ansible

It isn't too far off from launching biplanes from the Akron / Macon airships. The biplanes had a big hook on top to latch into the trapeze mechanism, which isn't shown in the movie.

The other nitpick is that the airship should really run up to its highest airspeed to allow the biplane to recover quickly when launched. So that requires coordination with the airship crew.

I am an even worse horder than Jerry, to the point of making my most fun games un-fun. I am a bit crazy in how I play games like Divinity: Original Sin 2 (and eventually BG3).

I have this obsession with playing optimally at the highest difficulty level. So I have to collect every resource, craft all the best items, etc.

But collecting all that stuff is actually quite a tedious click-fest in many modern games like D:OS2. (Dallas' bedroom on Lady Vengeance is a prime example.) And it requires going to every nook and cranny of the world map.

So I can't stand leaving anything behind, and I'll never end up using even half of it, but what if I do need it and I don't have it later on?

I've been playing Cyberpunk 2077 recently, and I don't have that problem with this game, though the solution may be unsatisfying to many. I've already hit max level on everything, and upgraded everything that I can. There isn't that much loot in the game in general (each mook has one or two items), and that can be quickly picked up and broken down as needed. I have more money than things to spend it on.

So I spend my time exploring the world rather than managing the character's inventory.

The Nintendo Switch Zelda games also do a pretty good job of balancing all the inventory / crafting. The resources regenerate (fruit trees grow more fruit over time) so it isn't necessary in most cases to try to grab everything whenever you see it.

Some retired people I know are bored. Driving across town gets them out of the house and gives them something to do.

Another great resource for crypto news is Molly White's website:

https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/

What's amazing to me is reading about what the crypto thieves and smart contract exploiters do with the funds they've taken. It seems common for a person who's managed to acquire $100K USD worth of ETH or Solana to then turn around and buy some NFTs with it.

I'm like: "Dude, you just had a great payday, now you get to ride off into the sunset with your ill-gotten gains." But either they are crazy, the world is crazy, or I'm going crazy. I don't understand it all.

I also used a flight stick with Descent and Descent 2. I configured the hat switch for strafe up / down and strafe left / right.

Later, I also bought a [Logitech Cyberman 2](https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Logitech_CyberMan_2) 6-DoF controller for playing Descent, but it wasn't as satisfying as I had hoped. Part of the issue was moving / turning along multiple axes which limited the range of input from the controller to the game. So if you only pushed forward, you got 100%, but pushing forward and sideways, you only got ~70% of each (trigonometry). But with a keyboard or buttons, you could get 100% of each.

I also ended up mapping forward / back to buttons because it was less annoying to hold down a button constantly for movement.

I was strangely obsessed with computing on the go for quite a long time. The HP 200LX was one of the steps on my journey. At the time, I was able to get this really cut-down real-mode version of Linux running on it. I was rather happy with being able to get 'vi' running and being able to program directly on it.

I didn't end up doing much actual programming on it while sitting under a tree on a breezy summer day though.

Later on I would experiment with running a full Linux userspace on Android phones that had decent keyboards (the original G1 / ADP1 and the Samsung Sidekick 4G).

I don't think people can tell what is satire or not in the crypto scene anymore. Someone issue a "rug pull token" and still received 8.8 ETH (approx $29K USD), while telling people it was a scam.

https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=rug-pull-token

> ... bluetooth keyboard, and a smartphone with an external storage memory device. ...

I'd replace this with an old Chromebook with regular Linux installed (very cheap, ~ $20 USD), and a 1TB micro-SD card. All solid-state (no hard drive), and good battery life.

Yes, these are cool and fun projects, but not something I'd use on a regular basis.

I've bought a few old Chromebooks off of eBay recently (for around $20 USD each), and re-flashed the BIOS so that I could install Debian on them.

The student-oriented Chromebooks are reasonably sturdy, and at that price point, I just don't care if something bad happens to it.

I would have liked to see at least 8 cores for a development board like this.

There's still fraud detection / prevention, card terminals, and other various infrastructure to pay for. Someone's going to pay for it, somehow.

Also, suppose Stripe did offer a low / zero transaction cost card. What's the incentive for me (a customer) to get it? It isn't any better than the other no-monthly-fee CCs, and is strictly inferior to a rewards card.

For merchants, yes, they are incentivized to accept Stripe's new card. But they can't stop accepting the other ones until Stripe has a significant share of the transactions. And may not be able to do so even then.

And meanwhile Stripe is eating the cost of running this new zero fee card system, which effectively takes away money that they could invest in their own business.

Sounds like a lose, lose, lose all around.

The real solution is to have a law that caps the CC transaction fee. Or allow merchants to add a surcharge for rewards CCs.

I'm just concerned about battery safety with Chinese EVs. I've seen more than a few video clips of Chinese EVs just spontaneously catching fire (not from an accident).

I would be more confident in owning a Chinese-made EV if it conforms to appropriate battery safety standards, and that those standards are enforced by USA regulations.

I'm sure at least half the problems with the Chinese EVs are the inadequate regulatory environment created by the PRC.

Eh, you sort of had agency with that game. At least in the sense that it is possible you could screw up and it would take a long, long time to get over that. Buying too much of resource A, when you should have saved up money for resource B, that sort of thing.

Back in the day (mid 1990's IIRC), I read one of the NetApp whitepapers on their WAFL (write anywhere file layout), and that's what sold me on merging the storage layers. The Motorola group I was at was transitioning from Auxpex to NetApp around that time.

You are fit.

But there's a difference between that and being at the very peak of human physical and mental endurance.

In many ways, it seems harder than climbing Mount Everest, due to the time limits.

Yes. I got my start, back in the day, following along a magazine article on modifying an Atari 2600 joystick for use with the Tandy Color computer. Worked fairly well too, though I ended up modifying my Galaxian arcade game clone to work with it.

I had previously toyed with the idea of marketing "organic" audiophile speaker cables. The ad copy would have been that the cables were harvested from veins of copper dragons that lived in faraway mountains. That the sound would be warmer and richer than ordinary, industrially produced artificial speaker cables, which tend to sound harsh.

That might work for pre-recorded video, but I don't think it would be stable and reliable for live streams.

I was a long-time holdout for landscape-mode physical keyboards. I owned the original ADP1 from Google, which had a decent keyboard. I then upgraded to the Samsung Sidekick 4G, which had an even better keyboard. After fixing the keyboard map, I installed a cut-down Debian userspace on it for mobile software development.

After that, I looked at buying a Motorola Photon Q, but I would have had to hack it to get it on my preferred carrier. Even then it would have been expensive. I think my next actual phone was a Nexus 4, and I eventually got used to swiping.

For overall typing and mobile software development experience, I've instead settled on relatively small and handy Chromebooks. This is even easier now days, because installing the Linux development environment is a few clicks.

It is an interesting approach I hadn't heard of before. For complex systems though, often reproducing the bug reliably is a large part of the problem. So giving the developers the maximum information is necessary.

Any time a "fix" is implemented, someone needs to be asking the right questions. Can this type of problem occur in other features / programs? What truly is the root cause, and how has that been addressed?

So it generates a fully rigged 3D model that can be animated by conventional means?

If it can do all that, and you add in motion capture from just a video, and that will drastically cut the costs for all kinds of animation projects.

Given that it is possible to render photo-realistic people now from 3D models (subsurface scattering for the skin, etc.), we are well on the way to a full video production pipeline. Just give it some scans of the people and objects you want, type in a description of the scenes, generate the voices via text to speech, and press "render".

The next few years are going to be crazy.

Thanks for the correction Bruce. I was in a rush (never post when you are in a rush, or drunk, or angry) and I was so used to seeing RV64GC that I didn't notice the absence of the 'C'.

The previous DVINO was a 5-stage in-order, this Sargantana core is a 7-stage out-of-order write-back with register renaming and a non-blocking memory pipeline.

So it is not a full in-order or a full out-of-order design.

Here's a pre-print paper I found:

Sargantana: A 1 GHz+ In-Order RISC-V Processor with SIMD Vector Extensions in 22nm FD-SOI

https://upcommons.upc.edu/bitstream/handle/2117/384912/sarga...

RV64GC with a subset of the v0.7.1 vector extension. 1.26GHz nominal clock on a 22nm process.

The CoCo3 ran fairly well, though it did run hot. The higher speed variant of the 6809 in the CoCo3 was still fundamentally a 8/16-bit processor. The main upgrade compared to the older versions was a bank-switching chip. You could apparently map any 8KiB of the 512KiB to any of 8 positions in the 64KiB address space of the 6809. It was sort of like segment registers... except less flexible.

I sorely wanted an Atari 520ST when they first came out, but it was more than I could afford at the time.

After graduating from university, I eventually got a Gateway 386 with a whopping 4MiB of RAM. In part to play Wing Commander and Castle Wolfstein. I've mostly been a PC guy since, though I've dabbled in RISC-V more recently. Not ready yet to make that my main desktop though.

It is likely uncompressed video, so that really means just picking and choosing what to keep. Most of it is likely trash anyway.

Apparently the guy has some kind of video production company. It is possible that these are raw video files which will take up way more space. Even though this is his business, there's a decent chance that most of it will never be needed again.

He should have started backups back in August when the FBI seized his computers, instead of waiting until the last minute (week).

The FBI seized his computers back in August. He should have bought new hard drives and made a backup of his cloud storage starting back then, if that was so important.

Yep, we did both of those back in the day. The bank switching was needed for ROM copies that didn't relocate as easily, or if you were modifying the BASIC interpreter itself.

Towards the end of the 1980's I upgraded to a CoCo3, with 512KiB of RAM (wow! so much), a disk drive (156KiB) and OS-9 level 2. Also got the C compiler for OS-9 when it was on sale (discontinued).

My final setup would have the entire operating system loaded into RAM, with a RAM disk, upon which I'd copy in the C compiler. And display it via a glorious 80 columns on a monochrome monitor. It was with all that I started writing my own vi clone, but didn't get too far.

Nice. I had gotten started with a CoCo 1 with just 16KiB of RAM. That eventually got upgraded to 64KiB and Extended Color BASIC. That made it easier to copy ROM cartridges and save them to cassette tape. One trick there was to cover over or cut the trace to a pin on the cartridge that prevented it from automatically starting. That was handy for switching between BASIC and the EDTASM+ ROM.

One use of all that was to fix the CoCo's clone of the arcade video game Galaxian, called Galactic Attack[1]. The CoCo had analog joysticks, and the writer of Galactic Attack thought it would be neat to have the ship you control track the X axis of the joystick. Except it would be unfair to whip the joystick from one side of the screen to the other while avoiding the enemy shots. So in the Galactic Attack game, the player ship lazily tracked the position of the joystick, moving slowly to the position of the stick. In practice this made the player ship hard (for me) to control and felt unresponsive. And it made it hard to hold still in the case an enemy bomb was close by.

I had already modified one of my Atari 2600 joysticks to work on the CoCo (probably a Rainbow magazine article). So what I did next was to modify the joystick routine to just create three zones (move left, dead zone, move right) for the X axis values. The game may or may not have been written with all relative branches (instead of absolute), so I might have had to fix that too.

Good times.

[1] http://www.lcurtisboyle.com/nitros9/galacticattack.html