The author’s of the 3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development book have provided their intro book for free online. It’s basic for those getting started, but nothing beats free and the author has done a number of GDC talks.
Love it or hate it, the McRib was back for a limited time after Thanksgiving. The sandwich classic has been a crowd favorite since its debut in the 1980s.
But if you can’t get enough of that saucy taste, you could buy a whole gallon of sauce at their website WholeLottaMcRibSauce.com for $19.99.
As expected from such a marketing promotion, when they went on sale at 10:00 ET on November 25 they sold out almost instantly. Jugs appear to be going for about $100 a piece on eBay.
You could then try out the Sam’s club imitation McRib.
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A combination of COVID over hiring and AI is making the job market very tough. Especially considering the tech industry has been seeing record layoffs for the last 2 years.
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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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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.
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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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:
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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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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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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