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“Bill Hader tells some hilarious stories about his interactions with Tom Cruise while making ‘Topic Thunder.’ But what’s incredibly eerie is that when he does impressions, the face of his target is deep-faked over his own in such a smooth way that you don’t notice when it starts and ends. The effect…”
“ A long explainer and background article about planning and maintaining the maze of undersea data cables that make the Internet possible. ”
“ Graying COBOL programmers still get pressed into service to modify programs that might otherwise run for decades without changes. Also, in many cases, the Y2K problem was never fixed, just deferred. ”
“ For every developer doing amazing, cutting-edge things and writing about it on the web, there are 99 that just get work done every day using boring technology that still works just fine. ”
“ A collection of stories from employees of dating apps which reveal they’re not as genuine as you might think. ”
“ A reflection on why we collect physical things and why the digital equivalents will never be the same. ”
“ A company in Rwanda delivers blood and medical supplies by drone. They can parachute a package of blood 50 miles away in 30 minutes, ordered via text message. ”
“ A company uses never-ending video of a wall of lava lamps to generate unpredictable encryption keys for their software. ”
“ A groundbreaking video from 2004 which describes a fictionalized future on what the media landscape might look like in 2014. ”
“ A list and description of dozens of spreadsheet errors that had significant business impact. ”
“ The Cambodian language is notoriously hard to type. So the speakers just…don’t. ”
“ A game developer uses gaming software to build a realistic version of Flappy Bird. ”
“ For a few years now, Ford has had headlights that use GPS to know when the road ahead is curving, then turn the beam to illuminate what’s around the bend. ”
“ An article about technology progress, but I found it more interesting for the discussion of the technology hype/adoption cycle. ”
“ There exists a low-frequency radio transmission of an alternating ‘buzz’ sound, sprinkled with the occasional Russian word. No one knows why this exists. It’s been going on for decades. ”
“ A man in Wales was a very early Bitcoin miner. He has 8,000 Bitcoin in a wallet for which the only key is on a hard drive he accidentally threw away. ”
“ The website of the Heaven’s Gate cult who committed mass suicide when the Hale-Bopp comet passed by Earth in 1997 is still online and unchanged. ”
“ Details of a brazen hack of the multi-state lottery system by one of the key security employees that resulted in multiple lottery winnings. ”
“ Ingress is a AR game from the people who would go on to make Pokémon Go. But it’s much more serious, and has people flying all over the the world to complete missions. ”
“ A programmer got in a dispute with someone, so he deleted this code from a communal repository. Problem was, lots of other systems depended on that code. ”
“ A fascinating conference presentation where a guy (sometime hilariously) explains the insane process of how to land a Space Shuttle. ”
“ The story of how one girl got famous literally overnight and how that affected her life and her mental health over time. ”
“ Lovely tribute to the first CD-ROM encyclopedia that many of us owned, and the sense of wonder that it brought us. Wikipedia killed it, but Encarta was a refuge for me for many years. ”
“ A contemplation about the distraction of modern life. It’s long, but that’s kind of the point ”
“ When a domain name owner wouldn’t give it up, the thwarted buyer sent a gunman to his house and attempt to force him to transfer the domain at gunpoint. ”
“ A guy comprises the computers (including the webcams) of a scam call center in India. He shows how the scams work (they claim to have accidentally over-refunded people, then ask for money back), and ultimately disrupts the scam, hilariously. ”
“ A promotional video for the first version of Adobe Acrobat in 1993. It details the work processes of a fictional office that will seem familiar to a lot of who were working in the 90s. ”
“ This is the first image ever posted to the web. It has been at this same web address since 1992. The image depicts a comedy musical group formed at CERN, where the web was invented. ”
“ The US government has a long history of wanting to be able to get in touch with you in an emergency. ”
“ A domain name forever enshrined on license plates accidentally expired and was picked up by a very different organization. ”
“ To test road surfaces, there’s a massive rotating machine in France that simulates years of tires traveling over the road. ”
“ This is the first video ever posted to YouTube. It’s 18 seconds of one of the founders talking about elephants at the zoo, ”
“ Microsoft’s Flight Simulator 2020 is so detailed that it’s hard to pick it out from real life. Here’s a side-by-side comparison. ”
“ When geographic coordinates are empty – ‘0,0’ or ‘null’ – mapping databases use a fake placename called ‘Null Island’ to represent the thing that is not there. ”
“ The IRS is likely running on software code that is 60 years old. ”
“ In 1976, a young Bill Gates wrote a open letter to a computing newsletter imploring people not to make bootleg copies of his software. This letter is the source of much of the antipathy against Gates in the programming community. ”
“ A guy plays with Photoshop’s new AI filters, and – while laughing hysterically – shows that Photoshop can estimate and apply how emotions might appear in a picture. ”
“ Pixar faked camera features in the last Toy Story movie. It created shots using limitations of actual cameras even though it was an animated movies and didn’t use cameras. ”
“ Limited range makes jet packs impractical for most uses, but they come in handy for boarding ships, as demonstrated in this training exercise. ”
“ A company has crowd-sourced a quarter of a billion dollars and has been working on a video game for seven years. ”
“ A solid backstory about the undersea cables that you don’t think about, but that move all your data and make your digital life possible. ”
“ Back in 2017, an incident in the Black Sea, and a bunch of Pokemon Go players, revealed that Russia can spoof GPS coordinates. ”
“ A discussion of the Nike Vaporfly, why it dominates elite running, and how technological advancement disrupts athletic record-keeping. ”
“ A hypothetical discussion of what might happen if Google got hacked. ”
“ An AI researcher considers a single image and notes all the things a computer would have to understand to perceive the image the same way humans do. ”
“ Using anonymized cell phone tower data, watch how software can track all the Sturgis attendees as they move across the country. ”
“ The U.S. military uses Internet Relay Chat a lot, perhaps most importantly to run tactical operations in real-time. IRC is a very old – but still quite popular – technology, dating to 1988. ”
“ Content moderators at YouTube spend their days looking at the worst of human nature. Not surprisingly, some of them are suffering from PTSD. ”
“ Someone found a weirdly rare car abandoned in a parking garage. The article explains the history of the EV1 and why GM tried to kill them all. ”
“ Using just conference call video, researchers can reverse-engineer your shoulder movements to figure out what you’re typing with surprising accuracy. ”
“ A YouTuber explains, in detail, how much YouTube videos make. It’s not just views – the geographic location of the audiences matters, as does how long they watch your video. And then, in the second half of the video, she explains how she tripled her income. ”
“ As the proof for the effectiveness of Nike Vaporfly shoes starts to mount, it’s becoming clear that the record books will never be the same. ”
“ Advances in technology haven’t really saved us any time. They’ve just given us more stuff and raised our expectations for how life should work. ”
“ Soldiers studying for protocol exams have inadvertently revealed nuclear secrets by creating online flashcards for them. ”
“ A solar-powered satellite has been in orbit since 1958. It is the oldest man-made object in space, and circles the earth every 132 minutes. Its orbit characteristics still constitute valid experimental data. ”
“ A story of the horrifying reputation damage one person can do on the internet, and how hard it can be to stop them, or reverse what’s been done. ”
“ A good explainer of ‘numbers stations,’ which are radio frequencies that broadcast series of numbers on a schedule. It’s assumed they’re communicating to spies in the field, but no one knows for sure. ”
“ A 1994 clip from the Today show where the hosts discuss the ‘@’ sign, and try to explain what ‘internet’ is. ”
“ A deeply uncomfortable truth is that many commercial aircraft are poorly maintained and pilots depend so much on automation that they simply don’t know what to do when something unexpected happens. ”
“ Employers who took the effort to find and install an alternative web browser performed better on every metric and stayed in jobs longer. ”
“ Early PC computers – before the advent of secure software – often had physical keys to lock the case or the keyboard. ”
“ A librarian in upstate New York was the first to bring the Internet into libraries and coined the term ‘surfing’ to describe browsing the internet. ”
“ This starts as a blistering indictment of Epic, the medical records system, but morphs into a larger discussion of how doctors relate to technology and whether it makes things better or worse. ”
“ A detailed look at how movies capture human motion for CGI. ”
“ Twenty years ago, the way the sound systems at outdoor music concepts was completely changed. This changed how the music sounds, but also how the stages were designed. ”
“ There’s a particular spot over the Earth that disproportionately damages satellites because of a radiation field. We’ve come up with ways to account for when stuff malfunctions. ”
“ There are ‘bar codes’ printed on the ground in multiple places around the United States, used to calibrate spy satellites. ”
“ There’s been an Easter Egg hidden in Windows 95 for 25 years. (The video is long, but you don’t need to watch the entire thing.) ”
“ A Twitter troll hijacks a picture and creates a meme. The women in the picture eventually find the meme, and their response is not what you would expect. ”
“ With the help of Red Bull, a team builds a camera fast enough to follow an F1 car around a very fast track ”
“ Most of the value created by the Internet doesn’t involve people spending money, so it’s hidden from GDP measures. ”
“ The first ‘ethical hacker’ might have been a Frenchman who sabotaged the Nazi punch card system for storing data on citizens, thus preventing them from querying for Jews. ”
“ Face-changing apps have gotten so good that a middle-aged man was able to pose as a young, attractive female and amass 16,000 followers just by using a filter on his phone. ”
“ There was a highly influential YouTube star before those were a common thing. But something happened, and he vanished. Completely. ”
