Great! Let's put 24/7 webcams in his house, so he'll perform spectacularly and we can get many more absolute banger ideas like this one!

I'm just doing what the man himself says: "Fighting for a world where the watching goes both ways." But then, I suspect that when he said that he was thinking it's "us versus the government", and not "regular citizens versus billionaire tech-robber-barons".

Why do these tech-bros always seem to act like the problem is government, and they're somehow "fighting the good fight" no matter what they do? The problem is any powerful group with the power to steamroller others. And big business is at least as bad as big government.

Drum memory predates the Sinclair by quite a while. But there is an often repeated story involving an impossibly-optimised Blackjack program for a drum memory computer called "The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer".

I don't buy AAA games, so YMMV, but I buy my games almost exclusively from GOG and Itch these days. I have loads of games on Steam, but now the DRM-free aspect is most important to me. If something is only on Steam, I may still buy it if I can confirm that it's "DRM-free" (e.g. bypassable Steam check) there, or if it's so cheap that I won't mind losing it. As honest as GabeN and the Steam team seem to be, I've been shafted enough times already.

The one drawback I see for buying on GOG vs buying on Steam (which can also be kind of an advantage depending on your perspective) is updates. Steam seems to let publishers push updates out whenever they want. While a few publishers do actually seem to forget about GOG, I have read comments from a few different developers (in response to complaints from customers) that they had sent their updates to GOG but were stuck in an approval process. It appears that the GOG team manually tests every update before putting it up for customers, and there's a large backlog for a small team, so it can be several months before a patch gets through.

A potential ley line blockage that's cleared by a ritual performed every winter solstice by a hobbyist spellcaster who lives on a farm in the middle of nowhere?

Assembler, BASIC, Old C code, Cobol...

...Pascal, Fortran, Prolog, Lisp, Modern C code, PHP, Java, Python, C++, Lua, JavaScript, C#, Rust...

The list is infinite.

Show me a language in which it is impossible to write spaghetti code, and I'll show you someone who can't recognize spaghetti code when it's written in one of their favourite languages.

I had an OG nGage when they were still (as close as they would ever be to) relevant; I won it as a prize in a competition. And while I really liked it, I wouldn't have bought one with my own money unless the price had dropped by at least 50%, and even that's only given my personal positive experience with using one. As a regular consumer paying full price, it would certainly have been a hard pass for me.

The design seems to have been created by a group of mobile phone designers who once saw some pictures of a Gameboy Advance. I presume that the astounding decision to put the single game/SD card slot under the removable battery came from thinking that it would still be a phone first, and users would either install an SD card as a semi-permanent upgrade, or keep one game in the device until they finished it. I've only played one nGage game on mine (Tomb Raider), and the performance wasn't awful but it definitely left something to be desired. They were probably leaning hard on realtime 3D as a way to differentiate it from the GBA, but I don't think the CPU had quite enough power to make it responsive enough.

That being said, I used it happily for years as my main phone, and it generally outperformed all of my friends' phones by a wide margin. The only problem I ever had with "side talking" was having occasional random idiots on the street pointing and laughing. Now we all hold big, flat slices of bread up to our heads, but everyone does it so it's OK I guess. The phone call quality itself was crystal clear both ways. The speaker call mode was also miles ahead of any other mobile phone I saw at the time (or even any phone I've had since). I did get used to using it from my pocket with a microphone headset, though.

The nGage was a high-end Symbian Series 60 device with features much closer to modern smartphones than the more traditional, dedicated mobile phones that formed most of its competition. When it came out, BlackBerry was only just starting to expand beyond the enterprise space into the regular consumer market, and Apple's original iPhone (which don't forget was nowhere near as smooth and polished as they are now) was still 4 years away. Using the nGage with a headset actually worked out well since I often used it to listen to mp3s, a feature that many mobile phones still lacked at the time.

I could (and frequently did) surf regular, unfiltered, uncompressed websites on my nGage at a time when very few portable devices had that capability. And while I didn't play nGage games with it, it was fantastic for playing J2ME and Symbian games, many of which offered a GBA-like experience (albeit on a smaller screen) thanks to the relatively powerful CPU. That's not hyperbole; I was often also carrying a (frontlight modded) GBA around during that period, and switched my on-the-go gaming between them depending on my mood and what games I'd got recently. It also had surprisingly good battery life, although this may have been shortened when playing nGage games.

The nGage gets a lot of flak as a handheld gaming system going up against the GBA, and that definitely wasn't any kind of fight at all. But it was an extremely capable phone for the time, and even as "just" a phone, it still had useful gaming leanings. I think that there was a lot of knee-jerk reaction about "side talking" at the time, and despite there also being some legitimate complaints (like the card slot placement), I feel that it's doing a disservice to Nokia's engineers to have it go down in history as a total, unmitigated disaster.

Why be like that? Whether you think their position is silly or not, this person obviously gets called out on this a lot. And rather than pitch a fit over being needled about it for the umpteenth time, they responded with links that ought to satisfy any genuine curiosity. Considering the times I've seen an empty "Go educate yourself!" as a response from petulant children, I'd say buddy did us a solid. They don't owe us a personalized response.

When I go to that URL on a stock, direct FF install, I still see that notice.

I love low-level stuff and this still took me a little while to break down, so I'd like to share some notes on the author's code snippet that might help someone else.

The function morse_decode is meant to be called iteratively by another routine, once per morse "character" c (dot, dash, or null) in a stream, while feeding its own output back into it as state. As long as the function returns a negative value, that value represents the next state of the machine, and the morse stream hasn't yet been resolved into an output symbol. When the return value is positive, that represents the decoded letter, and the next call to morse_decode should use a state of 0. If the return value is 0, something has gone wrong with the decoding.

state is just a negated index into the array t, which is actually two arrays squeezed into one. The first 64 bytes are a binary heap of bytes in the format nnnnnnlr, each corresponding to one node in the morse code trie. l and r are single bits that represent the existence of a left or right child of the current node (i.e. reading a dot or dash in the current state leading to another valid state). nnnnnn is a 6-bit value that, when shifted appropriately and added to 63, becomes an index into the second part of the array, which is a list of UTF-8/ASCII codes for letters and numbers for the final output.

Does anyone know if the AI also figured out how to make any of these materials, or if it only assessed that they could probably exist in a stable state? This article isn't clear about that but it seems like the answer is the latter.

It really depends on your expectations. Once you clarified that you meant parity with current consoles, I understood why you wrote what you did.

I'm almost the exact opposite of the PC princesses who can say with a straight face that running a new AAA release at anything less than high settings at 4K/120fps is "unplayable". I stopped watching/reading a lot of PC gaming content online because it kept making me feel bad about my system even though I'm very happy with its performance.

Like a lot of patient gamers, I'm also an older gamer, and I grew up with NES, C64, and ancient DOS games. I'm satisfied with medium settings at 1080/60fps, and anything more is gravy to me. I don't even own a 4K display. I'm happy to play on low settings at 720/30fps if the actual game is good. The parts in my system range from 13 to 5 years old, much of it bought secondhand.

The advantage of this compared to a console is that I can still try to run any PC game on my system, and I might be satisfied with the result; no-one can play a PS5 game on a PS3.

Starfield is the first game to be released that (looking at online performance videos) I consider probably not being worth trying to play on my setup. It'll run, but the performance will be miserable. If I was really keen to play it I might try to put up with it, but fortunately I'm not.

You could build a similar system to mine from secondhand parts for dirt cheap (under US$300, possibly even under US$200) although these days the price/performance sweet spot would be a few years newer.

Well, I don't work for Threads or Meta, and I don't know anything about their short-term or long-term plans. But let's imagine a theoretical, commercially-operated social web service called "HeartStrings", which acts in bad faith:

• HeartStrings uses their significant marketing ability and existing user base to become a dominant entity in the Fediverse. Simultaneously, they downplay or even hide the fact that a lot of their initial content comes from the Fediverse. This isn't difficult as their traditional target audience probably won't know about the Fediverse or even be able to understand the concepts behind it without significant explanation, which they are unlikely to pursue on their own.
• HeartStrings implements extra services for their users which only work on HeartStrings (karma, useful built-in bots and moderation tools, regular prize giveaways, "preferential" positioning of posts from HeartStrings, their own spin on "hot" or other post sorting options)
• They create local "backups" of posts from other instances (a.k.a. scraped content), "for the convenience of HeartStrings users" and, initially, also as "a service to the Fediverse."
• Once they have sufficient users and content, they begin blocking posts both to and from certain other instances (probably not actually defederating, but handling everything silently, internally). When someone finally notices this systematic censorship, HeartStrings provides vague justifications involving "misinformation" and "illegal activities".
• Because this creates minimal backlash from core HeartStrings users, the company works faster and faster toward their end goal of completely removing ActivityPub support while simultaneously implying that the Fediverse came to HeartStrings (rather than the other way around), was given a fair chance by HeartStrings, but turns out to be filled with terrorists, drug sellers, pedophiles, and other bad actors. With no central body to defend it effectively against such a well-financed aggressor, the Fediverse takes this virtually without responding.
• Result: HeartStrings has sucked what free material and promotion it could from the Fediverse during its critical launch phase, then sabotaged the Fediverse, and finally kicked it to the curb.