While these changes were measurable, they were unlikely to stand out in blind listening.
In recent testing, audiophiles were unable to tell the difference between audio signals going through a copper cable, a green banana, or even wet mud.
Runescape was one of the first really big, popular online games. Soon, people wrote bot programs to do repetitive tasks for you. Then the game designers started fighting back from the bots.
What came next was the rise of the back and forth arms race with attack and counter-attack that created a lot of early MMORPG memes and cultural touchpoints. Today the arms race has advanced to ill-advised kernel based anti-cheat system and even AI based cheat detection.
Learning how and why these systems developed is an important part of any software engineers toolbag.
Each year on January 16, the town celebrates the traditional Luminarias festival. Purportedly held for five centuries, the origins of the festival trace back to a ritual purification to preserve the health of the horses in the village. Bonfires are lit in the central streets, and horses jump through the flames, with the smoke intended to protect the animals from disease.
The 70’s was famous for folk songs, but did you know this trend was also occurring overseas as well? Pentangle did a number of folk songs – but the songs they song weren’t from 20 or 30 years earlier like in the US. They were from 300 years earlier in 1775 like this song – Willy O Winsbury.
They also recorded this fantastic version of Hunting Song:
Open Sauce Technology and Creator Festival happens most years. Here’s a summary of cool keyboards found in at 2025. The next one will be July 17-19, 2026 in San Francisco.
As we enter Lent, we are invited to fast, give alms, and deepen prayer – but those are simply practices designed to help us reach the true goal: a relationship of truth with God and each other. I think there is a lot of confusion about fasting and almsgiving – because I know I got it wrong for a long time.
In Isaiah’s time, the people of Israel complained God didn’t seem to answer their prayers despite fasting and almsgiving. The passage tells us that the people were even trying hard to please God, but Isaiah was instructed to tell them why they were missing their mark. They were performing the acts of penance, but their hearts were still full of injustice and lacked conversion: driving their workers, leaving people naked and hungry, and even committing violence on one another. To go a step further, Jesus Himself tells us that there will be some who prophesy in His name and even drive out demons and performed miracles – but will still be rejected as having never known God. Why? Jesus gives us this parable:
The Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector
9 To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable: 10 “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11 The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. 12 I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’
13 “But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’
14 “I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”
Luke 18:9-14
At first, the Pharisee appears to be doing everything right – fasting, tithing on all his earnings as prescribed, and trying to live an upright life. There is not wrong with all that in itself. But Jesus tells us that this alone doesn’t justify us in God’s eyes. We see the Pharisee focused on how he is better than others around him – full of pride and silently judging others.
The modern version of this is saying, “I’m basically a good person – I don’t kill people or rob banks or anything.” If this is our response, we better take heed. Jesus is speaking to us too.
So is fasting, tithing, almsgiving worthless? No. Jesus is telling us that fasting and tithing without humility or while judging others is worthless. Fasting without repentance or conversion is worthless. Most of all, fasting and tithing without the purpose of connecting and reconciling your relationship with God is worthless.
Instead, we should fast and give alms with humility and the purpose of connecting ourselves with God spiritually. We should fast and give alms for the conversion of our hearts and as an offering for others. We should fast in ways to untie sin in our lives. We should stop behaviors that encourage others to sin. We should clothe the naked and feed the hungry at our door. We should help lose bonds of poverty, ignorance, fear, hunger, and illness to live justly with our fellow man.
Then our prayers will be heard and answered. But most of all, at the end of our lives we’ll find ourselves able to stand before the God we have loved and talked with daily and find ourselves justified – despite our sins – and hear the words,
23 His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. Since you have been faithful in small matters, I will give you much greater responsibilities. Come and share your master’s joy.’
Matthew 25:23
GDC sent out their annual State of the Game Industry survey and it confirms the dire state of game development. More than 25% of game developers were laid off the last 2 years and half of them have not found another job.
Game developer Farhan Noor, who has been tracking industry job cuts since 2022, estimates that around 8,500 workers were laid off in 2022, 10,500 workers in 2023, 14,600 workers in 2024 and 5,300 workers in 2025.
A North Korean imposter was uncovered, working as a contract system developer at Amazon U.S., after their keystroke input lag raised suspicions with security specialists. Instead of a more normal 10ms lag normal remote workers generated, this contractor’s lag was around 110ms.
North Korean workers have increasingly infiltrated U.S. organizations to raise hard currency for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) or sometimes indulge in espionage and/or sabotage. It’s definitely not the first time and joins their highly successful Bitcoin theft efforts.
Apple II copy protection was a really interesting thing. While floppy controllers were partly hardware/firmware devices, Apple II floppy disk controller was incredibly simple and most of the work of reading/writing was done in software. This meant that copy protection schemes for the Apple II could utilize a LOT more clever and difficult tricks such as custom data encoding, half tracks, empty tracks, bad crcs, bad addressing headers, etc.
As time has gone on, original Apple II disks are becoming more and more scarce. Even worse early cracking efforts often hacked the games in ways that got around disk protection, but also removed or broke things. Unfortunately, that meant removing opening cut scenes or other game-altering changes.
The 4am Archive on the Internet Archive is an attempt to back up those original copy protected games as they were. So far there are 1673 Apple II titles safely imaged.
4am has even been interviewed by Paeleotronic on how and why he went about this. He even provides some of his tools like Passport.
Definitely give the interview a read and also check out some of the games on the archive. Many of his images (like Maniac Mansion for Apple II) come with a text file that gives all the details about what protection was found and how he worked around it.