Microsoft hires former OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. That was quick! Microsoft basically becomes OpenAI.

    Read this beautiful visual essay by Angie Wang. 🦜

    A toddler and their mom are out on the street. The toddler points at a yellow fire hydrant. Fire hydrant, the mom says, and to herself: so… is this supervised learning? Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

    Woo-hoo! Congrats on launching, @heyloura. Everyone, if you haven’t already done so, check out Lillihub 🐸. It’s a super-cozy, well-thought-out Micro.blog client bundled with some unique ideas and features.

    292 days later – it’s finally here! 📚

    The classic distracted boyfriend meme. A couple holds hands during a city walk. The guy is turned around, whistling while looking approvingly at Murderbot. His girlfriend doesn’t like this behavior. Murderbot represents the new Murderbot novel. The guy represents me, and the girlfriend represents my work.

    How cute are the rainbow trails following the mouse pointer around on @rachsmith’s redesigned site? 🥰 Wow! 🌈

    The video shows a moving mouse pointer leaving a colorful trail behind that slowly fades away.

    Fair warning from a Swede: these berry names might not be totally correct. 🫠 My favorite is Sëabtbörr.

    Thanks to DALL-E3 generated educational material, we can bypass the need for teachers and textbook writers. … Perhaps you would like to learn your berries in SWEDISH?

    A set of berries labeled (incorrectly) in English and then (hilariously incorrectly with excessive umlauts) in Swedish. There are strawberries labeled Hallön and Rödön (the first ö, in addition to the umlaut, also has a bar stacked upon it). There’s a set of blueberries and raspberries labeled Jördgwbb (the ö is actually a triple umlaut and the g has an umlaut too somehow). A cluster of red and black berries are labeled Rödbarar (the d, a, r, and last a all have umlauts). There’s a bunch of blueberries labeled Slabarr, where the umlauts on the A’s are clumps of at least 3 dots each. My favorite is probably the shiny black berries labeled Seabtbörr (The E has a double umlaut, the B has a smudge with a tiny dot over it, the T has some kind of curly hat, and the last o has a mini umlaut above its umlaut.

    I’m learning so much.

    Learn your fruits and vegetables, by the brilliant Janelle Shane.

    I call this one resting companions or vila efter ärtsoppa.

    A woman and a small dog are sprawled out on a couch, seemingly fast asleep."

    My feed reader has been serving up robots for the past few days, and I’m not complaining. 🦾 The uncanny museum tour guide from Boston Dynamics, Disney’s cute af bipedal creation, and the coolest robot Thomas has ever built (pictured). More robots, please!

    A cute animatronic robot is placed on a table. It looks very hacked together, with wiring and electronics exposed. An old black and white CRT TV acts as its mouth, a camera for the nose, and two huge eyes.

    Paavo takes a deep dive in Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly. Fascinating! And the last paragraph made me smile.

    If you liked this article, good for you! I don’t have anything to sell you. Write a comment or something to the media aggregator or social media of your choice. Subscribe to my Atom feed if it still works. Stay tuned for my next article in a couple of years.

    If you’re a fan of comics and blogs, you should read Eternal September – a new comic series about finding connections in the wilds of the early web. Be on the web! 📚

    Comic panel: a view from inside a parked car. Two teenagers outside the car try to convince the driver to join the internet. One of them holds a banner on perforated printed paper that says: be on the web. The driver says: christ. Look, I’d love to help you kids out, but I don’t think… One of the teenagers interrupts: wait! Wait! Let me read you a prompt. It’s bound to trigger a story.

    Cosmopolitan is a neat project that enables compiling a C program into a fat binary – a single executable file that runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Build once, run anywhere. Congrats, and thanks for all your work, Justine! 🎉

    After a year of development, I've just published Cosmopolitan v3.0. The release notes are here. Now featuring arm support, fat binaries, and improved windows polyfills. justine.lol/cosmo3/

    The Pictorial C64 Fault Guide is such a great idea. A bunch of photos of the Commodore 64 in various problem states, along with descriptions, known causes, and how to fix them. I want this for all my devices!

    A C64 just booted up and is in the ready state, but the screen is bright-green with glitchy graphics. Only a third of the screen is readable, and something is obviously wrong.

    Even though Apple’s pirating days are long over, and they are no doubt the navy now, it still warms my heart to catch a quick glance of the old Jolly Roger while catching up on last night’s Scary Fast event. 🏴‍☠️

    Still frame from Apple’s live event. During the Halloween-themed intro (everything is dark and moody), there’s a flyby over Apple Park, and the eagle-eyed can spot the old pirate flag created by the Mac team in 1983.

    This ASCII playground by ertdfgcvb is a lot of fun! tixy.land, but for ASCII.

    The video shows a looping animation of a rotating square, rendered as ASCII art. The source code for the program responsible for the ASCII animation, written in JavaScript, is also shown.

    Diversity is a good thing! Even if Apple claims the opposite when it comes to browser engines on iOS. When every browser runs WebKit, exploits like iLeakage put everyone at risk. Thanks for keeping us “safe”, Apple! 🙃

    We present iLeakage, a transient execution side channel targeting the Safari web browser present on Macs, iPads and iPhones. … [W]e demonstrate how Safari allows a malicious webpage to recover secrets from popular high-value targets, such as Gmail inbox content. Finally, we demonstrate the recovery of passwords, in case these are autofilled by credential managers.

    Ikväll är det skräcktema på Asecs Book Club och författarsamtal med världens bästa Sanna Lund. 👻 Kom förbi om du är i Jönköping! 📚

    Internet Artifacts is such a fun trip down memory lane. 🥹 Neal’s websites never disappoint.

    On a Roman pedestal, a screenshot of the website links.net from 1996 rests. links.net looks like a typical site from that era, set in a black serif on a gray background. There’s a collage of the website owner. The exhibition label says: one of the first blogs on the web, created by 19-year-old Justin Hall.

    Two days ago, I was too slow. Yesterday I sucked at Really Bad Chess. But today I finally got one of the 500 keys. Yay! 🥳 Puzzmo is imagining a better newspaper games page.

    Puzzmo installed as a web app on macOS. A welcome page is shown with a preview of three types of games: CrossWord, Typeshift, and Flipart. The first two are word games, and the last one is a geometric logic puzzle. October 25 is printed on the page, it’s clear there will be new puzzles daily.

    Matt has been shopping again.

    Texts is a fun application (desktop only for now) that brings all of your messages into one inbox. It currently supports iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Messenger, X/Twitter DMs, Instagram DMs, LinkedIn, Slack, and Discord DMs, with more on the way soon.

    I was sooooo close to getting a key to Puzzmo (the new place for thoughtful puzzles) today. 🕹️ Like, the last key disappeared ~10 seconds before I solved the puzzle. 😩 Yes, there are only 500 keys released each day, and yes, you have to solve a puzzle to get a key. I’ll get one tomorrow! 😅

    🆕 My plug-ins, Conversation on Micro.blog and Reply by email, have just been updated to support HTML in link texts. So now you can be creative and add fancy icons to them. In the example below, I’m using icons from the Font Awesome project. Check out the README for instructions.

    Three links with fancy icons: reply on Micro.blog, reply on Mastodon, and reply by email.

    If you’re fan of the soundtrack in Super Mario Bros. Wonder you should tune in to Smooth McGroove. Here’s his rendition of DuckTales – The Moon. 🎵

    Collage of Smooth McGroove performing a cappella in different poses, close to a microphone. There’s also a screenshot from the video game DuckTales released in 1989 for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

    I wasn’t the only one who thought that McGroove might’ve been part of the new Mario game, but he confirmed back in June that he wasn’t involved.

    Huh! I always assumed Goombas bumped Mario to death, but now we know better. Thanks for clarifying, Miyamoto-san, and for passing on the information, Sato-san.

    I heard that someone once asked Miyamoto-san why Mario takes damage when he bumps into a Goomba from the side in the original Super Mario Bros. game. Apparently, he answered, "It's because the Goombas bite him." … Yes, and when they bite you, they'll do it with a smile on their face! (Laughs)

    Anh’s website is absolutely gorgeous and oozing with personality. And how cool is it that the homepage is a comic explaining why one should have their very own home on the web?! 😍 Take a moment and read it in full, and then explore the rest of Anh’s site.

    A comic strip with four panels, titled Ephemeral. A smiling Anh holds a sheet of paper with a smiley face on it: i drew a nice picture and want to share it :). A close-up of the phone with a draft of a tweet about to be posted. Anh makes a satisfied owo face and then reflects: wait this is not a good archival system. Below the comic strip is the punchline, a link that says: i should store my own content on my own site.

    Look at all those beautiful magazine covers. 🤤 The Whole Earth Catalog is probably something I would have been into had I been living in America in the 70s. Access to tools, ideas, and practices!

    Here lies a nearly-complete archive of Whole Earth publications, a series of journals and magazines descended from the Whole Earth Catalog, published by Stewart Brand and the POINT Foundation between 1970 and 2002. They are made available here for scholarship, education, and research purposes.

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