Category Archives: News

Article note: I have a whole set of thoughts about this stuff: 1. Most games (and ...everything...) are situations where there are several similar creations around the same time, and which one gains traction is not easily predetermined. It's usually not the first or most sophisticated one. See Minecraft for example, there were a plague of blockworld games around that time, and it was not the first or fanciest. Likewise most Apple products. And, you know, transistors. 2. The 2048/Threes situation (FOSS, similar but not exact clone, made for fun/education, under a different name, distributed for free) and Wordle and appstore clone called Wordle (Trying to hustle a quick buck on someone elses' idea _and_ name recognition) are substantially different things. I don't really have a problem with making Free replacements for any thing where it is technically easy to do so. I played a ton of the https://www.fiveletters.xyz/ clone that isn't a one-a-day, and a little of the "I wrote Wordle in a tiny bash reading from the system spellchecker dictionary" stunt doing the rounds the other day. 3. I get yelled at for this one, but 2048 is a more satisfying idle game than Threes. The absolute regularity of 2048 makes it meditative. The powers-of-two thing tickles computer people. 4. The simultaneous, unavoidable rentseeking and gatekeeping by the large incumbent tech players is a menace to society.

Article note: 6.5_Exa_bytes of Flash memory ICs unusable due to contamination in a factory. That's hard to think about. At least it's not a single-supplier item.

Article note: Oohh. More Futurama with most of the original people. Yes please.

Article note: Oh hell yeah. OpenSCAD is a super handy tool, and it's really easy to make models that render it obnoxiously slow. This isn't general parallelism, but it gets a ton of other chokepoints _and_ removes barriers to parallel processing.

Article note: I have the better part of a terabyte of encrypted incremental backups rclone'd into my university institutional google drive as a remote, because it was advertised as "unlimited". I haven't heard anything, but I should probably expect to.

Article note: Excellent. An independent ARM is currently important for the industry.

Enlarge (credit: Arm)

SoftBank’s $66 billion sale of UK-based chip business Arm to Nvidia collapsed on Monday after regulators in the US, UK, and EU raised serious concerns about its effects on competition in the global semiconductor industry, according to three people with direct knowledge of the transaction.

The deal, the largest ever in the chip sector, would have given California-based Nvidia control of a company that makes technology at the heart of most of the world’s mobile devices. A handful of Big Tech companies that rely on Arm’s chip designs, including Qualcomm and Microsoft, had objected to the purchase.

SoftBank will receive a break-up fee of up to $1.25 billion and is seeking to unload Arm through an initial public offering before the end of the year, said one of the people.

Article note: I don't understand what kind of buys-security-products-they-saw-in-an-airport-ad useless middle-manager decision making lead to them getting involved with ID.me in the first place.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | imaginima)

The Internal Revenue Service is dropping a controversial facial recognition system that requires people to upload video selfies when creating new IRS online accounts.

"The IRS announced it will transition away from using a third-party service for facial recognition to help authenticate people creating new online accounts," the agency said today. "The transition will occur over the coming weeks in order to prevent larger disruptions to taxpayers during filing season. During the transition, the IRS will quickly develop and bring online an additional authentication process that does not involve facial recognition."

The IRS has been using the third-party system ID.me for facial recognition of taxpayers. Privacy and civil rights advocates and lawmakers from both major parties have objected to the system. The IRS wasn't demanding ID.me verification for filing tax returns but was requiring it for accessing related services, such as account information, applying for payment plans online, requesting transcripts, and the Child Tax Credit Update Portal.

Article note: I click-holed about the NEC V20/V30 8080-alike family a while ago. They really were shockingly impressive parts for how little attention they get. Some of their extensions were awesome and well-conceived, their BCD system is sort of unbelievably sophisticated, and the trapping in- and out- of compatibility mode trick is awesome.

Article note: Well, that's going exactly as expected. The controller I got as a freebie will be a fun bit of ephemera one day in the not-too-distant future.

Enlarge / How much longer can Stadia stay aloft? (credit: Google / Aurich Lawson)

As Stadia continues to cling to life inside Google, a new report from Business Insider's Hugh Langley sheds light on what the cloud gaming division has been up to for the past few months. As usual, the report is not promising.

According to the BI report, the "Stadia consumer platform" has been "deprioritized" inside Google and now only takes up an estimated 20 percent of the Stadia division's time. After Google closed its only first-party studio last year (before it had ever produced a game!), a blog post hinted that a white-label service would be Stadia's future. We saw a bit of what that would look like in October when AT&T released a cloud version of Batman: Arkham Knight that was secretly powered by Google Stadia. BI reports that service will be called "Google Stream" and that "the focus of leadership is now on securing business deals for Stream."

The white-label Stadia service would work a lot like the way Google Cloud Platform works—companies that don't want to run their own cloud gaming service could just use Google's back end and distribute their games however they want. Like with Batman, presumably there are no branding requirements necessary and no need to plug into the Stadia store or the rest of the Stadia ecosystem.

Article note: It took me a minute to figure out what they were going on about about because the article is all emotional pleas no content. They're talking about Sodium Nitrite. The extremely common preservative/curing agent used in meat curing and sausage making (its why hot dogs have that pink color). Its LD50 is like 71mg/kg, it's less dangerous than most cleaning products.