AI Brings History to Life
AI can bring still images to life. I wrote about MyHeritage Deep Nostalgia tool before.
Adam Savage discusses work
What’s the best way to get paid as a freelancer? How do you assess the viability of a new member of your workshop team? Two topics covered by Jame’s video below.
I found the evaluation of a new team member as really interesting. I have found it’s not as simple as just hiring the smartest person. Special forces absolutely requires competency/physical ability – but will also drop candidates for reasons of integrity, perseverance, ability to take personal responsibility, professionalism, and especially ability to operate as a team player. Being a maverick or deceitful, no matter how talented you are, make you a bad team member.
“One of the less smart people – that wasn’t that great – had an attitude that was so good it made the workplace function better. I can’t quite explain it but it was really true.”
He nails it. It’s true on software teams. It’s not always true, but time and again I’ve seen personal dynamics and attitude are MORE important than ability. A rockstar that’s hard to work with or can’t get along with others might as well not be on the team. Either manage them on a project all by themselves or find another teammate that fits well.
Also, when it comes to the difficulty of being a freelance, Mike Monteiro’s “F*ck You, Pay Me” video is a must-watch.
Saving the largest commercial CRT ever made
The Sony Trinitron KX-45ED1, aka the PVM-4300, is thought to be the largest CRT TV ever sold to consumers. It has a 43-inch visible diagonal on its 45-inch tube and weighs in at almost 440 lbs. The stand alone is over 170lbs. At the time, it cost $40,000 USD in 1989 (or about $100K today, adjusted for inflation)
Long since thought gone, Shank Mods managed to save an extremely rare 43-inch Sony Trinitron KX-45ED1 from an untimely ending. It was being kept on the second floor of an Osaka noodle shop called Chikuma Soba – a building due for demolition in just a few weeks.
It was moved from the soba shop, crated up, and shipped to the US. While it worked well – it did need servicing. The alignment was off, had some tube cataracts, and the dynamic convergence amplifier circuit had failed. They worked on them all and have a very nice display.
The video describes the incredible journey and is definitely worth a watch
Articles:
Demoscene is not dead
Andreas from Insomniac Games made a Amiga 500 demo in 2019 as part of this work with The Black Lotus demo group. He presented not only the Eon Amiga 500 demo, but tons of great technical information about the 4 years it took to develop it.
Old demo scene programmers hold amazing amounts of wisdom. When solving the core pieces of logic, I found this is true (but when doing larger, complete system development, these don’t work)
Work backwards from desired outcome to discover your constraints. Don’t just brute force. Instead, ask, what must be in place for us to get the peak performance from the key component we’re dependent on (render, disk load, etc). Then work from that constraint.
Do everything you can at compile time, not run time. Pre-compute tons of things – even the build-up of the data structures in memory. Just run it and then save and reload that blob automatically.
Over-generalizing early is a trap many devs fall into. Solve the problem in front of you. Trust that you can delete the code and do something else if it sucks. It’s cheaper and faster than trying to anticipate things ahead of time. Do the simplest thing that will work and if it sucks come back and delete it.
If you end up with a small runtime table/code that doesn’t require runtime checks because you can prove it can’t go wrong, you’re doing something right.
When developing, the actual Amiga is super slow and limited. They took an Amiga emulator and hacked it up so they could debug on it instead. Using calltraps to trigger the emulator, they added memory protection, fast forward, trigger debug, loading symbols, cycle accurate profiling, single step, high-resolution timers, etc. Also allows perfect input playback.
Modern threading and consumer/producer components (disk loading, data transfer, decompressors, etc) often just throw things in buffers and YOLO. There’s no clear backpressure to show you where you’re wasting time/space. Running on this kind of hardware/simulator shows you how much time the design is wasting by poorly and inefficiently designed algorithms/constraints.
Presented at Handmade Cities event in Seattle at: https://handmadecities.com/
Homeless Deaths in Portland increase dramatically – again
In another example of well meaning but misguided homeless advocacy policies, Portland is seeing a dramatic increase in suffering and death – at much higher rates than the rest of the country that is seeing declines. A report from the Multnomah county medical examiner shows homeless deaths have been increasing at a dramatic rate year over year – despite some of the strongest implementation and policies that spending millions in free tents, permit free camping, wide distribution of free ‘harm reduction’ drug use kits, legalization of drug use, suspension of prosecution for drug crimes, and open door offers of free treatment.
It turns out that after a decade of homeless advocacy groups encouraging these policies, they are actually increasing deaths at an alarming and clear rate far higher rates than even imprisonment ever did. The death rates can be mapped almost 1-1 with policy implementation. The end result is dramatically more suffering and deaths.
Which should be no surprise. Activists and advocacy groups are not medical or scientific groups. They’re simply (at best) social workers with a particular agenda – many without any training or background in the causes they are behind. It’s probably time we started questioning the policies and money spent by activists and advocacy groups just like we do the proposed policies of politicians. If someone truly cares about the plight of homeless, it’s our duty to question and hold these groups accountable for the deaths the policies are causing.
All of this also in spite of a massive new homeless income tax – proving once again that it’s not a money or compassion problem – but a leadership problem.
Data available in the annual Domicile Unknown Multnomah County Health Department report.
Sub-pixel art
Japhy Riddle in a hackaday article tries to re-create the look of old CRT sub-pixels – the individual red, green, blue phosphors that make up a single pixel. His approach is to basically fake it with Photoshop, but old systems like the Apple II, debayering, and even modern text anti-aliasing actually use some of these techniques.
2025 Lincoln City Glass Floats events
Finders Keepers runs the yearlong hidden glass float events on the central Oregon coast and just released its 2025 schedule Tuesday, detailing its 16 special drops over the course of the year, in addition to its daily drops on Lincoln City beaches.
- Jan. 3-5 – 25th Anniversary Opening Weekend: 100 floats
- Feb. 8-17 – Antique week: 100 Japanese antique-style floats
- Feb. 14-16 – Valentine’s Day: 50 Red/pink/white floats
- March 22-April 19 – Spring break: 200 floats
- April 19-22 – Earth Day: 50 Earth Day floats
- May 9-11 – Mother’s Day: 50 floats
- June 13-15 – Father’s Day: 50 floats
- June 20-21 – Casino Anniversary: 30 floats
- June 21-22 – Summer Kite: 10 floats
- Aug. 30-Sept 1 – Ocean Conservation: 40 floats
- Sept. TBD – Celebration of Honor: 50 Red/white/blue floats
- Sept. 20-21 – Fall Kite: 10 floats
- Oct. 11-14 – Indigenous Peoples Day: 50 floats
- Oct. 31-Nov. 2 – Halloween: 50 floats
- Nov. 14-16 – Restoration Pow-Wow: 50 floats
- Dec. 12-14 – Holiday: 50 floats
Articles
Most played games on Steam 2024
Steam has published the list of 100 most played games (by peak concurrent player count) of 2024. Also shown are the top sellers, new releases, steam deck, played with controller, and VR categories. Linked at the bottom are the previous years winners as well.
Links:
Having strange dreams? Call this number!
The best description I have heard of Portland when I got here in the late 90’s was that it was a city full of shipwrecks and refugees – where people wash up on it’s shores with few prospects and sketchy pasts. Portland is nothing if not a strange place. You’ll find odd things posted on poles all over town. Every now and again, someone will dig into one of these to find out what they’re about. The Willamette Valley Dream Survey is one of those. Long story short: the most recent branch of this that showed up in Utah revolves around a doomsday prediction on Sept 5th, 2020.
Nexpo did a little over-dramatic dig into the phenomenon by going so far to buy a burner phone and calling them. He also digs into a local 2600-like hacker group called Futel (he pronounces it wrong, it’s pronounce Few-tell – like ‘futile’ as a play on words about telephone monopolies and other alt-conspiracy type plays on words). that converts old payphones into free (likely VOIP) phones.
- Reddit posting: https://www.reddit.com/r/Portland/comments/1gz8lz3/was_taking_a_walk_and_saw_this_couldnt_get_a/
- Happy Valley Dream Survey: https://www.reddit.com/r/RBI/comments/gds79y/happy_valley_dream_surveys_a_personorganization/?share_id=VwUeGwSqFJS1Iq4VOWPWl&utm_content=1&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1
Only 15% of Steam users are playing your new game
Valve’s Year In Review for Steam revealed that only 15% of Steam players spent their time on games released in 2024. 47% of players devoted their time to games from the past 1-7 years (or “recent favorites”), and 37% played titles from eight or more years ago (“classics”).
That 15% is a significant increase over the 9% of playtime spent in 2023 on new games released that year (though it’s down on the 17% of time folks spent in new games in 2022). So 2024 has actually seen a bit of a bounce back from last year.
Links: