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 #

The Living New Deal Map — mapping 18,359 public works and artworks funded by the New Deal, with tens of thousands still to be added (via) #

Trolls have flooded X with graphic Taylor Swift AI fakes — a failure of content moderation, federal legislation, and basic human decency, the images originated in a Telegram group for non-consensual AI-generated porn #

YouTube deletes 1,000+ deepfake celebrity scam ads after 404 Media investigation — this little indie publication has been killing it, happy to be a supporter since launch #

Buzzfeed’s “dire” debt problem — their stock is down 98% since going public, they need to repay $150 million in debt by late 2024, and are looking to sell off assets to stay alive #

The voice-cloned George Carlin special was not written by AI — a modern update of Keaton Patti's old "I forced a bot" schtick, but tacky and unfunny #

People Make Games explains Jubensha, the murder-mystery social deduction game that took over China — a multi-billion dollar immersive role-play sensation that doubles as a way to make friends and meet new people #

F.a.l.J’s mathgames — a growing collection of beautiful art/code math visualizations with P5.js, try Pong B&W in fullscreen (via) #

VICE talks to Lyle the Therapy Gecko, the internet’s unofficial therapist — Lyle Drescher found an online audience livestreaming conversations with anonymous strangers in a gecko costume #

Mixed reality vacuuming — "never miss a spot again" (via) #

OpenAI quietly scraps promise to disclose governing documents to the public — not only for its for-profit arm, but for the 501(c)3 nonprofit parent organization as well #

The NSA Furby Documents — 60 FOIAed pages from the NSA's ban on the toy in the late '90s #