Overclockers go to extremes to cool their PC’s. China’s northern city of Mohe just experienced its coldest temperatures since 1969 by dropping to a freezing record low of -53C. Chinese content creator “苏打baka” decided to take her entire gaming PC loaded with an Intel Core i9-13900K CPU and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 outside to see what it feels like gaming in sub-zero ambient temperatures.
It was first run at moderate workloads and the CPU did initially thermal throttle as expected. After putting the AIO on, the temperatures outside got so cold that the pump eventually died when the liquid within the AIO froze.
The AIO was replaced with the Noctua NH-P1 passive heatsink and the CPU dropped to 10-15C while the GPU ran at an even lower -40C temperature (-18C Hotspot). The CPU had so much thermal headroom that it was easily overclocking up to 6.18 GHz. Even under heavy load, the GPU never went past 30C.
Over the last couple of years, there are different estimates of when the Apple Car (Project Titan) might finally make it to market. The estimates have ranged from 2024 to 2028. Now the latest report predicts a debut in 2026 with a custom Apple Silicon chip, no self-driving, and a price tag under $100,000 (after previously considering pricing it above $120,000).
Back in 2017 after several years of work, it appeared Apple had given up on producing a physical vehicle and was ready to focus on autonomous vehicle software.
The Orient Express. The train that forever changed luxury travel almost 140 years ago (debuted October 4, 1883) is being brought back to life yet again – but this time by French hospitality group Accor, which uses the Orient Express name under license from SNCF, France’s national train service.
Starting in 2024 this most recent rebirth of the railroad icon will gear up to resume service from the French capital to the rest of the continent, reviving the same lavish journeys of its heyday. While details and itineraries have yet to be confirmed, it’s likely that some of the routes will end in Istanbul, just as it was for the first Orient Express.
What’s more amazing is that many of the original cars have been found and are being restored right now.
In total, seventeen cars—12 sleeping cars, one restaurant, three lounges, and one caboose—will form the ‘new’ convoy. All of them date back to the 1920s and ’30s and used to form what was known as the Nostalgie-Istanbul Orient-Express (the train took different names depending on its routes).
In 2015, industrial history researcher Arthur Mettetal embarked on a worldwide quest to inventory what was left of the Orient Express for SNCF. The luxury train company had shut down in 1977, but different iterations of the Orient Express had been briefly resurrected in the 1980s, only to disappear almost completely by the following decade (save for the Belmond’s Venice Simplon-Orient-Express rail service, part of a completely separate venture). In the intervening years, many of the trains had gone off the grid.
During the course of his survey, Mattatel came across an anonymously posted YouTube video. He analyzing the clip for clues and located it on the border between Belarus and Poland.
A few months later, Mettetal traveled to Warsaw with Saint Lager, as well as a translator and a photographer and found them. They had been there for about 10 years.
“We were expecting them to be in terrible condition, but inside they were surprisingly well-preserved,” recounts Saint Lager. “Some of them still had the original Lalique glass panels that were so emblematic of the Orient Express. We also found Morrison and Nelson marquetry,” which are intricate wood carvings with inlays of precious materials like gold or ebony. “The Art Deco details were just incredibly vibrant,” Saint Lager says. Following two years of negotiation between Accor and the owner of the Nostalgie-Istanbul, the train was eventually escorted back to France where they are being refurbished.
Tickets will go on sale in 2023—but if you can’t wait, there’s always the Orient Express La Dolce Vita (another project by Accor) slated to hit the tracks soon.
The special actually marks the feature-length debut of Casper Kelly, who has shown his mastery of subversively creepy comedy with the likes of a Blair Witch Project parody starring Mystery Inc., called The Scooby-Doo Project and, most famously, the hilarious and horrifying 2014 short film, Too Many Cooks.
The filmmaker has also written for cartoons like CatDog, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Squidbillies, as well as co-created the live-action Adult Swim series Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell. One of his first contributions to more earnest horror was in the 2018 movie Mandy where he crafted the bizarre in-universe commercial for a branch of mac-and-cheese called “Cheddar Goblin.”
You can watch the Adult Swim Yule Log (aka The Fireplace) on HBO Max or here:
Being good coaches – Organize your team so that each person is working in their sweet spot (where they can use their strengths and are highly motivated to contribute) – then challenge them to perform their best by continually engaging with them to help solve their problems.
Not micromanaging – Managers need to trust their employees and not get involved in every little detail. Needing to be informed and involved in every decision is a roadmap to demoralizing a team.
Show interest in employees’ wellbeing – Gallup poles indicate employee wellbeing has six dimensions: emotional, career, social, financial, physical, and community. Leaders should be aware of how each employee feels about each of these elements of their wellbeing before they become an issue of burnout.
Listening to the team – Strong active listening skills are the foundation for good communication. Managers that have good active listening skills are able to hear problems earlier, develop trust, and win the hearts and minds of those they manage.
Help with career development – Managers who believe in their team members maintain a high view of them by showing interest in the work they do, the career aspirations, and creating learning and development opportunities for their people.
“If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in.
God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby because it sure as hell has heard you”
The Backrooms is an urban legend and June 10, 2019 creepypasta which originated in a 4chan thread about unsettling images. It’s one of the first examples of liminal spaces — an aesthetic that creates unique feelings of eeriness, nostalgia, and apprehension when presented with such places outside of their designed context. They often involve pictures of familiar places that usually are busy – but are empty in the photo.
Super Eyepatch Wolf does a great little documentary on the phenomenon
The tread became hot, and in 2019 someone created a free indie game on Steam that let you wander the Backrooms. You wandered the generated space with nothing but the sound of humming lights and fighting for your sanity. Cue countless spinoffs and alternate takes – none of which were as good as the original.
Fast forward again to Jan 2022, and Kane Pixels created some amazing found-footage style re-creations that are some of the best entries since the original. Give it a watch to get that creepy feel of wandering alone in an empty mall or parking lot at night while getting the creeping feeling someone, or something, is following you…
Update 07/29/2023
Someone has created a free Steam game that lets you play this VHS style walking experience. The Complex: Found Footage
It’s all over the news that tech layoffs are everywhere. It appears that layoffs in tech are already well above the pace of the Great Recession of 2008. The treading for 2023 is looking to be even worse. Some say that the fundamentals of this tech crash are much better than the 2001 dot-com crash, but we’re clearly on a very bad, and accelerating, job loss trajectory.
Alphabet: 16-week base severance package with an additional two weeks for every year of employment at Google, Pichai said in a memo to employees. Laid-off employees will also have “at least” 16 weeks of share vesting accelerated and receive 6 months of health-care coverage.
Microsoft: Benefit-eligible U.S. employees are to receive severance, six months of health care and stock vesting, and 60 days of notice.
Amazon: Amazon is offering full pay and benefits over a 60-day period, when Amazon will keep them on the payroll but they won’t be expected to keep working. After that period, Amazon will offer laid-off employees several weeks of severance depending on their length of time with the company, a separation payment, transitional health benefits and job placement. It’s unclear if Amazon’s severance package includes any provisions that would allow employees to accelerate the vesting of stock compensation.
Salesforce: Laid-off employees would receive a minimum of “nearly” five months of pay. Benioff’s letter to employees also said that laid-off employees would receive health insurance benefits and career resources. Severance packages would include six months of health-care coverage and a “minimum of two months outplacement support.”
Meta: Zuckerberg promised “every” laid-off employee 16 weeks of severance, plus two weeks for every year of service, as well as vesting of restricted share units and health insurance coverage for a predetermined amount of time.
Twitter: Musk had previously said that laid-off employees would receive three months of severance pay. But some Twitter employees said that when they got their severance letters, they were offered only one month of severance in return for a non-disparagement agreement and a waiver of their right to sue the company.
Valefisk is a game designer that has decided that games can be a great way to troll and torture his friends and players.
In the past, he’s done a variety of game playthroughs – but severely abusing the mechanics in hilarious ways and with completely bonkers self-imposed challenges. The videos are all really good examinations of our assumptions about games and how violating those assumptions produces hilarious results. He took the low-budget peasant farming game Farmer’s Life and played it trying to stay as drunk as possible while completing challenges (he called it the Eastern European living challenge). Playing the empire building game Victoria 3 but with a traitor like Among Us. Imagine playing a CS:GO tournament but the actual player is blindfolded and a second person is trying to tell the player where to go and shoot. He creates cities in Skylines that are nothing but roads. Plays battle games with no unit caps and even playing Crusader Kings but only allowing marriage alliances that are incest.
More recently he has started purposefully making games to torture and befuddle his friends. He’s made such creations as EXTREME Monopoly, a first-person adventure game with purposefully broken mechanics and puzzles that make no sense, and a host of other troll playthroughs of games. more recently a board game that is just…hilariously evil.
He unleashes it on his friends – one of whom appears to be nursing a massive hangover.
Groundbreaking immunotherapy for repair-deficient colon cancer
The findings of a small clinical trial with 14 patients were presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting in June 2022 by researchers from MSK. In six months of treatment with dostarlimab, a monoclonal antibody therapy drug, all 14 patients saw their colorectal cancer tumors vanish entirely.
In the study, all 14 patients received the immunotherapy treatment dostarlimab as the first-line treatment for mismatch repair-deficient locally advanced rectal cancer. MSK researchers administered single-agent dostarlimab, an anti-PD-1 monoclonal antibody, every three weeks for six months in patients with mismatch repair-deficient stage 2 and 3 rectal adenocarcinomas, to be followed by standard chemoradiation and surgery.
All 14 patients who initiated treatment and had at least six months of follow-up saw no evidence of a tumor through numerous tests including an MRI, PET scan, and biopsy to name a few. Because of the disappearance of the tumors, none of the patients required chemoradiation or surgery.
While mismatch repair-deficient colon cancer is not the most common type of colon cancer (only about 3-5% of colon cancers), the findings showed astounding results of what appears to be an actual cure for this type of cancer without surgery or chemotherapy. 5 years of follow-up monitoring will be required to confirm this result, so there is still a long way to go.
