The Man Who Killed Google Search — Ed Zitron is reading the internal emails released in the Google antitrust case #

musicForProgramming(); — beautifully chill mixes for focused work with an excellent interface (via) #

NYT’s incomplete guide to how TikTok has changed America — the Senate advanced the measure today to force ByteDance to sell TikTok within the next nine months or face a national ban #

KRAZAM OS — everyone's favorite satirical startup culture sketch comedy troupe launched a Windows 98-inspired homepage (via) #

The Flipbook Experiment — the findings and animated results of The Pudding's experiment asking anonymous people to trace a line in order, flipbook-style #

Christmas shopping online in 1996 — videos like these are the only documentation of some early websites that predate the Internet Archive's large-scale web crawls with Alexa #

Bizarre traveling flame discovery — Steve Mould digs into a strange phenomenon when igniting lighter fluid in a thin trough (via) #

NASA fixes Voyager 1 glitch, resuming communication after five months — no big deal, they just patched code to work around a corrupted 46-year-old memory chip 15 billion miles away #

Ghost joining the fediverse, will adopt ActivityPub — sounds like Buttondown may be federating too #

Equinox — an impressive WebGL/Three.js space adventure game/demo from Little Workshop (via) #

LatentScape — explore the latent space of Are.na images together with others (via) #

The Read, Write, Own Web of the 1990s — Olia Lialina highlights examples from the Geocities archives of the web before platformization (via) #

I Hope This Email Finds You — Waldo Jaquith made a clever, sometimes poetic, new Mastodon bot that finds sentences in Google Books #

Do Not Reply Cards now selling sticker packs — do not tell me why the thing I like is bad #

2024 AI Elections Tracker — Rest of World is tracking AI-generated election misinformation in this year's global elections (via) #

Post.News shutting down — one of the many Twitter clones to pop up in the wake of the Elon acquisition calls it quits (via) #

Lola Dupre — love the work of this collage artist who primarily works with paper and scissors (via) #

Hands-on with Delta, the first console emulator officially allowed on the Apple App Store — free with support for the NES, SNES, N64, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, and Nintendo DS #

We Need To Rewild The Internet — antitrust enforcement, open standards, public funding, and collective governance (via) #

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) #