Category Archives: News

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Grim Fandango

Posted on 2024-11-09 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I like the balance of this review. Grim Fandgo is absolutely one of the most beautiful, aesthetically interesting games of the early 3D era. The setting and story are deep and compelling. And... it's almost too frustrating to play in places. The third act drags. The controls fight you. Some of the puzzles are the most egregious sort of adventure game bullshit. It's one of the few games I'd say is absolutely improved by just playing along with a strategy guide.
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TSMC will stop making 7 nm chips for Chinese customers

Posted on 2024-11-08 by pappp

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: Ooh. That's some serious geopolitical news.
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QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there’s an RPi image

Posted on 2024-11-07 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Hasn't QNX opened up to varying degrees several times before, eventually followed by a pull back to more restrictive terms? QNX is nifty, and I have fond memories of that cute QNX demo floppy that booted a responsive graphical desktop with networking, but with Moore's law gains and RTLinux finally getting mainlined this year, I suspect the appeal of a freeish small Unix with RT features is reduced.
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A Brief History of Cyrix

Posted on 2024-11-03 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Lost this article in my tab forest the other day, just found and read it. It's a good narrative read for a somewhat complicated story.
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Touchscreens are out, and tactile controls are back

Posted on 2024-11-03 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Please let it be true! I've been waiting for us to move back toward tactile interfaces for like 20 years, before we even got to the worst of it.
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Reddit is profitable for the first time ever, with nearly 100 million daily users

Posted on 2024-10-29 by pappp

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Article note: Aw crap, they succeeded in entering the "value extraction" phase.
Pink text reading “reddit” with also pink portions of the Reddit alien’s head occupying the bottom right and top left corners of the image, the top one upside down, all on a black background.
Image: The Verge

Reddit just turned a profit for the first time. As part of its third-quarter earnings results released on Tuesday, the company reported a profit of $29.9 million, along with $348.4 million in revenue — a 68 percent increase year over year.

The company hasn’t been profitable at any point in its nearly 20-year history. Since going public, Reddit lost $575 million during its first quarter on the market, but it decreased that loss to $10 million last quarter, and is now finally in the green.

Reddit also grew to 97.2 million daily users over the past few months, marking a 47 percent increase from the same time last year. That number exceeded 100 million users on some days during the quarter, Reddit says.

Reddit’s advertising revenue grew to...

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Strava was used to locate the most powerful people

Posted on 2024-10-29 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: The same kind of stunt made the news in 2018, and it's pretty obvious that automatically posting your location data somewhere public means anyone who wants to can track you, not just nation-states squeezing it out of your cell phone provider. And, the Ukrainians just used the same trick to assassinate a Russian general. But, as ever, most people aren't going to think about electronic privacy.
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Linus Torvalds: AI is 90% marketing, 10% reality

Posted on 2024-10-29 by pappp

Source: Boing Boing

Article note: That seems about right, there are a handful of nifty and potentially useful things coming out of this AI Hype cycle. But most of it is useless gimmicks and executive FOMO.
Torvalds giving hardware vendor NVidia the finger at a 2012 talk.

The creator and lead maintaner of Linux says AI is 90% marketing, 10% reality. Linus speaks for a lot of us, I think! That it's marketed as "AI" in the first place is a good example of what he's talking about. — Read the rest

The post Linus Torvalds: AI is 90% marketing, 10% reality appeared first on Boing Boing.

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McDonald’s busted ice cream machines can now be fixed — legally

Posted on 2024-10-25 by pappp

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Article note: Right to Repair is good for everyone except for rentseeking parasites.
A photo showing someone holding an ice cream at McDonald’s
Photo by Gerald Matzka/picture alliance via Getty Images

McDonald’s always-broken ice cream machines might finally get easier to fix. That’s because the US Copyright Office granted an exemption allowing third parties to diagnose and repair commercial equipment — including the ones that make your McFlurries.

Now, franchise owners will be able to break through the digital locks that have blocked them from repairing McDonald’s ice cream machines for years. According to the Copyright Office, the exemption will allow people to diagnose, perform maintenance, and repair “retail-level commercial food preparation equipment.” McDonald’s ice cream machines have become so notorious for breaking that someone even created a tool to track broken machines.

The decision is part of the Copyright Office’s final...

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NetGuard – rootless Android outbound per-app OSS firewall, like LittleSnitch

Posted on 2024-10-23 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: This looks like a promising way to limit mobile suck. Less automatic than system-wide ad-blocking - which at this point I'd go back to a flipphone before I'd tolerate a smartphone without - but able to cut off classes of problem that are currently hard to manage.
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