The Life and Death of the Bulbdial Clock — Ironic Sans shows how publishing your ideas, even in half-baked form, can lead to surprising results #

Google is starting to squash more spam and AI in search results — a long-overdue change, presumably in response to excellent reporting from The Verge, Wired, and 404 Media #

Inside the world of AI TikTok spammers — low-effort content is taking revenue from real creators, pairing stolen YouTube clips with synthetic voices reading Reddit posts #

Dinosaurs Park — masterful editing from the Bell Brothers, mashing up Jurassic Park, Dinosaurs, and Jay-Z #

Hank Green interviews Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge — interesting conversation about online community, platforms, the fediverse, and "revolutionizing the media with blog posts" #

Behind F1’s Velvet Curtain — Road & Track deleted this outstanding story by McMansion Hell's Kate Wagner shortly after publication, with no explanation (via) #

Full of Themselves — analyzing "title drops" in 26,963 movies, when characters say the name of the movie they're in (via) #

Mastodon for the Apple II — hilariously full-featured, including infinite scroll, 2FA, content warnings, and support for video (via) #

TinyLetter, in memoriam — Phil Kaplan of DistroKid/Fucked Company fame launched it in 2010 and sold it to MailChimp a year later, who shuttered it on Friday #

Behind the scenes of There I Ruined It’s voice cloning remixes — it helps if you can sing a passable impression of any artist #

DONOTREPLY.CARDS — a proper home for Dan Hon's social media warning messages, with printed stickers on the way #

Weird Fucking Games — since 2014, this new-to-me blog has tracked literally hundreds of strange experimental free indie games (via) #

Kottke.org redesigns with 2024 vibes — love the integrated quick links with unfurls, I'm overdue for a refresh myself #

Celeb Clock — Matt Round made a real-time clock of celebrity schedules sourced from interviews, articles, and books (via) #

EMO: Emote Portrait Alive — Alibaba model turns an image and audio source into videos with synchronized speech and realistic face/head motion #

Frog Chorus — web app that uses your microphone/speakers to let your laptop or mobile device chirp with others nearby #

the minecraft soundtrack but it’s midwest emo — this works really well, in large part because C418 made one of the most beautiful game soundtracks ever (via) #

Textpattern turns 20 — open source allows projects to live on long past their creators, as Dean Allen showed #

DOOM on a toothbrush — the only acceptable use of a wifi-enabled child surveillance toothbrush #

The game magazine that spent two years taunting a Final Fantasy VIII hater — stay for the kicker #

Positive Affirmations for Site Reliability Engineers — new KRAZAM #

404 Media reports Tumblr and WordPress plan to sell user data to Midjourney and OpenAI — Automattic's new statement confirms they're "working directly with select AI companies" with an opt-out for future AI training #

50 years later, David Cassel revisits a 1974 magazine’s predictions for 2024 — "a glimpse of a future that never was" (via) #

Inside the underground floppy disk music scene — The Verge's Alexis Ong profiles artists releasing their work on hard-to-find 3.5-inch disks #

SDXL Lightning — generate janky 1024x1024 images nearly as fast as you can type, try random strings and nonsense #

Airfoils and the physics of flight — another gorgeous, deep interactive explainer from Bartosz Ciechanowski #

How Comics Were Made — Glenn Fleishman launched the Kickstarter for his deeply-researched visual history of the comic strip #

POGI — an insufferably twee AI virtual pet, the freeform text inputs can lead to some entertaining results #

How Ben Ashforth photographed roads named after every day of the year — tremendous five-minute talk about how he mapped a route using OpenStreetMap data to visit 366 streets across 14 countries in seven weeks, making a calendar out of it (via) #

LED Matrix Earrings — making animated earrings from LEDs that are "so small, inhaling them is a very real danger" (via) #

When does a journalist become a hacker? — Sarah Jeong on journalist Tim Burke, who is facing hacking charges for accessing unaired Kanye interview footage from a poorly secured video site #

Bellingcat investigates a secretive global network of non-consensual deepfake porn apps — the level of obfuscation here is remarkable, shell companies illicitly collecting payments through sites like Patreon, Steam, and G2A under fake names #

Rearranging the Deck Chairs on the Titanic — a short game about labor and futility (via) #

Does bribing or threatening ChatGPT make it generate better text? — Max Woolf systematically tries to find out if it responds better to front-row Taylor Swift tickets or all-caps death threats (via) #

Google tests removing News tab from search — I remember when Google had a symbiotic relationship with publishers, before AMP, featured snippets, knowledge panels, and now AI summarization #

Vice Media lays off hundreds, abandons Vice.com — elsewhere in the digital media apocalypse, Yahoo laid off Engadget's leadership and BuzzFeed is cutting 16% #

Bluesky begins limited data federation — you can now, with some effort and their approval, self-host your own Personal Data Server that contains your account, data, and signing keys #

Television — Adam Lisagor brings us the future of television, a television you strap to your face #

“You’re calling it Slack?” — how Slack got its name and domain, after rejecting Honeycomb, Circuit, Superset, and Kitchen, among others #

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) #