Gmail will break your heart
— with Gmail turning 20 last month, Caitlin Dewey is collecting your long-forgotten emails for an (anonymized) art project #
Brr.fyi on engineering for slow internet at the South Pole
— modern web apps and OS updates are mostly unusable with glacial speeds and high latency at McMurdo Station #
Internet sleuths find origin of the photo that inspired “The Backrooms”
— a 2003 photo of an empty hobby store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin #
$400k worth of stolen Playdates mysteriously returned
— if you watched Cabel Sasser's excellent GDC talk, you'll know two pallets of handhelds disappeared earlier this year #
Neven Mrgan on how it feels to get an AI email from a friend
— "like getting a birthday card with only the prewritten message inside" #
Aaron A. Reed on wordplay as a game mechanic in interactive fiction
— most of the games he talks about can be played instantly in the browser for free through IFDB #
Teresa Ibarra analyzed 83,000 text messages with her ex-boyfriend
— "Q: It's very personal to share this. Why did you do this? A: that's art babey!!" #
Sympawnies, pet portraits in sheet music
— Noam Oxman makes animal portraits made of musical notation, composed to match the personality of each subject #
Golden Gate Claude
— as part of a new research paper, Anthropic released a version of their LLM that hyperfixates on the Golden Gate Bridge (via) #
The Space Quest II Master Disk Blunder
— only discovered 28 years later, most of the interpreter's source code could be found in "unused" sectors of the disk #
The Kleptones remastered “Yoshimi Battles The Hip-Hop Robots” and “A Night At The Hip-Hopera
— celebrating the 20th anniversary of two of the best mashup albums of all time #
Osamu Tezuka’s “Jumping” from 1984
— beautiful animated short with a first-person perspective, there's a behind-the-scenes video that includes a panorama view of the entire map (via) #
The launch lineup for XOXO 2024 is out!
— really proud of this one, registration is open for the next eight days until Wednesday, May 29 #
Ten Blue Links
— single-serving site with instructions for switching your browser to Google's AI/clutter-free search results #
City in a Bottle, how a magical 256-byte city generator works
— Frank Force breaks down one of his most popular dweets #
Cabel Sasser digs into a forged Apple employee badge on eBay
— a detailed forgery exposed with the help of Apple Employee #8, it ended up selling for $1,001 with shipping #
The Graying Gig Workers
— Rest of World's series of articles reporting on the pros and cons of gig work for older workers around the world #
AI art bots are killing DeviantArt
— this was entirely predictable when I first wrote about their failure to police it two years ago #
Nilay Patel interviews Sundar Pichai on AI, the future of Google Search, and the fate of the web
— Patel is a dogged interviewer, but Pichai refuses to acknowledge Google's broken pact with the web #
Coding My Handwriting
— Amy Goodchild expands her generative font experiments to reproduce her own handwriting in 26kb #
The story behind the kid who went 1940s viral for his “lost week” at the movies
— $20 in 1947 is $280 in 2024 dollars, buying one adventurous 10-year-old boy a wild week in San Francisco #
Twitter.com is officially X.com now
— one of the worst rebranding decisions of all time is mostly complete, though references to Twitter and tweets are still everywhere #
Archie, the internet’s first search engine, is rescued and running
— a copy of the source code for the FTP search engine was found at the University of Warsaw in Poland #
Retro tech in anime supercut
— a compilation of camcorders, VCRs, floppies, cassettes, arcade games, and more from '80s and '90s anime (via) #
Fabio and the Goose
— Bobby Fingers teams up with Adam Savage and The Slo Mo Guys to bust a long-standing myth about the incident #
Google Search will now show AI-generated answers to millions by default
— a destructive, predatory move that seems likely to hurt everyone who publishes for the web #
Pink Floyd’s “Any Colour You Like” on the Famicom Disk System’s Family Composer
— every video on this channel is great, covering Frank Zappa, Weather Report in Otocky, Steely Dan on the Roland PMA-5, and Jaco Pastorius on a music box #
Replace your Windows cursor with a cat paw
— inspired by a viral Foone post on Tumblr, you can buy it now at the very good domain catpawdesk.top #
OpenAI announces GPT-4o
— they're really tripling down on acting like a human, these live video demos are clearly inspired by Spike Jonze's "Her" #
A British Nurse Was Found Guilty of Killing Seven Babies. Did She Do It?
— The New Yorker is geoblocking this fascinating article in the UK, presumably because its impact on the retrial could violate their contempt of court law #
Matt Sephton digs into the early history of Japanese emoji
— painstakingly redrawing emoji sets he found on electronic organizers and pocket computers that predate SoftBank's emoji set by at least a decade #
Development notes from xkcd’s “Machine”
— how the massive collaborative Rube Goldberg machine was designed and built in three weeks #
Pop Culture Detective’s Patriarchy According to The Barbie Movie
— "a primer to help explain what patriarchy actually is, what it isn't, and how it ends up harming everyone, including men" #
Exploring Hacker News by mapping 40 million posts and comments
— don't miss the Hackerverse demo, visualizing 2D embeddings as an island of posts #
Food for Fish
— a browser game with lots of underpants, made with WebGPU so try it in Chrome, Edge, or Safari Technology Preview (via) #
Apple’s “Crush” iPad ad sparks backlash
— amazed nobody there realized how a tech behemoth crushing creative tools with a giant hydraulic press would be received #
Indie rock legend Steve Albini dies at 61 of heart attack
— a shocking and tragic loss, Shellac's first album in a decade was due out next week #
Pokémon Go players are vandalizing OpenStreetMap to cheat the game
— an issue for seven years, seems like Niantic should be storing a snapshot of map data to discourage editors (via) #
Meet Me at the Workers’ Club
— Molleindustria's interactive reconstruction of Alexander Rodchenko's Workers' Club from the 1925 World Expo in Paris #
404 Media investigates the “zombie internet” of Facebook’s AI spam
— a growing plague of AI bots posting nonsense for an audience of humans, other bots, and hacked human-bot hybrid accounts (via) #
Washed Out’s “The Hardest Part”
— first music video made with OpenAI's Sora, embracing its surreal artifacts, broken physics, and dream-like creepiness #
We can have a different web, if we want it
— Molly White on the yearning for the "good old days" of the web #
Printing music with CSS Grid
— responsive music rendering for the web; see also: Soundslice's world-class responsive sheet music and guitar tab viewer (via) #
Doom Scroll
— a DOOM-inspired demo without JavaScript made with the CSS scroll-timeline property, supported only in Chrome for now (via) #
Daniel Shiffman’s The Nature of Code gets updated for 2024
— his 2012 book on simulating natural systems now uses p5.js, available free online or as a printed edition (via) #
Famous paintings recreated with emoji
— Nimona creator ND Stevenson uses Instagram Stories as a canvas #
Moviecart, full-length movie cartridges for the Atari 2600
— nice attention to detail with the box art, manuals, labels, and only using films from the 1970s (via) #