Twitter launches new API to make amends with third-party developers — fool me once, etc etc #

The scars of “non-lethal” weapons deployed in protests — what doesn't kill you… can still really fuck you up for the rest of your life #

Pseudonymous postal carrier writes about the disastrous changes to the USPS — you can follow @DingusJMcGee for more #

Mozilla Talent Directory — some of the many people laid off and looking for new opportunities #

Sudowrite — Amit Gupta and James Yu are making a creative writing assistant with GPT-3  #

Broken cable damages Arecibo Observatory — a three-inch cable ripped through 100 feet of the reflector dish #

Mozilla lays off a quarter of the company — major cuts as their browser share declines and lucrative Google contract expires #

tech brain — "an addiction to easy answers combined with a wholesale cultural resistance to any kind of complexity" #

Vid2Player, controllable video sprites from tennis footage — next-gen Pong will melt your GPU #

Exploring accidental triggers of smart speakers — researchers found more than 1,000 words or phrases that incorrectly trigger Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Google devices #

WeHole — watch YouTube videos with under 500 views with others (via) #

Redbone’s “Come and Get Your Love” gets an official video, 46 years later — animated by Native American artist Brent Learned for the first Native American band to achieve a top 5 Billboard single (via) #

masterWiki — MSCHF's latest drop is Masterclass class summaries in the style of WikiHow #

TwikTwok — swipe through popular videos on Twitter #

ACLU calls for dismantling the DHS — co-signed #

Making Mixolumia from idea to release — 18-month-long Twitter thread follows the full development of an indie video game #

USPS overhauls leadership, centralizing power around new Postmaster General — reassigning or displacing 23 postal service executives via a memo buried on a Friday #

Gripping Food With Force — happy friday, everyone (via) #

Blaseball — absurdist text-only fantasy baseball idle game with a thriving fan community #

After 72 years, federal judge ends antitrust rules on studios owning theaters — a kick in the teeth to indie theaters and filmmakers already suffering through a pandemic #

Steven Levy interviews Bill Gates on Covid — ignore the clickbait headline #

Antimander — visualizing the complex tradeoffs in redistricting, a kludgy alternative to proportional representation #

Trump signs executive order to ban transactions with Bytedance and WeChat beginning September 20 — this will undoubtedly face legal challenges, and needs to die in court #

Adam Neely harmonizes the Jay-Z deepfake — three talented musicians find the rhythm in machine-generated speech #

Spelunky 2 will be released on September 15 — Derek Yu explains what guided his design choices for the sequel #

Louisiana Supreme Court upholds Black man’s life sentence for stealing hedge clippers more than 20 years ago — five white male justices affirmed, with the sole female and Black person on the court dissenting #

Facebook employees find evidence of special treatment for right-wing sources of misinformation — Facebook fired an engineer who complained internally #

This RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 maze takes trillions of years to complete — see also: the rollercoaster that takes 3,000 in-game years to ride #

Scientists rename human genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates — it was easier to rename MARCH1 and SEPT1 than wait for Microsoft to allow users to disable autoformatting (via) #

Georgia students suspended for posting photos of crowded hallways — the story behind the viral photo is worse than it looked #

Three of Bon Appétit’s Test Kitchen stars of color quit over pay discrepancies — even after weeks of negotiations, their new contracts would still pay less than their white counterparts #

Paper interviews Rebecca Sugar and Noelle Stevenson — the creators of Steven Universe and She-Ra reflect on queer representation in animation #

Trump’s TikTok crusade makes US censorship look a lot like China — though unlikely to be enacted, the White House's proposed "Clean Network" would be akin to a new Great Firewall #

New York, D.C. attorneys general sue NRA for widespread fraud, seek to dissolve organization — good riddance #

Instagram launches Reels, its TikTok competitor — unlike TikTok, you can't download videos, they're capped at 15 seconds, and the feed's buried in a tab #

A blog secretly written by GPT-3 made it to the top of Hacker News — the author wrote only the title and intro for each post, the AI wrote the rest #

Adrian Hon on what ARGs can teach us about QAnon — expanding on his popular Twitter thread; related: Charlie Warzel interviewed him about it for the NYT #

TikTok and the Sorting Hat — Eugene Wei on how algorithms can form interest graphs at unprecedented scale without following anyone #

Melanie Faye’s Tiny Desk (Home) Concert — incredible guitarist and songwriter, she's a great Instagram follow #

TikTok and the Law — Lawfare looks at the legality of the White House's order for ByteDance to divest (via) #

Star Turns — Duncan Robson compiled all his face-aligned rotating movie posters into a single video #

Alanis Morissette performs “Ablaze” with her daughter — singing a song about parenting while parenting (via) #

Trump threatens TikTok will “close down” on September 15th unless an American company buys it — needless to say, TikTok creators and fans are freaking out #

Calendar 2020 — that feels about right #

How the Pandemic Defeated America — Ed Yong's cover story for The Atlantic is a deep dive into the U.S.'s catastrophic pandemic response #

Future Islands’ “For Sure” — animated music video about "two autonomous rental cars finding love on the way across state lines after a climate collapse" (via) #

Antibodies (Do You Have The) — Cousin Greg from HBO's Succession made a pop-punk pandemic anthem #

Matt Muir’s Web Curios goes on hiatus after 300 issues — my favorite linktastic newsletter goes on break because Imperica, its publisher, shut down today #

Sourceful — search engine for a community-submitted collection of public Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides (via) #

Meeting Intruders — convert Google Meet into a Space Invaders knockoff with your coworkers as the aliens #