kaiyimi has one of the better videos on getting an SGI IRIX system. Looks like you have to use specific versions of MAME64 (223) and jump through lots of hoops – but it seems like a workable solution.
I would love to know how he set up the original hard drive image.
If you’re looking for me, I’m with all the grown men in the corn.
I didn’t even realize the old Bop-It toy had an ending. The original edition ended after a maximum score of 100. The second edition went up to 200 points.
This song is amazing – and perfect for Easter.
The internet is just now becoming aware that many new cars have cameras that watch you. Everyone is ascribing this to insurance companies, government control, and so forth.
The reality? This was mandated under the Biden administration and the EU for all new cars to have drowsiness detection systems in all cars. One of the solutions car manufacturers have found is to point a bunch of cameras at you and do gaze detection.
If people are freaking out about this, wait until they hear that all cars and trucks starting in 2026 must have passive drunk driving testing systems before you can start the car – a law which is ironically being defended by alcohol companies. Can you guess why?
Yosh has been covering the increasing use of AI to test for better and faster racing times for track A01. The conclusion: AI was able to bet the human world record, but is still lagging the hand-tuned TAS (tool assisted speedrun). They’re not done trying yet – we’ll have to watch and see how many more records fall to AI and which do not.
I also heard this from another person that worked directly with Steve Jobs. Fascinating comparison with Elon Musk as well.
The 1993 movie Sneakers (currently free on Youtube) is one of my favorite movies. It has an amazing cast and one of the better soundtracks I’ve run across. It is one of the first great movies about hackers – and it’s largely very accurate for the 90’s era technology. Back when phone phreaking, cracking and copying games, pirate BBS boards, satellite TV hacking, building computer viruses, and breaking into early computer systems was all the rage.
One of the scenes in the movie involves a mathematician talking about large number theory in relation to cryptography. I took such a grad course on cryptography at Purdue back in the 90’s; and remember listening to his prattle about Artin maps, prime factorization, and a possible breakthrough of Gaussian proportions. Little did I know, however, his little diatribe and the slides were written by no other than Leonard Adleman – a 2002 Turing Award winner – as one of the creators of RSA encryption.
He recounts his interaction with Larry Lasker who approached him to consult on the movie and write the scene. Here Adleman shares his memories:
He told me that there would be a scene wherein a researcher would lecture on his mathematical work regarding a breakthrough in factoring – and hence in cryptography. Larry asked if I would prepare the slides and words for that scene. I liked Larry and his desire for verisimilitude, so I agreed. Larry offered money, but I countered with Robert Redford – I would do the scene if my wife Lori could meet Redford.
I worked hard on the scene. The “number field sieve,” (the fastest factoring algorithm currently known) is mentioned along with a fantasy about towers of number fields and Artin maps. I was tempted to name the new breakthrough the “function field sieve,” — since I was actually working on a paper at the time which would later appear with that title – but I decided against it, for reasons which escape me now.
I made beautiful slides on my Mac. This took a great deal of time (graphics programs were not as user friendly as they are now) but I wanted the stuff to look impressive. As it turns out, Larry had them redrawn by hand by some guy on his crew – he said that hand drawn slides looked more realistic. Of course he was right – but I could have saved a lot computer time had I known in the first place.
Len Adleman
‘Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things’
Isaac Newton
Despite the drawbacks and impractical nature of this device, space science researcher @dyd_Nao created a USB drive made of magnetic core memory – a technology that was used a lot in space technology of the 1950’s and 60’s.
It’s really awesome – despite the fact it only holds 128 bytes of data and is the size of a small dinner plate.