the two-minute example #

DreamFusion, text-to-3D using 2D diffusion — it's unbelievable how fast this area is moving #

NESOS — 48K OS for the NES featuring "two core applications, the word processor, and the settings" (via) #

Teenage Engineering’s PO-80 Record Factory — a recreation of Gakken's Toy Record Maker, make your own lo-fi 5" vinyl records #

Google is shutting down Stadia — predicted by virtually everyone since it launched, it'll close in mid-January #

Meta announces Make-A-Video, a text-to-video AI generator — like Google's Imagen, I expect an open-source model to come out before this is public #

The Guardian interviews one of the admins keeping Discworld MUD going — online for over 30 years, the community has created over 20,000 detailed rooms with 12 million lines of code #

Björk’s Sonic Symbolism podcast — she digs into one of her albums for each of the nine episodes #

Matt Mullenweg on the challenges of hosting adult content in 2022 — like Matt, I'd also love to understand why Twitter and Reddit are an exception to Apple's anti-porn policies #

Days Since Incident — 9,691,764 days since last Apocalyptic Volcanic Eruption (VEI 8) #

Folding Ideas on “passive income” con artist entrepreneurs — Dan Olson wrote a 25,000 word book in 25 days to fully understand how one ghostwritten audiobook grift worked #

Darth Vader’s Voice Emanated From War-Torn Ukraine — James Earl Jones signed over rights to Darth Vader's voice, replaced by AI from a Ukrainian startup #

webЯcade — impressive open-source web frontend for 20+ emulated game systems and support for custom feeds #

summarize.tech — surprisingly good GPT-3 powered summaries of long YouTube videos #

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 #