nicole_express

Questionable acronym choice; immediately made me think of arbitrary code execution (which, you know, I would hope any processor would be capable of)

Nothing is actually rendered on the pre-render scanline, though?

Was not able to use the name of the blog post in the title, it's actually "How a Konami Cabinet Stays on Target: Target Panic!" but the "How" got stripped by HN

Personally I prefer having a smaller screen on my laptop, because I can plug it into a monitor when I need a large screen but it makes it more portable.

Still miss the 11" MacBook Air, what a great form factor.

It seems like a fine offer to have exist, but one that a pension fund with low risk tolerance wouldn't want to take. So everything seems reasonable with the world.

Similarly I don't understand why indicies are rushing to change their rules to allow SpaceX in. People accept a certain risk tolerance and changing the rules to ramp up the risk seems questionable at best.

I would say the center-left didn't, but the left did. Not particularly relevant to SpaceX, though, since the left doesn't run many defense contractors.

The Signetics 2650 found its way into a bunch of arcade games by lieu of British company Century Electronics. I have a conversion kit of theirs installed into a Donkey Kong Jr. board, which outright replaces DK Jr.'s Z80 with a daughterboard containing the CPU. Always wondered why they chose that in particular, it's not a very common chip, and just using the Z80 that was there and replacing the ROMs was the more common option for conversion kits like that.

The PC Engine CPU is highly underrated. People like to go "haha, it was the TurboGrafx-16 but its CPU was 8-bit" like that makes it a joke, but that clock speed boost on top of the 6502 architecture is a big deal. (The S-CPU on the SNES still has an 8-bit data bus too, so the 16-bit advantage isn't as strong as it seems)

The Arcade Card add-on was designed specifically around using the transfer instructions to rapidly transfer graphics into VRAM, something it was very good at. Made some really good Neo Geo ports possible.

I find programming for the 6502 to be a joy in a way that the Z80 isn't. I'm not quite sure why that is; I guess maybe because 6502 feels so stripped down, the amount of context you have to keep in your head is extremely low?

It's an odd thing here, because I don't really understand why this is LLM-specific at all. If someone came up to me and asked "who's the 6 Nimmt world champion?" I'd google it and probably find the same result, and have no reason not to believe it. I mean, for all I know the game is being made up too, though it has more sources at least.

The "Arduina" comment definitely made me think it might be at least a little satirical in nature

Honestly I believe there's a puritan streak in the aspartame controversy; you don't deserve to experience sweet taste if you're trying to avoid sugar, you need to suffer for your diet, and it's unfair to have a zero-calorie soda that tastes good.

I could be convinced otherwise by data, but when I'm seeing decades of attempts to prove it's dangerous and none actually pan out, I'm not going to feel bad about drinking a few diet cokes a day.

I can definitely see why the Asus CEO would want to put it in that box, though.

Well sure they didn't do the dance, but you don't have to do the dance. The reason to do it is that it's a good defense in a lawsuit. Like you say, all of this is a legal minefield.

So my understanding was that the original code was specifically not fed into Claude. But was almost certainly part of its training data, which complicates things, but if that's fair use then it's not relevant? If training's not fair use and taints the output, then new-chardet is a derivative of a lot of things, not just old-chardet...

This is all new legal ground. I'm not sure if anyone will go to court over chardet, though, but something that's an actual money-maker or an FSF flagship project like readline, on the other hand, well that's a lot more likely.

Of course, the problem with this interpretation is that all modern LLMs are derivatives from huge amounts of text under completely different licenses, including "All rights reserved", and therefore can not be used for any purpose.

I'm not sure how you square the circle of "it's alright to use the LLM to write code, unless the code is a rewrite of an open source project to change its license".

I mean, Blanchard was the longtime maintainer of chardet already, and had wanted to relicense it for years. So I think that complicates your picture of "squatting an existing successful project".

Honestly it's a weird test case for this sort of thing. I don't think you'd see an equivalent in most open source projects.

Not a lawyer, but my understanding is: In theory, copyright only protects the creative expression of source code; this is the point of the "clean room" dance, that you're keeping only the functional behavior (not protected by copyright). Patents are, of course, an entirely different can of worms. So using an LLM to strip all of the "creative expression" out of source code but create the same functionality feels like it could be equivalent enough.

I like the article's point of legal vs. legitimate here, though; copyright is actually something of a strange animal to use to protect source code, it was just the most convenient pre-existing framework to shove it in.

Interesting that your takeaway is "capitalist South Korea doesn't exist" when I also said the 38th parallel held?

Also I guess now we're discussing the Repugnant Conclusion, which is a bit out of scope

New Coke is a very interesting counterpoint to the brand focus, but on the other hand, they did at the time make a very big push of it being "New" Coke. Hard to tell what would've happened if they had just swapped out the formula.

I drink Diet Coke, which is basically the same formula that became New Coke with chemical sludge instead of sugar, and it tastes pretty good to my tongue to the point where I drink it over Coke Zero, the one closer to "the real thing".

In theory, this is why there should be competition in industry, because it removes the capability of a single large actor to be able to control the government's access to things.

Oddly, though, it seems like that should solve this problem as well. I'm not sure why the Department of Defense insists on Anthropic's models in particular; one would think one of the other players, at the very least least xAI, would be willing to step in and provide the capability Anthropic doesn't want to provide.

You can sum this up with: Producing stuff without polluting the environment in most cases is impossible. Reducing the pollution costs a lot of money, and can make your product non-competitive.

I mean, the true reason here seems to be that producing stuff without polluting is impossible if you have to compete with stuff produced with lesser pollution standards.

In theory, this could be an argument for heavy import tariffs from countries with lesser pollution standards. The downside, of course, is that at the end of the day this would still mean "stuff is more expensive, maybe a lot more", which is obviously unpopular as it means fewer people can get the stuff. (And of course, a US state's ability to restrict trade with other US states is extremely limited)

They just now changed how they enforce the rules. Of course they have a legal pretense for their action; everyone has a legal pretense.

These rules have generally not been enforced this broadly because the expectation is that they wouldn't actually stand up to First Amendment scrutiny, should it make it to the Supreme Court. Of course, CBS is at no risk of suing the administration if Paramount wants any chance of buying Warner, so in this case they can restrict as they please.

A big part of my annoyance is that in the past, something like Phantasy Star Fukkokuban would not really be worth lying about; people need a reason to lie.

The sites that are most valuable to preserve are likely the same ones that are most likely to put up barriers to archiving

Extremely shameful of Ars Technica; I used to consider them a decent news source and my estimation of them has gone down quite a bit.

One thing I'm curious about here is moderation; you are outsourcing it to Bluesky to a degree, but I assume you'd want a way to remove posts you don't want to reproduce on your blog beyond hoping that Bluesky management bans them?

The big thing that holds me off from playing in person is scoring; for the life of me I really struggle with the fu calculation.

I guess the solution to that is only win big hands, but that's its own problem :)

Fair enough, I guess I'm assuming too much knowledge-- a supergun is just a device designed to take a JAMMA arcade connector and provide everything an arcade cabinet would do for a home setup. (i.e., provide video output, some sort of game controller input, bring audio levels down from amplified JAMMA to line level)

I've talked about playing arcade boards at home on the blog so often I sometimes forget to be more accommodating to new readers.

Looking at dry pasta from Europe and the US, they seem pretty much the same, except the US pasta is more likely to use enriched flour; not sure what makes that less healthy.

Bread varies a lot and yeah we have some terrible breads, I don't buy them but someone must because they keep selling them

It's actually the opposite-- New Coke came out after Diet Coke, and was more-or-less Diet Coke with sugar (HFCS, whatever) instead of aspartame.

But yeah it's definitely not the same as classic Coke. Also gets rid of the coca extract, I think?