The long history of U.S. racism against Asian Americans
— from "yellow peril" to "model minority" to the "Chinese virus" #
Nicole Chung’s advice to a parent whose son bullied his Asian classmate
— "If we’re not challenging and educating our kids about racism, we leave them at risk of perpetuating it" #
The answer to Anti-Asian racism is not more policing
— also: Vox covered the policing debate among members of Asian-American communities #
Asian-Americans experience far more hate incidents than numbers indicate
— many go unreported because of language/cultural barriers and lack of trust in law enforcement #
Bystander intervention training to stop anti-Asian/American and xenophobic harassment
— free one-hour interactive training, I signed up for next month (via) #
61 Ways to Donate in Support of Asian Communities
— from policy reform and legal defense funds to LGBTQ and gender-based orgs #
There were 3,800 anti-Asian racist incidents, mostly against women, in past year
— new report from Stop AAPI Hate, a reporting center for anti-Asian hate incidents, which escalated during the pandemic #
Chess world champion plays Bongcloud Attack opening in tournament
— welcome to the world of meme chess, popularized by grandmaster/livestreamer Hikaru Nakamura #
Hackers can reroute text messages without permission using commercial SMS services
— extremely disturbing, and yet another argument for never using SMS for auth #
Zoom Escaper
— add echo, choppiness, noise, crying babies, and more to your microphone audio to get out of terrible meetings #
Turntable.fm revived after eight years, as two competing sites
— one from its original founder, and a reboot created by two former team members (via) #
VoCSSels, a voxel editor for 3D CSS/HTML models
— a browser-based clone of Kenney's brilliant KenShape for Windows/Linux (via) #
Finding Mona Lisa in Conway’s Game of Life
— parallelized to run a thousand iterations on Google Colab in 40 seconds #
Teens on a Year That Changed Everything
— art, photos, and words from U.S. teens on a year of pandemic, protest, and social isolation #
What Really Happened at ‘Reply All’?
— followup from the NYT on the fallout from Reply All's reporting on Bon Appetit (via) #
Beeple sells NFT of a JPG for $69M, the most ever for a digital work
— despite their obvious waste and uselessness, NFTs will persist as long as crypto-whales keep dropping life-changing sums on artists #
NYT interviews 75 artists about their pandemic year
— Tig Notaro, Issa Rae, Jenny Holzer, Aaron Sorkin, Phoebe Bridgers, and many more #
Buzzfeed’s oral history of March 11, 2020
— the day the WHO declared a pandemic, NBA cancelled the season, and Tom Hanks got it within hours of each other #
Adi Robertson’s Verge feature on Twine
— the legacy and influence of the accessible tool for crafting branching interactive fiction #
Deepfaked Tom Cruise breakdown
— the creator works on Sassy Justice, and each TikTok clip took weeks of work (via) #
Phantom Tollbooth author Norton Juster dies at 91
— I adored this book, and the 2012 documentary exploring its lasting impact #
Google urged employees reporting discrimination to take mental health counseling and medical leave
— 11 current and former employees were effectively told "it's not us, it's you" #
Remembering Allan McDonald
— the engineer refused to sign off on the Challenger launch and helped expose the disaster cover-up, risking his career twice #
Who I Lost
— devastating NYT interactive feature interviewing Americans who lost friends and loved ones to Covid-19 (via) #
OpenAI’s state-of-the-art machine vision AI is fooled by handwritten notes
— the downside of teaching your AI to read #
Now Play This 2021
— the festival of experimental game design is fully online this year with a delightful lineup #
The Garden of Earthly Delights
— inspired by Bosch's triptych, an online chatroom for the animals of Age of Empires II (via) #
Everest Pipkin on the environmental issues of cryptoart and NFTs
— "Proof of work places a direct lien against the future." #
Indie.vc calls it quits
— sadly, most investors want big exits, not a bunch of sustainable independent companies paying dividends #
Glitch workers sign tech’s first collective bargaining agreement
— Glitch voluntarily recognized the union a year ago this month #
Remote, Oregon
— job sites are geocoding remote work positions to an unincorporated hamlet in southern Oregon #
AI learns to speedrun QWOP
— combining reinforcement and imitation learning to get a top 10 speedrun (via) #
Twitter announces Super Follow paid creator subscriptions
— elements of Substack, Patreon, and Clubhouse #
The Verge report on employee discrimination at Mailchimp
— stories of racist/sexist behavior and pay disparities from 11 current and past employees #