May 2, 2017
Princess Leia’s Stolen Death Star Plans
— full-album Sgt Pepper remake into a Star Wars concept album, with videos for each song (via) #
Leigh Alexander interviews 4am and Jason Scott on cracking Apple II software
— the pseudonymous cracker explains why this preservation matters #
If They Could Pay Us Less, They Would
— brilliant comic on wealth disparity, the gig economy, and universal basic income #
Hacker leaks Orange Is The New Black’s fifth season after failed blackmail
— "thedarkoverlord" claims they also got material from Fox, IFC, ABC, and National Geographic #
Kevin Kelly on the myth of a superhuman AI
— refreshing counter-argument to the current religious fervor #
Businessweek on Spinal Tap’s $400M lawsuit
— a laundry list of the clever ways that movie studios screw over artists #
The Guardian quits Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News
— I wonder how many publishers would still use AMP if it wasn't a prerequisite to get in the Google News carousel #
Mat Honan on Facebook’s augmented reality aspirations
— "You have to build for the reality we live in, not the one we hope to create." #
A Time Capsule for the World Wide Web
— Tim Carmody's running a great series on Kottke.org this week #
Bloomberg on Juicero, Silicon Valley’s $400 juicer
— investors dumped $120M into a "juicer" that squeezes bags of pre-made juice #
Internet Archive adds early Mac emulation
— launch a vintage Mac app in seconds in the browser; how it works #
Cal Henderson’s Webstock talk on the evolution of emoji
— incredible deep dive into the technical and cultural history #
Technical postmortem on building Reddit Place
— this year's best April 1 project was a massive team effort #
Meme collectors using the blockchain to trade rare Pepe cards
— using Counterparty to enforce scarcity for digital works (via) #
Hyperallergic on Pippin Barr’s virtual museum of digital water
— now available free for Mac and Windows; don't miss the process posts #
Burger King abuses Google Home and Wikipedia for Whopper ad
— love the increasing desperation in the Wikipedia edit requests from their marketing head #
The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI
— nobody really knows how the most advanced AI works—only that it does (via) #
Glitch’s First Websites collection
— remix retro replicas inspired by LiveJournal, MovableType, MySpace, and more (via) #
The Verge on the ethics of amiibo hacking
— fans create nicely-designed cards for each amiibo bin; here's a good tutorial #
Scott Rosenberg on the status of Google Books
— the internal priority shift was part of a larger trend I wrote about #
Windows 3.1 with networking support emulated in WebVR
— it's multi-user too, try walking around (via) #
NYT on the booming CD market in Indonesian KFCs
— "Music and chicken have become intertwined." (via) #
Resurrecting a 1986 BBS after a 23 year hiatus
— they're a bit busy now, but there's no shortage of telnet BBSes online #
Russian-owned LiveJournal adds censorship policies, bans political speech
— LJs with more than 3,000 daily visitors can no longer be anonymous or use obscenities #
Smash Mouth Fractal
— using harmonics to compose a melody that repeats itself at 1024x the original speed (via) #
Deeply Artificial Trees
— Bob Ross gets the Deep Dream treatment, the audio is a WaveNet model of Ross's voice #
Games that might have been
— training a recurrent neural network on a list of 150k videogame titles #
Cards Against Humanity’s Pay What You Want experiment gone wrong
— they did the same thing at XOXO 2013, but our attendees not only paid, they organized the cash #
An Oral History of Something Awful
— "I'm obviously not a visionary, but I predicted that the internet would be shitty back in 1999" #
JODI’s Automatic Rain from 1995
— part of Rhizome's Net Art Anthology, works open in date-accurate web browsers (via) #
Casey Newton on Mastodon, the decentralized, open-source Twitter clone
— I signed up on another instance and there's a learning curve; also: Yoz Grahame and Sarah Jeong #
Atari 2600 emulator in Minecraft
— stunning feat of engineering, albeit at one frame every three minutes #