Nvidia releases StyleGAN2, state-of-the-art generative image modeling — clears up many of the visual artifacts of StyleGAN, see it in action on This Person Does Not Exist #

“They” is Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year 2019 — nice to see the continued mainstream acceptance of singular they #

Pico-8 Advent Calendar 2019 — a new game for the fantasy console every day until Christmas, don't miss the flawless Snowcraft demake #

YouTube expands anti-harassment policies — a clear reaction to their failure to act in the Carlos Maza/Steven Crowder incident #

Twitter announces Bluesky project to develop (another) decentralized open standard for social media — ActivityPub was tailor-made for this use, but they seem committed to reinventing it on the blockchain #

Vulfpeck Live at Madison Square Garden — I watched them play for a small crowd at XOXO, and four years later, they're selling out MSG with no label, manager, or advertising #

XOXO’s Worldbuilders fundraiser for Heifer International — we're giving away prizes from our own collection of XOXO history, and would love your help hitting the goal by December 17 #

Wired Magazine’s cover story on Simone Giertz — after surviving her brain tumor, she hopes to move on from shitty robots to space exploration (via) #

Twin Peaks VR — I still wonder what the cancelled Twin Peaks for the NES would've been like (via) #

“Link In Bio” is a subtle undermining of the web — Anil Dash on how links represent a threat to closed systems #

Bloomberg Businessweek’s Jealousy List — this year's articles their editorial staff most wish they'd written #

Choose Your Own Adventure publishers try to get phrase banned from Itch.io — Chooseco has only owned the trademark since 1999, after Random House let it lapse #

The Universal LEGO Sorting Machine — made from 10,000 LEGOs, the AI-powered sorting machine can recognize and sort every LEGO part ever made #

10×19 — first day of the annual project where designers and illustrators create new covers for their top 10 albums of the year #

Verizon blocks Archive Team from preserving 20 years of Yahoo Groups history — days before mass deletion, they banned Archive Team's volunteer email addresses (via) #

TikTok’s Top 100 of 2019 — related: Taylor Lorenz interviewed Vanessa Pappas, TikTok's most accessible executive in the West #

People with Cool Avatars  #

Daniel Keogh’s maximalist illustrations — like Where's Waldo for memes #

Natural History Museum — delightfully weird short from Kirsten Lepore, who's currently directing an indie feature film #

Recovering hidden video from lighting changes — reconstructing the shadows in Plato's cave with deep matrix factorization (via) #

Janelle Shane experiments with AI Dungeon 2 — playing with this feels like black magic #

AI Dungeon 2 — an AI-driven text adventure that responds realistically to any input, one of the most profoundly amazing projects I've ever seen #

25 Rock Facts from me, Greg — lilly is a precious resource and must be protected at all costs #

YouTube Rewind 2019 — taking the safe route with a purely stats-focused roundup after last year's cringefest #

Teaching AI Feminism and Making Art — Arwa Michelle Mboya is training a neural network on iconic feminist texts (via) #

Tracking the bestselling songs for every decade back to 14,000BC — trust me and stick with it #

Nintendo took down Super Mario ROM hack video that likely inspired Mario Maker 2 feature — as Patrick explains, the ultra-hard Kaizo Mario fan-made games almost certainly inspired the original Mario Maker #

Hair Love — charming animated short, have tissues ready (via) #

The Hungry Terminator — next-level deepfake from the creator of the Bill Hader/Arnold Schwarzenegger swap #

Looop.dev — new creative coding tool for experimenting with looping animation (via) #

Motherboard on Ring’s evolution into Amazon’s private surveillance network — the first of a three-part series, here's part two (via) #

Craigslist finally gets an official iOS app — I truly never thought this would ever happen (via) #

flatpak — 24 hours left to back this puzzle book in the guise of an Ikea-esque catalog #

Lost Code — "a graphic design project exploring the fiction in translation" from Hilda Wong and Ellen Lo (via) #

Matthias Eberl’s research on TikTok’s privacy issues — they fingerprint individuals with both Canvas images and internal audio generation #

The Verge’s Adi Robertson on fighting lies, tricks, and chaos online — disinformation doesn't always look how you expect, often just telling you what you want to hear #

How Joey Clift “celebrated Native American Heritage Month by ruining a comedy podcast” — a poorly-conceived attempt at inclusivity turned into a lesson on tokenization (via) #

href.cool’s Links of the Decade — brilliant roundup of the best internet from the 2010s; from Kicks Condor, who is the best #

Campo Santo confirms “In the Valley of Gods” on hold — the former Firewatch devs are focused on Half Life: Alyx and other projects at Valve #

Keybase and the chaos of crypto — if you use Keybase, you've probably seen a rise in spam lately and here's why #

Volunteer archivists are working to seed LibGen’s 33 TBs of scientific material — I wasn't familiar with The-Eye, which seems to be an Archive Team-esque project #

The Atlantic’s Kaitlin Tiffany looks back at Tumblr’s first year without Porn — "porn creators… weren't quarantined in some illicit corner of the site—they were woven into its basic fabric" #

Riot Games to pay every female employee since 2014 with $10M settlement — "at the end of the day, Riot prefers to pay the women still here for the trouble of continuing to work with alleged abusers" (via) #

DrumBot — play real-time music with a machine-learning drummer that drums based on your melody (via) #

Cooking with Wool — charming stop-motion animation from Andrea Love (via) #

China now requires facial recognition scans for mobile phone users — "Please leave us with some privacy." #

Shelfbrain’s Word of the Day — generative language model making up word definitions, also available in print #

Amazon’s DeepComposer lets humans compose generative music with AI — we've come a long way since Microsoft Songsmith #

The Deep Sea — new project from Neal Agarwal, a constant source of joyful old-school internet (via) #

Annalee Newitz’s NYT op-ed on the future of social media — with thoughts from Mikki Kendall, Erika Hall, Janelle Shane, Safiya Umoja Noble, John Scalzi, and Siva Vaidhyanathan #