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Category: Interesting or Cool

Living computer museum is no more

Living computer museum is no more

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The estate of Paul Allen has decided to close the Living Computer Museum and Labs mid 2024. All the equipment was sold off at during several high profile Christies auctions.

It’s a terrible loss to computing history in my opinion.

Update: check out the links below if you want to look at some of the amazing items that were sold.

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Building your own NAS box

Building your own NAS box

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Before going out and building your own NAS RAID solution, you need to consider some important details. One detail that is getting a lot more press is energy costs. In the past, some would recommend just taking some old desktop hardware you have laying around and then loading a dedicated NAS operating systems such as Unraid or TrueNAS.

But as many have pointed out in the comments, using a dedicated NAS box has some serious advantages – mostly in more efficient power draw. While a commercial NAS box may cost about 20% more, that can easily pay for itself after a year of power draw if the NAS is always on.

It’s always good to check your TCO (total cost of ownership) before just whipping something up you’ll need long-term.

GitHub is under constant, automated attack

GitHub is under constant, automated attack

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This problem is very serious since AI’s are often trained on Github projects. This means your AI generated code is increasingly more likely to have serious security issues in it.

GitHub is undergoing automated attacks involving the cloning and creation of huge numbers of malicious code repositories, and while the developers have been working to remove the affected repos, a significant amount are said to survive, with more uploaded on a regular basis.

An unknown attacker has managed to create and deploy an automated process that forks and clones existing repositories, adding its own malicious code which is concealed under seven layers of obfuscation.

Given the current scale of the attack, said by the researchers to be in the millions of uploaded or forked repositories, even a 1% miss-rate still means potentially thousands of compromised repos still on the site.

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Top cities Gen Z is moving

Top cities Gen Z is moving

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Gen Z is making very different choices than millennials. This is something especially true for cities like Portland, OR that went from one of the fastest growing cities in the US to the 6th fastest SHRINKING cities with the highest commercial vacancy rate in the country.

A financial services company used data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey to determine which U.S. cities saw the most Gen Zers move in throughout 2022:

1. Ann Arbor, Michigan

2. Provo, Utah

3. Boulder, Colorado

4. College Station, Texas

5. Athens, Georgia

6. Tallahassee, Florida

7. Berkeley, California

8. Gainesville, Florida

9. Columbia, South Carolina

10. Syracuse, New York

Grok 3 clones Breakout

Grok 3 clones Breakout

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David Plummer re-created the classic game Breakout using Grok 3 AI. It generated a Javascript program that can be played in a browser. He even shared the prompts and code on github.

Another score for AI heavily augmenting the need for programmers.

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Meow Wolf Santa Fe secrets

Meow Wolf Santa Fe secrets

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I recently enjoyed a trip to Meow Wolf in Santa Fe. Here’s some links for Easter eggs and secrets to be found in Meow Wolf Santa Fe.

Some people might like to explore blindly, but I found the trip much more enjoyable having some background knowledge before going. I still spent 3 hours there even knowing much of the story. There’s just too much to see and read if you wanted to go in blind. It would easily take half a dozen 1-2 hour trips just to read through the materials in each of the sections and piece it all together.

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Making Streaming interactive

Making Streaming interactive

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Twitch streamers are really getting creative. Besides completely AI generated content, others have been experimenting with viewer participation in unique ways.

Shindigs is one of the streamers really experimenting with new ideas. He’s streamed as a gun with eyes, a “biblically accurate angel McRib vtuber”, and a Costco hotdog. He also mixes real and animated footage. In one stream, Shindigs went “back in time” every time he died in Lies of P, eventually turning the broadcast into a radio play. He recently let characters play Christmas songs with chat and created music experiments live.

While playing Helldivers, he recently allowed his viewers the ability to use chat to type things in and they pop up in the stream like a helmet cam. The viewers quickly started riffing on numerous themes while he played.

He created this effect using SAMMI, a stream tool that connects Twitch chat and Channel Point redemptions to Open Broadcast Software. With it, he created his Twitch plugin called ‘Bug Twitter’ that allowed this functionality. He also created a plugin called ‘strategems’ that uses OBS’s Advanced Mask. Viewers can use Twitch channel points to activate effects like distorting the screen to make it more difficult or ‘Australia mode’ that flips the screen upside down.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2071145144

Check out his X stream here, or watch more of his videos on his Twitch channel.

He’s not the only one being creative. CardboardCowboy built a cartoon RPG world where the NPCs are played by Twitch chat with TTS (Text To Speech) complete with proximity-based audio that fades off as he moves away.

Young streamers on Twitch seem to be exploring a lot of extremely creative ideas with a more publicly interactive form of streaming. There’s likely an interesting balance between interacting with the viewers and yet maintaining some sense of cohesive sanity and avoiding trolls seeking to ruin the experience – but what they are doing and trying are wildly creative. Give it a look

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‘Dark Patterns’ in game design

‘Dark Patterns’ in game design

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[Dark Patterns are] design practices that trick or manipulate users into making choices they would not otherwise have made and that may cause harm. – 2022 FTC definition

Eric Weiss, a trial lawyer who defends companies from class action lawsuits and other disputes, is warning software and game dev clients during his GDC talk to be aware of the dangers of “dark patterns” as lawsuit cases are rising.

This isn’t just academic – and not just related to gambling sites. The FTC just landed a $245 million settlement with Epic Games after claiming that Fortnite’s unintuitive UI constituted using “digital dark patterns to bill Fortnite players for unintentional in-game purchases.”

What are other dark patterns? The Dark Pattern Games website gives some examples. The free-to-play market of apps probably has some of the most egregious. Some you may have encountered from online retailers include:

  • A warning that a product is almost sold out—”only two remaining!”—when there’s actually plenty of stock
  • A timer that counts down the seconds remaining on a limited-time 20% discount, but just resets after hitting zero
  • A request to send you email updates that can only be rejected by agreeing to a ridiculous accusation like “No thanks, I don’t care about children”

Weiss says that one of the dark patterns is grinding: “One of the identified dark patterns is grinding. And that’s ‘making a free version of a game so cumbersome and labor intensive that the player is induced to unlock new features with in-app purchases.’ So it’s set up in a way that you don’t need to make a purchase, but is it so difficult that the practical reality for the reasonable gamer is that they’re going to have to make that purchase? Have they been deceived, or is it unfair in some way?”

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AI Tarpits

AI Tarpits

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AI companies are desperate for content to train their models. They’re catching increasing flack for hammering websites and scraping every bit of written, video, and still image content on the entire internet. AI company data scrapers have been busted for everything from grabbing copyright data to more practical problems of hammering certain websites millions of times a day and ignoring robots.txt files that are used to tell bots what to stay out of.

Enter, tarpits and Nepenthes.

Building on an anti-spam cybersecurity tactic known as tarpitting, he created Nepenthes, malicious software named after a carnivorous plant that will “eat just about anything that finds its way inside.”

Aaron clearly warns users that Nepenthes is aggressive malware. It’s not to be deployed by site owners uncomfortable with trapping AI crawlers and sending them down an “infinite maze” of static files with no exit links, where they “get stuck” and “thrash around” for months, he tells users. Once trapped, the crawlers can be fed gibberish data, aka Markov babble, which is designed to poison AI models.

It’s just one more counterattack in poisoning and combating AI.

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Local Live Film Scores

Local Live Film Scores

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Live bands doing the music scores done live alongside the movie – like old silent film days? Yes please.

I’ve seen a few of these over the years from various different bands/groups – such as Mood Area 52 when they did Nosferatu at the Mission Theater in 2013 and the hugely popular showing of Dario Argento’s Suspiria accompanied by the Italian prog-rock band Goblin lead by original keyboardist Claudio Simonetti.

Pigeon Milk seems to be infrequently doing some shows like this as well. They don’t seem to have any schedule or even a website. Looks like you’ll have to use your local event tracking sites to find them.

Here’s a clip of them from the Kelly’s showing of the movie 2001.