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) #

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 #