duskwuff

> I suspect that [modifying data in memory] is how the Game Genie for the Nintendo Entertainment System worked.

Game Genie, Action Replay, and other similar devices worked on a different principle - the "codes" represented patches to the code in the game cartridge, not to data in memory. (The original Game Genie for the NES could patch up to three bytes.)

In practice, these patches often amounted to simple modifications like changing the constant value used to initialize a "lives" or "health" variable, or patching out code which caused the player to take damage or die.

Output lane switching is possible - some mods (e.g. [1]) add it, as well as even wilder options. Not offering it in the base game is a deliberate choice.

As far as belt lane management goes, another interesting option - which is also present in the engine, but not used by default! - is lane splitters [2].

[1]: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/quick-adjustable-inserters

[2]: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/lane-balancers

For another example: one "theme" listed is "Walking Dead episodes". The streets which come up are ones with names like "Faith" or "Family", which happen to also be names of episodes of that show. There is clearly no actual connection here.

IIRC, a number of the team members started as players.

Those are aftermarket products for use in heavy vehicles, not something that's present (or usable) in passenger cars.

> Aside from memory safety, which is solved by using a compiler that just doesn't allow unsafe memory operations

I don't see how that's possible without turning the language into something that isn't C, either by adding significant new functionality (e.g. fat pointers) or subtracting enough functionality that it's a much less capable language (e.g. disallowing dynamic memory allocation).

Unfortunately, they can't:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Amendment

> There are still some types of CRT-related vacuum tubes in production for applications digital equivalents are objectively less performant in.

Like what? The only significant applications I'm aware of for vacuum tubes nowadays are high-power RF amplifiers (including household microwave magnetrons) and intentional X-ray emitters.

> I was wondering how you could possibly sync up something like a Carrier that has multiple fighters.

Same way as everything else - you play out the simulation and see what happens. The behavior of the interceptors is as deterministic as any other unit. (They just happen to not be directly commandable by their owner.)

Replay files are streams of the orders given by players. They generally can't do anything which would be impossible in game.

Not feasible. The VODs are from a spectator's perspective; there's a lot of action happening "off camera" (like players building units) which affects what's seen on camera later, and which would be extremely difficult to reconstruct from what's visible.

What you're describing is a casual game, not competitive play. And, of course, all bets are off if you're playing with additional rules like "no rush" which remove the element of tempo from the game.

Yes, e.g. https://github.com/gulshngill/bwrepanalysis. But I doubt an agent would learn much from them without a lot of additional processing - the replay files are little more than a stream of the orders given during the match (e.g. "at tick 17, player 1 ordered unit 234 to attack-move to 56,78"). They're difficult to make sense of without a lot of additional context, like the map layout, the location and status of other units, what parts of all that are actually visible to each player, etc.

This is not a viable strategy in competitive play. It's a huge resource/time investment with a dubious payoff.

If you could win as Protoss by building Dark Archons, raiding your Zerg opponent's base to capture a worker, building a bunch of Zerg production and tech buildings, and attacking with a combined army... you most likely outclass your opponent, and could have won much faster using a more conventional strategy.

> They've gone with a lesser known company Kioxia.

Formerly known as Toshiba's memory division. They spun off the business as Kioxia in 2017.

> So why not set up a simple grid (say, Pages on a mac or Libre Office or Scribus) and pair the best photo you can grab with a description opposite it, on a nice background?

Or, for that matter - skip the photos, just do text, maybe with a few bits of clip art if you're feeling daring. Photos are hardly essential for coffee drinks, which tend to all look the same in real life anyway.

> It's also nice that it translates directly to the file system.

On the other hand, this means that it's bound by filesystem naming rules - e.g. you can't have an object named "abc/", or a pair of objects named "a" and "a/b".

> The problem with ebooks is that you cannot be 100% certain that you're reading the original text.

That's equally true of print books. Misprints happen.

1992. (It's a music joke.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_for_the_People

Telegram's usage of "GIF" (any short video without sound) is incredibly weird and frequently goes against users' expectations. I wouldn't treat that as definitive.

Yes. These drawings are a companion to Apple's accessory design guidelines, which include a lot of other interesting design considerations:

https://developer.apple.com/accessories/Accessory-Design-Gui...

> This was also a time when Flash content was supported by Apple QuickTime

While QuickTime supported some Flash content, my recollection is that it only supported simple animations which could be mapped onto QuickTime's own interactive video features. I don't think it supported ActionScript, so this kind of interactivity would have been beyond it.

There was even an unpleasant period in the early 2000s where MSIE was the only viable browser on Mac OS. Safari and Firefox hadn't been released yet, Netscape 4.x never made the jump to OS X, and ports of the Mozilla suite were never particularly usable on the platform.

LLMs are also incredibly poor at recognizing that they're "out of their depth", especially when their context is already full of their attempts to do something.

> They stopped piling on all sorts of non-standard vendor lock-in stuff after IE6.

IE6 also stuck around a lot longer than previous versions. It was released in 2001; IE7 didn't show up until 2006, and was an optional update which many users skipped.

I've seen a number of "child invents thing" news stories where the supposed invention was entirely bogus. For example, one widely circulated story in the late 2000s involved a young student in Nepal inventing a solar cell made out of human hair. Their supposed invention made no technical sense, and no one was able to replicate their results.

No, neither - the amount of CO2 that'd be needed for use as a refrigerant is insignificant. There's already a lot of CO2 produced as a byproduct of industrial chemical processes like petroleum refining. Some of it is captured for reuse (e.g. in drink carbonation); most of it is released to the atmosphere.

WordPress is free software. Its users are under no obligation to contribute to its development, or to give money to Automattic.

Yes. This typically manifested as either:

- religious or mystical experiences, often paired with the belief that the AI model is a manifestation of a divine being and/or has become sentient

- belief that the person has made a great scientific breakthrough using AI, typically in someone with no real knowledge of the field (which was usually theoretical physics)

- paranoid fantasies, e.g. belief that one is being followed or surveilled, that one's computers or other electronic devices have been compromised, etc.

(Ars Technica reports on a particularly horrifying instance of the first type at https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/09/man-told-chatgpt....)

I also have some fond memories of WWWBoard instances, from Matt's Script Archive.

https://www.scriptarchive.com/wwwboard.html