Mystery Supply Company
Enjoy the background sounds and music of the classic Scooby Doo episodes? The Mystery Supply Company creates lots of looped backgrounds of those classic episodes. Great if you need some background ambience.
Black balling employees
Microsoft is also said to have imported Meta’s policy of blacklisting departed employees it doesn’t want back. In Microsoft’s case, BI said, the two-year bar applies only to people let go for underperformance. Microsoft also changing its bonus rewards system by increasing the rewards granted to workers producing the most results over periods of three or four years, rather than just one or two.
Microsoft’s actions follow similar moves by Meta, Google, and Amazon, which all recently introduced incentives for workers to produce at the highest levels they can—while regularly firing employees considered to be lagging.
Intel did this a number of years back under BK and it didn’t go so great. Many great employees left and never came back because of the punitive nature. An employee might not be a great fit for one group – but does that warrant black-balling an employee for ALL positions? It seems like a failure of management and hiring to me.
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Influence and mind control
I was reading some fun stuff about the mysterious urban-legend arcade game Polybius. As part of the reading, I got curious if the mind control or brainwashing claimed was actually possible.
During some simple searching, I ran across this interesting video that claims getting information from people is very possible – but not via Hollywood brain wave machines and magical drugs.
Alone in the Dark
Great little mini-documentary on creation of one of the first 3D adventure games: Alone in the Dark.
You can also watch the original GDC talk by Frederick Raynal
Movie theaters challenge you to bring your own bucket – and people do
Movie theater popcorn can often have over a 1000% markup compared to how much it actually costs the theater to buy and produce. While that might sound excessive, bottled water is often marked up over 4,000%
In an effort to help people come back to theaters, Cinemark ran a promotion in which they would fill any popcorn container you wanted to bring for $5. People responded!
Doctor Hauzer for 3DO
Before survival horror became a thing, at the same time as Alone in the Dark, Doctor Hauzer existed on the 3DO. A fully 3D horror game published in 1994.
Physical Pong
Daniel Perdomo started a project to re-create the classic Atari’s arcade PONG game – but in physical form. It uses mechanical paddles and a magnetic floating bit.
I recently got to play with one of the ones created via their successful kickstarter and it was awesome fun. I would love to own one, but it’s unclear if they’re still making them. They were also a cool few thousand dollars when they were selling them.
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Heineken kidnapping
Fascinating story of the real life kidnapping and ransom of the Heineken CEO.
I like how Hoog used old-school 90’s era graphics to tell the story. He seems to have a number of other videos that use this same style. Awesome
Flight instruments as art
SkyArt has a collection of unique and interesting avionics controls, dials, and readouts that you can buy and use as a cool desktop curios. They even have furniture and large art pieces that you can buy.
Google reports on how to transition to memory-safe languages
Improving code quality has become as, if not the, most important aspect of software. Bugs and security holes are exposing attack surfaces for personal data theft, infiltration, and ransomware. Google has been trying a number of approaches to improve things, and now they released a report on the effect of replacing memory unsafe languages with memory-safe languages.
Their approach stems from a number of somewhat obvious, but powerful observations. Memory vulnerabilities in a block of code decay quickly as it is tested in live conditions. In fact, they disappear exponentially with time as bugs are found and fixed. Therefore, the time when code is most likely to have the most memory safety issues is in brand new code.
It makes sense. As bugs are fixed, code becomes more and more bug-free (which is one of the big fallacies of the ‘lets scrap it and re-write all this messy code’ approaches). This also means that replacing old code with memory-safe languages actually doesn’t give you the best ROI. Instead, a team should focus on making sure the NEW code they add is in a memory-safe language to reduce the maximum amount of issues in the least amount of development time.
Google proved this out in their Android stack. By leaving the old code alone (just fixing bugs), they focused on just ensuring all NEW code was in a memory-safe language. This simple approach gave them a huge improvement in the number of memory vulnerabilities encountered each year:
Definitely worth a read
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