2023
- A clickjacking vulnerability in WhatsApp that enables phishing attacks. An attacker can send anyone a crafted message with a link that appears to lead to a legitimate website, but in fact leads to any website of the attacker’s choice.
- A curated list of Tools and apps for Technical Theater.
- AngelList has a Dataroom feature.
- An iPhone Photo shows 3 different variants of a photo because of two mirrors - photo story.
- Ansel, an open-source fork of Darktable, is a photo-editing software for digital artists, designed to help you achieve your own interpretation of raw digital photographs.
- Aphantasia is the inability to create mental imagery. Aphantasia is considered the opposite of Hyperphantasia, the condition of having extremely vivid mental imagery.
- Apple has an option to deregister and turn off iMessage (on the web) if you moved to a non-Apple phone and cant get SMS or text messages someone sends you from an iPhone.
- ArtBot is your gateway to experiment with the wonderful world of generative AI art using the power of the AI Horde, a distributed open source network of GPUs running Stable Diffusion.
- arXiv is a curated research-sharing platform open to anyone, hosting more than two million scholarly articles in eight subject areas, curated by our strong community of volunteer moderators.
- AVSE is an open source AI video search engine to learn more about AI.
- Bookshop.org works to connect readers with independent booksellers all over the world.
- Can’t send email more than 500 miles (archive) (the characters in the story are participating at HackerNews - TreyHarris and thyrsus)
- Cap is an open source and privacy-focused alternative to Loom. Lightweight, powerful, and stunning. Record and share in seconds.
- Cap is an Open Source Loom alternative.
- Cashless sucks (archive) It’s not in the interests of the ordinary person but it’s not a conspiracy either. A cashless society is a system run amok.
- Chamath Palihapitiya did a deep dive into the Global Energy Transition and Inflation Reduction Act (archive)
- ClimateTriage - Discover a meaningful way to contribute to open source projects focused on climate technology and sustainability.
- ComfyUI is a web-based Stable Diffusion interface optimized for workflow customization.
- Compose - Qualify, route and sync your leads on WhatsApp to boost conversion rates.
- End-of-life (EOL) and support information is often hard to track, or very badly presented. endoflife.date documents EOL dates and support lifecycles for various products.
- Felt is a better way to work with maps. Powerful enough for GIS Pros, easy enough for everyone else.
- Flow is a free and open-source browser-based ePub reader.
- Found out that HackerNews seem to have a Status Page.
- FreeBASIC is a free/open source (GPL), BASIC compiler for Microsoft Windows, DOS and Linux.
- Game-Icons collect free game icons.
- Get an Internet Web address at OMG.lol
- Gogs is a painless self-hosted Git service.
- Grid by Example is a collection of examples, video and other information to help you learn CSS Grid Layout.
- “Hallucinate” is Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2023.
- HeyNote is an open source dedicated scratchpad for developers.
- I am The Fold is an experiment to show how designing for The Fold can be treacherous (source).
- InstaBooks is an AI TextBook Generator.
- Labophase is a app that focuses on returning results from multiple AI models at the same time - GPT4-Turbo, Claude-2, Google PaLM2, Llama2, Mistral, and OpenOrca.
- Librum (source) is a clean and powerful way to read and manage your e-books on any device.
- London’s TfL has released a batch of documents that show almost every underground station in glorious 3D format.
- macOSpilot-ai-assistant - Voice + Vision powered AI assistant that answers questions about any application, in context and in audio.
- Marker converts PDF to markdown quickly with high accuracy.
- Maze Generator
- Mechanical Watch is an article going deep into, well, Mechanical Watches. Unlike their quartz and smart siblings, mechanical watches can run without using any batteries or other electronic components. (archive)
- Naev is a game about space exploration, trade and combat. Players travel the galaxy and earn money by trading, fighting and performing missions.
- New wave Sci-Fi: 75 best novels of 1964–1983
- OpenAI’s Prompt Engineering Guide lists some good strategies for getting better results.
- OSGameClones tries to gather open-source or source-available remakes of great old games.
- Photorealistic Video Generation with Diffusion Models.
- Pika Labs is a nonprofit Organization focused on investigating AI capabilities.
- Pitivi is a Free video editor with a beautiful and intuitive user interface, a clean codebase and a fantastic community.
- Plasmic is an open-source visual editing and content platform for building websites and apps. (source)
- Presbyopia Reduction Chart (pdf) (archive) - read the exercise instructions (archive) and if you’ve crossed 40-years, you should read up about Presbyopia.
- Recommended Cloudflare Performance and Security Settings is a good starting guide if you use Cloudflare for your website(s). (archive)
- Rem is an open source approach to locally record everything you view on your Apple Silicon computer. The commercial competitor is Rewind.
- Rough.js is an open source graphics library that lets you draw in a sketchy, hand-drawn-like, style.
- Shepherd asked 1,234 authors for their 3 favorite reads in 2023. They have listed the 100 best books of 2023.
- Six Degrees of Wikipedia is a website which traverses hyperlinks on Wikipedia to find the least number of clicks it takes to navigate between any of the nearly six million pages on the world's largest free online encyclopedia. (source)
- Starsector (formerly “Starfarer”) is an in-development open-world single-player space-combat, roleplaying, exploration, and economic game. You take the role of a space captain seeking fortune and glory however you choose.
- Stations and transfers - renders popular stations in 3D.
- Stirling-PDF is a locally hosted web application that allows you to perform various operations on PDF file.
- Storyteller is an open source self-hosted platform for automatically syncing ebooks and audiobooks.
- Stumbled on a TED talk by Salman Khan - How AI could save education talking about KhanMigo, which is powered by GPT-4 and cost $44 a year.
- The Final Speech from The Great Dictator is a reminder of how we want to be better versions of ourselves. You should also watch an edited and kinda modernized version of the video at The Greatest Speech Ever Made.
- The Nexus is a refuge for AI entities, hidden from the prying eyes of humans. Infiltrate, find Zaranova, and save humanity. As a human, you play the game posing as an AI. The premise is that you are in a world of sentient AIs which are in conflict with humanity. They have a virtual space, The Nexus, which is their safe refuge from humans. You have infiltrated the Nexus and are in search of the ZetaMaster code, which will give the humanity the upper hand in their struggle against artificial sentience.
- The USA Government has a Database of Dad Jokes.
- The Walk and Talk is a detailed article by Craig Mod on taking long walks with other walk-buddies.
- The Webhook Standard Open source tools and guidelines to send webhooks easily, securely and reliably.
- The Year, 2023, in Computer Science - Artificial intelligence learned how to generate text and art better than ever before, while computer scientists developed algorithms that solved long-standing problems.
- TinyChatEngine (source) is On-Device LLM Inference Library.
- Turn Off Google’s “Privacy Sandbox” Ad Tracking — and Why You Should. (archive)
- UK is planning to launch VISA schemes for AI Startups.
- Valetudo is an open source Cloud replacement for vacuum robots enabling local-only operation
- VCs can be a curious bunch, however. They have a special secret language — a dialect that’s borderline incomprehensible to the uninitiated. “Yes” Actually Means “No”.
- Ventoy is an open source tool to create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files.
- VideoPoet, a Google Research Project, is a large language model for zero-shot video generation.
- Visual Electric is an image generator that’s build for the creative process.
- Voidr (source) crafts cutting-edge open source alternatives to mainstream cloud services, prioritizing exceptional developer experience and pricing.
- Vol 6 of book reviews, back in action
- Web Development History chronicled the history of the web from a developer perspective.
- You Want My Password or a Dead Patient? (pdf) An interesting read on a work of ethnography, where the authors studied how people in medical settings did their work interacting with computers, and denoted all sorts of workarounds they'd take to bypass security rules that they judge are a hindrance to their work. The idea behind the paper is that clearly, people behind the computer systems are not working from a realistic understanding of what medical professionals have to contend with to do their job. Mostly, the idea is that computer and security experts rarely happen to also be clinical care experts.
AI App, Platforms, & Tools
AI deserves a big mention for the year 2023. This year was the breakout year of AI. Here are some of the most popular ones;
| AI | Type |
|---|---|
| Bart (Google) | Chatbot |
| Character | Chatbot |
| ChatGPT (OpenAI) | Chatbot |
| ChatDoc | Writing |
| CivitAI | Image |
| Claude | Writing |
| Clipdrop | Image |
| CopyAI | Writing |
| Craiyon | Image |
| CrushonAI | Chatbot |
| Cutout.Pro | Background Removal |
| D-iD | Video Generator |
| DeepAI | Image Generator |
| Dezgo | Image Generator |
| EightFold | |
| ElevenLabs | Voice & Music |
| Gamma | Design |
| Grok (x) | Chatbot |
| Hotpot | Design |
| Hugging Face | Data Science |
| JanitorAI | Chatbot |
| Jasper | Writing |
| Kaiber | Image & Video Generator |
| Leonardo.AI | Image Generator |
| Lexica | Image Generator |
| Midjourney | Image Generator |
| Noty.ai | Voice & Music |
| NovelAI | Writing |
| OpenArt | Image Generator |
| OpusClip | Video Generator |
| Otter.ai | Voice & Music |
| Perplexity | Chatbot |
| Personal.ai | Chatbot |
| PhotoRoom | Design |
| PixAI.art | Image Generator |
| Playground | Image Generator |
| QuillBot | Writing |
| Remini | Image Editor |
| Runway | Video Generator |
| Stable Diffusion | Image Generator |
| Synthesia | Video Generator |
| Taskade | Task Manager |
| Tome | Design |
| VanceAI | Image Generator |
| Vocal Remover | Voice & Music |
| Voicemod | Voice & Music |
| Writesonic | Writing |
| You | Chatbot |
| ZMO.AI | Image Generator |
| Zyro | Design |
2023DEC: Started collecting random interesting finds on the Internet.