Taylor Lorenz on Marissa Meizz and the No More Lonely Friends movement — how an overheard conversation spawned a TikTok movement of online friends uniting in real life #

Snopes cofounder/CEO plagiarized articles for clickbait under a fake name — they're retracting over 50 stories and suspending David Mikkelson from editorial duties #

50 Years of Text Games on Emily Short’s Galatea — a single-room game with a single NPC, a statue of a woman brought to life #

Summer Grill — another stunning Andrea Love stop-motion short made with felted wool (via) #

Ed Yong on how Delta changed the pandemic endgame — essential reading, as always (via) #

NYLONS — a new short animation from Felix Colgrave #

OpenAI Codex — these demos generating usable code in multiple languages with natural language instructions are blowing my mind #

Nestflix — brilliant collection of fictional movies and TV shows from movies and TV, like The Rural Juror and The Crows Have Eyes 3 #

Matches — hypnotic stop-motion animation by designer Tomohiro Okazaki #

Constraint Systems — 20 alternative interfaces for creating and editing images and text (via) #

Max Woolf experiments with AI code generation with GPT-J — "So can GPT-J write code to decide who lives and who dies in the robot uprising?" #

GPT-J, an open-source 6 billion parameter NLP AI model — fast, free, and performs nearly as well as OpenAI's 6.7B GPT-3 model #

I Know a Place — Everest Pipkin reflects on their experience making the Roblox Dream Diary #

Instagram banning-as-a-service — for $60, scammers will copy the target's profile info with a verified account and report them for impersonation (via) #

JS Kid Pix — a public domain open-source reimplementation of the Macintosh classic (via) #

How the founder’s toxic culture tore apart Fullbright, the studio behind Gone Home — at least 10 women quit in the last couple years, including co-founder Karla Zimonja #

solopsist’s surreal phone booth videos on TikTok — my new favorite account #

Garbage Day interviews DashCon’s creator — seems like a group of adults mismanaged the event and left a 17-year-old girl to deal with the fallout #

Hacked Facebook users buying Oculus headsets to try to get priority support — Oculus has its own customer support, but this desperate attempt at restoring accounts has mixed results #

Alien Dreams — an overview of the emerging art scene using AI to generate surreal imagery from text prompts (via) #

paint everything everywhere — a brilliantly elegant PuzzleScript game by increpare and pancelor (via) #

First “time crystal” built using Google’s quantum computer — the paper's completely incomprehensible to me, but it all sounds suitably sci-fi #

xkcd’s Mine Captcha — countdown until someone makes this for real #

Apple Bottom Jeans — late to this meme, but deep-diving these on YouTube killed me #

Windsor Road — a short delightful game by Louie Zong, made with GB Studio #

RP-FX, the Reese’s Puffs drum machine — printed on the back of cereal boxes, make beats with cereal and an AR web app #

World Record Domino Robot — I love how Mark Rober and friends perform remarkable feats of engineering for delightfully silly ends #

Highlights from Annapurna Interactive’s game showcase — so many great games, I'm most excited for the Outer Wilds expansion, Stray, and Storyteller #

How furries are making VR actually worth visiting — Coopertom is continually doing something great in VRChat #

Panic Podcast on the story of Playdate — preorders for the adorable cranky handheld open today! #

Gawker is back — revived from death by Bustle Digital Group, edited by Leah Finnegan #

Discord adds threads — badly needed, but Slack's implementation feels far more frictionless and natural #

Natsukashii, a nostalgic tile drawing tool — made for the TIC-80 fantasy computer; F6 to disable the CRT effect, K to corrupt (via) #

VICE talks to the Parkland shooting survivor whose QAnon dad thinks it was a hoax — another family torn apart by the conspiracy cult #

Sun, Sand, and Spaghetti — the Dominican tradition of empaguetadas, which I first learned about from Desus & Mero #

Space Invaders meets Kubernetes — elaborate satirical project to emulate an 8088 microprocessor with cloud microservices at 1/2000ths its original speed #

Designing 2D graphics in the Japanese videogame industry — deep dive into the tools used by Japanese game artists in the '80s and '90s #

How The World Works — Netflix is posting some of the best bits from "Inside" on YouTube #

Zeynep Tufekci on the U.S. dysfunction hindering response to the delta variant — not just politicization and anti-vaccine sentiment, but slow FDA approval and confused CDC guidance #

Connoisseur CAPTCHA — try to guess the difference between art priced under $25 and over $4,000 on eBay (via) #

Pogged.tv — monitoring live Twitch channels for spikes in chat activity, surfacing clips with a high concentration of emotes (via) #

Researchers show malware can be hidden in neural network models — undetectable by current systems, the network continues to function normally with up to half of neurons affected #

Brewster Kahle on the Internet Archive turning 25 — "We may not have achieved Universal Access to All Knowledge yet, but we still can." #

The inevitable weaponization of app data is here — a Substack newsletter outed a priest using location data tying him to Grindr and gay bars, leading to his resignation (via) #

Serial swatter who caused death of QWK packet creator gets five years in prison — Jason Scott gives more context about Mark Herring's contributions to BBS history #

Metafilter goes deep on Bo Burnham’s Inside — intensely-annotated post about every aspect of the "one-man/one-room pandemic comedy masterpiece" #

DeepMind releasing structures for almost every sequenced protein — "today we’re sharing high-quality predictions for the shape of every single protein in the human body" #

This beach does not exist — GAN-generated beaches trained on 20,000 beach photos (via) #

Sonic Half​-​Remembered — musician tries to recreate the Sonic the Hedgehog soundtrack from memory 30 years later (via) #

WSJ investigation into the TikTok algorithm — good demo of how it can send you down extremely specific rabbit holes #