The AI Keeps the Score — long Verge feature on the development of AI-assisted aids for judging gymnastics #

Public Work — a nicely-designed visual search engine for public domain images, but they could do a better job linking to sources #

The Many Lives of Null Island — I never knew the shape of the in-joke for geospatial data geeks was based on the island from Myst #

Scaling One Million Checkboxes to 650,000,000 checks — wild story of scaling a ridiculous side project #

anagrams.io — elegant anagram finder with a sharable visualization for each #

Generating sudokus for fun and no profit — interactive explainer for the various ways to code a Sudoku solver (via) #

The best video game documentary ever just got better — the excellent Double Fine PsychOdyssey just got a surprise 90-minute epilogue and a limited Blu-ray release #

Imitating the surreal transitions of AI-generated videos in real-life — I love watching a new subgenre of shitposting appear in real-time (via) #

Crawlspace — an experimental web journal akin to the html review, view source on each piece to read an interview with the artist (via) #

The bizarre secrets found investigating corrupt Winamp skins — photos, memories, sound clips, and 56 previously unknown Winamp skins hidden inside other Winamp skins #

Aggressive AI crawlers leads to surprise bandwidth bills — related: Anthropic's crawler hit iFixit's site a million times in 24 hours #

NYPD Coppelgänger — Sam Lavigne's used facial recognition on an archive of 10,000 publicly-available photos of NYC police #

Prompt Airlines — practice AI prompt injection with a series of challenges breaking a fictional airline's customer support chatbot #

Elizabeth Lopatto on the moral bankruptcy of Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz — they're happy to trade human rights and personal liberty for favorable crypto/AI/tax policies that benefit their bottom line #

Reddit blocks all crawlers in robots.txt, gives exclusive access to Google with AI deal — this means they're blocking the Internet Archive and every other search engine, a huge over-reaction ostensibly to stop AI training (via) #

Tiny Awards finalists announced — like last year, a charming selection of oddball web pages; you have until August 11 to vote for your favorites #

Button Stealer — Chrome add-on that automatically makes a gallery of buttons from pages you visit #

Making a jigsaw puzzle solving robot in 15 months — the technical details behind Mark Rober's latest video #

Weird Al’s Polkamania! — Al teamed up with 12 different animators for a new polka medley of #1 hits from the 10 years since the release of his last album #

Christina’s Bliss — using MS Paint for Windows XP, Cat Graffam mashed up the Bliss wallpaper with Andrew Wyeth's "Christina's World" #

Follow the Crypto — Molly White's new project tracks crypto PAC spending on the 2024 elections; FairShake is the #2 most-funded super PAC #

What Beats Rock? — like Infinite Craft, a clever but risky use of an LLM for collective gameplay #

Hackers steal text and call records of “nearly all” AT&T customers — the data leaked from Snowflake includes every number their customers called/texted for six months in 2022 #

Exploring an old computer store that shuttered in 2001, frozen in time — the tech time capsule sits in a strip mall in Norman, Oklahoma, stuck in legal battles after the owner went bankrupt #

MetaFilter owner Jessamyn West interviewed on the community’s evolution and moderation challenges — it turns 25 (!) on Sunday with big changes in the works, including a full code rewrite and converting to a nonprofit (via) #

Priscila, Queen of the Rideshare Mafia — fascinating story of a Brazilian woman who built a business renting fake gig economy accounts made with stolen identities out to undocumented workers (via) #

Internet Phone Book — an open call for website submissions for "a physical printed directory for the vast poetic web" #

TUAW relaunched as zombie content farm with AI articles under the names of its old staff — the new domain owners even generated AI photos for each author, despite not buying rights to any of the content #

Ironic Sans on StripWare, short-lived 1980s method of scanning code from paper — the Cauzin Softstrip was like a giant CueCat, used for scanning in BASIC programs from books #

Ghost federates its first newsletter — they also open-sourced their ActivityPub server built with Fedify #

large.horse — zoom in to see a good use for subdomains; see also: endless.horse from 2015 (via) #

Pixel Mirror — a faceted crystal that turns everything viewed through it into pixel art (via) #

shindigs’ thread of unique vtubers — some people doing incredibly creative things on Twitch, from watercolor worlds to playing with CRTs #

Scalpers work with hackers to reverse-engineer Ticketmaster’s “non-transferable” tickets — to defeat their 2FA-like revolving barcodes, the scalpers can now generate a valid token for any ticket #

Anna’s Archive faces millions in damages and a permanent injunction — the shadow library is incredibly well-run, recently changing domains to stay out of U.S. jurisdiction #

Scientific American podcast on Cleo, the Mysterious Math Menace — the anonymous math genius who haunted Math Stack Exchange with enigmatic answers before disappearing in 2015 (via) #

Lindsay Ellis on Yoko Ono and the Beatles — Lindsay Ellis has been active on Nebula, but this is her first new video essay on YouTube in nearly three years #

Chappell Roan spent 7 years becoming an overnight success — I wonder how the Atlantic Records rep that dropped her from the label after "Pink Pony Girl" feels about that decision now #

What should an electric car sound like? — interesting Vox video on the sound design for the hidden speaker systems that replace engine sounds #

Kowloon Walled City cross-section illustration — click/hover to read the English annotations for Terasawa Hitomi's stylized panoramic drawing from 1997 (via) #

Cloudflare launches one-click button to block known AI scrapers and crawlers — they'll also try to block AI companies using spoofed user agents like Perplexity #

In defense of an old pixel — tremendous Marcin Wichary talk on pixel fonts, complete with a new full-featured pixel font editor for the web #

Pikimov, free web-based motion design and video editor — the lightweight 5MB After Effects alternative was built by a single dev and processes everything locally with no signups or cloud uploads #

Perplexity’s grand theft AI — Elizabeth Lopatto doesn't hold back against AI search vampires trying to suck value out of the open web #

Code Galaxies — visualize software dependencies as stars in an explorable galaxy (via) #

Examining Jane Appleseed’s emails from an Apple Store demo computer — Apple is missing an opportunity to build an immersive ARG inside all the messages, photos, files, and apps #

One Million Checkboxes — "checking a box checks it for everyone," like a one-bit version of Reddit Place #

Recreating Georg Nees’s “Schotter,” iconic generative art from 1968 — don't miss part two where Zellyn finds the artwork's original seed from a billion possibilities (via) #

Woodworm — clever free PICO-8 puzzle game where you're a little worm carving wooden sculptures #

Major record labels sue AI music generators Suno and Udio for mass copyright infringement — this is a big case to watch, the largest group to try to set a precedent that training AI on copyrighted works for profit isn't fair use #