It’s amazing that the Atari ST had such an effect on 80s and 90s music. Some engineer pitched building in MIDI because it was a cheap differentiator versus the Amiga. That gave bedroom musicians a digital music studio in a box. Wintel killed the ST. Internet piracy nearly killed the music biz.
I remember mocking No Man’s Sky when it first came out. It was janky and felt small. I’m not laughing now. It’s possibly had the best comeback in gaming history.
Weird streaming issue where some services claimed to be having technical issues. Quad9 was routing my IPv6 DNS lookups to a resolver of theirs in the US. DNS0.eu routes it just up the road from here and the streams are flowing. I’ll use that for now.
Today is failed hard drive destruction day. Which involves a Torx 6 & 8 set of screwdrivers to get into the case and then a hammer to finish off the platters. Five down, three to go.
Media has made killers cute. We've given them sardonic voice overs in TV shows. Some have become "I can fix them" characters in books. They'll kill only the bad people, or so the authors would have us believe. That's not how these people work. The reality is that everyone around a serial killer will be in some way damaged or destroyed by them. Other people's pain is their point. Red Dragon, written in 1981, doesn't do cute.
When Dante wrote this narrative poem he did so in Italian instead of Latin to make it as accessible as possible. Alas, I can't read 14th century Italian so I have to depend on translators and their copious amount of footnotes. Over the past 700 years the footnotes have piled up at the bottom of the page like centuries of snow. Dante would be horrified. Ignoring the opinions of academics and slogging my way through the translated poem, this is a groundbreaking piece of creativity.
Lorde’s transparent CD for her latest album is giving older players fits. Because it’s not a CD. It doesn’t have the Compact Disc logo. It’s a low reflectivity disc being used in a laser reader that requires reflectivity. It probably leans heavily on modern CD player error correction just to work.
In 1996, Liam Neeson starred in the historical drama Michael Collins; likewise, Pamela Anderson was in Barb Wire. If you had told me at the time that they’d reboot The Naked Gun franchise together, I’d have laughed at you. In this reboot of a franchise that first started in 1982 with the six-episode Police Squad!, Neeson’s Frank Drebin Jr. takes on Danny Heuston’s reverse effective altruist green technology billionaire. Anderson’s crime writer has a family connection and a score to settle, which brings her into Drebin’s life.
I walked into someone’s office to have a discussion, and he grabbed a stack of dot matrix printer paper and then marked up the issue we were discussing in penmanship that was so clear you could almost smell the computer pioneer off it.
Superman (2025) isn't a movie by someone who studied Richard Donner's Superman. It's a movie by someone who studied Christopher Reeve's performance in Superman. David Corenswet gives Clark Kent/Superman a Reeve's like charisma even though he falls short of giving his Superman a Reeve's like presence. The cast here outstrips the dialogue. Unlike prior Superman movies everyone can act. Rachel Brosnahan is a modern update to Hildy Johnson's fast talking 1940s reporter in His Girl Friday.
Anthropic had AI run a minifridge. It had an identity crisis and went broke. Project Vend: Can Claude run a small shop? (And why does that matter?) \ Anthropic
Having built my MiSTer FPGA system, the first thing I did was delete every core that wasn’t…
There are enough hidden gems on those systems for a lifetime.
Sweatshops for clothing. Sweatshops for AI. Some types of work never change. The AI Con book excerpt: The hidden workers who keep things running - Rest of World
I have clusters of smart home devices and sensors using different protocols. WiFi, Bluetooth mesh, Zigbee & Z-Wave. I was looking at standardising on Matter over Thread but the device selection for Matter is poor.
I keep notebooks in a bottom drawer that cover years of work and thoughts. While I may need to check last year’s notebook for work-related stuff a couple of times, I never look at the plans or thoughts. The plans serve as a direction, the thoughts are no longer deep.
I’d ride an electric bike were I not convinced I’d die in road traffic. But I’ve waited so long that subscriptions have come to bicycle hardware.
The Basic tier provides a rider dashboard, basic security, a stolen mode, and updates over Bluetooth for free. You can then pay £6.99 / €7.99 (around $9) per month, or £84 / €96 ($110) per year, to become a Core member
8BitDo 2.4G controller kept disconnecting from my docked Steam Deck during Dead Rising 2. An incompatibility between the 2.4G dongle and the dock’s USB 3.1 ports. But there’s a USB 2.0 port inside the controller charging stand! 🎮
As of December 2024, AI wrote 30.1% of Python contributions from US users vs 24.3% Germany, 23.2% France, 21.6% India, 15.4% Russia, 11.7% China. Chinese devs favor Gitee over GitHub. First-mover advantage? Doubtful. These gains may plateau as easy tasks get automated first.
I have the sneaking suspicion that PlayStation and Xbox are raising prices above the hardware loss line to be ready for Grand Theft Auto 6. Some people will buy a system just to play GTA 6 and will never buy another game for the system.
Shockingly, LLM users were far less able to recall or quote from essays they had just written. In fact, 83.3% of LLM users failed to provide even a single correct quote from their own writing, compared to just 11.1% in both the Search Engine and Brain-only groups.
That would be because they didn’t write them. They possibly didn’t edit them.