Safe at your desk

Seven levels of talking a language model into revealing a password it was told to protect. The best hands-on lesson in prompt injection going.

Hans Rosling's animated bubble chart of the world, still the fastest cure for being wrong about global development.

Broken telephone with drawings: a sentence becomes a picture becomes a sentence, and the album at the end is the whole payoff.

Top-down shooter with class loadouts and destructible cover, still busy years after everybody stopped writing about it.

An interactive world atlas you can scrub year by year from 3000 BC, watching every border redraw itself.

Twenty-odd fake hacking interfaces — agency mainframes, terminals, satellite maps — with buttons that fill progress bars.

Real-time fog-of-war conquest on a grid, one army tick every half second. Simple rules, brutal depth, matches under ten minutes.

Walks you through rebuilding classic algorithmic pieces — tiled lines, Joy Division, cubic disarray — one step at a time.

A genetic algorithm evolves two-dimensional cars across rough terrain while you watch generations fail forward.

A browsable restoration of the GeoCities neighbourhoods, so you can wander into Area51 or SunsetStrip the way people once did.

A free flight simulator in the browser using satellite terrain for the entire planet, with real air traffic overhead.

Geometry, algebra and calculus tools in one place, plus a huge shared library of constructions others have built.

A three-by-three grid of geographic categories where you name one country per cell and get scored on how obscure it was.

The game that made the genre: dropped into Street View, guess where on the globe you are. The free tier is thin these days.

A community-built geography quiz mixing street view, flags and country outlines, with private lobbies for a group of you.

Plain page of every emoji, grouped and clickable, for the machines that have no emoji keyboard worth using.

Climb a mountain of junk using nothing but a hammer, and lose an hour of progress to a single bad swing.

Directory of the emptied-out settlements of the American West, one short paragraph and one faded photograph at a time.

A search engine for animated GIFs recovered from GeoCities. Type any word and receive several spinning versions of it.

The GIF search engine everything else plugs into, still the fastest route to the exact reaction you have in mind.

The same cruelty as QWOP, applied to climbing: every handhold is a different letter key and you have to hold several at once.

Long-running newsletter and link hoard for glitch art — tools, artists and the occasional genuinely disquieting find.

Industrial fishing vessel tracks worldwide, rebuilt from satellite signals, showing exactly where the world's fleets have been working.

Satellite-derived tree cover loss for anywhere on Earth, week by week, with alerts you can zoom in on until you are looking at one hillside.

One mystery country a day, guessed by warmth — every wrong answer shades the globe a little closer to the right one.

Name three bands you like, then answer yes or no to its guesses until it works out what you are actually in the mood for.

Red-carpet criticism written with real fashion knowledge and jokes aimed at the outfit rather than the person in it.

Curated wall of the best-designed sites on the internet, filterable by type and updated relentlessly.

Full-disc satellite imagery of the Americas straight from the GOES satellites, refreshed every few minutes at absurd resolution.

Drive a golf ball absurd distances, upgrade the swing, repeat until the ball is leaving the atmosphere entirely.

Good news with a nudge attached — every story arrives alongside something you could actually do about it.

Positive news published daily since 1997, back when the idea sounded like a joke rather than a business model.

Castle building and siege warfare with the exact aesthetics of an advert you have definitely been served, and better strategy underneath.

Gigapixel scans from two thousand museums, plus the experiments that let you find your own face in a painting.

The whole planet in 3D in a browser tab, with guided Voyager tours for when you would rather be told where to look than choose.

Family Fortunes played against Google autocomplete, which turns out to be a bleaker and much funnier opponent than a studio audience.

Chart how often a phrase appears in books since 1500, which settles a surprising number of arguments outright.

Small library of ready-made gradients you nudge by dragging the angle, then copy straight into a stylesheet.

Draw a horse, then watch it gallop off to join the herd of terrible horses drawn by everybody else.

Solitaire variants you have never heard of, with a hint button and an interface built by somebody who actually plays them.

Choose ten items in the right order and the cube blossoms into something absurd; choose the wrong order and it sulks at you.

Comic-strip teardowns of real product decisions, each one explaining the psychology behind why it did or did not work.

Free cryptic, quick and Everyman crosswords every day, plus the setter blogs that explain each diabolical clue afterwards.

Look at a scatter plot and guess its correlation coefficient. A statistics lecture disguised as a slot machine, and it works.

A daily video game identified from progressively less obscure screenshots, with six guesses and a genuinely cruel first frame.

The official register of the longest, fastest and most improbable things people have done entirely on purpose.

A boarding-school story with robots, forest gods and a plot that has been quietly paying things off since 2005.

Daily coverage of hardware projects that had no commercial reason to exist. Reliably the most inventive corner of the web.