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) #

Sacha Baron Cohen blasts Facebook, Google, and Twitter for allowing hate and propaganda to thrive — "their entire business model relies on generating more engagement, and nothing generates more engagement than lies, fear and outrage" #

List of Lists: The Best of the 2010s — Rex Sorgatz is compiling a growing meta-list of every decade retrospective (via) #

The Jungle Prince of Delhi — Ellen Barry's remarkable story of a deposed royal family living in a ruined Indian palace, hiding a secret they took to their graves (via) #

Guess My Word — simple, clever web game to compete with others to guess a word that changes daily (via) #

Janelle Shane teaches an AI to begin a novel — she trained GPT-2 on over 10k opening lines with incredible results (via) #

The Digital Antiquarian looks back at Graham Nelson’s “Curses” — the final article in his fascinating series on the roots of the post-Infocom interactive fiction renaissance #

Descript adds um detection, full-text search — the powerful podcast/video editor continues to evolve in interesting ways #

The Verge on Syniverse, the company responsible for the Valentine’s Day SMS debacle — the missing 168,000 texts were roughly 0.5 seconds of activity #

The Final Days of Japan’s Most Incredible Arcade — Anata no Warehouse was inspired by the Kowloon Walled City (via) #

Information is Beautiful Awards 2019 winners — my personal faves are Plot Parade and Flowmap #

Hit the High Notes — sing into your browser to test your vocal range against 27 famous voices (via) #

Snake and Tetris At the Same Time — this is brilliant and i hate it (via) #

Typologies of New York City: A Crowdsourced Hyperlapse — cw: seizure warning; 1,272 photos from Instagram, 200+ hours of work (via) #

LegraJS, JS library to draw with LEGO-like brick shapes — for example, render any image in LEGO-like bricks (via) #

Typora, a minimalist Markdown editor — glowing recommendation from Darius Kazemi, who has good taste in software (via) #

Looom — playful upcoming iPad app for making looping animations (via) #

HoloVista teaser trailer — intriguing upcoming augmented reality game for mobile devices #

Hey Robot — last day to back Universal Paperclips creator Frank Lantz's clever tabletop game for smart speakers #

Super Patron Fuck Yeah — last chance to apply to Jack Conte's $50k arts grant for indie creators #

Half-Life: Alyx trailer — surprisingly, supports the Oculus Rift/Windows Mixed Reality in addition to Valve VR headsets #

Chrome/Firefox extension detects AI-generated text — Janelle Shane is testing it out and it seems like it works (via) #

8chan is still using Cloudflare — three months later, the sneaky assholes are working around the ban #

TikTok Group Chat meme — vertical scrolling as collaborative meme fodder #

Collider’s Deepfake Roundtable — celebrity impersonators paired with deepfake technology (via) #

IFComp 2019 winners announced — only 4 of the top 10 were parser-based games, continuing the trend of recent years #

BodyPix 2.0 — real-time multiple person segmentation in the browser with TensorFlow.js (via) #

How the Deaf community is adapting ASL in VRChat — I recommend subscribing to Syrmor's wonderful Humans of VR series #

YACHT’s GAN-generated music video by Mario Klingemann — the lyrics and music for their new album were written with the help of an AI trained on their back catalog (via) #

Teens posting cursed images to school pages on Google Maps — creative choice for shitposting (via) #

The Verge on the repercussions of YouTube’s new kids’ content flagging — videos perceived as targeting kids lose ads and community features, impacting game streamers among others #

Pitchfork’s Anatomy of a TikTok Hit — like on Instagram and YouTube, a less polished vibe is more real and relatable (via) #

Oscar-winning actor Mary Steenburgen went in for routine surgery, and woke up a songwriter — prime Oliver Sacks material here (via) #

Rod Stewart’s absurdly-detailed model railway — 124 feet long, 26 years in the making #

Gochi Gang explores Brooklyn’s Japan Village with Claire Saffitz and Mike Chen — first episode from Reina Scully's new webseries for First We Feast #

PayPal drops payments to Pornhub performers — according to Pornhub, their reversal will affect the livelihoods of over 100k people #

The Verge on the cottage industry of Amazon “preppers” — a competitive industry appears in the middle of nowhere (via) #

Baking and cooking simulations with mixture theory — I understand none of this math, but it's nice to know we'll have fresh baked bread and cookies in the Matrix (via) #

The Comics Reporter’s Tom Spurgeon, dead at 51 — a tireless advocate for the comics medium, everyone I know in comics is mourning #

NYT Mag’s special issue on the future of the internet — on parasocial relationships, the Chinese internet, censorship in Turkey, BigTech consolidation, and more #

Private equity company acquires .org registry — in June, ICANN removed price caps for .org domains #

The Daily chats with Leo, a 3rd grader, about Trump’s impeachment — incredibly charming, and surprisingly insightful, to see it through a child's eyes (via) #

Impeachment.fyi — Dan Sinker's newsletter rounds up the daily impeachment news #

The new 16″ MacBook Pro has a good keyboard — scissor switches, a real Esc key, and old arrow keys; the least important news today, but I'm still happy about it #