Calvin’s hair was originally different, but Watterson’s editor at the syndicate convinced him to change it, suggesting readers would want to see his eyes.
Ever wonder what the rest of Citizen Kane looked like? Got AI to generate the other 78 years of Charles Foster Kane’s life not depicted in the film, from potty training and first steps to board meetings and tax audits. Over 200,000 hours of him sleeping, it’s boring as fuck
Hank Green has cancer. Fortunately, it's one of the most curable kinds, Hodgkin lymphoma, and he started chemo today. He talked about his worries and expectations for how the treatment might affect his work and life over the next 4+ months in a characteristically thoughtful video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6a4hMyiwBo
Got carded for a beer. A little flattering, until I hand over my ID to the young woman at the counter. Loud enough for the entire restaurant to hear: “WOW! You’re as old as MY MOM!”
Waiting for someone to make an artisanal search engine that only indexes manually verified websites written by humans. Farm-to-table organic search results, handmade with 100% certified human creativity, like your grandparents told you about.
Of course, they frame it as "making it easier for people to get to the heart of what they’re looking for and get things done." But how long will publishers, blogs, online communities, and other creators tolerate generating free content to feed their machine, while getting little to nothing in return?
It's only a one line change: <meta name="googlebot" content="noindex">
Personally, I wish that the "code red" response that ChatGPT inspired at Google wasn't to launch a dozen AI products that their red teams and AI ethicists have warned them not to release, but to combat the tsunami of AI-generated SEO spam bullshit that's in the process of destroying their core product. Instead, they're blissfully launching new free tools to generate even more of it.
Google used to take pride in minimizing time we spent there, guiding us to relevant pages as quickly as possible. Over time, they tried to answer everything themselves: longer snippets, inline FAQs, search results full of knowledge panels.
Twitter just announced free access to the Twitter API will end on February 9, with unannounced pricing or usage details, effectively killing every free fun and useful thing ever built with it: bots, games, mashups, visualizations, research projects, autoposters, autoblockers, deleters, and so much more. https://twitter.com/twitterdev/status/1621026986784337922
Last month, I saw this wonderfully entertaining process video of artist Cat Graffam recreating Goya's "Saturn Devouring His Son" in Mario Paint. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJSx7q-Mt0c
I loved it so much, I bought it… in the form of the original Mario Paint cartridge she made it on. It's my new favorite possession. Digital art ownership with provenance and scarcity, no blockchain required!
Twitter quietly changed its Developer Agreement today to retroactively justify their unannounced ban on third-party Twitter clients. They added a single line forbidding "use or access the Licensed Materials to create or attempt to create a substitute or similar service or product to the Twitter Applications." Here's a diff between the two. https://www.diffchecker.com/DmAjUJGK/
An absolute kick in the teeth to all the indie devs who worked so hard to make Twitter a better experience for so many. Twitterrific was officially discontinued today and pulled off the App Store after 16 years of development. Among other firsts, they first used "tweet" to describe an update, first used a bird icon, and were the first native client on iPhone and Mac. https://blog.iconfactory.com/2023/01/twitterrific-end-of-an-era/
who could have ever predicted a student coding project with three people working on it and over 2 million users would have multiple critical vulnerabilities?
"The issues we reported allow any attacker to access all data, including private posts, private messages, shared media and even deleted direct messages. This also includes private email addresses and phone numbers entered during login." https://zerforschung.org/posts/hive-en/
Hive is adding ~500k users daily, passing the 1 million user mark on Monday and then 2 million users earlier today. They're supported only by the 24-year-old founder, two employees, and zero moderators.