gorgoiler

Over time NeoGeo realized they could sell you the hardware to play at home (“on-prem”) at arcade quality albeit at a price out of reach to most people. Alongside them, Nintendo and Atari gave you 80% of the fun at 20% of the cost. History will view games arcades as a flash in the pan compared to gaming at home.

Namco, Capcom, and Konami went into selling software instead of hardware but it feels hard to imagine buying a home copy of Fable** for $X,000 any time soon.

⸻

* That’s for video games. In fairground arcades you’d literally pay for tokens then use tokens for play. The analogy almost writes itself.

** The model, not the video game.

I check my brake pads every year. Eventually the incumbent pads lose out to some whipper-snapper from the new pads box. I might vote red again or I might switch to blue. It depends how muddy it is. Either way, it’s both a new/old choice as well as a red/blue choice.

Time-in-office is also a major contributor to corruption. Lukashenko has been winning the same election for 30+ years!

I think you are equivocating. Denying people their vote indeed counts as election tampering but that doesn’t mean giving more people the vote is also bad.

Is it a magic external power amplifier controlled by a handful of powerful companies? Like giant social networks for example, where the most successful network wins due to literal network effects coupled with the ability (capital, income) to pay for the technology and staff to run it. Or Big Oil who needs capital to exploit an oil field and ongoing money to pay their expert staff to work for them. Or Big Pharma, or Big Ag.

The alternate lens is that AI is like a dictionary or medicine reference or some other keystone textbook. Very expensive and time consuming to compile, but after that it requires little to no cost to duplicate and every copy helps a new person be better.

Unfortunately for the trillion dollar “labs”, I can’t see how AI is going to be the next Standard Oil, Meta, Pfizer, or John Deere. Unless the labs can somehow capture the market, destroy or outlaw the competition, or in some way cripple the general public’s ability to run their own models, then they are doomed to failure.

In the long run, Standard Oil will lose out to me hanging a solar panel off my balcony. Facebook is losing out to self organised networks using commodity chat apps (ahem, owned by whom? -all). The Labs will lose out to ollama.cpp running on my own hardware.

Now, one thing The Labs could do of course to defend against me running my own stuff, is to buy up all the VRAM so there’s none left for me! It’s as if my local inference was powered by milkshake, and they drank my milkshake, they drank it up!

Western culture devolves into poor, corrupt, violent, petty criminality. Welcome to Mega Cairo.

The classics, of course:

  ls -larth
  … | awk ‘{print $…}’
  for f in … ; echo foo $f ; end | sh -x

Another one though is if I need some kind of random-ish seed for something like a cache key, or a hidden URL path directory, or the password for the bitcoin wallet I keep publicly online to taunt others:

  date | md5sum

The golden, underlying rule of Amateur Radio is to respect and protect the bands with which we have been trusted.

Part of me though wonders what this would have been like if it had been a slick sciencey presentation that paid real tribute to the talent below the smug denim C-suite. A bit more Engelbart or Feynman or Sagan and a bit less Balmer, Bezos, and Bozo the clown.

Showing the world your flying car is a moment to shine as a serious person. These men seem to be actively trying to not do that!

What I suppose was repetitive though — and where you might be coming from — is the formula itself. The entire island was the same episode format, even if the plot was different each time. Like Knight Rider — formulaic, but I loved the formula!

https://sixcolors.com/post/2026/10/silencing-airtags-enables...

The outrage feels misplaced. The way to stop evil people abusing your global track-anything network is to not have a global track-anything network. Apple PR must be on yellow alert right now feeling glad they’ve dodged a bullet.

Imagine if Meta did this instead. They could network their smart glasses and leverage their ubiquity to help people find lost pets — but strictly only lost pets, not people — but then Something Labs might ship a tool to make a person's face look pet-like enough to turn Find My Pet into Find My Ex.

There are things in this world that people can and should be stopped from doing, and there which anyone can do unhindered if they so wish. In between those two boundaries there’s a standard of decent behavior that one should strive for in order to be considered a good person.

Giving credit isn’t required, but many consider it basic decency.

https://github.com/be5invis/PatEL

It’s a real hackers typeface.

(Or maybe you stall them on the phone while scribbling a note to your PA saying “BUG STORY LEAKED TO VALLEYWAG PUT OUT COUNTER PR GET AGEAD OF STORY” hoping to get a tweet out before the ValleyWag gumshoe gets off the phone.)

(Or maybe you keep a notion.so page pre-filled with all your secrets and each one has a BURN button next to it, ready for you to tap when ValleyWag call up for a comment on their upcoming exposé in re: PR/Disasters/20206090500039.md)

The big baddies of build have worked this way for a long time already. Git surfaces a single Merkle tree id for the whole repo on each commit, but build tools like bazel/blaze, buck, pants, et al look at hashes of subtrees and use cached artifacts for the parts of the tree that didn’t change.

Your CI no longer becomes a binary signal on the code and more of a continuous signal on how much your “this works” pointer has caught up with your “this is the latest code” pointer.

I would explain in more detail but why listen to me when you can have Tintin and Captain Haddock walk you through features such as the dual purpose tyre-iron / starter-crank?:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/266233955544

One of their best innovations was the four wheel drive version that did away with front/rear transmission by having separate front/rear engines!

https://citroenvie.com/1964-citroen-2cv-sahara-a-love-story/

(Not my site, but I have an almost identical set of photos from the same auction in Berlin. What a treat!)

https://www.typeami.com/

Disappointed to not see flap windows. How am I supposed to get a blood blister from pinching my finger in a regular window?! No apparent hole in the front to hand crank the transmission either. Would’ve been a nice nod to the original if you had been able to hand crank some regen charge back into the battery. (The original crank was so you could start the engine if^Wwhen the battery was flat.)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DjFuvlwGvq0

I’m slightly ashamed to admit this too but it was always a bit fun to get a bump of the petrol tank vent, a tiny pin aperture in the chrome tank cap.

https://www.franzose.de/en/Citroen-2CV/2CV6/fuel-system/ANR1...

Maybe the EV version could come with a chrome truffle holder in the same position, for a similar olfactory kick start before the school run. Please don’t send help. We all turned out fine despite it being 4-star leaded.

Also another commenter here says this is clearly for city driving. What?! This is clearly for taking a shortcut across the lower field to buy a bottle of wine and a pack of Gitanes before the village shop shuts for lunch!

This machine was a tool car and the kind of design icon that earned its place because it interfaced man with machine, not because it looked pretty.

For the latter it’s whether you’ve had a judgment against you, which is a matter of public record.

For the former it’s based on how much money you have and what you spend, including on servicing existing debt. Lying about this would be fraud. In that sense, my proposal does indeed open up a new avenue for fraud but I don’t think that’s the same as it being unworkable!

It feels onerous as an idea because bank statements, monthly bills, payslips, will bequests, stock vests and trades, bank robberies*, and investment income each have different ways of being tracked. At least most of these records of individual financial activity come with a PDF these days. It wasn’t that long ago that applying for a loan meant scanning in papers for your lender to review.

Computers are smarter now. Not only can they read documents (or at least match the shapes against shapes they’ve been told are real) but they can also understand the contents too (or at least match the words against ideas they’ve been told are real.)

There may well yet be a future Data Valhalla where individuals hold their life.zip themselves, and upload whatever bits of it are needed to get that Nordstrom store card / car financing / cheeseburger loan without having an intermediate credit agency.

*I feel there’s a kernel of a joke there about a bank robber asking for a receipt with the loot in anticipation of declaring it on their tax return.

For me, modeling is just as much about figuring out the shape and features of an object as it is producing a STEP. I would love to model an object in a GUI then re-edit the file with code and re-render with a library, not the least reason being that GUI tools render multiple orders of magnitude faster.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aWnFWclW0Qs

As long as the signal is built, like any good interrupt code, to only do message passing instead of blocking work then there won’t be any performance issues. We’re polling between a handful of local processes that are in the order of human-computer interaction, not polling remotely in a large scale way.

Do you take your hot air balloon up and trust where the wind takes you?

Do you sail across, into, and down the wind, using its power but still choosing where you go?

Do you cycle under your own power, lifting your saddle, tucking your head down, and trying to avoid the wind’s effects as much as possible?

All three are valid! Most people can’t sail or produce 400W with their legs, but most people can operate a hot air balloon burner. The capital expenditure part of this analogy might work as well:

the balloonists spends a reasonable amount of money to ride where the wind takes them;

the yacht crews spends fortunes to conquer the world as first-class wind masters;

the cyclists go it alone through sheer human strength and persistence, with a handful of them being astonishingly good at it.

(I cycle to work btw, albeit on a 50lb Pashley cruiser. Bike level autonomy at, erm, hot air balloon speed!)

Historically, of course, copy and paste on a Unix machine was a mouse thing and followed X11 conventions. You selected text with the left mouse button — automatically be saved to the primary clipboard just by virtue of being selected, no key press needed — and the middle mouse button pasted it at the location you clicked.

This is somewhat different to having the two part motion/action of select/control-C and click/control-V. It’s boiled down to just select and middle-click. Separately, you can often use shift-Insert to paste the primary buffer.

And if someone decides the codebase needs an abstraction over (and therefore specific functions to handle) Iterable[Walrus|None] then you check the weather and suggest they take a break and go for a stroll. (You check the weather to see if you should lend them your brolly.)

What am I missing?