Death of Vine

Conflict with the content creators, not just bad Twitter management, doomed the video product

2023-09-28 vine • twitter • socialmedia • video • business

Philips CPAP malfeasance

Medical device manufacturer hid evidence of serious problems from the FDA

2023-09-27 cpap • sleepapnea • philips • medical • fraud

About Polygon Indexing

Comments on a new geospatial library with interesting indexing

2023-09-23 spatialite • gis • database • rtree • maps

CERN big data

Petabyte-scale storage; moving from InfluxDB to VictoriaMetrics

2023-09-21 database • timeseries • bigdata • cern • influxdb • rrd

Rod of Iron Ministries

Moonie offshoot cult literally worships with guns

2023-09-21 america • politics • guns • moonies • cult

Lego salmon butchery

Fun stop motion animation

2023-09-20 via:kottke • food • cooking • butchery • salmon • fish • lego • animation • stopmotion

Reno Air Race Fatalities

A list with links to more info of the exciting but dangerous airplane event

2023-09-18 reno • airraces • aviation • safety

Trust & Safety coercion

Documentation of the harassment of people working to make Internet products more safe

2023-09-18 yoelroth • twitter • politics • trump • elonmusk • moderation

Labor unions and EVs

Details of the auto strike and how it's related to shifting labor landscape for electric cars and their batteries

2023-09-16 labor • union • politics • evs • electrify • cars • uaw

Qian Xuesen 钱学森

Details of the life of a Chinese Manhattan project researcher, in the context of the Oppenheimer movie's release in China

2023-09-16 china • history • manhattanproject • qian • rockets • military

Roguelike Pac-Man

Fun ironic spin on game design

2023-09-16 via:waxy • games • pacman • roguelike • funny

Kenji's Quesbirria

Video of making the awesome newly-trendy Mexican food

2023-09-15 food • birria • quesabirria • barbacoa • kenji • cooking

Deuteronomy 24:14-15

A Biblical entreaty to pay people daily for their work

2023-09-15 labor • payroll • employment • laborlaw • bible • religion

Google Visitor Experience

Corporate office is building a welcome for tourists and visitors

2023-09-15 google • bayarea • mountainview • tourism

Digital dependence

Musing on how relying on Google Maps, Grindr, or ChatGPT means we lose human skills

2023-09-15 grindr • maps • navigation • chatgpt • culture • technology

Migrants in the Darien Gap

Harrowing story of hundreds of thousands of people transiting the most dangerous land in the Americas trying to get to the US

2023-09-15 immigration • politics • dariengap • colombia • migrants

OSM tile traffic

Visualization of a year's traffic at OpenStreetMap's tile servers

2023-09-14 osm • visualization • maps • traffic • vruba • paulnorman

TESCREAL

A briefing on various problematic futurist ideologies, including some forms of AI hucksterism

2023-09-14 transhumanism • politics • tirefire • culture • futurism • ai

2010 Internet utopia

Linking for the commentson the final book, Clay Shirky's "Cognitive Surplus". A quick look back back on 2010 techno-optimism from a bleak view in 2023.

2023-09-14 internet • culture • utopia • optimism

Hexadecimal clock

Visualization of the 2038 problem by casting 32 bit time as 4 hands, each with 8 bits of the current time.

2023-09-13 clocks • visualization • 2038 • time • unix • via:hackernews

Starlink revenue

$1.4B in 2022. Which is a lot but not what was hoped or needed.

2023-09-13 starlink • spacex • business • revenue

Heat pumps are efficient

New study finds heat pumps are more efficient than fossil fuel heaters, even in cold climates

2023-09-12 electrify • globalwarming • heating • efficiency • power • heatpump

18,000 year old NA artifacts

A find in Oregon may push back dates of the earliest humans in North America by a few thousand years

2023-09-12 archaeology • oregon • rimrockdraw • history

Musk and the Sacramento datacenter

Absolutely unhinged story of an unplanned move of servers. This ended up breaking a lot of Twitter, for months.

2023-09-12 twitter • ops • datacenter • elonmusk • devops • manic

Erica Astrella at EFF

Tech leader also known as Erica Joy has joined the board at EFF

2023-09-11 ericajoy • erica • eff • nonprofit • governance

C2 Wiki

The original wiki, dating to 1995, full of discussions and history

2023-09-11 wiki • history • programming • wikiwikiweb

Facial Recognition

A survey of the state of the art: putting names to faces is a solved problem but the big tech companies have withheld it from the public

2023-09-10 ai • privacy • facialrecognition • google • facebook • face

1Password recovery process

A reddit comment from a 1Password security team member about the security of their special process to get access to an account via recovery

2023-09-10 security • 2fa • password • 1password • socialengineering

Wyze camera disaster

Cloud hosted security product has a caching failure, shows people videos of other people's homes

2023-09-09 wyze • badtech • camera • privacy • cloud

Gay sex on screen

Interesting analysis of where we are with depictions of male/male sex on TV and film

2023-09-09 gay • lgbt • sex • censorship • heartstopper • tv • movies

AI Emojis

A little generative AI project

2023-09-08 via:waxy • emoji • slack • ai • generative • art • funny

Mullvad + Tailscale

Excellent networking tool adds an easy way to use Mullvad as a general VPN privacy

2023-09-07 tailscale • vpn • privacy • browser • internet

LLM visualization

Cool interactive look at what an LLM is doing, predicting the next words

2023-09-07 llm • ai • visualization • via:simonw

Flipper remote

A universal remote with the simplest set of buttons

2023-09-07 remote • av • adaptive • elderly • tv

Deadbeat Musk Twitter

A roundup of some of the lawsuits from companies whose bills Elon Musk refuses to pay

2023-09-07 twitter • elonmusk • musk • lawsuit • fraud

Atkinson Hyperlegible

A font designed for readability even with impaired vision

2023-09-06 fonts • disability • blind • reading • typeface • text • accessibility

Nisenan tribe complication

Native Americans from Nevada County have a complicated history including disagreements about who represents the tribe

2023-09-06 history • nevadacity • grassvalley • nevadacounty • nisenan • miwok • indian • nativeamerican

The Boy and the Heron

New Miyazaki film, I think the last. There's a trailer!

2023-09-06 movie • miyazaki • ghibli • animation • japan • studioghibli

Burning Man schadenfreude

Thoughtful essay talking mocking the elites who were suffering mud and discomfort at the desert party

2023-09-06 burningman • schadenfreude • elites • culture • politics

Hillshading with diagonal hatching

A plotter-friendly fill algorithm for terrain

2023-09-06 plotterart • plotter • hatching • maps

Postmarks

A new social bookmarking system, based on ActivityPub

2023-09-05 bookmark • linkblog • socialmedia • activitypub • fediverse • mastodon • delicious • pinboard

Paxton Impeachment

A briefing on the trial of Texas' corrupt attorney general

2023-09-05 politics • paxton • texas • impeachment • corruption

Nutrition data sources

Thoughtful list of specific information on food: calories, etc

2023-09-05 food • calories • database • dieting • usda • fda • nccdb

rclone

Sync various cloud storage systems on Linux command line. Includes a FUSE file system driver

2023-09-05 rsync • cloud • mount • fuse • linux • commandline • files

Reddit moderation concerns

Big purge of moderators after the protest results in changes in site quality

2023-09-04 reddit • moderation • content • mods • api • community

Australian indigenous language news

Some professional news samples in Kriol, Warlpiri, and Yolngu Matha

2023-09-04 australia • language • creole • pidgin • kriol • aboriginal • indigenous

FoodData Central

US government database of nutrition facts

2023-09-04 food • calories • dieting • nutrition • cooking

Climate Change Tracker

Excellent dashboard style visualization of key global metrics

2023-09-03 climatechange • science • globalwarming • via:hackernews • dashboard • visualization

3D Tenochtitlan

Renders of what is now Mexico City, in pre-Columbian times

2023-09-03 archaeology • mexico • cdmx • Tenochtitlan • history • aztec

Dynapad

Some folks are porting the seminal Pad++ zooming interface to modern systems.

2023-09-03 pad++ • pad • benbederson • jimhollan • research • hci • ui • zoomable

Truth Social SPAC woes

The IPO financing scam ran in to SEC trouble and has been delayed and delayed, another deadline is in a few days

2023-09-03 politics • trump • truthsocial • spac • scam • fraud • sec

What 3 Words is a Mess

A detailed analysis of the stupid rent-seeking map company's bad system.

2023-09-02 maps • what3words • badtech • geolocation • addresses

My swordswallowing accident

2008-era blog from a circus act performer. Link is to the story of the actual injury, there's a whole blog about learning the act, the medical recovery, etc

2023-09-02 circus • swordswallowing • via:metafilter • medical • esophagus

How the Race Was Won

A lovely bit of visualization made from a composite photograph

2023-09-02 photos • photography • race • composite • infovis • visualization

Dangerous Tesla

"Full self driving "autopilot" tries to kill an expert electric car reviewer

2023-09-01 tesla • fsd • autopilot • ai • robotcar • liability • danger

Houston election manipulation

Texas shut down the election office in its biggest city

2023-09-01 houston • votingrights • politics • texas • votersuppression

✨California Forever✨

Details on the tech investment in what may be a new city

2023-09-01 california • solanocounty • housing • city • urbanism • pipedream

Open source business licenses

Thoughtful piece on what open source means in a business context

2023-08-30 mapbox • opensource • licensing • hashicorp • businessmodel

location-guard

A browser extension for changing your geolocation

2023-08-30 chrome • firefox • extension • browser • privacy • geolocation • location

WebLLM

Run an AI in your browser with hardware acceleration

2023-08-30 llm • ai • webgl • llama2

Polynesian Stick Charts

Good photos and references for a type of ocean map

2023-08-30 maps • cartography • polynesia • navigation • ocean • pacifika

Google Solar API

New dataset to estimate solar power potential

2023-08-30 solar • electrify • google • maps • pv • solarpanels

Bing malware-like ads

New levels of marketing sleaze from Microsoft

2023-08-30 microsoft • bing • google • ads • windows

Combinatoric Art

Course syllabus for a form of generative art, exhaustively enumeration all geometric combinations of some rule system

2023-08-30 generative • art • geometry • sollewitt • golan

Same-Sex Moche Art

Scholarly article on the depiction of homosexual acts in Peruvian erotic art from 100-800 AD. (Full article is on sci-hub.)

2023-08-29 peru • moche • anthropology • sex • lgbt • gay • homosexual

Moche Erotic Pottery Vessels

NSFW, a collection of sexually explicit art from pre-Columbian Peru

2023-08-29 sex • nsfw • pottery • anthropology • peru • moche

Starlink dish firmware

Details from a dump of the satellite Internet terminal

2023-08-29 starlink • spacex • space • firmware • reverseengineer • satellite

UMich offline

Major American university takes itself off the Internet for a security concern

2023-08-28 internet • security • badtech • umich

Concrete Stamp

Lovely Swiss design

2023-08-28 stamps • switzerland • design • concrete

Cloudflare Starlink stats

Some details of the satellite ISP from a large website operator

2023-08-27 starlink • clouflare • internet • isp • stats • traffic

Man announces he will quit drinking by 2050

A plan for global warming

2023-08-26 funny • globalwarming • climatechange • satire

Wandrer GPS game

A game that rewards exploring new places

2023-08-25 games • gps • exercise • walking • bicycling • via:hackernews • maps

Flannery Associates

Investor syndicate wants to build a new town between Fairfield and Rio Vista

2023-08-25 realestate • bayarea • investment • finance • techbros • california

No javascript build

Reflections on HTMX developers on not using any Javascript build

2023-08-25 programming • javascript • typescript • build • development • browser

Factorio: Space Age

Long awaited DLC for the factory game is finally revealed. It's kind of the Space Exploration mod but made more accessible.

2023-08-25 games • factorio • mods

North Korean scifi

Non-dissident literature reifies the political control

2023-08-25 northkorea • dprk • politics • scifi • writing

Tasmota

Hacker firmware for ESP based devices common in Internet of Things small products

2023-08-23 automation • hacking • tuya • power • firmware

China's malaise

Long piece about the pessimistic national mood among China's young people. Lying flat, letting it rot.

2023-08-22 china • politics • culture • freedom • tangping • bailan

prettymapp

Makes beautiful maps from OSM data. A reimplementation of prettymap with speed and a webapp

2023-08-22 maps • via:hackernews • prettymap • cartography • webapp

NFT scam against artists

One of the most interesting features - perpetual fees to the original artist - has been dropped by all the major NFT markets.

2023-08-22 art • nft • scam • artist • royalty

Simple AVX-512 code

A nice demo of an easy SIMD calculation (Latin1 to UTF-8)

2023-08-21 via:hackernews • programming • simd • intel • avx512 • assembly

Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule

Detailed profile of Musk, the global influence of his companies, and his own personal erratic behavior

2023-08-21 elonmusk • starlink • twitter • politics • culture • spacex • ukraine

Piripkura update

Recent details on the indigenous family living in the Amazonian rainforest and the Brazilian politics surrounding their home

2023-08-21 brazil • brasil • indigenous • politics • anthropology

Piripkura

Extraordinary documentary about the last members of an Amazon rainforest group living disconnected from modernity

2023-08-21 brasil • brazil • indian • indigenous • anthropology • movie • documentary

Catching up on LLMs

Simon Willison gave a talk / overview of recent AI work from a hands-on perspective

2023-08-19 ai • llm • learning • simonw

California hurricanes

A map of hurricanes and tropical storms that got to or near California

2023-08-18 weather • hurricane • california • pacific

CPUC / Cruise corruption

Cruise's former lawyer is now on the CPUC commission and voted to let Cruise experiment with its cars in San Francisco

2023-08-18 corruption • cruise • cpuc • sanfrancisco • selfdriving

GPT4All

Collection of code and data to make LLMs accessible to programmers

2023-08-18 llm • models • chatgpt • ai • programmign • code

LLaMa 2 license

Nice endorsement of open source. (Although the actual license has a couple of anticompetitive restrictions.)

2023-08-18 opensource • ai • llm • llama • facebook • microsoft • code

Bone apron

Gorgeous ritual object made of human bone

2023-08-18 via:reddit • bone • tibet • museum

TV dialogue audio

The sorry state of video production where you can't understand what the characters are saying. The solutions offered are not convincing.

2023-08-18 tv • audio • mixing • sound • dialogue

Murderous Gays

Reflection on reclaiming the entertainment stereotype of Bad Gays

2023-08-17 lgbt • gay • movies • villains • acting

LLM GPU Buying Guide

Advice for small local AI work. Buy an NVidia GPU with as much VRAM as you can find.

2023-08-17 ai • llm • programming • hardware • nvidia • gpu

Datasette Cloud

Simon Willison's data exploration tool now has a hosted version

2023-08-16 datasette • data • sqlite • database • simonw • cloud • hosting • datascience • journalism

LLM CLI tool

A very easy to use set of Python drivers for running AI models

2023-08-16 llm • ai • python

Trump Twitter subpoena

Details of what data was requested from Trump's Twitter account, including direct messages, location information, IP addresses, etc

2023-08-16 politics • trump • twitter • privacy • indictment

Storylets

A theory of the narrative structure of interactive games

2023-08-16 writing • games • stories • rpgs

Red, White & Royal Blue sex scene

NSFW, a clip of the sexiest of the scenes in the new gay romance movie. Not porn but definitely more explicitly anal sex than I've ever seen in mainstream entertainment.

2023-08-15 gay • lgbt • sex • redwhiteroyalblue • nsfw

Unicode simplified

Some basic rules for using Unicode in 2023 in the simple ordinary way. UTF-8 everywher!

2023-08-14 unicode • encoding • programming • utf8 • json

CO₂ vs GDP

Measurement of carbon impact and wealth of nations

2023-08-14 climatechange • co2 • carbon • gdp • economics • data