Andy Baio Profile picture
👋 I quit! Follow me at https://t.co/y8ZJoROs4C or the less cursed sites below. - Mastodon: https://t.co/tL5G9nm0qF - https://t.co/f6QPo7DCjf - https://t.co/KDVcxIEDWq
Nov 1, 2022 8 tweets 3 min read
Last week, a Redditor fine-tuned an AI image model on the work of one illustrator, sparking a debate about the ethics of reproducing a living artist's style. I talked to that artist to see how she felt about it, and the person who made it. waxy.org/2022/11/invasi… The Redditor used a technique developed by Google called DreamBooth, reimplemented for Stable Diffusion, using only 32 illustrations from the artist. Training took 2.5 hours of cloud GPU time at a cost of under $2. He then released the finetuned model for everyone to use.
Oct 26, 2022 9 tweets 3 min read
I'd love to know where this YouTube channel is getting all its vintage videos from. Ephemeral footage of computer/game stores, arcades, and videos of the early internet like this one: surfing the WWW in 1995. Hanging out in the Facebook offices in 2005
Oct 22, 2022 9 tweets 6 min read
The Stable Diffusion Discord has a channel devoted to spectacular failures and it’s full of gems ImageImageImageImage totally normal animals ImageImageImageImage
Sep 23, 2022 9 tweets 4 min read
Here’s a mystery: someone apparently exploited American Airlines’ in-flight PA to broadcast their own voice for the duration of a flight. Flight crew couldn’t stop it and never figured out who did it or how it was done. American Airlines told @garyleff that maintenance “determined the sounds were caused by an issue with the PA amplifier. There was no external access to the system.” But what kind of amp malfunction could cause those very human sounds? viewfromthewing.com/no-theres-no-g…
Jul 14, 2022 9 tweets 6 min read
“Grainy 1974 color photograph of Muppet President announcing his resignation at press conference from Oval Office desk with orange curtains in background” ImageImageImageImage “black and white photo of Albert Einstein at a chalkboard inventing jean shorts” ImageImageImage
Mar 15, 2022 10 tweets 3 min read
Vimeo is screwing over long-time indie creators, ordering them to pay thousands of dollars yearly or they’ll delete their accounts with a week’s notice. This is particularly awful for Patreon creators, since it’s the default video provider. theverge.com/2022/3/15/2297… Vimeo says they’re only asking the top 1% of bandwidth-users to pay up, but that’s a shockingly low bar: one creator said their most-viewed subscriber-only video had only 815 views, enough to put them in the top 1% of all users and requiring a $3,500 yearly plan. Image
Mar 2, 2022 4 tweets 2 min read
Well, I definitely didn't see this one coming. Way back in 2008, I was the first person to cover their launch. Ethan was kind enough to give me the scoop and an exclusive interview, which reads charmingly quaint now. waxy.org/2008/09/bandca…
Feb 1, 2022 6 tweets 3 min read
Wow, @joinhitpiece (hitpiece.com) is selling "NFTs of all your favorite songs" to "join an Artist's community," but without permission from the artist. They're selling NFTs of songs from every artist listed on Spotify. All their artist/album images are pulled from @Spotify's CDN at i․scdn․co and it looks like their GraphQL search is just a thin wrapper to the Spotify API. Their artist IDs are all Spotify IDs.
Jan 11, 2022 8 tweets 5 min read
This guy shamelessly cloned Wordle (name and all) as an F2P iOS game with in-app purchases and is bragging about how well it's doing and how he'll get away with it because Josh Wardle didn't trademark it. So gross. There have been games with similar mechanics dating back at least to the 19th century — the 1980s game show Lingo was far from the first — but this guy plagiarized the name and interface from Wordle as a naked cash grab.
Dec 8, 2021 7 tweets 3 min read
This spaghetti is "blockchain certified." That QR code goes to this page, which isn't viewable on desktop unless you make your window narrow. A real throwback to Web 1.0-era "please adjust your browser width" pages.
May 15, 2021 11 tweets 4 min read
A short thread of articles/essays/resources I found useful for understanding the crisis in Gaza: the forced dispossession of Palestinians, the resulting protests and Israel’s violent reaction to them, U.S. media/political biases, and the sociopolitical context underlying it all. “The violence in Gaza rightly captures headlines, but it conceals the silent and relentless dispossession at the heart of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.” newlinesmag.com/argument/the-p…
Apr 11, 2021 4 tweets 2 min read
Buried in @benyt's new article about Substack is this little parenthetical. nytimes.com/2021/04/11/bus… Image Also broke the news that @cwarzel quit the NYT for Substack!
Apr 11, 2021 14 tweets 7 min read
I spent an hour looking for this in Usenet/listserv archives and finally gave up. Anyone know the original URL for “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web” before they renamed it to “Yahoo” and moved to akebono․stanford․edu/yahoo in mid-1994? Originally launched as “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web,” Jerry Yang renamed it to “Jerry and David’s Guide” because he hated getting all the credit—but David Filo hated getting top billing, so they quickly decided on renaming it “Yahoo.”
Nov 20, 2020 4 tweets 2 min read
Substack's unwavering commitment to neutrality, and an unwillingness to set content guidelines beyond porn and hate speech, makes me think they're headed for an ugly place. cjr.org/special_report… Substack's approach to moderation in 2020 reminds me of Twitter and Reddit in 2010 i.e. "the free speech wing of the free speech party." Good for engagement at first, but often attracts a group of loud and terrible people that shifts public perceptions of what and who it's for.
Aug 11, 2020 6 tweets 2 min read
I built some AWS infrastructure to batch process audio to automatically generate lyric timings for karaoke, which is useful if you ever want to convert WAP to JSON. did you know audacity has a built-in karaoke plugin
Jul 17, 2020 19 tweets 9 min read
Woke up to national coverage of the Trump administration’s dangerous escalation of police violence here in Portland, in large part thanks to @OPB's report on federal officers silently grabbing protestors off the streets in unmarked minivans. opb.org/news/article/f… Our county sheriff, mayor, and governor have all denounced the intervention, calling the federal response a “a significant setback,” “irresponsible,” and a “blatant abuse of power by the federal government.”
Aug 27, 2019 4 tweets 2 min read
(cw: rape, sexual assault) Yesterday, @alienmelon wrote about how famed game composer Jeremy Soule raped them a decade ago and used his reputation in the industry to exploit a young talent for free labor and silence their story. Inspired by Nathalie's story, @UnburntWitch wrote about her own experience of sexual assault, months into her game design career, by Night in the Woods/Aquaria co-creator Alec Holowka.
Jul 24, 2019 6 tweets 3 min read
For the last 800 days, @meganamram has posted this tweet every day. So I scraped those 800 tweets and put it in a spreadsheet to make some charts, like a normal person. If you're wondering, Megan definitely isn't scheduling her tweets. She's clearly posting them manually throughout the day, every day. The earliest was at 7:16am PT on July 12. The latest was a minute before midnight on August 11, 2017.
Jul 20, 2019 4 tweets 2 min read
This @DigiAntiquarian retrospective of Sierra Online's Police Quest 4 doubles as a blistering critique of the game's "author," disgraced LAPD chief Daryl F. Gates, and a history of the racist and violent police force he commanded. filfre.net/2019/07/chief-… Last year, @DuncanFyfe wrote an excellent feature on the game. vice.com/en_us/article/…
Mar 17, 2019 6 tweets 2 min read
Very sad to hear Dick Dale, the King of Surf Guitar, died last night at age 81. I was lucky enough to meet Dick, and see him play, when I was a Cool Teen™. theguardian.com/music/2019/mar… In 1995, Dick wrote a regular column for Music Confidential, an internationally-distributed (albeit short-lived) tabloid-style music magazine that my family published. His column was "Pissed Off and Pissed On," a place for him to vent about whatever he wanted.
Mar 17, 2019 18 tweets 6 min read
In 1990, McDonald's produced an animated anti-drug PSA that brought together ALF, Garfield, TMNT, Ducktales, The Smurfs, Winnie the Pooh, Tigger, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Muppet Babies, Slimer, The Chipmunks for the most ambitious crossover event in history. Simulcast on all four major American networks, plus 11 other cable networks, it aired the day before my 13th birthday in 1990, but somehow, I've never heard of it until today. I watched it, and now I'm going to share my pain. I'll let the president and his wife set it up.