November 12, 2019
The Blue Donkey
— MSCHF created a fake Seamless restaurant to secretly funnel corporate perks to political candidates who oppose big corporations #
BBC Radio 4 on the work and tragic death of TempleOS creator Terry A. Davis
— I missed the news of his passing last year; his mental illness inspired fascinating work, along with a history of racist, homophobic paranoia #
Little Runmo
— two years in development, a surreal animated short inspired by side-scrolling platformers (via) #
Unmixer, extract and remix loops from any song
— just announced and slow right now, but read about how it works while you wait (via) #
NYT’s Caity Weaver digs into the Valentine’s Day text message mystery
— a third-party named Syniverse was responsible for firing off 168,149 messages, 265 days late (via) #
Sanam Maher on TikTok in Pakistan
— while some are trying to ban it, TikTok is giving some Pakistani users an audience and new source of income (via) #
The Size of Space
— from Neal Agarwal's excellent Neal.fun, a reliable source of joyful internet (via) #
AV Club’s 100 best, worst, and weirdest of the internet in the 2010s
— any "best of" list that starts with Demi Adejuyigbe is a winner #
Neural network tries to reconstruct photorealistic faces from emoji and emotes
— pure nightmare fodder, but especially the pepperoni pizza made of lips (via) #
Teachable Machine 2.0 launches
— dead simple tool to train a machine learning model entirely in the browser #
Mysterious text messages from Valentine’s Day were received late last night
— upsetting texts from ex-partners, dead friends, and family members #
State-of-the-art language processing with ten lines of TensorFlow 2.0
— Hugging Face's Transformers library had me generating text with GPT-2 on my laptop in about five minutes #
Airbnb promises to verify all 7 million listings after VICE report exposes scam
— a surprising response to Allie Conti's outstanding exposé #
Uber’s self-driving car involved in fatal crash couldn’t detect pedestrians outside of crosswalks
— reminder that the crime of "jaywalking" was invented by automakers #
Rating every horse emoji
— "Pasterns and fetlocks appear abnormal, suggest radiographs before purchase." #
Light Commands
— inject unauthorized voice commands into Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple voice assistants with lasers! (via) #
Reporter writes about getting fired by the Des Moines Register
— cowardly behavior from the paper, withering under a firestorm of criticism fueled by bad-faith actors #
Bijan Stephen profiles Hot Ones for The Verge
— the chicken wing gimmick is silly but effective, Sean Evans is a remarkable interviewer, and I love every episode #
VICE’s Allie Conti investigates an Airbnb scammer
— lax verification enables large-scale hosts to exploit their platform #
Kotaku’s Death Stranding review
— the first reviews for Hideo Kojima's new game are dropping, and it looks both audacious and agonizing #
Chris Wetherell reflects on building the Retweet for Twitter
—
Chris previously started and ran Google Reader, a product sorely missed by everyone who used it
(via) #
Robin Sloan on the scale and feedback of social media platforms
—
interesting twigbunch on Rosegarden
#
Run Your Own Social
—
Darius Kazemi's guide to running a small social network for your friends; emphasis on "small"
#
Profile of 8chan creator, Frederick Brennan
—
he should have let it die instead of selling it to this asshole
#
Mike Davidson on Superhuman’s creepy email tracking
—
and more generally, about ethics in technology
(via) #
Using machine learning to find public domain Krazy Kat comics
—
novel use of AI to search newspaper archives with solid results
#
How The Shawshank Redemption Humanizes Prisoners
—
stunning video essay from Pop Culture Detective's Jonathan McIntosh on America's shifting perceptions of the prison-industrial complex
#
The Guardian’s Silicon Valley dictionary
—
sharply-written modern descendant of Devil's Dictionary 2.0
(via) #
First Look Media ends funding for The Nib, shuts down Topic
—
The Nib is going independent, and you can support it here
#
How Lil Nas X used the meme ecosystem to make a #1 hit
—
even Taylor Swift can't top Old Town Road on the charts
#