musha68k

Reminder that this is primarily a Silicon Valley / VC related and owned technology news aggregator.

Fringe topics will stay fringe until they're hip (again?); currently non fringe from my intermittent read:

- anything "AI"

- retro computing (honest interest x mourning/cope in the non-deterministic agentic takeoff)

- random topics that hit the zeitgeist

Check out lobste.rs as well as SIG across forums, IRC, fediverse, discord, etc, etc – and or create your own like in the olden days :)

https://sive.rs/dance-lessons

FWIW I prefer to come here and post, read up and comment on "AI" over having to wade through proxied shitter content (it truly stinks over there).

It's still the same kind of leadership that also closed Japan Studio as well as Studio Liverpool.

They don't understand what made the brand great in aggregate.

*UHD BluRay rentals but yes, hard agree. Also a great place to socialize and talk about which movie to rent traditionally.

Mostly mediocre to bad entertainment and distractions anyways.

I'm not a fan of the "binge watch chowder" of the last 15 years and much rather extend my collection of actually worthwhile UHD BluRay movies to watch deliberately every other Sunday night or so.

I agree completely, it was a tragedy that Commodore shipped with that one.

Even though I still have lots of original home / computer hardware including multiple versions of the C64 (working or still to be fixed..) I just ordered the Cyberpunk 2077 ornate "Commodore 77" so as to be able to play with it and potentially port over and adapt BBC basic adjacent basic like MMbasic (or make my own focused attempt at it).

It's a semi open FPGA platform and latest one here is still not MiSTer grade on many fronts but should give enough freedom at least to have my own bespoke ROM replacement come up on init.

The goal would exactly be that of eventually getting rid of the builtin basic for recreational biking of the mind with our young padawan...

I also own a MiSTer and the community's well done BBC core already largely gets us to where I want us to be but the platform chiefly lacks the SID as well as the nature of a dedicated device.

Booting into "C64 BBC basic" is a must; I hope to book some time for this project next year at the very latest.

https://commodore.net/store/commodore64/?shape=Breadbin&colo...

https://mmbasic.com/overview.html

I guess Dijkstra would have commented something along the lines of "just call it informatics already".

Perfect for kids; especially great that it doesn't come with a display by default.

A highly motivated, well funded and hence potentially contagious and "blessed" effort in proliferation ... and colonization.

"If You’re Paying for the Product, You Are the Product"

Don't Look Up

At the very least why not upload the scanned books to the internet archive while already at it?

This is highly disturbing news; is this standard practice? What did Google Books do before?

I've been using Macs for decades and never had these issues personally. It seems like some people do literally rest their hands / arms on desk / notebook body while typing.

The "sharp edge syndrome" here to me seems to be a good thing then as it acts as a reminder for proper ergonomics / posture.

First Google AI search result on the topic:

"Never rest your wrists on your MacBook while typing. Instead, let your palms rest gently on the laptop body only when you pause. Hover your hands as you type. This prevents you from bending your wrists and protects the nerves in your carpal tunnel."

That also pretty much exactly mirrors the way we learned typing / posture at school in Austria.

The effects would definitely be felt by everyone if the global population were on its way to be halved. Also knock-on effects like mass emigration putting additional pressure on an already difficult political landscape. Potential for many more wars; more unknown unknowns etc.

Edit: the report’s "Extreme" severity band is indeed not a forecast but they’re basically saying "the chance of this happening is way too high".

UK official body of actuaries basically says we are on trajectory of "Extreme" rating:

> 3°C or more by 2050. Multiple climate tipping points triggered, tipping cascade.

> over 4 billion deaths

If so, big shifts would already be imminently felt within next 5-10 years.

Remember that there would basically be no place to hide from these direct or knock-on effects.

Not for any self sufficient "prepper with a Mac Studio" nor for any billionaire with their "Galapagos" private island data center come habitat or any other short-sighted fantasy escape scenarios.

https://actuaries.org.uk/media/ni4erlna/planetary-solvency.p...

Edit: "on trajectory" to "Extreme" was too strong; it’s the report’s worst case band and not a forecast. What they’re basically saying is that "the chance of this happening is way too high".

Central heating / thinking.

Yes, just a big cool Cerebras wafer for the closet please.

You need to listen / interject and show that you are making an effort, then people usually will meet you there and you can even fall back to English again if you have to but then steer back towards target language. Learning opportunities.

I've been there, same as in Quebec for French but I would see it as a learning opportunity to practice.

In Austria I've always made an effort to stay inclusively in English in these settings but it's probably normal to fall back to default language in most countries and cultures especially when the context is not about the work per se.

I know life as an immigrant, especially while having kids and professional careers can be tough.

That said, personally I'm thankful for Quebec having been the forcing function to learn French.

With no prior formation to reach "intermédiaire avancé" took me about 20 months of studying on the side with one lesson per week for most of that time; usually before or during work hours (partially was a group setting there).

I'm a German native speaker so I'm probably biased / ignorant about some major language hurdles but to me German must be the easier language to pick up for most as it's way more regular.

I think the trick is to make a deliberate choice / opening up to love language and people, speaking with as many native speakers as possible etc. It also really helped me to almost exclusively switch to consuming French news and most of other media.

I'm not a fan of dubbing in general but for learning, Hollywood movies in French have been mostly great same as with German translations. Maybe watch older movies, they used to put in an unreasonable amount of work into those especially.

Computer games I'm personally still playing mostly in French to this day and I know that German translations are usually done with a lot of heart as well.

Edit: do check out https://www.arte.tv/de/ if you haven't - one of our favourites for both French and German of course; probably one of, if not the best TV worldwide. Always especially palpable after having been on youtube for a while too long; just the opposite of engagement bait, wholesome and good journalism and more.

Maybe a "lousy analogy" but here you go ;)

https://youtube.com/shorts/u3SY8nvjhQA

Don't give up on core tenets basically; the EU is a (comparatively) great place to live because it's a free place.

We can't have multitudes, be "antifragile" etc through centralization and surveillance.

Even if we were to believe this to be a winning move, it's not how this European project was envisioned and we won't ever be able to truly "compete" at that game.

In these times hence we IMO should be doubling down on the core tenets; freedom being chief amongst them.

Akin to how Huang in that interview alludes to globalization and how it made him / USA a winner.

This is the anti-EU move but they simply don't understand that.

Authoritarian centralization efforts need to be fought Huang style - with an European twist - as we might be behind on a lot of axis but we "Didn't Wake Up a Loser".

China / US leadership must not be the carte-blanche to formalize whatever low bar in how we handle our own privacy; going straight for the "self own" I guess?

Sorry for prompt mode but I hope this is at least somewhat legible to fellow Europeans, if not please listen to antirez in original Italian or auto translated:

https://youtu.be/cmYiWsFn3GM

I hear quite a few tangents in there; the main one being: especially in EU we need to go "agentic". Don't wait for politics to do The Right Thing. They should play retrospective backup at best.

I'm thinking they might be actually thankful for having been provided vision / imagination.

Team up with the bureaucrats after the fact but don't listen to them too much - again - to Do The Right Thing. Especially when they are potentially infected by lobbyists...

FFS I hate this timeline; we really need to show up for real. Again and again and again and again...

True, this is the new reality though. My main gripe with Strix Halo is memory bandwidth and compute performance. Gaming performance sits squarely in base PS5 territory just as is the case with Steam Machine AFAIR; yet due to economies of scale "cheap" 2020 era PS5 still has higher memory bandwidth by quite a bit last time I checked.

PS6 "undertaker of physical media" will supposedly be priced >$1k: https://youtu.be/-F1JS-4Abjo

I had hoped this was about Medusa Halo, but unfortunately, it's about 2025 technology. It's the same as Framework Desktop was at the end of last summer, which would have been a slightly silly but fun buy at $2k... I'd hope Mark Cerny / Sony launch PS6 sooner rather than later, as together with the upcoming LPDDR6 standard, it should trickle down to us in the local LLM mud eventually?

"RTFM" if available and factual to me is very satisfying.

So without much nostalgia / betting on actual hardware the (partially ST community derived) MiSTer project is just great for this kind of stuff - I guess you know it - if you will a micro PDP-11 surrogate.

I haven't tried this core myself yet but I will eventually:

https://github.com/MiSTer-Enhanced/PDP2011_MiSTer

More people have been flocking to "retro computing" for a while now.

My hunch is that it's partially driven by mourning over increasing loss of deterministic "von Neumann computing"; so not pure nostalgia.

It doesn't matter the platform or if "only" in software / web or whatever it's just a great hobby to dabble with in general, especially when kids are getting into it.

The ZX Spectrum Next, Commodore 64 Ultimate and the likes, same as their OG versions are still great "bicycles for the mind" and a great intro to microcontrollers etc.

I'd personally be ready for an FPGA based "Mega Atari 800" or some such!

No doubt Anthropic Mythos/Fable are frontier. I also miss having access as it uncovered some "evals repellant" regressions on my personal pet factory.

OTOH for most of my day to day work I've come to realize that faster ~ Opus 4.6 / GPT 5.3 level capabilities could be the sweet spot as scaffolding has to be put in place right after clean specs and constant review anyways. The latest chinese models and GLM 5.2 in particular felt on-par on that front.

As everyone knows, Kool-Aid is also just mostly water.

I work in AI / infrastructure and I have never seen as much interest towards investing into sovereignty by actual deciders. Thankfully, at this point I can't see any flip-flopping / change of messaging stopping that train.

In CA/EU over the last ~15 years, one used to be perceived as a bit of a "weird systems person" by just proposing alternatives to the big hyperscalers.

So the Trump administration, hands-down, has been the greatest ally here.

In tandem, I was hoping Anthropic would be keeping "dangerously capable" models banned from "evil Chinese distillers" for as long as possible.

With those unfortunate specs a used PS5 + Steam Deck OLED is the better deal to me.

HDR on that screen is just something to behold and UHD-BD drive is the cherry on top.

https://github.com/streetpea/chiaki-ng

I could see myself buying the undeniably beautiful GabenCube at spec if the price were at or only slightly above SW2/PS5 level; as an additional device to play the outlier game that is exclusive to "PC" and Steam Deck / Macbook Pro not delivering enough oomph for it to run satisfactorily.