The Old New Thing
• Raymond Chen
A contingency plan.
The post Why did the Microsoft Entertainment Pack for Windows have a special sticker announcing that it also had Tetris? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Terence Eden’s Blog
• @edent
One of the promises of the AI-filled future is that we'll all have highly capable autonomous servants "agents" to work for us. Even back in the 1990s, it was a common trope in future-gazing to insist that a person's personal slave agent would negotiate on their behalf. Ask your meek digital pal agent to find you a restuarant in town, tonight, for a hot date, catering to your dietary preferences, …
The Silicon Underground
• Dave Farquhar
On August 19, 1974, Chuck Peddle, Bill Mensch, Rod Orgill, Harry Bawcom, Ray Hirt, Terry Holdt, Wil Mathys, and Mike Janes quit their jobs at Motorola to venture out on their own, founding MOS Technology. The eight had worked on
The post MOS Technology founded August 19, 1974 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.
Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
• Cory Doctorow
Jeff Geerling
• Jeff Geerling
In the before-times, when Raspberry Pi CM5s were (relatively) affordable, I built a number of Pi clusters (example), and one of the most annoying parts of the build was flashing Raspberry Pi OS to all the Pis.
One, two, or even three Pis isn't a big deal, but once you hit 4+, the process of plugging the Compute Module into a carrier board, plugging that into a computer, managing Raspberry Pi Imager, and trying to match up details like a hostname, MAC address, and the physical Pi itself, gets annoying.
Marcus on AI
• Gary Marcus
Their planned IPO is facing headwinds, trust has evaporated, and their burn rate is only getting worse
John D. Cook
• John
A new paper just came out, The Maximum-Area Small Polygon Problem. The paper solves the problem of finding, for each n, the n-gon with diameter 1 and maximum area. For odd n, the solution is what you might expect: a regular n-gon. I would expect this to be the solution for even n as well, […]
The post Big little hexagon first appeared on John D. Cook.
Marcus on AI
• Gary Marcus
A theory about what went wrong, and some open questions about what might happen next
Marcus on AI
• Gary Marcus
Brief update to last’s week’s note re: the growing backlash.
John D. Cook
• John
The imbalance conjecture is now a theorem. James Alexander Schreib and Yousof Yavari posted a proof last week. What does the conjecture theorem say? Start with a graph G and for every edge, calculate the absolute value of the difference of the degree of each end. Then the theorem says there exists another graph H whose vertices […]
The post The imbalance theorem first appeared on John D. Cook.
Experimental History
• Adam Mastroianni
OR: an apology to my English teachers
Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
• Cory Doctorow
John D. Cook
• John
Suppose you have a planet in an elliptical orbit around a star. The math is identical for any light object orbiting a heavy object, such as a moon or satellite orbiting a planet, but we’ll call the heavy object a star and the light object a planet. The center of the star is not quite […]
The post Mean distance to the sun first appeared on John D. Cook.
The Silicon Underground
• Dave Farquhar
Egghead Software was a US retail store that sold computer software from 1984 to 2001. It declared bankruptcy 25 years ago this week, on August 18, 2001, after an attempted reinvention as a dotcom selling online failed. Why did Egghead
The post What happened to Egghead Software appeared first on The Silicon Underground.
Andrew Nesbitt
• Andrew Nesbitt
Something you have, something you know, and someone else's OAuth.
Entropic Thoughts
• kqr
It is common for promotional pamphlets aimed at children to contain a themed variant of snakes and ladders. This is the “game” where the players toss a die, move as many places as the die says, and then some spots on the board have an event that send the player forward, or back, or give them an extra toss or whatever.
The theme is typically related to whatever the promoter wants to promote, but styled for children. I get the appeal – for children. They can probably imagine they’re really travelling along the path! In the variant pictured below, there’s forest and water and tunnels and dogs and everything!
Troy Hunt
• Troy Hunt
The current ransomware situation is a bit of a kludge (deep breath): a lot of ransomware (which often doesn't even involve "ware", it's just extortion) is carried out by kids who successfully make a truckload of money but can't spend it without
