404 Media on Spy Pet, an underground service secretly scraping thousands of Discord servers — they sell access to scraped user messages and activity to anyone with cryptocurrency #

On Opening Essays, Conference Talks, and Jam Jars — Maggie Appleton tries to understand what makes a good opening for non-fiction writing #

The Cloud Under the Sea — beautiful Verge feature on the invisible seafaring industry that maintains internet cables at the bottom of the ocean (via) #

Molly White on generative AI — a thoughtfully nuanced take that weighs their limited benefits against the outsized human cost #

NYT profiles Today In Tabs’ Rusty Foster — "weird media gremlin" #

Tavi Gevinson’s “Fan Fiction: A Satire” — Rookie's founder made a 75-page zine about her relationship with Taylor Swift and her music, blurring the lines between fiction and reality #

Early 1990s clip art captured an era — Benj Edwards goes spelunking in CD-ROM clip art collections, and you can too now that DISCMASTER is back online #

The Markup investigates sites blocked by school web filters, finds gross overreach — they requested lists of blocked sites from 26 school districts across 14 states, 11 refused on "cybersecurity" grounds #

Mario Meets Pareto — a visual analysis of the 25,704 possible kart builds in Mario Kart 8 (via) #

20 years and a million postcards later, a reflection on PostSecret — opened last July, their Digital Museum of Secrets is worth checking out (via) #

One Minute Park — virtually spend 60 seconds in a random park or add your own to the growing collection (via) #

The Playdate Story — Cabel Sasser's GDC talk is a logistical and emotional rollercoaster of highs and lows, highly recommended #

The Verge reviews the Humane AI Pin — feels like this entire class of AI gadget will be outmoded as soon as Apple integrates the useful bits into iOS #

Dark Visitors — a list of known AI data scrapers and agents, plus an API/WordPress plugin for keeping your robots.txt updated if you want to block them #

How OpenAI, Meta, and Google cut corners to harvest training data — the irony of YouTube scolding OpenAI for transcribing their user's videos when Google did the exact same thing #

telnet mapscii.me — "the whole world in your console" #

Corridor Crew recreates the sodium vapor process, a proto-greenscreen used in Mary Poppins — Disney won a visual effects Oscar in 1965 for the effect, but lost the custom prism they made to make it possible #

xkcd’s Machine, a community-contributed mega Rube Goldberg device — a belated interactive April fools in the spirit of last year's brilliant Escape Speed game #

world_sim — a large language model prompted to act as a sentient CLI universe simulator (via) #

500 Mile Email — a curated list of absurd software bug stories #

The wi-fi only works when it’s raining — I love a good debugging story; this one's part of April Cools' Club, an open challenge to publish something unexpected on April 1 #

CARS — Playables surprise-launched their followup to Plug & Play and KIDS, another delightfully weird monochrome art game #

Hidden Agenda, an effects pedal for your mouse and keyboard — fun open-source hardware/software project imagines reverb, delay, tremolo, and distortion beyond the guitar (via) #

a proper cup of tea — Terry Cavanagh made an interactive Downpour tutorial for making the perfect S Rank cuppa #

NYC’s AI chatbot tell businesses to break the law — "Yes, you can take a cut of your worker's tips." #

American Prospect on how Boeing execs drove out longtime engineers for short-term profit — centered around the whistleblower who died of apparent suicide before the last day of his deposition against the company #

8BitDo’s new C64-inspired mechanical keyboard — I don't want or need a new keyboard, but haven't felt this targeted since LEGO's Atari 2600 set #

Two-thirds of NYT articles on anti-trans legislation quoted zero trans people, 18% contain misinformation — Media Matters and GLAAD report the numbers behind the last 12 months of the Times' transphobic fearmongering #

Models All The Way Down — Christo Buschek and Jer Thorp dig deeper into LAION-5B, the massive dataset used to train image generators like Stable Diffusion #

How Bellingcat geolocated fugitive U.S. militant Ammon Bundy to southern Utah — if you're on the run and don't want to be found, maybe don't post videos of yourself on YouTube #

John Herrman investigates the origin of X’s pornbot reply spam deluge — in short, black hat spammers are paid a commission every time a horny dude signs up for a Dutch "flirt site" with paid chat operators (via) #

404 Media adds full-text RSS feeds for subscribers — more importantly, other publications on Ghost can now do the same thing #

Infinite Mac adds NeXT emulation — making an important part of computer history easily accessible, go try out Tim Berners-Lee's original WorldWideWeb browser #

Dog Poo Golf — Matt Round made a very silly browser game inspired by Wii Sports with the music to match; can you beat my score of 5? #

Google starts pushing AI-generated text above search results without an opt-in — a truly terrible idea, but given their new head of Search led SGE's development, it's only getting worse from here #

Nilay Patel interviews Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on federation and the future of social media — I agree with the general sentiment, but as much as I enjoy the current vibes of Bluesky, I think their future business prospects are grim #

Making a Macintosh Studio — Scott Yu-Jan makes an iPad mini dock on a Mac Studio inspired by the original Macintosh (via) #

Henry Heffernan’s homepage — can your portfolio run DOOM? (via) #

Online age verification laws are dragging us back to the dark ages of the internet — as 404 Media points out here, they hurt sex workers while doing nothing to help minors but drive them to unregulated, unmoderated alternatives #

15 Note Poly Tempo Pendulum — Canadian composer/percussionist Jérémie Carrier plays 15 different notes at 0.2 bpm differences to create hypnotic changing polyrhythms (via) #

Picotron — a fantasy workstation from the creator of PICO-8 #

In a twist ending, the final uncleared Super Mario Maker level revealed to be a tool-assisted run — that means that Team 0%'s work is done, and the game is officially beaten #

Hank Green announces We’re Here, a weekly newsletter of “good and cool stuff from around the internet” — sounds like my cup of tea and probably yours too #

PencilBooth — interesting new independent app for "visual email newsletters" targeting artists, free up to 100 subscribers (via) #

The Brewintosh — Kevin Noki 3D printed his own working full-size Macintosh, detailed in an extremely chill voiceless video (via) #

The Oral History of Pitchfork — a good companion to Elizabeth Lopatto's piece about the life and death of Pitchfork in The Verge #

Threads rolls out one-way fediverse sharing — nice to see, but I'll be shocked if this ever extends to account portability or access to the Threads social graph #

U.S. sues Apple for illegal monopoly over smartphones — The Verge is pulling all the news and updates into a single stream #

The HTML Review 03 — third issue of the tremendously good experimental webzine, "an annual journal of literature made to exist on the web" #

Researching a bizarre 2000s sitcom with ChatGPT — Ironic Sans' David Friedman has started making video essays, which are predictably great #