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 #

Mastodon adds post editing, explore page, moderation dashboard — they beat Twitter to it #

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) #

Strong Bad answers his first email in four years — the last one was April Fools' Day in 2018 #

A Short Hike 99 — chill multiplayer mod for April 1 #

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 #

Amazon workers vote to unionize Staten Island warehouse — the first Amazon union in the U.S. #

Comic Helvetic — I genuinely love this free Comic Sans/Helvetica hybrid (via) #

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) #

Lessons From 19 Years in the Metaverse — Charlie Warzel interviews Wagner James Au about what we can learn from Second Life #

The 2,731-Person Project to Build New York City in Minecraft — builders are collaborating to recreate NYC one neighborhood at a time (via) #

People Make Games investigates three indie studio founders accused of emotional abuse — well-reported piece about Ken Wong (Mountains), Steve Gaynor (Fullbright), and Robin Hunicke (Funomena) #

This City Does Not Exist — machine-hallucinated satellite imagery (via) #

What happened to Torah learning software TropeTrainer after the death of its creator — S.I. Rosenbaum's remarkable story of faith, passion, and software obsolescence after death (via) #

Yarn Spinner — a friendly web-based tool for writing branching game dialogue (via) #

Nilay Patel interviews Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg — wide-ranging chat about Tumblr, Wordpress, the financial securitization of everything, and keeping the web weird #

Vimeo ordering creators to suddenly pay thousands of dollars or they’ll delete their videos — particularly painful for creators on Patreon where it's the default video integration #

Rocketman Bob Maddox rides his “Beast” jet engine go-kart — "that was about half-throttle" (via) #