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 #

Visualizing the most popular TV series from 1986-2019 — I love this series from Data Is Beautiful, covering websites, social networks, programming languages, and more #

Xfinity ruins E.T. for the holidays — Comcast owns E.T.'s owner, Universal Pictures, as well as NBC, the network this expertly-made schlock aired on #

Runway Palette — stunning desktop-only color visualization of 144,000 outfits from 3,800 runway shows; how it was made (via) #

Jamie Brew on How to Write With an Artificial Intelligence — try it out, just start typing and hit Tab any time for generated text from GPT-2 #

The voxel art of Dima K — one of many talented artists using MagicaVoxel, the free voxel art editor/renderer; see also: Niklas Mäckle, Sir Carma #

Former Go champion beaten by DeepMind retires after declaring AI invincible — "Even if I become the number one, there is an entity that cannot be defeated." #

Twitter will start removing inactive accounts in December — this immediately raised the issue of memorializing accounts, with no clear answers #

Oops! Predicting Unintentional Action in Video — Columbia University students trained a machine to understand fail videos (via) #

RIPE ran out of IPv4 addresses — the final registry allocated the last available IPv4 blocks (via) #

Leaked Chinese operation manuals reveal new details of mass internment and AI-driven “predictive policing” — mass surveillance, large-scale data collection, and machine learning employed for social control and state-run terror (via) #

Christian Weiske’s replacement OUYA server goes live — the games were saved by volunteer archivists, and stored at the Internet Archive (via) #

Vanity Fair interviews Billie Eilish for the third year with the same questions — they should keep it going for 55 years like the Up series (via) #

Save .ORG — EFF, Internet Archive, Creative Commons, and many more are trying to stop the sale and protect .ORG #

Sunday Afternoon at Denny’s — a mini-documentary following a MAGA meetup that gets protested by neo-Nazis (via) #

The Register digs into the disturbing sale of the .ORG domain registry to a private equity firm — everything about this stinks (via) #

The Verge’s Mia Sato on the Hmong diaspora’s use of free conference calling as pirate radio — accessible without internet, and largely run/DJed by women, some lines have over 1,000 simultaneous callers (via) #