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April 10, 2023
— John Oliver’s web-only episode about the seedy underbelly of Chuck E. Cheese via MetaFilter #
— satirical or not, it’s staged content optimized to annoy people into engaging with it to game the algorithm #
— related: classified military documents have repeatedly leaked on the War Thunder forums #
— Google, Meta, and Amazon are focused on chasing trends to appease Wall Street, while letting their core products wither #
April 8, 2023
— the earliest known is an anti-war message in a text editor for the PDP-6, hidden in 1968 but only discovered in 2021 #
— audio preservationist Craig Smith had to bake the Ampex tapes in an oven to make them stable enough to transfer via @wildtrax1 #
April 7, 2023
— a little poem about the universe before the Big Bang; don’t miss the remix #
— for The Verge, I wrote about my personal experience being colorblind and they did a beautiful job on the design #
April 6, 2023
— CBDQ was responsible for over 58,000 joyfully weird Twitter bots during its eight year run #
— Elon Musk despises journalists, as his recent targeting of the NYT and NPR demonstrates, but the inertia is real #
— the tendency for LLMs to generate fake facts, and fake sources to back it up, can have devastating real-world consequences #
— ProPublica exposes his clear violations of disclosure laws, but Supreme Court justices can only be removed by impeachment #
April 4, 2023
— sad to learn the RSS reader that I happily paid for since 2013 decided to pivot to shameful enterprise surveillance tools #
April 3, 2023
— “AI dominated by American-influenced image sources is producing a new visual monoculture of facial expressions” #
— “an annual journal of literature made to exist on the web,” my personal fave is Grid World #
— Bert Fan made a lovely web-based BBS to play Legend of the Red Dragon; desktop browser recommended via @bert #
— for his new newsletter, Timothy B. Lee wrote a great overview of the complex fair use questions at the heart of the Stable Diffusion lawsuits via Simon Willison #
March 30, 2023
— Auralnauts started messing around with deepfake voices and lip syncing #
March 28, 2023
— Bartosz Ciechanowski has made a bunch of these interactive essays, and they’re all great #
March 27, 2023
— rather than seek an acquirer, he worked with Project Equity, which helps companies move to employee ownership #
— this should be addressed with consumer data privacy legislation, not a Great Firewall of America #
— Dan Olson takes on Decentraland and the amorphous “metaverse,” the natural followup to his prescient video essay on the NFT bubble #
March 22, 2023
— I trust MSCHF more than Intuit, a predatory company that tricks customers with dark patterns and lobbies to stop improvements #
March 17, 2023
— artist Amy Goodchild compares its generated output to earlier versions made with GPT-3 #
March 14, 2023
— as competition heats up, I suspect more companies will treat ethics as disposable #
— one of my favorite blogs, Ironic Sans, is now a video series! #
— all the visual input examples are wild, it scores 90% on the Bar Exam compared to 10% for GPT-3.5 with less hallucination #
— I’m wearing my official Kottke.org t-shirt to celebrate #
March 9, 2023
— whether it’s months or years, the only safe bet is that he’ll blame its failure on someone else #
March 8, 2023
— powered by the free and excellent Whisper speech-recognition model, but this is much faster for me than running it locally #
March 7, 2023
— charming free city-building sandbox via @Matt_Muir #
March 6, 2023
— the Geoguessr god walks through his process via Garbage Day #
— write snippets of JS that runs on their servers; Simon says it reminds him of “Yahoo! Pipes but with a code-first interface” via @simon #
— best of the web, right here via @NotABigJerk #
— another gem from There I Ruined It #
— perfect little browser-based Lunar Lander clone, add flips for a higher score or try getting the most spectacular crash via Hacker News #
— Marcin Wichary added tons of tips, tricks, and hidden options in the sidebar via Kottke #
March 2, 2023
— hypnotic animation of hand-painted everyday objects #
March 1, 2023
— Ami’s new game is funding on Kickstarter, completely charming, and really close to hitting the goal #
— an irreverent look back at the album’s legacy from The Ringer #
— embracing ambiguity can be an effective tactic for spreading propaganda with plausible deniability #
— instantly syncing collaborative whiteboard/drawing app with no logins #
— over three years in the making, the list of improvements to the free 2D/3D game engine is intense #
— the ChatGPT API is 10x cheaper than their existing GPT-3.5 models, and Whisper’s audio transcription/translation costs $0.36/hour #
February 28, 2023
— Marcin Wichary rounds up some of @nanoraptor’s parallel-world computer and keyboard renderings via MetaFilter #
February 27, 2023
— loading the image into a canvas and iterating through every background color, foreground color, and character to find the right combo #
— “Speak bravely. Own what you say. Prepare to be understood.” via @brosandprose #
— it’s made by volunteer members of a crypto-shilling singularity cult in a German commune, run by a streamer accused of emotional abuse #
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