the html review, issue 02: "an annual journal of literature made to exist on the web," my personal fave is Grid World thehtml.review

AI and the American Smile: "AI dominated by American-influenced image sources is producing a new visual monoculture of facial expressions" medium.com/@socialcreatur…

Feedly launches strikebreaking as a service: sad to learn the RSS reader that I happily paid for since 2013 decided to pivot to shameful enterprise surveillance tools newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/feedly-launc…

I just discovered that every copy of macOS ships with a hidden PDF of Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin whitepaper. But why? waxy.org/2023/04/the-bi…

Clarence Thomas secretly accepted luxury trips from major GOP donor: ProPublica exposes his clear violations of disclosure laws, but Supreme Court justices can only be removed by impeachment propublica.org/article/claren…

ChatGPT invented a sexual harassment lawsuit about a real law professor: the tendency for LLMs to generate fake facts, and fake sources to back it up, can have devastating real-world consequences washingtonpost.com/technology/202…

Dan Gillmor on why (and how) journalists should leave Twitter for Mastodon: Elon Musk despises journalists, as his recent targeting of the NYT and NPR demonstrates, but the inertia is real techdirt.com/2023/01/04/jou…

Twitter cuts off Cheap Bots Done Quick, Substack, Feedbin, Thread Reader, and others from API: CBDQ was responsible for over 58,000 joyfully weird Twitter bots during its eight year run theverge.com/2023/4/6/23673…

Chasing rainbows: for The Verge, I wrote about my personal experience being colorblind and they did a beautiful job on the design theverge.com/23650428/color…

"There was no up, there was no down, there was no side to side": a little poem about the universe before the Big Bang tiktok.com/@reinaofthecid…

Restoring the original Wilhelm Scream recording session: audio preservationist Craig Smith had to bake the Ampex tapes in an oven to make them stable enough to transfer blog.freesound.org/?p=1515

The history of Easter eggs in software: the earliest known one is an anti-war message in a text editor for the PDP-6, hidden in 1968 but only discovered in 2021 tedium.co/2023/04/08/eas…

Big Tech's big downgrade: Google, Meta, and Amazon are focused on chasing trends to appease Wall Street, while letting their core products wither businessinsider.com/tech-companies…

Pentagon’s Ukraine war plans leaked on Minecraft Discord before Telegram and Twitter: related: classified military documents have repeatedly leaked on the War Thunder forums vice.com/en/article/pka…

Garbage Day on the rise of TikTok bait videos: satirical or not, it's staged content optimized to annoy people into engaging with it to game the algorithm garbageday.email/p/on-bait

Last Squeak Tonight: John Oliver's web-only episode about the seedy underbelly of Chuck E. Cheese lastsqueaktonight.com

Mad Magazine's Al Jaffee, creator of the Fold-In, dies at 102: from April 1964 to April 2013, only one issue of Mad was published without new material from the comics legend nytimes.com/2023/04/10/art…

The Ringer interviews Paul Dochney, the Los Angeles writer behind Twitter legend Dril: his first interview not in character theringer.com/tech/2023/4/12…

Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500,000 group chat messages: fine-tuning LLaMa's privacy-friendly uncensored model on messages stored in iMessage's SQLite db with vast.ai, deploying… izzy.co/blogs/robo-boy…