Here’s a 12 hour time lapse of American, Delta, and United during the outage. Possibly the biggest IT outage in human history. Definitely worse than Y2K ever was.
It’s a reminder that this all happened by accident from people trying to prevent issues. Shows you how fragile modern infrastructure really is.
Wiseguy is responsible for the release of both N64Recomp and Zelda64Recomp, a project that ports The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask to PC with graphical and QoL improvements like ray-tracing, uncapped FPS, and proper ultrawide display support.
While previous decompilation efforts took years, N64 recompile can do this automatically – in just a few minutes. Even more amazing is that it should work on just about any N64 game.
It’s pretty incredible work.
Articles:
Not content to see 3 years of decreasing population, Oregon is now seeing its innovation hubs of software and chip design dry up and move away.
Software employment statewide is down 7.4% from its peak in the summer of 2022. The software cutbacks may mirror what’s happening in Oregon’s chip industry, which boomed during the pandemic and then lost jobs last year.
Venture capital investment in Oregon startups fell sharply last year — to its lowest level since 2017. Relatively few entrepreneurs are starting tech companies in Oregon and those that are launching don’t seem to be attracting much attention. The Portland Incubator Experiment, which was at the center of Oregon’s software boom a decade ago, shut down its tech component last summer as tech entrepreneurship waned.
The article noted that Multnomah County now has one of the highest personal income tax rates that is likely making Portland less attractive for ambitious entrepreneurs.
Links:
Microsoft has recently release DOS 4.0 as MIT licensed OpenSource.
Dave’s Garage does a walkthrough of the history, sets up a dev environment (masm and C 5.1 compiler), builds the source, then bonus points for writing it to an actual 5.25″ floppy using a greaseweazle. He then boots it off an actual IBM XT.
It doesn’t get more American than this. 😀
Replicate built a GPT-4 powered vision + ElevenLabs python script so you can star in your own Planet Earth episode narrated by David Attenborough. (Code: https://github.com/cbh123/narrator)
AI Raspberry Pi Cat Detection constantly monitors your feline friend and immediately sends you an email the moment it makes mischief. You can also configure the AI narrator to keep you posted on your cat’s activities
What happens when you combine an Etch-a-Sketch toy screen with the Raspberry Pi? You get Micah Tilton robot Etch-a-Sketch project.
Do your kids like bedtime stories? Stefano Mazzocchi has put Fably, the AI storytelling companion, on a Raspberry PI Zero.
Just push the button, tell it what kind of story you want, and enjoy the results. So much for bedtime stories with the kids.
This project is open source and you can build one for yourself or run it from your laptop. The project is located here: https://stefanom.github.io/fably/
Articles:
Throwflame bills the The Thermonator robot as “the first-ever flamethrower-wielding robot dog”. It is now available for purchase for $9,420.
The Thermonator is a quadruped robot with an ARC flamethrower mounted to its back, fueled by gasoline or napalm. It also has LIDAR for mapping and obstacle avoidance, an onboard camera for first person view, and laser sighting.
Articles:
While other states are recovering from all the things that happened during Covid, Oregon went from being one of the #1 places to move to now one of the 8 states that is now losing population as people move away.
The picture is even a little worse than a one-year metric because this isn’t a one time thing. Oregon, and the city of Portland, has lost population for 3 years running. The state demographers have been using their own numbers and ignoring US Census data; and have been wrong (3 years in a row) saying these were only blips and incorrectly predicting quick rebounds.
Demographers are now starting to sounding economic impact alarm bells and the state faces the possibility of losing a seat in congress. Some have pointed out that this is exactly how rust belts formed in the NE.
Oregon now has the dubious distinction of ending up on a recent Visual Capitalist chart.
