Want to create your own clothes that have lighted tape/lines like recent Tron movies? Want to create unique lighting at your next event or home? Want to wrap your car in illuminated panels?
Look no further than Ellumiglow. They sell a wide variety of wearable electroluminescent solutions for home and clothing.
Rating exactly how well an AI does on tasks has been an open field. There are benchmarks, but there have been lots of arguments these current early benchmarks are too limited or biased. A new player is on the field and they seem to have discovered that some benchmarks are actually evaluating incorrectly a shocking amount of times.
A startup called Datacurve released a benchmark it says does a much better job. DeepSWE, a 113-task evaluation spanning 91 open-source repositories and five programming languages, produces a dramatically wider spread among the same frontier models.
It’s biggest shock is that it claims many benchmarks aren’t even correct. Their tests cover a pretty impressive and wider range of characteristics such as bigger, more representative tasks. They avoid what they call ‘contamination’ that results from benchmarks that rely on simple Github coding samples that some models simply regugitate vs truely generate. And most damning – they found that some benchmarks verifiers (the part of the code that verifies what the AI built is correct) gives false positive/negative rates from 8-24% of the time.
More benchmarks and more testing is valuable for evaluating models – so hopefully these guys will help push the industry to more scrutiny and reproducible real-world results.
You can even go download it and try it on your own models.
Links:
When you were at home growing up, each day felt so long. Now that you’re grown and on your own, it feels like it never lasted long enough.
Gabriel Woolf was re-united with the prop Sutekh mask he wore in the 1975 episodes of Pyramids of Mars. He puts the mask on and re-creates the voice perfectly. Not bad after 50 years.
Ethanol gas proports to reduce air pollution; but it’s not without side effects. Gas mileage goes down by about 3-4%. Ethanol is hygroscopic which means it attracts water and can lead to corrosion and water-fuel phase separation over time can damage rubber seals or create gum deposits.
Therefore, it’s recommended that equipment with small engines, motorcycles, classic cars, and especially watercraft should use non-ethanol gas. But where to find it?
Pure-gas.com lets you look up stations in just about any state that sells ethanol free gas. Be ready to pay for it though – usually $0.20-$1 more per gallon.
Eric Hanson decided to hike for 6 days across the Brenta Dolomites using an intense via ferrata trail between mountain huts. You can see some of the trails such as the Via Ferrata Castiglioni and Bocchette Centrali while staying at the XII Apostoli and other amazing mountain huts.
Before flash memory became ubiquitous, hard drives were the only means of bulk storage. The Nokia N91 cell phone had a tiny Toshiba (MK4001MTD) 4GB hard drive in it. You can even still buy some of these old phones if you want a working version.
Outside of the mass, I have to say that going to confession is one of my favorite sacraments. Not that it’s always easy, but the sense of freedom and grace you get afterwards is unlike anything else. It’s also a wonderful way to bring our brokenness to Jesus and ask directly for grace to help.
But to have a good confession, one must take time to reflect on their life. There’s lots of ways of examining our conscience, but one must be careful of their limitations. Reflecting on the Ten Commandments is a classic way. We can also review our corporal works of mercy, doctrine on Catholic social teaching, and the Beatitudes.
But all these different ways might still miss something critical – the genuine desire and examination of what is keeping your relationship with Jesus stuck or divided.
These lists can lead someone into just legally reviewing and going through a rote list in confession (see the video below at 1:57). Now, we should be reflecting and making a list of any mortal sins we must name directly in kind and number. But if we’re not careful, this approach can focus us too much on a big list of largely minor sins. Again, there isn’t anything exactly wrong with this approach; but it might cause us to start seeing their relationship with God like that with an accountant or lawyer.
It might be preventing us from addressing the things that are truly blocking us from completely following Christ.
The Breaking In the Habit video above gives great advice. What if you put down the list and ask what is weighing on your heart the most right now? If Jesus were to return right now, what would get in the way of your following him completely? What is the hinderance in your relationship with Jesus right now?
I recently went to an unfamiliar church for confession, and instead of the usual pages of scripture based reflections; they had a simple one sheet page that was great. Instead of focusing on a legalistic review, it seemed more to ask yourself what is the thing that is keeping you from fully following Christ in your life right now.
Maybe give this list a chance for your next confession.
EXAMINATION OF CONSCIENCE
“Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.” Mt. 11:28
Old Man Yells at Code decided to write an upscaler for old Sierra games like Kings Quest and Space Quest. Upscaling old pixel art is not as simple as you would expect since the old Sierra games used vector art. He does a great job discussing the tradeoffs and making a working version – even if some of the charm of those old games is the pixelization artifacts.
Microsoft has decided to open source DOS 1.0 on the 45th anniversary. In 2018, Microsoft open-sourced MS‑DOS 1.25 and 2.11. In 2024 they made the source for MS‑DOS 4.0 available to the public as well. On DOS 1.00’s 45th anniversary, Microsoft has released the earliest DOS 1.0 source code discovered to date.
Check out the Paterson listings on github. It has transcription of the listings, original files extracted from printouts of the source.