Tom Coates on how Threads will integrate with the Fediverse
— extensive notes and thoughts from a small meeting with the Threads team about their federation plans #
Why Platformer is leaving Substack
— every newsletter I love, from Garbage Day and Today In Tabs to Citation Needed and Ironic Sans, are moving off the Nazi-friendly platform #
brr.fyi goes home
— is this the end for the best blog ever written about life in the South Pole? stay tuned for part two #
Using the Wayback Machine and Google Analytics to uncover disinformation networks
— Bellingcat made a lightweight tool for scraping current and historic Google Analytics data
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How Google’s search algorithms reshaped the web
— The Verge's Mia Sato breaks down, step by step, the homogenizing effect of optimizing for search traffic #
Fixing Macs Door to Door
— entertaining stories from working as an Apple subcontractor in Chicago doing on-call repairs in the late 2000s #
American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year is “enshittification”
— Cory Doctorow coined the perfect word for the lifecycle of online platforms, from rapid growth to extractive death (via) #
Making a Nintendo PlayStation
— the jankiest homebrew gore I've ever seen, courtesy of a twisted genius with an angle grinder, drill, and a whole lot of hot glue #
New study finds coin flips aren’t 50/50
— after 350,757 coin tosses, partly livestreamed on Twitch by volunteers, the researcher found a slight bias toward the same side facing up #
“Can you teach me your favorite dance move?”
— Belgian dancer Ed People travels the world recording people teaching him dance moves with charming results #
Mobile ALOHA
— Stanford researchers open-sourced a spendy robotics kit made with off-the-shelf parts that can perform complex tasks like cooking and cleaning #
Ars Technica on the Vectrex’s cult following and newly-discovered games
— there's a reason my logo is a Vectrex; it's a weird and beautiful console, a commercial failure but wildly innovative (via) #
Building A Marble Clock
— Ivan Miranda's four-part series is worth watching from the beginning as he iterates and improves the design #
arcc, the Apocalypse Recovery Computing Cluster
— Matt Round's latest is a deep multiuser simulation of a fictional Cold War-era computer network and hardware, currently £10.02 to join #
13-year-old becomes first person to ever “beat” Tetris for the NES
— don't miss the video where he hits the kill screen after 38 minutes of play and nearly passes out #
Tom Scott and the formidable power of escalating streaks
— Simon Willison writes about using streaks in life and work, but they're at their best when they leave room for iterative improvement #
Portal demake for the Nintendo 64, now out of beta
— the first 13 test chambers are playable with source code and ROM patcher available (via) #
Mickey-1928
— fine-tuned image model trained on newly-public domain images of Mickey Mouse from 1928 #
After 10 years, Tom Scott quits making weekly videos
— an amazing run of thoughtful work, ending on his own terms and with tremendous style #
uBlacklist
— browser add-on for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari to block websites and entire domains in Google, Bing, and other search engines (via) #
The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again
— with decentralization and fragmented platforms, Anil Dash is optimistic for a revival of the personal, human web #
New York Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft for training AI models on their work
— the suit goes beyond copyright claims to accuse Bing of damaging their brand with hallucinated citations #
The best articles Rest of World didn’t publish in 2023
— like the Bloomberg Jealousy List, their staff picks the best global tech stories they wish they'd written this year #
How Big is YouTube?
— estimating the number of YouTube videos and other metadata from random sampling of video IDs #
Untangling Threads
— Erin Kissane breaks down the benefits, risks, and risk mitigations of Threads joining the fediverse #
Substack embraces Nazis
— Hamish McKenzie's letter makes it clear they're not only committed to platforming bigotry, but funding and profiting from it #
Kurzgesagt’s Ultimate Size Comparison
— love how they frame each comparison with human scale in the middle, with you in between a single DNA strand and the Sun (via) #
Largest dataset powering AI images removed after discovery of child sexual abuse material
— what does this mean for Common Crawl, the source that the LAION datasets were derived from? #
Clickbait Remover for YouTube
— replaces ridiculous thumbnails with an image from the video, open-source and available for Firefox #
7 Months Inside an Online Scam Labor Camp
— NYT investigation into a Chinese human trafficking operation powering "pig butchering" confidence scams (via) #
Mickey, Disney, and the Public Domain
— after 95 years of copyright, the earliest version of Mickey Mouse will enter the public domain on January 1 while remaining trademarked #
Facebook is being overrun with stolen, AI-generated images people think are real
— 404 Media's Jason Koebler digs into yet another flood of generative AI chum content and the people trying to track it #
How much Hank Green makes from Shorts, Reels, and TikTok
— fascinating inside baseball breaking down the CPMs and conflicting incentive structures for each short-form video platform #
The ’90s art collective that smuggled subversive art into episodes of Melrose Place
— Decoder Ring's podcast version of this story is also great (via) #
After 22 years, Google Groups ending support for Usenet
— probably for the best since they've allowed it to become a major source of newsgroup spam #
Pipe Dreams: The Life and Times of Yahoo! Pipes
— Glenn Fleishman interviewed the original team, among others, for this beautifully-designed history of the Web 2.0 app (via) #
E3 is officially dead
— I'll always remember it as the place I first played Katamari in 2004 and Okami and Shadow of the Colossus in 2005 #
The Great Scrollback of Alexandria
— a preserved collection of thousands of funny, weird, and notable tweets, some deleted and reconstructed from screenshots #
The Year Twitter Died
— a special series from The Verge with contributions from Sarah Jeong, Zoe Schiffer, Nilay Patel, and an archive of thousands of Good Tweets #
Ed Yong on how reporting on long Covid made him a better journalist
— "How could so many people feel so thoroughly unrepresented by an industry that purports to give voice to the voiceless?" #
The Pudding Cup 2023
— The Pudding's picks for the best visual and data-driven stories of the year #
Motion Extraction
— meditative video about a simple technique for spotlighting motion in video from Posy (via) #
Pee-wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special’s HD remaster is now free on YouTube
— one of the greatest and weirdest holiday TV specials ever, made by a cast and crew of oddball geniuses #