plasticbugs

Fable solved a long-standing bug in a Coleco Vision game that I have been working on with a small team of people. Fable did what both Claude 4.8 and ChatGPT/Codex could not do after many hours of attempts. Fable talked me through debugging the issues using an emulator. This is approx 10k lines of code in Z80 assembly. You can see the project here: https://github.com/plasticbugs/mrdoarcade

Our bugs have been squashed and now that Fable 5 has been recalled, Claude 4.8 is capable enough in Z80 assembly to help get the rest of the game across the finish line for a physical cartridge release. Claude 4.8 Z80 is iffy at best - scattershot approaches at hiding the bug symptoms. Fable 5's approach was to step back, analyze the issue, reproduce the issue with debugging in place and fix the root of the issue instead of a bunch of patchy fixes that hide the underlying bug.

I personally know two of the three people named, and trust me, they are going to be livid about this.

Not giveaways, but it was instead a "name your own price" discount that allowed you to pay as little as $1399 and as much as $9999 (your choice) for an OP-1. What's bizarre is throughout the month of July, the OP-1 Field was completely SOLD OUT. And it felt pretty galling to their customers they would have this "name your price" promotion continue into July with the same device as the previous month - most people expected them to switch up which item would get the discount. No one was able to purchase an OP-1 from July 1 - July 31 at any price on their site.

I traveled across the country promoting Comcast@home for the summer of 1998. We visited malls near major cities where the service initially rolled out -- places like the Irvine Spectrum and the Smith Haven Mall. For each mall, the local cable company (usually Comcast, sometimes it was Cox?) provided a cable drop that gave us an approx. 300kbps connection. In some cases, this was the first broadband internet connection the mall had ever received (with most stores using dial-up modems to transmit their sales to the corp. office at the time).

Our setup required a POTS connection as well so we could do races between the two. We used comically large jpegs to do the demonstration.

My most memorable experiences from that time were from interacting with older folks who had never even seen "the internet". Some people had traveled many hours just to see the internet for themselves — even crossing state lines to get to us. And we felt like the Oracle at Delphi. Folks not even knowing how to use a mouse asking us to find information about their army platoon or information on old friends who they lost touch with. Some just wanting to us to explain what the internet was and how they might be able to use it.

We traveled with an enormous rack we called the UBR (which they told us was a universal broadband router -- which we picked up in San Jose from Cisco Systems). Sidenote: Sorry Cisco for backing up into (and majorly damaging) the fence surrounding your dumpsters!! This device provided a network connection to each of the four kiosks we had spread over the small footprint we were allotted in whatever court they had set aside for our use.

I remember showing folks how fast the connection was by downloading Doom to the local machine. The UBR would cache large files so in some cases, files would download in what felt like an instant and we would have to explain what a cache is and why those kind of speeds are not representative of average use.

I was a very heavy internet user at the time and had only ever experienced a connection as fast in the dorms on campus at the state college I attended.

It was a blast.

To Patrick (from Toronto) from @Home: I never did read RFC 793 which you so thoughtfully printed out for us on what seemed like a ream of paper.

https://archive.is/Ep9sV

Yes, I believe it’s a fork of VS Code, so all your favorite extensions and settings are portable. It will even ask to import your VS Code settings on first launch.

It definitely depends on what language you’re using and the complexity. But Claude 3.5 and now 3.7 are far superior in my experience for coding tasks. It’s like the difference between ChatGPT 3.5 and 4. It’s far and away more useful and less error-prone for my use cases than other sota models. Cursor + Claude 3.7 in Agent mode is my goto.

I briefly worked for Crunchyroll, which began life as an anime pirating service with subtitles. The contracts with the Japanese anime publishers came later. Now they vigorously protect their content from "pirates".

This comprehensive film series from PACE is how I learned (and lots of practice) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIT4ra6Mo0s

So saddened by this news. I worked with Gordon. He had a wonderful sense of humor. Was a true believer, die hard technologist, uncompromising, witty and honest. Will be having a drink here in his honor shortly.

If anyone is interested in modding an Atari VCS (2600) for similar high quality output, Tim Worthington's excellent Atari RGB mod kit is an easy and affordable way to upgrade it. https://etim.net.au/2600rgb/

A screenshot of Pole Position https://etim.net.au/2600rgb/screenshots/pole_position_nabuko...

Tom7 is my favorite content creator. Each of his projects feels like a ~master’s thesis~ video dissertation. If you are not familiar with his work, please take some time to watch his other videos. They are all outstanding so I won’t recommend any specific one.

Tom7, if you’re out there (here), thank you for the free education and entertainment. You are an inspiration!

There is a new VirtualBoy emulator that runs on the Nintendo 3DS so that you can play these games again in 3D. And yes, you can adjust it to play in a different color than red. Some of the games, especially Wario deserve another look from retro game fans. https://github.com/skyfloogle/red-viper

Several years ago, after finishing a coding bootcamp, I created this little web app that turns YouTube channels into an XML podcast feed. Might need to dust it off. https://github.com/plasticbugs/podcasty

It really was! I interviewed with them (didn't get the job), but ate a delicious pizza during their interview process. Their dream was to have the pizza cook on the way (like in Snow Crash). The only automated part was the pizza was made on a conveyor belt and towards the end of the line, humans were placing toppings. So it was automated to a point... at least it was when I was there in summer of 2018.

In the video, they show that some videos got more than 1k views, but most around a couple hundred. YouTube requires 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of watch time. So definitely no money earned yet on the channel they created.

Unless they have some secret other channel with a bunch of manufactured videos. ;)

I can pile on to this. I had to rename my employer's Microsoft Teams app because it doesn't autocomplete the app's name after an apostrophe is typed in the Microsoft Teams app (both native and web).

For example, typing "@O'Shaughnessy Demo App" into Teams to fire off a command to our bot would automatically stop populating the autocompletes after the apostrophe is typed. So users would be forced to scroll through the entire list of usernames that begin with O to get to our app name to type a command into our bot.

Our workaround was to rename the application to "Demo App by O'Shaughnessy". Microsoft is aware of the bug after we posted in their dev forums, but has not fixed it yet.

You'd think that typing the full "@O'Shaughnessy Demo App do thing" into the app without relying on autocomplete would work, but it does not.

Siri: "Here's Snow (Hey Oh) by Red Hot Chili Peppers" :smacks-forehead:

Sorry, I did actually ask for Snow White in the car! And it played a song called "Snow". Haha, reproducing it here at my desk I mistakenly said "Cinderella"

It's a striking condemnation of the current state of things that my $1K+ mobile phone does not do anything close to what's in this demo. I would pay $200 just to have a voice assistant that isn't totally incapable of playing songs requested like "Play SONG_TITLE from ALBUM_TITLE".

As an example, yesterday my daughter asked for a song from Snow White.

EDITED FOR CORRECTNESS (originally I said I asked for Heigh Ho from Cinderella)

In the car I say, "Hey Siri, play Heigh Ho from the Snow White Soundtrack". Siri: "Sure, here's Snow (Hey Oh) by Red Hot Chili Peppers" (try it yourself!)

Why are Alexa and Siri still so useless, inaccurate and inconsistent? Why can't I yet ask Siri to "book me a ride via Uber from location X to location Y" or "reorder the same thing I got last Tuesday from Uber Eats"? I assume it's down to compute costs, but I would absolutely pay an additional subscription fee for more intelligence behind these voice assistants.

I believe this as well. My co-worker will have no problem getting another high-profile role in tech. His embezzlement will be seen as go-getter material.

I should add my former co-worker is easily found in Google. He is not a low-profile kind of person. He is best known for owning expensive cars and bankrolling “cannonball run” record attempts.

I was more speaking to the audaciousness of it all. I expect many employers will still do their due diligence and with high profile cases like these it’ll be impossible to hide. So I guess the perpetrator ultimately has to own their actions and maybe including these indiscretions in their LinkedIn is inevitable.

A former co-worker of mine ran nearly this exact same scheme. As an executive for a cable network, he bilked his company out of 8 million dollars. He invoiced the company for video production work that never happened. $25k here, $20k there. He has since served his time of 4+ years in a New York state prison. He lists his role at that cable company on his LinkedIn.

I expect she will do the same and she’ll be back on the market in a few years with her Facebook diversity manager role at the top of her LinkedIn.

The algorithm presented me with one of these videos and now I’m binging on them. Each video presents an intricate mechanical 3d print.

Some of my favorites so far:

Mechanical 7 Segment Display https://youtu.be/r02oNu5t4Bs

Noodle cup timer https://youtu.be/qg9cYwPFyqs

Marble machine from a reel spring https://youtu.be/--qqFnPk3KM

Some older consoles can output RGB natively if you have the correct cable: including most SNES models (not the ‘mini’), every Sega console, Atari Jaguar and the Neo Geo home system. Interestingly, the SNES mini has the cleanest video signal of any SNES model directly out of the GPU but requires a mod to get RGB out of it.

I have RGB modded my Atari 2600 with the Tim Worthington mod mentioned in the article. It’s one of the easier RGB mods in the retro games hobby scene. If this kind of thing sparks your interest, check out retrorgb.com where they’ve cataloged the video modding options for most older game consoles.

Yep, there is a flash cartridge called the Harmony Cartridge. It’s great for playing Atari home brew games which in many cases are better than anything available on the original VCS. Pac-man 4k is a great example. https://harmony.atariage.com/Site/Harmony.html

After scrolling down past dozens of photo collages, this appears to be a visual diary by a prolific artist.

The search box at the top performs a text search on the captions below each image. Somehow I stumbled on his Five Ketchups book - something I had seen before.

https://collections.centerforbookarts.org/Detail/objects/549...

There’s an impressive amount of work here - a peek into an artist’s process.

Marco was one of my biggest inspirations to become a software engineer. I worked in the same office as he and David Karp and was there when they launched Tumblr. I spent many lunch breaks picking David and Marco’s brains about the work they were doing. Many years later, I mustered the courage to switch careers and become a web developer. I’m now a full-stack dev at O’Reilly Media. It’s not glamorous but I am very proud of the work I do. Cheers to Marco!