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 #

Bird Folder, name new folders after random birds in macOS — inspired by Emily Yoon's story about a Korean ZIP utility #

Chessformer — clever grid-based puzzle platformer with chess pieces (via) #

Vole’s public domain “Happy Birthday to You” covers — for people missing offices, try the "Unenthusiastic Colleagues Who Can’t Remember Your Name" version (via) #

Same Energy — a minimalist visual search engine built on deep learning (via) #

The mysterious Wikimedia photo of a purple flower getting 78 million hits daily — 20% of all requests were for one photo, starting when India banned TikTok (via) #

A Heart from Space — a web-based tool allowing a group of people to draw shapes with GPS, inspired by a conversation with Yo-Yo Ma (via) #

Paul Ford on the secret, essential geography of the office — I'm not nostalgic for offices, I just miss a change of scenery for working and spending time with people outside my house (via) #

Twitter’s Trump ban is permanent even if he runs again — he'll likely be acquitted in his second impeachment, but at least we won't have to see his fascistic tweets anymore #

MetaHuman Creator — Epic's upcoming browser-based, cloud-streamed tool to craft highly-realistic 3D human faces, backed by Unreal Engine (via) #

Is this cop playing copyrighted music to avoid being livestreamed? — he later plays a Beatles song, an even safer bet to trigger automated content blocking #

David Friedman explores the “Everybody Hurts” YouTube comments — a micro-community expressing messages of grief, loss, and support; CW: suicide #

Rabbit Rabbit: A Game of Superstitions — I helped with editing/production on Ami's new 350-card trivia game that just launched on Kickstarter #

The Live Music Project — incredible analysis from The Pudding of the characteristics of live vs. studio recordings #

Adi Robertson on the 25th anniversary of Section 230 — experts warn the Democrats' proposed Section 230 reform bill could have major side effects and devastate the internet #

Chin Masker — masks that look like you're wearing masks wrong, but you're actually wearing it right #

Super Mario World Restored — reconstructed from the original source samples, smooth as silk (via) #

Robin Sloan on the strange world of NFTs and crypto art — I'm a fan of weird internet and artists getting paid, but it all seems kind of silly and unsustainable #

Reply All on the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen’s online reckoning — the powerful first part of a four-part series from Sruthi Pinnamaneni #

How misinformation fueled a coup in Myanmar — “People can’t get real information… They restored the internet but not the television." #

Smac McCreanor’s Hydraulic Press dance videos — even more on her TikTok #

Danielle Baskin shares the story behind her satirical Blue Check Homes site — "not everyone understands your commentary and will share your jokes as fact" #