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 #

Inside the UK’s black market for fake vaccine passports — "PDF artists" selling faked documents #

Coconut Kitty and the complexities of sex workers editing themselves to look underage — critics allege Diana Deets is "pedobaiting," she says it's for privacy and a form of performance art #

Old Vidme embeds turn into porn after domain sale — waiting for dead video sites like Viddler, LiveLeak, and blip.tv to meet the same fate #

Twitch streamers make millions promoting shady crypto gambling — lucrative sponsorship deals from crypto casinos let them quietly play with free house money #

Realless — a website that changes every time you blink (via) #

Ars Technica previews Playdate — Engadget, The Verge, and Eurogamer also previewed the little handheld, with preorders opening next Thursday #

Pose Estimation and WebGL — click "nextVideo" for more examples (via) #

Google’s Olympics doodle is a full sports JRPG — seven minigame events and global leaderboards #

Tumblr lets writers offer paid subscriptions — the Automattic-owned platform will take a 5% fee, half of Substack's fee #

The Jessica Simulation — very mixed feelings about this story of a guy using Jason Rohrer's OpenAI chatbot project to simulate his dead fiancée #

Flip-digit fluid simulations — sound on for these (via) #

Puparia — made entirely alone over three years by animator Shingo Tamagawa (via) #

The Print Shop Club — an Apple II emulator running Print Shop modified to generate PDF downloads of your prints (via) #

New Anthony Bourdain documentary deepfaked his voice with AI — "we can have a documentary-ethics panel about it later" #

One by One, My Friends Were Sent to the Camps — Uyghur poet Tahir H. Izgil shares the story of escaping China with his family #

Kevin Roose reports on the internal Facebook freakout over @FacebooksTop10 — he used Facebook's own analytics tool to show, day after day, how right-wing pages dominate engagement #

The Internet Dungeon of Unexplained Phenomena — Leigh Alexander is prompting GPT-J-6B to generate creepy stories with images by BigSleep #

A Unified Theory of Online Anger — Garbage Day on the automated systems and financial incentives perpetuating an endless cycle of outrage #

The privacy war inside the W3C — browser vendors and ad-tech engineers face off in a bitter geeky battle over new privacy standards #

Half a Life in 2 Minutes — face-aligning and averaging Noah Kalina's last 7,777 daily photos into a 130-second video #

Kevin Parry turns into things — he does great breakdowns of each video on his channel #

Apple’s Weather app won’t say it’s 69 degrees — possibly because it's storing source data in Celsius and rounding, though this is fixed in iOS 15 #

You are now Possessed — short free browser game that won last year's GMTK Jam (via) #

Rebecca Jennings on digital accents — social dialects emerge from shared digital spaces #

Andrea Love’s stop-motion felt animations — like if PES worked solely with fiber (via) #

Cheating at first-person shooters with computer vision and capture cards — bypassing system-level security by running on a separate machine entirely #

Under A Star Called Sun — lovely short sci-fi story game made in Bitsy (via) #

How Marcin Wichary learned to hate InDesign — arduous behind-the-scenes process post on how he automated the layout for his upcoming book #

Dead Startup Toys — MSCHF is selling miniature replicas of overfunded hardware flops #

Freespin — astounding demo running entirely on a Commodore floppy drive with the Commodore 64 unplugged #

Britney Spears’s Conservatorship Nightmare — Ronan Farrow and Jia Tolentino investigate for the New Yorker #

All the right words on climate have already been said — Sarah Miller pens a painful postscript to her 2019 article on Miami real estate and climate change (via) #

Bloomberg on a Microsoft contractor who stole $10 million in Xbox gift cards — internal code generation, identity theft, and funds laundered through crypto #

Janelle Shane on teasing higher-quality images out of neural nets — adding phrases like "Unreal Engine," "Trending on Artstation," and "award-winning" can generate better results #

Portland Year of Protest — Luka Grafera's incredibly detailed illustrated map, with giclée prints for sale #

The songs that inspired the Super Mario Bros soundtrack — this would totally be a lawsuit if it happened now #

John Lennon and Space Invaders — Space Invaders was a smash hit in 1979, but finding these photos still surprised me #

Oakland police officer admits to playing Taylor Swift to keep video off YouTube — another example of police trying to abuse automated copyright takedowns to avoid public accountability #