As automotive demand falters in Europe, Bosch said 450 of it’s employees (primarily in Stuttgart and Gerlingen) would get reduced hours, and equivalently reduced pay, starting March 1, 2025. In Oct, they also announced plans to lay off 7,000 employees
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Coming this March 25-29th, 2025 in Manorbier, UK, for a measly £2800-£3200, you can join in playing a Dungeons and Dragons campaign in a real castle. You Meet in a Tavern will provide 24 hours of actual D&D in the castle spread over 5 days – along with themed activities, elaborate medieval themed feasts and banquets, and can even stay at the castle (only a few slots – everyone else stays at the nearby cottage or in town).
Activities include archery, falconry, miniature painting, cooking experiences, and reenactments.
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The world has gotten very familiar to retro hardware re-creations, game emulation, re-releases, speed runs, creating new games for old platforms, as well as new exploits, tools, and discoveries. The nitty gritty work of doing all of this, however, is a labor of love. For those that dig into the binary, there’s tricky copyright concerns that need to be managed, only scraps of information about old hardware and software, highly optimized/tricky code that is tough to read, and almost no financial gain – except for commercial re-releases.
Made Up of Wires walks us through a live bit of decompiling of the PS1 classic: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night to give you a taste of the work involved in this kind of work. Not really that different than any other reverse engineering but surprisingly accessible as these old games were relatively small and simple.
Akka Arrh was a never released arcade game developed in the 80’s by the ever-wacky Llamasoft/Jeff Minter for Atari. A few cabinets were made, but only 3 are known to exist. None of the cabinet owners were willing to copy and share the roms. However, that all changed in 2019 and you can now play the old version via emulation.
As the story of the controversy goes on the MAMEWorld Forums, one of those collectors had a technician come to his home to repair some other game. In the process, the technician allegedly went into the Akka Arrh cabinet, copied the ROMS, and then anonymously posted them online. This generated a lot of controversy in the collector and retro gaming controversy.
Jeff Minter was hired to re-build the game in 2023. He said the original game’s design was “interesting but flawed” and lacked a compelling design to draw players back in when they lost. The much improved version is now available on PS4, PS5, Xbox, Switch, and PC.
I think the interesting part is the gameplay. It plays like a multi-level Missile Command in which you start zoomed out and as attackers break through your defenses you zoom in and back out again. I think that kind of mechanic is pretty difficult, and makes me ponder how that kind of mechanic could either be done differently or applied to very different kinds of games…
Stack Overflow just released it’s 2024 developer survey results. One of the metrics under
Shiftmag does a reasonable analysis of why – and it’s likely not coding itself.
Funhouse Lounge in Portland puts on an amazing show each year: Die Hard, the Musical Parody
David Oranchak post a video of how a 3-person international team of unlikely codebreakers (David, a warehouse operator in Belgium, and an applied mathematician) made the discovery that solved the Zodiac killer’s 340-character cipher. Cool points for the fact they used an old school hill climbing cipher program called AZDecrypt that was written in BASIC to solve Zodiac’s cipher.
You’re not going to get everyone to agree on plans. When you need everyone to agree, the least agreeable person has all the power.
If you find yourself all through life managing other’s emotions, expectations, and making sure they are happy all the time – when is it your turn to be happy?
You are allowed to take up space. Don’t minimize yourself or what you want so much that you never get a say in what happens.
Procrastinator: “I do great in my group projects because I don’t want to let them down.” That’s good. Is it ok to let yourself down by not putting the same effort in for yourself?
Boundaries are for you, not for other people.
You can’t control others or tell them what to do. Instead of saying “You can’t do that” to tell others what they can/can’t do, you only control yourself so you say “If you do that, I will do X <leave/report you/etc>”
What would happen if you started treating yourself the way you would treat someone you love?
When real leadership is absent, the loudest complainer tends to get their way.
When someone in your life is trying to bully, change, or make your day a little more shitty, by asking emotionally loaded questions – put the emotional response requirement back on them. Manipulative question: “So, do you like have any friends?” Answer: “Does that worry you?”
Happiness is the persistent willingness to exert some level of effort, each day, toward helping yourself and others
If you don’t have these problems with any other person in your life, why do you think you’re the problematic person in this one relationship?
Your parents know how to push your buttons because they’re the ones who installed them. Your siblings fine tuned them.
Person X may well drink themselves into an early grave, and there’s not a single thing you can do about it.
The facts may not care about your feelings, but your feelings conversely don’t care about the facts.
“Your feelings are something you cannot change”. When I was drinking and drugging, I constantly was trying to find a way to change what I felt or keep what I felt going forever. If I was sad, I did drugs to change that. If I was happy, I did drugs to keep that feeling going. Now I feel things and I realize the easiest thing to do is accept that I feel that way, and try to gather information about why. Then I go change what I can/needs changing and let the rest go.
Just because you can’t control something doesn’t mean you have to carry the weight of it
Every emotion is not tied to your illness/condition, sometimes you are just sad
Task avoidance: “It’s either now, or not now”, insinuating that if its not now it will keep being “not now” until you make it be “now”. That helped me a lot with getting tasks done as I think of them rather than putting it off until I feel like doing it.
The reason why your mom is acting this way towards you is not because she thinks you’re incompetent or bad at everything you do: it’s because she is COMPETING with you.
Happiness is not a destination.
Compromise means meeting in the middle. If the other person doesn’t do their half of the work, stop doing that work for them.
Thoughts are just thoughts. You can welcome them in, and then show them the door. They’re not reality.
If you spoke to your friends the way you speak to yourself, would they stick around?
Love is given. When a relationship doesn’t work out it doesn’t mean you’re not worthy of being loved.
Keeping the peace on the outside should never be more important than keeping the peace in yourself
You don’t have to be perfect to be worthy of love and respect
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The AI Black Mirror YouTube channel has some real nightmare fuel videos. The All Purpose Everything Sauce ad demonstrates what a hard time AI has with understanding how people eat.
MiSTer is an open source project that recreates classic computers, video game consoles, and arcade machines using modern FPGA hardware. It can emulate arcade systems (Neo Geo, etc), home consoles (NES, Gameboy, Atari 26/52/7800, NeoGeo, SNES, Vectrex) and even home computers like the Apple II/Mac/IBM PC.
It will run you about $350-500 – or even more if you want add-ons. It also requires some complex setup; but it can generate some of the best emulation of retro gaming systems.
A review of gameplay:
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