April 21, 2022
Are You The Asshole?
— pose scenarios to three AI models trained exclusively on YTA, NTA, and hybrid answers from Reddit #
Underunderstood tries to find the MTV dial position sticker
— amazing deep-dive into the history of FM radio delivered over cable TV lines in the '80s for early stereo audio #
The 8-year process behind Playdate’s glorious crank
— astounding how close Teenage Engineering's original concept is to the final product #
Painting a Landscape with Math
— another incredible Inigo Quilez video breaking down a Shadertoy animation #
Panic! On the Editorial Page
— Michael Hobbes breaks down a terrible NYT editorial on cancel culture #
A rare interview with Phil Fish on Fez’s 10th birthday
— it's just nice to know he's still out there, hope he's doing well #
Elon Musk offers to buy Twitter in hostile takeover bid
— his cringe TED interview this morning shows he has zero understanding of how content moderation works at scale #
Bitch Media to close in June
— incredible run of over 25 years of independently-published feminist media #
Who’s In Your Wallet?
— The Pudding's visualization of prominent figures on bank notes around the world #
Tiny Elden Ring
— the latest in Flurdeh's series of tilt-shifted game worlds, like Tiny Cyberpunk, Tiny Red Dead, and Tiny Bioshock (via) #
Summon Demons
— stunning 1-bit dithered animations from Russian artist Uno Moralez, mildly NSFW (via) #
Harder Drive
— Tom7 turns the internet, Tetris, and fancy covid tests into hilariously inefficient hard drives #
The complete r/Place 2022 timelapse
— or you can view the complete canvas as an interactive timelapse #
Senate confirms Ketanji Brown Jackson as first Black woman on Supreme Court
— Harris presided as Jackson was confirmed, but no Black women had a vote #
Home Sweet Homepage
— a charming comic about growing up online from BubbleSort Zines creator Amy Wibowo #
Is Crypto Re-Creating the 2008 Financial Crisis?
— Charlie Warzel interviews Hilary J. Allen about her essay on shadow banking, decentralized finance, and regulation #
Twitter changed how embeds work for deleted tweets, causing blank spaces on websites
— blockquote text would previous display for deleted tweets; this impacts every blog or news site that ever embedded a Trump tweet #
Marcel The Shell With Shoes On trailer
— Dean Fleischer-Camp and Jenny Slate's 2010 web shorts were adapted to a full-length film and it looks charming #
MIT scans the brain of a carpet cleaner who speaks 24 languages
— hyperpolyglots seem to have smaller, more efficient language areas in the brain (via) #
Unreal Engine 5 released
— the release notes are overwhelming, with The Matrix Awakens city demo available as a free sample project #
OpenAI’s DALL·E 2
— generates AI art from text at 4x the previous resolution with more accuracy; see the paper for more examples #
Parker Molloy’s experiments with Midjourney, a new AI art generator
— I've also been playing with the beta and the results are astounding #
Comparing what TikTok shows to Russian vs. Ukrainian users
— starting with new TikTok accounts using IP addresses located 50 miles apart, the difference is stark #
Elon Musk buys 9% of Twitter stock as he pressures company on “free speech”
— his Twitter poll last month now sounds ominous #
Footage of 11-year-old Prince found in archival film of 1970 Minneapolis teachers’ strike
— discovered by accident, immediately recognizable #
Taylor Lorenz on the popularity of Reddit’s Place revival
— five years later, it's seen 6x more users participating driven by communities on Twitch and Discord #
Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossman making a new Monkey Island game
— coming this year, it will canonically follow Secret of Monkey Island 2 as Ron explained in his 2013 post #
On Seeing Both
— another thoughtful Hank Green rumination, a good companion to his "Is it All Hopeless?" video from a couple weeks back #
xkcd’s Instructions
— a 9-hour-long TTS audio transcription of a LOGO program that draws… something, but good luck converting it back to syntactically-correct code #
The Past and Future of Flag Emoji
— Jennifer Daniel explains why the Unicode Technical Committee is no longer accepting flag emoji proposals (via) #
Infinite Mac, an instant-booting Quadra in your browser
— system7.app and macos8.app instantly emulate Mac hardware full of software, with drag-and-drop file import/export and persistent storage #
Lumon Industries Macrodata Refiner
— all of you innies better get cracking if we're going to meet our quarterly quota #
Building Pong inside a single sprite on the Commodore 64
— on the C64, sprites were 24x21 pixel objects that can be moved over a background (via) #
Mike Masnick on how moderating content supports the principles of free speech
— a free-for-all of spam, harassment, abuse, and hate drives away people, resulting in fewer forums for speech #
Hackers are faking emergency data requests to access sensitive customer data
— compromised police email addresses were used to collect info from Discord, Apple, Instagram, Snap, and Google, among others (via) #
Facebook paid GOP firm to malign TikTok
— another Taylor Lorenz scoop, Targeted Victory pushed the unfounded "Slap a Teacher TikTok challenge" rumor to local news #
Funomena shutting down after report on emotionally abusive founder
— a shocking and sad end to the indie studio behind Wattam and Luna #
Photorealistic 3D renders of classic TV game show sets
— David Friedman on one photographer's impressive hobby, shared only in a TV history Facebook group #
The Sound of Love
— stories of love and heartbreak found in the comments of songs uploaded to YouTube (via) #
Russians are racing to download Wikipedia before it’s banned
— the 29 GB torrent was downloaded 106k times in the first half of March, a 4,000% increase since January (via) #
Anti-war Russians find a lifeline on Clubhouse, which Russia hasn’t blocked yet
— "any time there is a wall, information finds little places to seep through" (via) #
Drug discovery AI suggests 40,000 new possible biochemical weapons in six hours
— machine-learning for finding new medicines can easily be flipped into bad actor mode (via) #