Riumplus was inspired by the imagers in the game Riven (the sequel to Myst) to create his own working andotrope for Mysterium 2023.
Here’s the imager from the game:
And here’s his version:
It works by rotating two tablet/phone inside a cylinder that has slits cut in it so you only see the faces of the tablet directly facing you. He has a great writeup on how he created the device, filed a patent for it, and as has a video:
I like his thinking: we already have enough computers – what we need is more personality. Where are the kind of robots we saw as kids? C3PO, R2D2, the robot from Lost in Space. So, he hacked an Alexa into an old TV with a set of eyes and gives his robot a little of the personality he was looking for.
Veritasium does a great overview of maze-solving robots. He goes over the different algorithms as well as optimizations that weren’t optimal, but were faster because the mechanics of the path made it faster for the physics of the robots. There were also unique optimizations that take advantage of diagonals, gyroscopes, suction to make 6G turns, and other ideas.
It’s a reminder that even when something seems solved, there is likely huge optimizations still waiting to be discovered.
But then again, you can go the other direction and try to build the most unskilled robot. Hebocon celebrates unskilled robot builders – even penalizing those who try too hard or using proper technology.
Basically Homeless decided he wanted to make an invisible PC. What? He tried using a variety of different off-the-shelf technology so that he has just a empty desk with a piece of nano-particle film that has the desktop projected on by a digital projector.
Parts list:
There’s a lot of small details, so it’s worth the watch.
Dream Textures add-on for Blender by Carson Katri uses stable diffusion to generate textures for a scene. Below is an example based on the prompt “sci-fi abandoned buildings”. The AI-generated results aren’t always perfect, but the process is pretty amazing. Not to mention amazingly fast compared to creating from scratch.
Welcome to dISAppointment! Well, it has been disappointment for anyone wanting to use old retro sound cards or attach 5.25″ floppy drives or MFM/RLL hard drives in modern computers. They all relied on ISA controllers, which have not been supported for over a decade now. But is that about to change?
I recently read about this really clever hacker’s adapter. TheRasteri found he could still access the ISA bus lurking latently in modern computers through the Low Pin Count (LPC) bus which is exposed on the TPM port in many modern motherboards. He created a hardware interface board that connects to the TPM port, exposes an actual ISA slot.
He plugged in a Sound Blaster card via the adapter – and voila! It worked.
More details on his YouTube site, or you can follow the active development thread on Vogons. No word yet if he’s producing any for purchase; but he does want to open source the work and wants to see if he can partner with PCBWay to develop them.
I for one would absolutely buy a few of them.
Update:
Fintek makes the F85526 PCI Express to ISA Bridge IC.
It seems promising, but it is unclear if anyone has built a functioning device around the chip. Vogons even discussed it on their thread that also mentioned the dISAppointement ISA device.
-Me (inspired by Joel Spolsky)
“There is almost no reason to re-write a huge software codebase from scratch. If anything, evaluate wrapping it with an emulator that can filter for the things you want to change before a re-write.”
javidx9 walks us through his 3 month adventure writing a NES emulator in C++. He does a great job walking through the topics with beginner friendly explanations and good production values of diagrams and coding.
Other resources:
A very short, but decent beginner article on prompt engineering with chatGPT.
While ChatGPT is a robust language model, it does have its limitations. If you ask ChatGPT to “Provide information on machine learning,” it may respond with a lengthy but not necessarily top-quality answer. However, if you ask, “Tell me the pros and cons of using machine learning to solve image classification problems,” you are more likely to receive a superior outcome because:
Some other tips include:
CyberArk has discovered a few simple tricks will produce code for malware. By changing the request, they could make a wide variety of kinds of malware in almost no time – despite the ChatGPT filters to avoid this kind of malicious generation.
How? While ChatGPT initially refused to generate malicious code when asked directly, by asking ChatGPT using multiple constraints and asking it to obey, it merrily spit out the code.
Further, it appears the API version of ChatGPT doesn’t even have the filters and doesn’t require this manipulation.
They then modified the query and changed the injection method and other parameters. This mutated the code repeatedly, making the malware unique every time – including encoding it in base64 for even harder detection.
They then expand their experiment to include the creation of ransomware – and get similarly good results.
The article is definitely worth a read. Have you made an offline backup of all your files lately? 🙂
KiraTV does an excellent investigation into one of the most popular and hyped games called ‘The Day Before’. Hounded by continual delays, strange announcements, and then final removal from Steam – Kira jumps in and finds that the reality behind the game and it’s studio founders is even MORE bizarre than you could imagine.
Besides documenting the bizarre development of the game itself, he finds a lot of interesting things about the even more bizarre Fntastic game studio. This includes the almost cult-like studio heads and their idea of ‘volunteering‘ – which appears to be unpaid work wrapped in lots of creepy grooming.
This is absolutely something I see on the rise in startup and game culture. I see institutions that create cult-like atmospheres around founders and a culture that gaslight new or naïve employees using words like ‘passion’. Meanwhile, the reality is they provide inadequate/non-existent pay, long hours, and dangerous levels of emotional manipulation for anyone who questions, disagrees, or tries to threaten their control.