royjacobs

As a platform engineer, that's quite a cynical take you have there. What I've found works best is to write tools that take away complexity so that teams don't all need to reinvent the wheel. Then make it so well-documented and easy to use that teams don't need to be _forced_ to use the platform tooling, they'll just use it because it's the most convenient thing to do.

And I assume there'd be some sort of web ring involved as well?

To be fair, the technology and storage available in the early 2000s would have been quite sufficient to store all of Reeves' facial expressions.

I have the exact same thing. It always makes me wonder why companies choose to have blue neon lights on their buildings because it's nearly impossible to read them when it's a thin font.

If you're interested in elevators and the hacking thereof I would also highly recommend this talk: https://youtu.be/ZUvGfuLlZus

The director, Paul Verhoeven, has been very interested in World War 2 and has in fact made multiple movies set in WW2. The satiric elements in Starship Troopers and its parallels to Nazi Germany (and especially the propaganda elements) were definitely intentional.

Police in Northern Europe typically spend their time going after large dealers, producers, etc. Arresting low-level dealers happens too of course, but believe it or not, police over here don't consider the # of arrests to be their primary KPI.

This short was written and directed by Ian Hubert, who is an amazing 3d artist. I'm not affiliated in any way, but I'm just blown away by the sheer talent on display here.

If you're interested, a few years ago he did a very interesting presentation[] that goes into a bit more detail on his way of working.

[] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whPWKecazgM

I believe that was Namco (as evidenced by the Ridge Racer PS1 loading screen).

I've loved them much more than I had originally anticipated. He just shows up the components he loves to use and _that seems to be enough to be entertaining_.

To be pedantic, Farbrausch definitely popularized using a custom tool but they were being built in years prior, as well.

Source: Wrote a tool in 1998 for our not-great-looking 64k intro "Pure" by demogroup Quad.

This reminds me of the trip I took to Iceland in 2010. Just on the day we were about to fly back home we were instructed to turn on the Hotel TV, which was showing very eerie video footage of Eyjafjallajökull erupting. The stark emergency chyron combined with the vague video footage gave us a very unsettled feeling.

Then we walked into the lobby where some 80s pop was playing, the staff was cheery and asked what we'd like to have for breakfast because we'd probably fly home a few hours delayed. I guess you become unflappable when you literally live on top of volcanoes :)

On the Iceland Air flight home we watched a very interesting documentary about the Eldfell eruptions in 1973. It's really fascinating, although I can't seem to find a link to the docu. See also: https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/01/the-eldfell-erupti...

I've enjoyed my time in the C64 and later the PC demoscene and I'm amazed it's still going pretty strong. Perhaps not on the level it was at during what was arguably its peak in the mid-90s, but still.

It has certainly shaped a fairly large group of people currently working in our industry, even if they were only tangentially aware of the scene (perhaps with cracked games as a gateway drug, as it was in my case).

Kudos for getting this organized.

Like us demosceners say, go make a demo about it then

That CPU is still going strong. In fact, I'm currently building an assembler for the 6502 in Rust.

https://mos.datatra.sh

The BIOS used in the original Compaq machines is the classic example of this.

This may come off as snarky, but as long as I've been following Rust and Amethyst the latter seems to always be in some kind of "not quite there yet but it will be after the next rewrite/rearchitecture". Same goes for Conrod, its GUI library.

It seemed like an inevitability that some other library would come along that would move forward a bit quicker.

I'm happily using Feedly ever since Google Reader got shut down. I genuinely would be missing out on a lot of content if people would stop providing RSS feeds, especially for blogs that only update very sporadically.

Wouldn't the mode be encoded in the type system via the tokens your parser is generating? I mean, every mode would be a different enum containing all the tokens that are valid in that mode?

Wow, he died mere miles from where I live yet I had never heard of him. A fascinating tale, thanks for sharing.

But that's the point, right? For a manufacturer "universal" means the lowest common denominator whereas for an end user "universal" means...well, universal.

It cannot be emphasized enough how much the recent USB specifications are dropping the ball. I wouldn't mind paying a small premium just for a guarantee that things will Just Work when I connect them.

Instead, USB device manufacturers want to cost optimize everything, which probably forced the standard to become so Byzantine. Understandable from a manufacturer's point of view, but terrible from an end user perspective.

I believe that's the main selling point of OPA (as also pointed out by the_duke in the other comment).

This is quite interesting, although I'm worried about the policies being tied to the underlying programming language. While this does allow for additional flexibility, it makes them hard to share in a polyglot shop.

In that era typically only things recorded in studios would be video, the rest would be film. So Connections could certainly he remastered, and I hope the BBC does so. Some of their older documentaries, like Ascent of Man, already got that treatment.

For my own home automation setup I'm using a device called RFXCom. It plugs into a USB port and can send and receive all sorts of remote control signals, not just IR but also things like the Somfy protocol mentioned in the article.

It's really nice because to the hardware it just looks like a regular remote control. No soldering needed either.

I find it quite a mental leap to go from "Microsoft improved connection scalability in Postgres" to "Microsoft is going to extinguish Postgres, arguably the most popular open-source database in existence".

That's a very unfortunate point of view to take, stuck in the mists of time. Wouldn't it be better to be forward-looking instead?

In The Netherlands people tend to do the same with products based on Nijntje (known as Miffy internationally).