Correcting flutter in Steamboat Willie’s audio
— using a new 34GB lossless 4K scan of the original 16mm film reel on the Internet Archive #
Improbable Island
— sprawling 16-year-old new-to-me browser text adventure RPG with sweary British vibes and a unique code of conduct (via) #
kala.watch
— hypnotic visualization of different units of time passing in a number of styles, "cardioid" is beautiful (via) #
John Herrman on the future impact of Google adding an AI text generator to Chrome
— "We have the technology, in other words, for a web that publishes itself. Will anyone want to read it?" (via) #
Where’s Madeleine?
— find Holly Gramazio's cat in this charming little game made with Downpour, v buckenham's upcoming no-code game-making app (via) #
How beloved indie blog The Hairpin turned into an AI clickbait farm
— the domain was snapped up by a scumbag SEO, plagiarizing many of the original articles under fake bylines alongside machine-generated sludge #
iFixIt’s CES Worst in Show 2024
— from Ecovacs' surveillance vacuum and Instacart's AI shopping carts to BMW's AR goggles and Sennheiser's $300 disposable earbuds #
The Living New Deal Map
— mapping 18,359 public works and artworks funded by the New Deal, with tens of thousands still to be added (via) #
Trolls have flooded X with graphic Taylor Swift AI fakes
— a failure of content moderation, federal legislation, and basic human decency, the images originated in a Telegram group for non-consensual AI-generated porn #
YouTube deletes 1,000+ deepfake celebrity scam ads after 404 Media investigation
— this little indie publication has been killing it, happy to be a supporter since launch #
Buzzfeed’s “dire” debt problem
— their stock is down 98% since going public, they need to repay $150 million in debt by late 2024, and are looking to sell off assets to stay alive #
The voice-cloned George Carlin special was not written by AI
— a modern update of Keaton Patti's old "I forced a bot" schtick, but tacky and unfunny #
People Make Games explains Jubensha, the murder-mystery social deduction game that took over China
— a multi-billion dollar immersive role-play sensation that doubles as a way to make friends and meet new people #
F.a.l.J’s mathgames
— a growing collection of beautiful art/code math visualizations with P5.js, try Pong B&W in fullscreen (via) #
VICE talks to Lyle the Therapy Gecko, the internet’s unofficial therapist
— Lyle Drescher found an online audience livestreaming conversations with anonymous strangers in a gecko costume #
OpenAI quietly scraps promise to disclose governing documents to the public
— not only for its for-profit arm, but for the 501(c)3 nonprofit parent organization as well #
Neon Knives
— free two-player local multiplayer game in the browser, take out your enemy in a field of randomly-roving NPCs a la Hidden in Plain Sight #
90% of top news outlets now block AI bots, right-wing sites mostly allow them
— an extension of the free vs. paywall news gap, quality journalism is expensive to produce compared to polarizing clickbait #
Feedle
— new-to-me search engine for blog posts and podcasts, with an RSS feed for every search and a solid trending posts list #
Discmaster rises again
— offline since June, the semantic search engine for thousands of vintage shareware/compilation CD-ROMs is back online #
Old’aVista, a guide to the old internet
— launched in 2021, a search engine indexing early personal websites plus Yahoo directory listings from 1996 to 2003 (via) #
Ode to Internet
— a modern orchestral arrangement of the 56k dialup modem handshake, paired with unrelated '90s film footage (via) #
How platforms killed Pitchfork
— Casey Newton on the challenging environment it faced, from the ad market to personalized algorithmic recommendations #
Conde Nast is folding Pitchfork under GQ, with layoffs
— its editor-in-chief, Puja Patel, was also laid off from the 28-year-old music magazine #
Researchers find Google search really has gotten worse
— "Search engines seem to lose the cat-and-mouse game that is SEO spam" (via) #
Sixteen Stories for Flickr Commons’ Sixteenth Birthday
— Jessamyn West wrote 16 quirky stories about some of the lesser-known images from their vast photo collection (via) #
Ken Fritz spent years building a $1 million stereo, but the real cost was unfathomable
— Geoff Edgers writes about a workaholic audiophile whose obsession consumed his life and everyone around him #
Molly White’s guide to migrating from Substack to self-hosted Ghost
— not for the faint-hearted or non-technical, but gives her far more control than any other platform #
Instagram co-founders shutting down Artifact after less than a year
— a promising idea, but for me, the recommendations were generally worse than Google News's For You #
George Carlin’s daughter seeking legal action against voice cloned “comedy” special
— disappointed to learn Will Sasso of MADtv and lemon Vine fame was responsible for this mess #
Who hosts the fediverse?
— over half of all Mastodon users are on an instance hosted by Hetzner (via) #
Internet Archive now hosts DatPiff’s hip-hop mixtape collection
— 366k mixtapes saved, over 50 terabytes of music, from 18 years of the site's history (via) #
Tom Coates on how Threads will integrate with the Fediverse
— extensive notes and thoughts from a small meeting with the Threads team about their federation plans #
Why Platformer is leaving Substack
— every newsletter I love, from Garbage Day and Today In Tabs to Citation Needed and Ironic Sans, are moving off the Nazi-friendly platform #
brr.fyi goes home
— is this the end for the best blog ever written about life in the South Pole? stay tuned for part two #
Using the Wayback Machine and Google Analytics to uncover disinformation networks
— Bellingcat made a lightweight tool for scraping current and historic Google Analytics data
#
How Google’s search algorithms reshaped the web
— The Verge's Mia Sato breaks down, step by step, the homogenizing effect of optimizing for search traffic #
Fixing Macs Door to Door
— entertaining stories from working as an Apple subcontractor in Chicago doing on-call repairs in the late 2000s #
American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year is “enshittification”
— Cory Doctorow coined the perfect word for the lifecycle of online platforms, from rapid growth to extractive death (via) #
Making a Nintendo PlayStation
— the jankiest homebrew gore I've ever seen, courtesy of a twisted genius with an angle grinder, drill, and a whole lot of hot glue #
New study finds coin flips aren’t 50/50
— after 350,757 coin tosses, partly livestreamed on Twitch by volunteers, the researcher found a slight bias toward the same side facing up #
“Can you teach me your favorite dance move?”
— Belgian dancer Ed People travels the world recording people teaching him dance moves with charming results #