Today's news and jokes

new testflight!

Uhohlingo — it's like duolingo but:
- you can generate whatever lesson you want
- it's wrong sometimes

but hey, if you need a hyper-specific lesson like HOW TO TALK ABOUT MOVIES IN FRENCH or HISTORY OF RATS IN NYC, it's got you covered :) pic.twitter.com/Mu0DJdbUQL

— nate parrott (@nateparrott) May 15, 2023

CAVEATS
- it lies
- it is FANTASTIC at lying
- duolingo is a good company you should support
- you need an openai key to try it

but it's a fun lil project.

testflight: https://t.co/z8SEIAs0hg
github: https://t.co/x14jxomSTB

— nate parrott (@nateparrott) May 15, 2023

His website is simple but clever

"How an obscure news site began dominating your Google search results"

"With just 17,100 Twitter followers and 117,000 Facebook likes, Heavy’s social media presence is tiny for an outlet of its size. And while it often embeds video in its posts, it seems to produce little video of its own these days. It is, in other words, something of a throwback in an era when other new media companies view social virality, reader loyalty, and original video content as the paths to profitability. Meanwhile, at a time when rivals such as BuzzFeed, Vice, and Refinery29 are trying to develop fresh business models centered around custom advertising products, many of Heavy’s ads are your run-of-the-mill, programmatic display ads, placed on the page automatically by third-party ad brokers."

"A Surreal Trip to a Domain-Names Conference"

Atl:

Before NamesCon, I thought of myself as a pretty serious domain names enthusiast.

...

good TLDs and good words together don’t always work (as was explained to the owner of furs.io and lotions.io in one session). Long-time domainers also had oddly specific advice—”Hyphens make your domain less valuable—unless you’re in Germany” and “.info is a dead zone.”

...

While cranberry.com doesn’t appear to be a particularly compelling domain, Cyger argued that if you “just search [the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office] for cranberry,” it becomes apparent that a lot of companies have hinged their brand to that one word. (Searching USPTO’s patents database for assignees with “cranberry” in their name actually only offers up three companies, so maybe it wasn’t the best example, but conceptually I guess it makes sense). There’s a whole vocabulary for these domain investments—”generics” like the word cranberry.com, “brandables” which are basically ideas for products that don’t exist yet but might eventually, the ultra-rare “numerics” which mostly seem useful for Chinese markets because of the use of numbers in pinyin, a transliteration of Chinese words into the Latin alphabet.

Contact page/video game

Dark Igloo's contact page is a fun retro-style racing game. Bonus: Gnomeland Security patch: