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 #
World of Goo 2
— the classic physics puzzler is getting a sequel 15 years after the original (via) #
Tom Whitwell’s 52 things I learned in 2023
— his annual post is always an interesting and entertaining collection of facts and discoveries (via) #
Psychedelic Cryptography, making messages only visible to people on psychedelics
— relies on people seeing persistent afterimages/tracers, try increasing YouTube playback speed to 2x to see them (via) #
Google launches Gemini, the AI model it hopes will take down GPT-4
— they claim their most powerful model beats GPT-4 in most benchmarks, but it won't be available until next year #
Twitter users solve a 25-year-old mystery about a country song from the X-Files
— a wholesome Twitter thread these days feels like a glimmer of light from a dying star #
First trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI
— despite leaking early on X/Twitter, it broke YouTube records for most views in 24 hours for a non-music video #
Plagiarism and You(Tube)
— Hbomberguy's excellent four-hour exposé on video essayists passing off others' work as their own #
The 88×31 GIF Collection
— a collection of 4,210 classic 88x31 buttons, a standard started by the Netscape Now! campaign in 1996 (via) #
AI Garage Sale, haggle with AI personalities to buy real products
— test your prompt injection skills in this ridiculous project from BRAIN, the internet weirdos behind GEN-Z-SPAN #
It’s Black Friday, Charlie Brown!
— Louie Zong made a soundtrack for a fictional TV special in the style of early '70s Vince Guaraldi #
Source code for Infocom’s original interpreters released
— with little fanfare, Andrew Plotkin uploaded a trove of newly-discovered source code for various 1980s computers to GitHub #
Dr Ludwig and the Devil
— make a deal with the devil in this clever game that won this year's Interactive Fiction Comp #
Inside the Chaos at OpenAI
— Karen Hao and Charlie Warzel's deeply-reported piece about the events leading up to this weekend's drama; paywall-free link #
Half-Life celebrates 25th anniversary with new documentary and big updates
— the game's free on Steam right now for PC/Mac with new maps, restored content, and… Too Much Coffee Man!? #
Tumblr is betting big on going small
— kudos to Matt Mullenweg for talking openly about these changes, and continuing to maintain it while avoiding layoffs #
TikTok teens aren’t stanning Osama bin Laden
— Garbage Day's Ryan Broderick digs into what seems to be a moral panic inflamed by the media #
Vivaldi’s Summer on Commodore-based instruments
— Linus Åkesson created each instrument, wrote all the software, and plays every part #
draw my ui
— sketch a UI, which is then sent to GPT-4's vision model and converted to working code; note: OpenAI API key required #
Ferrofluid Synth
— the latest project from Swedish audiovisual artist/mad scientist Love Hultén (via) #
Gwern searches Wikipedia for unused three-letter acronyms
— a case study of coding with GPT-4 with interesting visualizations of the resulting dataset #
Jeff Bezos Rowing Boat
— instead of a miniature diorama, Bobby Fingers goes supersize for his latest unhinged video #
GitHub releases Monaspace font family
— monospace OpenType fonts that intelligently adjust glyphs and kerning to improve readability while staying in the grid #
A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft
— James Somers reflects on the changing nature of programming with AI assistance (via) #
YouTube will require labeling “realistic” AI-generated content, let music partners request removal of deepfake vocals
— it's like they've created their own parallel version of fair use's balancing test #
Internet sleuths search for a mystery pop song from a 17 second clip
— Miles Klee on another low-stakes unsolved internet mystery, like Celebrity Number Six (via) #
Connections with James Burke returns 45 years after it first aired
— streaming now on Curiosity Stream #
Recursive Recipes
— click ingredients to expand them, giving you instructions on how to make Eggs Benedict from scratch in a mere 17.5 years (via) #
G/O Media shutters Jezebel after 16 years, lays off staff
— they should give the domain back to Heather Champ (via) #
Omegle shuts down after 14 years over sexual abuse litigation
— it boomed during the pandemic for live performance and personal connection, but has always struggled with sexual predators #
Barack Obama talks to The Verge’s Nilay Patel
— on AI regulation, free speech on social networks, and the future of democracy and the internet #