Reddit’s 2020 Year in Review — Reddit exploded during the pandemic and protests, with daily active users up 44% and posts/upvotes up over 50% #

Agents raid home of fired Florida data scientist who built COVID-19 dashboard — allegedly over "hacking" an alert system in which "all authorized users use the same user name and password" #

Tumblr Year in Review 2020 — interesting snapshot of the community from October 21, 2019 to October 20, 2020 (via) #

Interactive Fiction Competition 2020 winners — the core game mechanic and implementation of The Impossible Bottle is genius #

This Person Exists — samples from the corpus feeding GAN-generated faces #

Recovering pixelated text from screenshots — reveals text obscured with a linear box filter, assuming you can supply it with an accurate font sample (via) #

500 Reasons We’ve Loved New York — a tribute to the restaurants, bars, shops, and other businesses, some over a hundred years old, that closed since the pandemic started (via) #

Zeynep Tufekci on a Covid case study of indoor dining — within five minutes of unmasked exposure, one person infected two others 15-21 feet away (via) #

The self-destructive final months of Tony Hsieh’s life — the beloved Zappos founder was privately suffering from mental health and addiction issues #

Windows Ugly Sweaters — they spelled "unspeakably beautiful" wrong #

The Markup on why web scraping is vital to democracy — the Supreme Court heard its first CFAA case this week, which may make scraping a crime #

100 Days of Art History Jinjins — artist digitally paints herself into famous paintings #

How Oisín Moran made a self-quoting tweet — Curtis Coleman's recursive tweet from 2009 is the only other example I know of (via) #

Casey Newton on how Microsoft crushed Slack — I had no idea Teams doubled in size in the last six months #

Nick Heer on Salesforce’s Slack acquisition — like Nick, I adore Slack and barely understand what Salesforce does, and that makes me worry #

Footage of the Arecibo tower collapse — heartbreaking, but at least nobody was hurt #

EFF on the misplaced blame on Section 230 for big tech’s failures — for different reasons, liberals and conservatives are both wrong about repealing platform immunity #

Google Poly shutting down in 2021 — a huge library of Creative Commons-licensed of 3D objects with a powerful API disappears in six months #

Verse by Verse — compose poems with the help of generative models trained on the work of famous poets (via) #

Combat at the Movies — scenes from ten classic films reenacted by the tanks from Combat for the Atari 2600 (via) #

Swirled Series — 115 checkerboard loop animations from 81 contributors (via) #

AR audio visualizer distorts real-world surfaces — built with ARKit #

TikTok’s Top 100 of 2020 — see also: Elite TikTok and Cartel TikTok #

Sidney Powell teams with 8chan admin Ron Watkins — Ron and his dad are widely suspected to be Q #

Laura Hudson reviews Ready Player Two — "Don’t you kids ever get tired of picking through the wreckage of a past generation’s nostalgia?" (via) #

Judgement on COVID-19 goes Heavy Metal — Andre Antunes remixes televangelist grifter Kenneth Copeland #

Adrian Smith discovers his 8-year-old self is a meme — he's taking it well #

Billie Eilish: Same Interview, The Fourth Year — I hope she keeps doing these forever #

A song by the demon of 2020 — Beardyman channels Randy Newman #

20 days of fantasy and failure — WaPo goes inside Trump’s attempted coup, a failed quest to overturn election results #

Web Conversations With the Year 2000 — Paul Ford's brief conversation with his younger self about web tech (via) #

First-person account and photos of the removal of the Utah monolith — four men dismantled it on Friday night, implied that they were annoyed by the environment impact of tourists in the area #

SpaceHey — MySpace rebooted by an 18-year-old German student, who was five years old at its peak popularity (via) #

How old, ambient Japanese music became a smash hit on YouTube — a 2016 study analyzed 22k YouTube videos and found recommendations fell into 50 clusters (via) #

Vulture on the season finale of “How To with John Wilson” — the strange and good HBO docuseries ended with scenes of NYC shot as the pandemic unfolded #

Russian Cyberpunk Farm — you'll want to turn on the captions (via) #

Painting a Selfie Girl with Maths — fascinating step-by-step breakdown of a procedurally-generated graphic; play with it on Shadertoy (via) #

The mysterious Utah monolith disappeared — Deborah Solomon dug into the theory that it was created by artist John McCracken #

First Tweets — just setting up my twttr #

Radicle — intriguing new app for decentralized collaborative code development (via) #

DeepMind’s AlphaFold makes huge leap in protein folding predictions — it nearly solves the 3D shapes of complex protein structures, more than doubling accuracy in the last four years (via) #

Closing the Loop on China’s Mystery Seeds — outstanding audio investigation by Adrianne Jeffries into Amazon review scammers, why they used seeds, and why it ended so quickly #

Banners Begone! — clicker games are my Kryptonite, transparently manipulative but I still succumb #

David Lu spent 11 years making a Line Rider track — in the process, he rebuilt Line Rider using modern web standards to fix its bugs, which became the official version #

Correlating Covid-19 cases and negative reviews of scented candles — people who lost their sense of smell and haven't realized it yet #

NYT investigation into Coinbase’s treatment of Black employees — nearly all the company's Black employees left a year and a half ago, before their "no politics" stance last month led to another exodus #

Strong Bad Emails on the Internet Archive — all the interactive easter eggs will now be preserved thanks to Flash emulation (via) #

Every Movie Cough — and some sneezes too #

Mixtape for the Milky Way’s “Video Games” — touching music video with papercraft recreations of games from Pong to Gris (via) #

Talkin’ Strong Bad — makes a great holiday gift, along with Trogdor!! The Board Game #