wernsey

My wife and I rewatched Congo recently and he was great in that too even through all the goofiness. My wife's also a big fan of the Three Musketeers (that might be the first movie from my childhood I remember him from, come to think of it)

Just some random tidbit: When I was in high school I bought every computer gaming magazine I could get my hands on and could afford with my allowance.

So when Deepmind first made headlines I recalled an article in the UK magazine, Edge, which had an article about a game called Republic being developed by a team of former Bullfrog employees lead by one Demis Hassabis.

Out of interest, I just checked Internet Archive, and lo and behold I found it [0]

I see Wikipedia [1] also mentions that he was the lead programmer on Them park and worked with Peter Molyneaux at Lionhead during the development of Black & White.

It doesn't add much to the story under discussion, but it makes me think at the time I wanted to be a game programmer but my parents encouraged me to go study engineering instead.

[0]: https://archive.org/details/edge-issue-078-november-1999/pag... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demis_Hassabis

What happens in practice that there are only so many grocery stores where consumers can choose to shop thanks to corporate mergers and lax antitrust enforcement. So if all of them raise their prices at the same time then those consumers are out of luck.

Now technically it would be illegal for the grocery stores to collude in price fixing like that, but they'll hide behind the fact that all of them will buy their surveillance pricing data from Google [1].

Google will tell all of the competitors exactly how much they can charge you for your eggs, and you'll get the same price everywhere.

[1] https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/will-google-organize-the-...

Surveillance pricing should be outright banned IMHO, but Cory Doctorow had an article earlier this week explaining all the ways this particular ban is broken [1].

It was probably broken by design, allowing the politicians to brag about how they're doing something, while the lobbyists managed to carve out such large loopholes for themselves that it will in likelihood never be a real deterrent.

For example: surveillance pricing is allowed if users opt-in so consider how many times you've clicked "I agree" on websites recently to get past some legalese wall of text blocking you from the content.

Another thing is you can't sue a grocery store, but you can petition the AG to sue them, which they will do only if they feel like it.

Not to mention that it applies only to grocery stores, not hotels and airlines and other industries which are inclined to do surveillance pricing

[1] https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/30/something-must-be-done/

Can I just do a shout-out for UnxUtils [1]?

I've had it on every Windows computer I used at work since forever now, and it is extremely useful to be able to use things like `sed` and `gawk` (and even `make`) from the command prompt

[1] https://unxutils.sourceforge.net/

SimCity 2000 showed a message "Reticulating splines" when it generated the landscape that didn't mean anything in particular.

It became a bit of a meme in the years since.

I've also used GrafX2 for this kind of pixelart work. It takes cues from old Amiga paint programs

http://grafx2.chez.com/

Real programmers use a magnetized needle and a steady hand

Google's concerns about security rings hollow to me. I believe it is strictly to exercise more control over the platform.

The appeals to people in Southeast Asia being scammed reminds me of a blog by Cory Doctorow last year: Every complex ecosystem has parasites [1]

The gist of it is that technology can be useful, but that usefulness comes with a price: sometimes bad actors are going to commit fraud or other undesirable actions.

As an example, you can reduce the amount of banking app scams to 0% by simply denying any banking apps on phones. But because of banking apps' usefulness we're not going to do that, so there will be some non-zero risk that you will get scammed.

As a technical user I chose Android for its usefulness, accepting that there may be a (minute) chance that I get scammed, but it is a risk I am willing to take, and Google will unilaterally take this choice away from me.

Still, I don't believe Google's security concerns are sincere, so I think I just wasted my time typing all of this

[1] https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/24/hermit-kingdom/

It's the perception.

"I couldn't be bothered to write a proper README, so I had the AI do it"

I disagree.

Code is the expression of knowledge and can be protected by copyright.

A lot of the popular licenses on GitHub (like MIT) permits you to use a piece of code on the condition that you credit the original author. If an LLM outputs code from such a project (or remixes code from several such projects) then it needs to credit the original authors or be in violation.

If Disney's intellectual property can be stolen and needs to be protected for 95+ years by copyright then surely the bedroom programmers' labor deserves the same protections.

That average fortune 1000 developer is still expected to abide by the licensing terms of those libraries.

And in practice, tools like NPM makes sure to output all of the libraries' licenses.

But the license terms state under which conditions the code is released.

For example: MIT license states has this clause "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software."

It stands to reason that if an LLM outputs something based on MIT-licensed code then that output should at least contain that copyright because it's what the original author wished.

And I saw a comment below arguing that knowledge cannot be copyrighted, but the code is an expression of that knowledge and that most certainly can be protected by copyright.

Maybe you should quote the full title of that post:

"I got into an argument on Discord about how inefficient CBR/CBZ is, so I wrote a new file format. It's 100x faster than CBZ."

It has some charts, notes and comments

Here's the old.reddit link: https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1qi64pr/i_got_i...

The blog just leads to https://research.swtch.com/qr/draw/, which is the demo page of the blogs [1] and [2] written by Russ Cox many years ago about putting pictures in QR codes by manipulating the error correction codes in them

[1]: https://research.swtch.com/qart [2] https://research.swtch.com/field

Or "relevant" in the sense that it's something I bought recently: I searched for vacuum cleaners, found one I liked an bought it. Now I will be seeing ads for vacuum cleaners for the next few months.

I've taken to using Markdeep [1] for this.

You write your markdown file, but add the code snippet at the bottom of yor document and save it with a .md.html extension. Then when you double-click it it opens and renders in your browser.

I save my notes in a Google Drive, and it's now replaced all the note taking apps I've tried over the years

[1] https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/

There is also a thread on Stack Exchange [1] for John Skeet facts, who has the most reputation there.

[1]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-fact...

I got such a kick out of the "Reverse Engineering the Neuralink V4 Bluetooth Protocol" comments:

> My son tried something like this and now he speaks in JSON whenever he gets excited. Is there a factory reset?

>> Hold a strong magnet to his left ear for 10 seconds. Note: he will lose all memories from the last 24 hours.

I see a lot of mention of ProtonDB in this thread, so I thought I'd take a look at which of my favourite games are supported.

Unfortunately, when I try to open it, it gives me a NS_ERROR_UNKNOWN_HOST when it tries to download the page's .js and CSS from a head.protondb.pages.dev domain.

I tried to add that to my /etc/hosts file, but then I got an error about a certificate.

Most strange, and the only clue I found online was this YouTube video[1] that suggests accessing it through Tor...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DY3snvH9Xc

Sadly true. There was a time I would've given them the benefit of the doubt.

And don't call me Shirley

The cynic in me believes Google is doing this to exert more control over the Android ecosystem, and has very little to do with security.

I'm also afraid it will make it easier for Google to bend to authoritarian regimes and ban developers whose apps are not government approved.

Think it can't happen? Think different:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/10/apple-bends-to-t...

Another issue with AI not crediting such a post is that the license is CC-BY-NC (at the bottom of the page), so in theory AI would be able to launder the license.

I wonder how many times this has happened already?

Neat. Somebody ported the old mobile Doom RPG to Amiga

https://www.lemonamiga.com/games/details.php?id=5049

There's a company called Tin Man Games that have adapted a couple of titles for modern devices.

Here's a link to their adaptation of Warlock of Firetop Mountain: [0]

[0]: https://tinmangames.com.au/games/the-warlocks-of-firetop-mou...

Grafx2 [0] has support for some retro screen resolutions. Not sure if has everything you have in mind , though

[0] http://grafx2.chez.com/

Oh, man, many years ago I used Tiddlywiki (and later Wiki-On-A-Stick) as a browser-based note taking app, but stopped using it because the API they used to save the file to disk got deprecated and removed.

History not repeating but rhyming, I suppose...

Anyway, thanks for this. I've just added it to my bookmarks.

I had to do some digging on SuperUser [0] to get this working in Firefox, because it has the "Add Search Engine" button disabled by default.

* Go to `about:config`

* Change `browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh` to true

* Now you can go to `about:preferences#search`

* ...and click the "Add" button below Search Shortcuts

* Add `https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14` as your URL.

* Set the name to "Google Web" or whatever you prefer and choose a keyword. You can also change your default search engine or other preferences.

[0] https://superuser.com/a/1756774/40115

Agreed, but now the doctor has to do her job and the AI's job.

Cory Doctorow wrote about it a while back. I think it was this article "Humans are not perfectly vigilant" [0]. It explains how technology is supposed to help humans be better at their jobs, but instead we're heading in a direction where AIs are doing the work but humans have to stand beside them to double check them.

[0] https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/01/human-in-the-loop/

This brings back memories.

I worked my way through some of its source code many years ago during my post-graduate studies and it was very _strange_. I see it is now on GitHub [0].

They used C macros to implement object oriented programming, with symbols like `me` and `my` and `thee` scattered throughout the source code. It seems the code has been converted to C++ (IIRC it used to be in C), but I still see the `my` keyword in there.

They have their own BASIC-like scripting language. The weirdest property for me was that it allowed for whitespace in the identifiers. Just look at the example in [1]: The `Create simple Matrix` is actually a function in the scripting language that constructs a matrix object. The function name corresponds to a menu item and IIRC they used some more preprocessor magic to reuse the same code for the menus on the GUI and the functions in the scripting language.

I don't think you're supposed to write the scripts by hand. Rather it recorded your actions as you worked your way through the GUI and then you could export and modify those recordings as scripts.

They also implemented their own cross platform GUI toolkit rather than using one of the existing cross-platform GUI toolkits, so it works on Windows, Linux (or any X Windows I believe) and MacOS.

[0]: https://github.com/praat/praat [1]: https://github.com/praat/praat/blob/master/test/script/comma...