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 #
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 #
Cheating at first-person shooters with computer vision and capture cards
— bypassing system-level security by running on a separate machine entirely #
How Marcin Wichary learned to hate InDesign
— arduous behind-the-scenes process post on how he automated the layout for his upcoming book #
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 #
Joy Generator
— short stories about the things that bring us joy and the science behind them (via) #
“I Kissed A Girl” to “Call Me By Your Name”
— Jan Diehm shares a story in The Pudding about hearing yourself represented with same-gender lyrics for the first time #
NYT visualizes the intensely weird PNW heat wave
— from these charts, I learned that it's really hot outside #
GitHub Copilot
— powered by OpenAI, an evolution of AI code autocomplete tools like Tabnine and Codota #
Don’t Piss Off Bradley, the Parts Seller Keeping Atari Machines Alive
— amusing story of one temperamental guy who cornered the market on Atari new-old stock (via) #
What the Robot Saw
— livestreamed "robot film" generated from YouTube's least-viewed recently-uploaded videos #
Court records show Britney Spears quietly tried to end her conservatorship for years
— for 13 years, her father's controlled her life, including work, finances, and even forced birth control #
Paul Rudd shows a clip on Conan, one last time
— when you're done watching that, go find the Baby Geniuses fight scene on YouTube #
A Eulogy for the Free Press in Hong Kong
— after 25 years, Apple Daily shuttered after 500 police raided its HQ, froze its assets, and arrested its founder and directors #
The Chinese content farms behind Factory TikTok
— popular industrial channels aren't factory workers documenting their labor, but largely cheap marketing for their employers #
How Peter Thiel turned a Roth IRA into a $5 billion tax-free piggy bank
— accounts designed to help working Americans save for retirement are being abused as tax loopholes for the ultra-rich #
John McAfee found dead in Spanish prison
— hours after courts approved his extradition to the U.S. for criminal tax evasion #
Joni Mitchell’s Blue turns 50
— the NYT spoke to 25 artists and writers about its influence; Joni released an EP of Blue outtakes/demos today #
Alternate Realities
— 2,400 CG artists were challenged to render a base animation, here's the top 100 in a single video (via) #
The Digital Antiquarian on the best of The Voyager Company
— Jimmy Maher digs through the vault of hard-to-emulate Apple CD-ROM multimedia #
Associated Press will no longer name suspects in minor crimes
— search results can cause lasting damage even if charges were dropped (via) #
NYT investigation into JFK8, Amazon’s massive NYC fulfillment center
— interviews with nearly 200 current and former employees reveal high turnover, inadvertent firings, and racial inequities #
Discriminator
— brilliant interactive documentary about facial recognition algorithms trained on Flickr's CC-licensed corpus #
Jay-Z’s verse on Monster except he’s listing as many monsters as he can
— Uberduck.ai is a good tool for comedy (via) #