That’s different

That’s different

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Le ravissement de Frank N Stein is a little art film made in 1982 before computer animation would have made the perspective drawing much easier. Today you could likely make this in an afternoon.

These sort of bizarre art films remind me of going to the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The top floor had lots of random video shorts like this. It’s interesting what gets considered ‘art’ – and 99% of it is forgotten by the next year. Maybe that’s why we’re seeing the dramatic collapse of the art world.

As it turns out – maybe a lot of it is just forgettable, uninspired noise?

Jaguar – A failure like no other

Jaguar – A failure like no other

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We all saw the videos of androgynous actors in strange clothes that left people unsure what Jaguar was even advertising. There was not a single mention of a car. Jaguar emptied its show floors of older models that were all discontinued and announced no cars – for a year.

Then the Jaguar Type 00 prototypes were shown and the attempt flopped. How bad? How about an entire year with no cars for sale and then a 97.5% sales collapse.

April 2024: 1,961 cars sold
April 2025: 49 cars sold

This lead to the firing of the 3rd party marketing group hired for the effort, the lead designers, and CEO. The current offerings from Jaguar are a 180 degree turn back to their older designs but it is unclear if they will ever recover.

A complete disaster and an intelligent re-invention can look similar at first, but it turns out that burning the bridges with an unproven firm before you even know if there is land on the other side is a very bad idea.

Markov Chains

Markov Chains

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“It is still an unending source of surprise for me to see how a few scribbles on a blackboard … could change the course of human affairs.”

Stanisław Ulam

Markov Chains/Monte Carlo methods are nearly magical mathematical systems. They’re based on tremendously simple math even middle schoolers can do – but have influenced everything from major computing features like spell checkers and search engines to world changing things like the analysis of viral spread and nuclear bomb development.

Social media swami

Social media swami

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This video about a fake psychic using social media against his targets was made over a decade ago as an ad for safe internet banking.

They were using very primitive social media of the time with no AI – today it’s much easier. It’s a good reminder your data can be weaponized against you (and probably why I got off all social media years ago).

Germans described by a German

Germans described by a German

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I found this quote from a German describing his fellow countrymen to be helpful in understanding some of my interactions when I was working there:

Germans are not efficient, they’re thorough. In fact, they’re often focused on being thorough to the point of being blatantly inefficient

Emulating audio IC’s – from scanning the chip with a microscope

Emulating audio IC’s – from scanning the chip with a microscope

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Giulioz gives a sequel to last year’s talk “Proprietary silicon ICs and dubious marketing claims? Let’s fight those with a microscope!“, where he showed how he reverse engineered a pretty old device by looking at microscope silicon pics alone, with manual tracing and some custom tools.

Fast forward, he shows how he reverse engineered a much modern chip: the custom Roland/Toshiba TC170C140 ESP chip (1995). Completing this task required a different approach, as doing it manually would have required too much time. He used a guided, automated approach that combines clever microscopy with computer vision to automatically classify standard cells in the chip, saving us most of the manual work.

They then sped things up even further by directly probing the chip: by exploiting test routines and sending random data to the chip he figured out how the internal registers worked to create a bit-accurate emulator. He even gives the source code out on github so you can emulate the devices yourself.

Listen to the result at 32:19 where they play Darude Sandstorm.

Links:

Short Circuit in Astoria June 6-7, 2026

Short Circuit in Astoria June 6-7, 2026

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I loved the movie Short Circuit. It was filmed here in Oregon in various locations, but mostly in Astoria, OR (the same place Goonies, Kidnergarden Cop, and a few other films were made).

For it’s 40th anniversary during the Astoria Film Celebration, June 5-7, 2026 there will be Cast & Crew appearances, Panel Talks, Licensed Merchandise, Film Screenings, Workshops, Trivia, an 80’s Prom and more across multiple venues.

If you’re feeling the urge, you can Airbnb Stephanie Speck’s house, visit the Goonies home, and learn all about the filming locations at the Oregon Film Museum.