LED Matrix Earrings
— making animated earrings from LEDs that are "so small, inhaling them is a very real danger" (via) #
When does a journalist become a hacker?
— Sarah Jeong on journalist Tim Burke, who is facing hacking charges for accessing unaired Kanye interview footage from a poorly secured video site #
Bellingcat investigates a secretive global network of non-consensual deepfake porn apps
— the level of obfuscation here is remarkable, shell companies illicitly collecting payments through sites like Patreon, Steam, and G2A under fake names #
Does bribing or threatening ChatGPT make it generate better text?
— Max Woolf systematically tries to find out if it responds better to front-row Taylor Swift tickets or all-caps death threats (via) #
Google tests removing News tab from search
— I remember when Google had a symbiotic relationship with publishers, before AMP, featured snippets, knowledge panels, and now AI summarization #
Vice Media lays off hundreds, abandons Vice.com
— elsewhere in the digital media apocalypse, Yahoo laid off Engadget's leadership and BuzzFeed is cutting 16% #
Bluesky begins limited data federation
— you can now, with some effort and their approval, self-host your own Personal Data Server that contains your account, data, and signing keys #
“You’re calling it Slack?”
— how Slack got its name and domain, after rejecting Honeycomb, Circuit, Superset, and Kitchen, among others #
AI search is a doomsday cult
— apps that summarize the web with AI are short-sighted and destructive, trying to solve a problem by making it infinitely worse #
The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet
— limited-edition essay collection inspired by Yancey Strickler's 2019 post, the first release from Metalabel, a new space for releasing and selling creative work #
Robin Rendle’s new homepage is a Hypercard-inspired mini-manifesto
— I love Robin's periodic essays, newsletter, and blog about design, typography, and the web (via) #
Billy Joel’s “Turn the Lights Back On”
— Trey Parker and Matt Stone's Deep Voodoo deepfaked three eras of younger Billy Joel for the video (via) #
Three students read the first passages from a 2,000-year-old scroll burned in Vesuvius eruption
— they won $700k detecting ink found in high-resolution CT scans of carbonized ash, virtually unrolled and separated into sheets of papyrus (via) #
Persistence of vision in black-and-white noise
— an interesting effect used in the 2007 game Lost in the Static (via) #
Password Basket
— generate a random password by catching characters, much more practical than Kenny Log-Ins (via) #
Video generation models as world simulators
— the full Sora paper and examples is giving me the same disorienting feelings I had seeing DALL-E 2 and worrying about what happens next #
OpenAI announces Sora, their first text-to-video model
— currently only for internal testing, it can generate minute-long videos from prompts with surprising fidelity and consistency #
How The Cut’s financial advice columnist was scammed out of $50,000 cash
— the lesson I'm taking from all these recent scam stories is to never answer the phone (via) #
Building Slack, Day 1
— two of Slack's original employees launched a new blog spilling the inside story from the company's first ten years #
Suite 2412
— Josh Sucher recreated a miniature version of his dad's old law office in painstaking detail #
The Grannies
— short film about a group of Melbourne-based artists who try to break the boundaries of Red Dead Redemption 2 (via) #
Firehouse Five and the Cinderella Surprise
— astounding Disney history from Cabel Sasser, who won an auction of Dixieland jazz 78rpm records and found a lost song cut from Cinderella #
Why it was almost impossible to make the blue LED
— Derek Muller explains why it took 30 years after the invention of red and green LEDs to make a blue LED, and talks to the man who did it #
The Pudding analyzes the “diva-ness” for 138 performances of the National Anthem
— fun dataviz exploring how far singers deviate from the standard melody, the methodology at the end is an interesting read #
Playdate is now widely available
— after shipping more than 70,000 preorders, the charming little handheld is in stock, opening to 20 new countries, and adding new games all the time (via) #
Social Media Warning Stickers
— Dan Hon made a series of tongue-in-cheek disclaimer images to manage replies, like "This Is An Observation: No Reply Necessary" (via) #
Hurt Party: A Game of Bad Apologies
— go back Ami's latest project, a party game that pokes fun at all of the terrible ways we say we're sorry #
After eight years, social app Peach sold to sketchy “YouTube growth platform”
— update: this turned out to be wrong, Dom Hoffman says the domain lapsed and the buyer published a false blog post and press release #
The Verge’s Mia Sato on the rise of AI-generated obituary spam
— scumbag SEOs turning personal tragedies into cheap hallucinated content for easy ad revenue #
Bob Moore, founder of Bob’s Red Mill, dies at 94
— instead of selling to the highest bidder, Moore transferred the company to his 209 employees in 2010 and it's more than tripled in size since (via) #
Sisyphus and the Impossible Dream
— I allow myself one link to a Casey Neistat video every ten years, and this is that video #
Special Fish
— can't believe I've never linked to Elliott Cost's charming four-year-old community of little personal webpages (via) #
Bluesky opens publicly and plans to start federating later this month
— you can follow me, @andy.baio.net and @waxy.org #
Spoutible’s API leaked personal data, including 2FA secrets and password hashes, for every user
— maybe building it on top of an off-the-shelf $89 PHP Twitter clone wasn't the greatest long-term plan #
Why Quora isn’t useful anymore
— a failure of content moderation, SEO spam, bad financial incentives, and a hard pivot to AI, its shutdown is only a matter of time (via) #
Google Search’s cache links are officially retired
— the "cache:" search shortcut still works… for now #
Making a PDF that’s larger than Germany
— Acrobat 7.0 maxes out at 381 km x 381 km, but what happens if you make it bigger? #
Never Post
— new member-supported, employee-owned podcast "about and for the internet" co-created and hosted by Idea Channel's Mike Rugnetta #
Project Tapestry
— Iconfactory is kickstarting an iOS app to unify public web sources like blogs, Mastodon, Tumblr, and Bluesky into a single timeline #
Nilay Patel’s Apple Vision Pro review for The Verge
— best thing I've read and seen so far about it, a device that's technically impressive but years away from something I'd use regularly #
shelby.cool
— minimalist web experiments and sketches from Shelby Wilson, co-creator/editor of The HTML Review #
ASCII Theater
— MSCHF's latest project lets you stream pirated movies to your terminal in glorious ASCII, with color and captions, now playing Barbie #