AI search is a doomsday cult — apps that summarize the web with AI are short-sighted and destructive, trying to solve a problem by making it infinitely worse #

The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet — limited-edition essay collection inspired by Yancey Strickler's 2019 post, the first release from Metalabel, a new space for releasing and selling creative work #

Robin Rendle’s new homepage is a Hypercard-inspired mini-manifesto — I love Robin's periodic essays, newsletter, and blog about design, typography, and the web (via) #

Billy Joel’s “Turn the Lights Back On” — Trey Parker and Matt Stone's Deep Voodoo deepfaked three eras of younger Billy Joel for the video (via) #

Three students read the first passages from a 2,000-year-old scroll burned in Vesuvius eruption — they won $700k detecting ink found in high-resolution CT scans of carbonized ash, virtually unrolled and separated into sheets of papyrus (via) #

20 Small Mazes — charming free puzzle game for Windows, but works perfectly on macOS with Whisky #

Persistence of vision in black-and-white noise — an interesting effect used in the 2007 game Lost in the Static (via) #

Password Basket — generate a random password by catching characters, much more practical than Kenny Log-Ins (via) #

Video generation models as world simulators — the full Sora paper and examples is giving me the same disorienting feelings I had seeing DALL-E 2 and worrying about what happens next #

OpenAI announces Sora, their first text-to-video model — currently only for internal testing, it can generate minute-long videos from prompts with surprising fidelity and consistency #

How The Cut’s financial advice columnist was scammed out of $50,000 cash — the lesson I'm taking from all these recent scam stories is to never answer the phone (via) #

Building Slack, Day 1 — two of Slack's original employees launched a new blog spilling the inside story from the company's first ten years #

Suite 2412 — Josh Sucher recreated a miniature version of his dad's old law office in painstaking detail #

The Grannies — short film about a group of Melbourne-based artists who try to break the boundaries of Red Dead Redemption 2 (via) #

Firehouse Five and the Cinderella Surprise — astounding Disney history from Cabel Sasser, who won an auction of Dixieland jazz 78rpm records and found a lost song cut from Cinderella #

Why it was almost impossible to make the blue LED — Derek Muller explains why it took 30 years after the invention of red and green LEDs to make a blue LED, and talks to the man who did it #

The Pudding analyzes the “diva-ness” for 138 performances of the National Anthem — fun dataviz exploring how far singers deviate from the standard melody, the methodology at the end is an interesting read #

Playdate is now widely available — after shipping more than 70,000 preorders, the charming little handheld is in stock, opening to 20 new countries, and adding new games all the time (via) #

Social Media Warning Stickers — Dan Hon made a series of tongue-in-cheek disclaimer images to manage replies, like "This Is An Observation: No Reply Necessary" (via) #

Hurt Party: A Game of Bad Apologies — go back Ami's latest project, a party game that pokes fun at all of the terrible ways we say we're sorry #

After eight years, social app Peach sold to sketchy “YouTube growth platform” — update: this turned out to be wrong, Dom Hoffman says the domain lapsed and the buyer published a false blog post and press release #

The Verge’s Mia Sato on the rise of AI-generated obituary spam — scumbag SEOs turning personal tragedies into cheap hallucinated content for easy ad revenue #

Bob Moore, founder of Bob’s Red Mill, dies at 94 — instead of selling to the highest bidder, Moore transferred the company to his 209 employees in 2010 and it's more than tripled in size since (via) #

Sisyphus and the Impossible Dream — I allow myself one link to a Casey Neistat video every ten years, and this is that video #

Special Fish — can't believe I've never linked to Elliott Cost's charming four-year-old community of little personal webpages (via) #

Antonymph — for desktop browsers only, a "pop-up music video" that manipulates the browser in interesting ways (via) #

GOODY-2 — the world's most responsible AI model, guaranteed not to cause harm #

Bluesky opens publicly and plans to start federating later this month — you can follow me, @andy.baio.net and @waxy.org #

Spoutible’s API leaked personal data, including 2FA secrets and password hashes, for every user — maybe building it on top of an off-the-shelf $89 PHP Twitter clone wasn't the greatest long-term plan #

Why Quora isn’t useful anymore — a failure of content moderation, SEO spam, bad financial incentives, and a hard pivot to AI, its shutdown is only a matter of time (via) #

Google Search’s cache links are officially retired — the "cache:" search shortcut still works… for now #

Making a PDF that’s larger than Germany — Acrobat 7.0 maxes out at 381 km x 381 km, but what happens if you make it bigger? #

Never Post — new member-supported, employee-owned podcast "about and for the internet" co-created and hosted by Idea Channel's Mike Rugnetta #

Project Tapestry — Iconfactory is kickstarting an iOS app to unify public web sources like blogs, Mastodon, Tumblr, and Bluesky into a single timeline #

Infinite Craft — Neal.fun's latest is an endless crafting toy heavily inspired by Little Alchemy #

Nilay Patel’s Apple Vision Pro review for The Verge — best thing I've read and seen so far about it, a device that's technically impressive but years away from something I'd use regularly #

shelby.cool — minimalist web experiments and sketches from Shelby Wilson, co-creator/editor of The HTML Review #

The Museum of Screens — wonderfully quirky virtual museum devoted to web games of all kinds (via) #

ASCII Theater — MSCHF's latest project lets you stream pirated movies to your terminal in glorious ASCII, with color and captions, now playing Barbie #

Pong Wars — I stared at this for longer than I want to admit (via) #

Who’s living inside this volcanic crater in Madagascar? — Vox's Christophe Haubursin goes to absurd lengths to find the story of a remote village spotted on Google Earth #

Correcting flutter in Steamboat Willie’s audio — using a new 34GB lossless 4K scan of the original 16mm film reel on the Internet Archive #

Improbable Island — sprawling 16-year-old new-to-me browser text adventure RPG with sweary British vibes and a unique code of conduct (via) #

kala.watch — hypnotic visualization of different units of time passing in a number of styles, "cardioid" is beautiful (via) #

John Herrman on the future impact of Google adding an AI text generator to Chrome — "We have the technology, in other words, for a web that publishes itself. Will anyone want to read it?" (via) #

Where’s Madeleine? — find Holly Gramazio's cat in this charming little game made with Downpour, v buckenham's upcoming no-code game-making app (via) #

How beloved indie blog The Hairpin turned into an AI clickbait farm — the domain was snapped up by a scumbag SEO, plagiarizing many of the original articles under fake bylines alongside machine-generated sludge #

Deadpubs — one man's highly opinionated, and weirdly soothing, reviews of London pubs on TikTok (via) #

Lumiere — Google Research's new text-to-video diffusion model can also handle inpainting, cinemagraphs, and converting still images to video #

iFixIt’s CES Worst in Show 2024 — from Ecovacs' surveillance vacuum and Instacart's AI shopping carts to BMW's AR goggles and Sennheiser's $300 disposable earbuds #