Noah’s Ark

Noah’s Ark

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The search for Noah’s Ark has been a long storied one. Crazy long in fact. Irving Finkel has revealed period cuneiform writings about the great flood.

Currently, every few years, someone will find something new at the famous Durupınar site near Mount Ararat where the Ark is supposed to have set ground.
Currently, researchers utilizing advanced underground scanning and excavation techniques have uncovered charred, wood-like material buried 30 feet beneath the surface they collected to date and study.

In previous investigations, scans were made using ground-penetrating radar to examine the formation’s interior. The team reported finding what it interpreted as a network of underground chambers and tunnels whose dimensions appeared consistent with descriptions of the Ark in the Bible.

These sorts of announcements have happened often enough over the decades that one should remain cautious, but the current oldest known map of the world is a Mesopotamian cuneiform tablet that supposedly gives a description of the ark (parsiktu vessel). Not only that, it gives details on how to get to it’s wreck – which is named concretely as having come to rest on modern Mt Ararat.

Fuzzy Memories

Fuzzy Memories

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Ever have a memory kind of pop in from nowhere? A random memory came up from some trip I made up to Seattle – something I did semi-frequently in the early 2000’s. I remember walking by and hearing some kind of show going on in the Pike Street market theater (yeah, the one with all the gum on the wall). There was nobody at the door, but the door was open and I heard singing so I walked in. Imagine my surprise to find the entire theater packed. There was a fantastical musical going on. I caught like the last 2 songs of the show – and it was some artsy stage show about the Manhattan project. I remember the dialog was…pretty stilted, ponderous, and not a little pompous.

I seem to remember the creators were there and the crowd seemed to be a lot of friends.

So, I threw that into chatGPT and asked it about my fuzzy memory. Some kind of big night for a mediocre musical about the atomic bomb that was in Seattle sometime in the mid 2000’s. What do you know:

Based on that timeframe, you are almost certainly remembering “Atomic: The New Rock Musical,” which had its World Premiere development and regional preview right in Seattle during that exact window. [1]

Sure enough – the music reminded me of the dialog. Apparently Atomic: The Musical went on to have “mixed to moderately positive reviews during its Off-Broadway run at Theatre Row in 2014, following earlier stagings in Australia. [1, 2]”

Who knew that AI can now help you with your bad memory.

AI Doctor Phil, Mauri Povich, and Jerry Springer

AI Doctor Phil, Mauri Povich, and Jerry Springer

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Big Tomater created this video of Palpatine joining Anakin and Obi-Wan on Dr. Phil.

Or how about a paternity test between Padme, Anakin, and Obi-Wan on the Maury Povich show. It was made locally on a RTX 5070 Ti graphics card – something anyone can buy off the shelf for $1300.

Or Luke finding out Darth Vader is his father on Jerry Springer!

Yeah – this is 100% AI generated. It’s getting this good.

Stay near the origin kids

Stay near the origin kids

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Most GPUs use the IEEE 754 single-precision floating-point format, known as FP32. The thing about using fixed representation for floating point values is that sacrifices have to be made. As you get further from 0.0, floating point gets less and less precise until…well these things happen.

Here’s what happens when you start translating objects far away from (0.0, 0.0, 0.0). After about 1km, things start getting imprecise enough to notice.

Here’s a good explanation.

VibeOS – Hallucinated Operating System

VibeOS – Hallucinated Operating System

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This is very tongue-in-cheek, but also somewhat mind blowing possibility thinking.

What if you really don’t need to buy software anymore – you just use AI in the OS to generate the apps you need on the fly? I highly suspect we may enter this realm soon.

Hope for the younger generation – greater sales for art tickets than Hollywood

Hope for the younger generation – greater sales for art tickets than Hollywood

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The Bayeux tapestry, a 1,000-year-old embroidery, went on display at the British Museum while the Bayeux Museum in France was closed for repairs.

The British Museum reached £14,100 in ticket sales the first hour the tickets went on sale online – selling 48 times that of a normal Wednesday morning. More than half (55%) of those buyers were aged under 35. They then were completely sold out in less than 3 hours.

Even more amazing? This was double the opening mornings for this year’s blockbuster films: The Odyssey only reached £7,000, and the box office smash hit Spider-Man: Brand New Day, only hit £6,300, according to the bank’s spending data for its 16 million customers.

Not sure if that’s saying young people are valuing art more – or that they are making a statement about the current state of Hollywood movies. Probably a little of both…

Yeah – this is why there will be no more coding jobs in 12 months

Yeah – this is why there will be no more coding jobs in 12 months

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MonroeWorld, takes an XBOX 360 binary file and recompile it for Windows. With 4 simple prompts, he has it working and is already adding new features (keyboard support, windowed running, etc). He even unlocks the program – which is easy when you have the compilable source.

He knows almost nothing about coding.

This kind of work would have likely taken a group of experienced devs with source access for the original game at least 3 months to port and release. He does it here in about 2 hours with very little knowledge.

Granted, this is not releasable software. It has not been validate, checked for security issues, etc. But this shows how a game company could potentially recompile every game they have ever made in their library for any platform and update it with just one guy working in the morning, and an agent running validation passes for a few days.

This is where the software world is. Anyone can do this. Any one person can do this.

Besides recompiling a game, Claude completely cloned Hollow Knight in under an hour. This video does a great job capturing what this experience is like for those of us in this industry. For those of us that have been developers for 20+ years, this is orders of magnitude beyond the rate of change we have ever seen. Whole teams of people can be replaced with just one person and an agent. Games, apps, and software you had to pay $100’s of dollars for can simply be made for the cost of the tokens.

Not a single second of my work day is the same as it was a year ago. I have not written more than a few line of code myself in months at this point. All of the software that I used to use regularly, I am replacing with my own custom software that I created with AI.

Anthropic’s IPO filing shows most of its compute goes to R&D, not customers

Anthropic’s IPO filing shows most of its compute goes to R&D, not customers

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Anthropic’s IPO filing is revealing tons of juicy information

  • Claude income only covers what it costs to serve up the requests, it doesn’t touch the hardware costs
  • Only 1/3 of it’s $8.9 billion first-half compute bill was for customers, the rest went to research, trainging and internal Claude usage.