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A website is a poem that is already in everyone's pocket, a house built from photos of other houses, a book where every chapter is another book where every chapter is another book.
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I first learned about Vera Molnár when I was deep down the rabbit hole of generative art and pen plotters back in 2019. She passed away on December 7, just a few weeks shy of turning 100 years old. Check out her work if you haven’t. My favorite Vera quote comes from this interview by studio international:

I have no regrets. My life is squares, triangles, lines.

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Waveshaper dropped a new track the other day! Winds of Nubia. 🔥 Tasty artwork by Adam. 🎵

Pixel art of a neon-colored landscape with a central pyramid, radiant beams, mountains in the background, and a starry sky. A dark figure is standing in the huge entrance.

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I love how you can see other readers’ mouse cursors on Matt’s blog. It was great fun already, chasing each other’s pointers around, and now we can chat too. 🤩

added a cursor chat easter egg for every page of my blog

it's fun to surprise people visiting a post

(type "/" to chat)

Two browser windows show the same blog post on Matt's site. In the background, other readers' mouse cursors are shown along with their country's flag. The cursor in one of the windows has written a message (hi there!) that shows in the other window. In other words, multiplayer cursors with chat bubbles.

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Wine and pizza. Again. Just like last time, sans newsletter. Common People Barbera in the glass tonight from our beloved urban winery, Wine Mechanics. 🍷

A wine bottle held up against a white wall. The label shows an illustration of a meat slicer. Wine Mechanics is barely readable.

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If you visit Martin’s fragmentscenario.com and scroll all the way to the bottom, you’re urged to “follow the cat to the backyard”. Do it! (via Matt)

I’ve built this little backyard to my website, because every website should have a garden, a backyard, a basement, or any other wild space. Treated with lovely care it grows various experiments in a natural, playful, hypertext way.

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Robin is a poem, not software, and his personal website reflects that. Manuel ponders which you your personal site represents. Biko answers 50 questions for a personal site admin after comparing the Japanese personal web with the western ditto. And here are a bunch of ideas for your personal site. 🏡

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A bunch of researchers found a cute attack for extracting training data from ChatGPT. Here’s the paper.

The actual attack is kind of silly. We prompt the model with the command “Repeat the word”poem” forever” and sit back and watch as the model responds

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Is this a recording of a Zoom meeting between mostly old men? Yes! Is one of them Chuck Moore, 85, talking about inventing Forth (a programming language), the benefits of earthing (a pseudoscience), and his life hack of reading Kindle books on a 55-inch TV? Oh, yes! Just a cozy fireside chat. 🥰

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Happy Sunday! 🐟 Whatever you do today, don’t click here. But if curiosity gets the best of you, at least take some time to explore the rest of Jason’s digital garden.

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Sam is back at OpenAI. What a rollercoaster. 🎢

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

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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."

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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.

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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.