News story on my friend Tim having to resign over a stupid anti-mask policy

A friend of mine quits his prestigious university job because the mask policy is dangerous

Chinese subsidiary "goes rogue" and goes its own way

Safety upgrade to power grid turns off power sooner if it detects a problem. Good! But they can't restart for hours.

Why Trumpies are squirting horse dewormer into their rectums; it's all a profit motivated quack doctor thing

It's the worst it's been since the pandemic started; worse than last year

A citizen at a school district meeting with a demonstration of the reasonableness of mask mandates

A bunch of Reddit influencers take the site to task for not doing enough to stop vaccine misinformation

Sixteen years of product strategy failures

A small / new Python program for making beautiful maps from OSM data. Includes a Colab demo.

A summary of where we are today with understanding where Covid-19 came from. This topic is so hopelessly political we may never get a clear answer.

Attorney General Paxton has been dodging jail for years. He now has had his office investigate himself and issued an unsigned report saying nope, he's not guilty of nothin.

An excellent demo of the modern Web experience

More evidence that the American idea of a market for healthcare is total nonsense: prices for services are secret and capricious

A very aggressive code reformatter: runs black and a bunch of other tools

Hideous witch hunt within the Catholic community.

A bit too hyped but a nice interview with an excellent generative artist

In which an irascible nightclub owner talks about the current state of anti-vax idiots and heavy metal

A hagiography of the Chinese woman behind the famous chile crisp sauce that is now globally popular

What happens when a death cult runs a popular but awful news agency

The pioneer of free SSL certificates is just fine, but if you want another option there are now several

2018 book excerpt about the early days of the company, lots of quotes from the original folks

The reason there's not a Verizon or AT&T app store is that Google pays the companies not to do that

More genetic evidence that at least a few Polynesians got to South America and contributed some DNA to the population

Interesting numbers behind the company that's about to kill its primary business

A small study perhaps showing that even relatively small amounts of elevated CO2 impair thinking

An accounting of how much economic benefit is given to fossil fuel companies in the form of ignoring pollution, subsidizing transport, etc

Former open source map tech darling does a deal with the stupidest proprietary location company in the business

A marvelous 14th century invention that accurately predicted the motion of the planets but with entirely the wrong scientific theory

Very detailed info for micro-optimizing code on Intel processors

Detailed article on making a trig function 50x faster by using an approximation and optimizing the code for modern CPUs

Lovely article about a lovely game, a cooperativeish board game about birds

Possibly the first total conversion mod of a video game; the original author's page about the game

Connects Europe's two main rivers across the European watershed

A simple explanation of email server and spam identifying systems

Instead of balloon soundings, upper air conditions derived from satellite data. Awkward UI; the San Francisco report is at https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/soundings/nucaps/pskewt/NPPstatic/sounding.html?g075715

An old barbeque style now mostly forgotten but still exists at the margins. Sort of like shredded pork, but for beef.

A variety of habanero bred to have no heat

Many details on non-ascii domain names, including differences in IDNA2003 and ISNA2008

America's first out gay ambassador passed away

Details on Trump's attempt to force Census to produce counts of undocumented immigrants to (unconstitutionally) change apportionment

Very impressive computer software / artist, lots of beautiful work inspired in part by traditional Chinese arts

Hilarious NYT article about creating a new "hype coin" cryptocurrency and the culture and tools of it

A collection of movies and shows that absolutely should exist

Schoolkids in China buy plotters to do their writing homework for them

A remarkable snapshot of cryptocurrency scams

Wirecutter looks at the product category; recommends 1Password or Bitwarden

Economist explores various disaster scenarios with cryptocurrency and just how bad it'd be for the real financial system

Coinbase's so-called stablecoin turns out not to be actually fully dollar backed. It's probably reasonable, but then why were they misleading people?

New open design for a PCI card that turns any PC into a super accurate clock.

Very precise timekeepers in a 2 inch square electronic component

Explanation of how the generative art system works

How to write webapps that use the GPU for computing. All very experimental

1 million neural network backed agents running at 60fps using a GPU for computation

Some lovely generative design and printing

Nick Montfort pushing the boundaries of artistic computing. Hacks the C64 CHRGET loop to modify the screen border color

A benchmark for Unix tty terminals

When good apps change for the worse

A short essay on how even in 2021 there are very few games that take sexuality seriously

A way of looking at space in terms of effort to get there

Major tool for understanding redistricting plans gets improvements just in time for census data

A fictional map from an alternate history

The city will pay for an emergency ride home for you if your house is on fire or you have a flat tire on your bike

Commentary on the human-proving tasks from an aesthetic point of view. It's smart analysis.

Reverse engineering the new game feature

A poem illustrated by the machine

Notes on running the machine learning art generator

A remarkable litany of famous actors playing one episode parts

Trumpy "Free speech" social media discovers the need for some sort of content policies and moderation

A Python library to magically correct mojibake and other forms of broken character encoding

An overview of current trends in art assisted by GANs

Hannah Johnston's notes on learning a new medium

San Francisco's mayor gets a slap on the wrist for various forms of petty corruption

Various quirks of timekeeping, particularly in the satellite GNSS infrastructure

Docked Russian ship fired its thrusters and spun the ISS around 1.5 times. Counterthrust from other docked ships prevented even worse motion.

Simple web tool for printing a QR code for your wifi access

Some solid perspective on a vaccine success reported as a failure

Thoguhtful musings on a musician and video artist working on transgender themes

Excellent and disturbing music video about body dysmorphia

Modern printers all print a code on the page that identifies you. Here's some software to manipulate that.