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The Creative Spirit of Who Framed Roger Rabbit

I love Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the 1988 movie by Robert Zemeckis. I haven't watched it in quite a few years, and Cypress Frankenfeld just pointed out this sequence from early in the movie:

It's a pelican riding a bicycle!

Look closely and you'll note that the pelican is animated while the bicycle is a real bicycle. Apparently they filled the wheels with water to add stability, then set it running and guided it with a cable.

Cypress gathered more details on the scene. What a delight.

Via @cypressf.bsky.social

Tags: animation, movies, pelican-riding-a-bicycle

You can just prove things, apparently.

I'm back from VCF Midwest 21, arguably the largest vintage computer festival on the planet.

After being blown away last year, I decided to get a table of my own this year, to demonstrate NTP Time on a bunch of old Macs, representing every era up to the pinnacle of the PowerPC, an Xserve G5 (serving duty as a Stratum 2 ntpd server).

Attending as an exhibitor is a lot different. In some ways better (I got to interact face-to-face with at least 200 people—after that I ran out of my 'time tokens'), and in some ways worse (I only got to see about 10% of the exhibits—if that).

Do you try again or give up?

The post Comparing exception behavior of magic statics, <CODE>std::<WBR>call_<WBR>once</CODE>, and <CODE>std::<WBR>async</CODE> appeared first on The Old New Thing.

The Flywheel theatre company are reviving the rep tradition by having five actors perform five different plays in five weeks. Their interpretation of Molière's classic is gaudy and hilarious. Even the lighting cues are funny! It is fair to say that School for Wives isn't exactly an uncontroversial play. The plot basically boils down to "Women! Eh? You can't live with them, you can't easily groom …

It might surprise you to hear we had emojis in the 1980s and 90s. We’ve had them since 1982, to be precise. The first known use was on a bulletin board by Scott Fahlman, a Carnegie Mellon computer science professor,

The post Retro emojis: We had ’em in the 80s and 90s appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Today's links Textured: The surprises are what matter. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: RIP Mr Dressup; Oligarch sucker-punch; ICC v CEOs. Upcoming appearances: Berkeley, Edmonton, Boston, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, ...

I recently wrote about Jev, a new “System One” language model that only outputs decisions: the answers to a set of user-provided multiple-choice questions. This means it’s nowhere near as flexible1 as a traditional LLM like ChatGPT, but in return it’s consistently fast. We d...

Be alert: targeted attacks on prominent Rustaceans Important warning from Adam Harvey and the crates security team: We believe that there is an ongoing campaign targeting rust-lang members and owners of popular crates that is attempting to compromise devices and accounts in...

How To Write With An LLM Thomas Ptacek on using LLMs as copyeditors, not as writing assistants: Rule Number One: You may not use a single word an LLM suggests to you. [...] I think that as a form of intellectual personal protective equipment you should adopt the rule that a...

Last week I opened Edge to test my Internet connection, because that's the only thing I use it for, and noticed something new. Right beneath the address bar was a new bar with a button offering to let the browser launch automatically whenever I start my computer. That was st...

My comment on Bonsai 2 27B: Near-Lossless Compression in a 9x Smaller Footprint — Hacker News. If you want to try out out the GGUFs from https://huggingface.co/prism-ml/Ternary-Bonsai-2-27B-gguf#th... be aware that you need Prism's llama.cpp fork to get them to work, from ht...

Self-generated prompt injections in compaction summaries In Our framework for reporting model misalignment OpenAI provide "six reports on unexpected or concerning model behavior we’ve observed in the last six months". This one here is my favorite: they caught some of their m...

Listener beware

Simple vs complex machinery.

The post <CODE>std::call_once</CODE> vs. <CODE>std::async</CODE> appeared first on The Old New Thing.

There’s a common saying in discussion of fractals that the length of a coastline depends on how small a device you use to measure it. I thought this was a hypothetical, say as applied to the steps in the construction of the Koch snowflake. But the saying has its roots in actually surveying. Lewis Fry […]

The post Empirical fractal first appeared on John D. Cook.

“We never want to be in a situation again where we underestimate the AI.”

Pondering the circumstances that led to the retirement of a 64-year-old cable brand in a merger. Turns out, brand loyalty matters less than we thought.

They sort of do the same thing, but differently.

The post Magic statics vs. <CODE>std::call_once</CODE> appeared first on The Old New Thing.

I recently bought a copy of Los Alamos Rolodex, a book displaying business cards from Los Alamos Nation Labs from 1967 to 1978. You can find some examples of the cards here. One of the cards in the book is for Eugene Frank, President of B & F Instruments. His card lists his phone number […]

The post Phone words first appeared on John D. Cook.