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) #

ertdfgcvb’s livecoding playground for text-based art — love the sand game made of "sand" #

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) #

Needledrop — a turntable interface for YouTube #

Jazz Popcorn Robot — love the way this ramps up #

The Kilobyte’s Gambit — can you beat 1,024 bytes of javascript? #

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 #

Gab hacked — 70GB of data, public and private, from the far-right social media platform #

picoCAD — build and texture low-poly 3D models in PICO-8 (via) #

AI learns to speedrun QWOP — combining reinforcement and imitation learning to get a top 10 speedrun (via) #

Finger.farm — modern free finger hosting for all your finger needs #

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 #

Virtual Coachella — your vibes are not compliant with festival policy #

gan.style — cursed generator resynthesizes audio from YouTube using a neural net trained on choral and strings recordings #

who’s my little chef — just frying some eggs #

ink 1.0 released — the powerful scripting language powering narrative games like Heaven's Vault, Pendragon, and 80 Days (via) #

Amulet — Robin Sloan proposes short poems whose SHA-256 hashed text includes four or more 8s in a row, with its own scratchpad #

Fry’s Electronics shutting down — I'll miss the great selection, friendly customer service, and completely normal decor #

Adventures in Stereograms — Scott Pakin's innovative stereograms are equal parts impressive and migraine-inducing #

Iceberger — the common mental image of icebergs is wrong, sketch one in 2D and find its stable orientation (via) #

Sgt. Pepper Photos — absurdly comprehensive effort to track down the sources for every image from the iconic Beatles album cover #

Flim, search engine for objects in movies — try keyboard, rabbit, balloon, etc (via) #

Lonely, angry, eager to make history — drawing parallels between the dynamics of WallStreetBets, QAnon, and TheDonald; the linked paper on WSB is interesting reading (via) #

Nyan Cat GIF sells for $590k — related: Joanie Lemercier on the problem of cryptoart #

Jennifer Daniel’s turtle emoji mashups — incredibly charming #

Former employee explains ByteDance’s complex content moderation operation in China — real-time analysis plus 20,000 human moderators censor nudity, profanity, live streams, and political speech #

Minit Fun Racer — a time-loop racer for PC with all proceeds to charity #

Rickroll 4K, upscaled with AI — see also: the Google Street View location #

Facebook wildly overstated potential audience size to advertisers — they removed a staggering 1.3 billion fake accounts in the last quarter of 2020 #

The Verge on Skittish — my new project got its first press; see also: Wired interview #

Facebook calls Australia’s bluff, bans external links to Australian news media — I can't believe I'm siding with Facebook on any issue, but forcing platforms to pay publishers for links to their sites is just stupid #

Two Reply All hosts step down after allegations of union busting and toxic behavior — the Test Kitchen series inspired The Nod co-host Eric Eddings to call them out for hypocrisy; see PJ Vogt's statement #

Slate Star Clusterfuck — nuanced take from Liz Spiers about Slate Star Codex, tech journalism, and negativity bias (via) #

Castle — reminds me of the original version of Byte, before it pivoted into Vine 2.0 #

TikTok stars and social media creators can now join SAG-AFTRA — the influencers are unionizing #

The IGF 2021 playlist — trailers for 460 independent games accepted into this year's Independent Games Festival (via) #

City Guesser — a video-based location guessing game #

Children of QAnon believers are trying to deradicalize their own parents — Jesselyn Cook talks to nine children of QAnon believers from age 19 to 46 in seven states #

Vicki Boykis on volunteer efforts to build state vaccine availability websites — web devs are building aggregators to collect useful information from dozens of sites #

Krebs on the Florida water system hack — someone used Teamviewer to remotely access a water treatment system and tried to poison it, but failed #

Hacking Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, Yelp, Uber, and others with package dependencies — replacing private npm/PyPI/RubyGem dependencies with malicious public ones using the same name #