February 25, 2021
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 #
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) #
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 #
Facebook wildly overstated potential audience size to advertisers
— they removed a staggering 1.3 billion fake accounts in the last quarter of 2020 #
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) #
The IGF 2021 playlist
— trailers for 460 independent games accepted into this year's Independent Games Festival (via) #
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 #
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) #
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 #
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." #
Danielle Baskin shares the story behind her satirical Blue Check Homes site
— "not everyone understands your commentary and will share your jokes as fact" #