the-rc

There was a project at Google Chicago to do something like that, around 15 years ago. For some reason, it was never launched.

What's this notorious backdoor?

There was a variant of this that occurred later. By that time there might not have been a dependency on Jeff's workstation anymore, but the DB, or at least one of its replicas, was getting copied to... /gfs/cg/home/sanjay/ — I don't believe it was Jeff this time. At some point, there was a very long PCR in the Oregon datacenter, perhaps even the same one that happened a few weeks after the 2011 Fukushima disaster. With the CG cluster powered off for multiple days, a bunch of stuff broke, but in this case the issue might have been solved by dumping the data and/or reading it from elsewhere.

Isn't HK under PRC control? The GFW might not be there right now, but who knows what happens over the seven years during which new Pixels are supported.

On the other hand, see the complete mess that are the IPU6/7 camera chipsets and their Linux support.

No, especially after congestion pricing, it doesn't get very busy. I assume the car was mapping the area and collecting background truth in general. Downtown and the financial district have interesting peculiarities, like the highly irregular grid and the patches of open air construction that have been in the middle of Greenwich St for many years, exposing tens of pipes and cables carrying who knows what.

We've been getting less and less of those, though. And even then, it's just for a few days. Last year was a bit worse, but two years ago it was very, very mild, I think. Yay global warming?

I think the problem in NYC will be getting medallions, assuming that's what self driving cars will need.

There are already so many (too many?) taxis and car sharing drivers, after TLC's massive increases of the last few years. You can play a game, based on something I read about last year: stand at a corner and count all cars/trucks/for-hire. The first two combined are barely outnumbered by the last group. And the few times I checked, half of taxis and car sharing vehicles were empty. (Of course that's different at peak times or when it rains.)

Will Waymo be allowed to add as many vehicles as they want, like a new class of cars, or will they need to buy out medallions from drivers? The former might undo all the progress in traffic relief that was brought by congestion pricing.

I saw one of these on Chambers Street just yesterday afternoon, but it must have been in manual mode, of course.

Unlike CRT screens, LCD ones from that time had usually a fixed resolution and wouldn't resize the image on the fly.

Why gorilla arm? This doesn't necessarily require lifting it. There's an old video around with Zuck doing gestures while walking and he starts with his arm mostly at rest. Even in the worst case, how is it more tiring than a phone?

None of that is announced yet, but there are two open source datasets for gestures and typing:

https://github.com/facebookresearch/emg2pose

https://github.com/facebookresearch/emg2qwerty

Infer what you will.

(I helped with their release and last month gave a presentation on the project's original research infrastructure, but I'm no longer on the team and I definitely never was allowed to talk about final products.)

The paper was just published in Nature https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09255-w (the preprint was out almost 18 months ago)

OMG. I was a fan of Telescript (and Obliq) at the time. I still believe that Java and the hype surrounding it contributed to the demise of mobile agents, although I'm sure that reality was more complex than that. Kudos for having such a cool job!

Maybe it's used to catch clones of the models?

Right, that's more clear cut with proprietary software, but what about open source code?

Does it apply to solo companies that provide software consulting to others? I guess it doesn't for S-Corps, because of passthrough, but might for C-Corps?

The hardware folks came mostly from outside SGI and were picked especially because they had worked on cheaper systems before.

Thorgerson and Powell ran Hipgnosis, which made a large number of the craziest and most memorable covers of the 70s/80s, not just PF. There are only three days left to watch the great documentary that Anton Corbijn made about them: https://www.netflix.com/us/title/81721595

MarkMonitor has been around forever. It's used by many of the largest companies. I remember quite a few Google outages that could be tracked down to MM issues.

Over the months, I watched it three times in person at NYC Film Forum, then another couple of times during the 24h January stream.

It's not AI and it's not just random clips, either. The opening and the ending are always the same. Some parts like the segment on Oblique Strategies and how they shaped the recording of Bowie's Moss Garden were played (almost?) every time. The bit showing the evolution of U2's Pride from a yodeling demo to the finished song played half of the times. Same with the one about his Windows 95 start sound. I think the latter screenings had more examples of generative pixel/glitch art (each of which, presumably, was unique).

My feeling was that segments were divided into categories and/or tags; their selection was like a chef's menu at a restaurant, where you don't know what you'll get, but you can expect that some kind of desserts are always at the end.

Also, I don't think it's exactly true that each performance is different. Between segments, there's some computer output scrolling by and it includes a filename of the next clip. At the start of the movie, the (fake?) filename includes the venue and the date. I didn't stick around for two consecutive shows, but I think they're identical through the day. The 24h streams were different, of course.

True... I didn't make clear that I had tried to take a wild guess after reading only the first sentence in the abstract.

I would have guessed that the surge had something to do with faster payments, namely contactless and the wireless terminals. In a way, it's even broader than that: if you order for pick up and prepay, payment is pretty much out of the picture entirely, replaced by just verifying that you are getting the right order. Then you're avoiding the productivity losses in serving the dishes, washing the plates, etc.

I always wondered if it's still alive only because Larry or Sergey use it every day.

This is the way Italians write, especially academics, translated into English words. Even in mundane, everyday documents the style has plenty of fillers and embellishments, unlike the more straightforward one of everyday English.

I don't know. Weirder things have happened:

https://www.reddit.com/r/PiratedGames/comments/172b5kv/rocks...

Is that what the counsel said?

Is the complete version 5:08 long, while the bad encoding is 4:28/4:29? Deezer and Apple Music have the latter, too.

Uh, no, uploaded MP3s couldn't even be deduplicated across different users, because of lawyers. I know because I was there. The team had to ensure having maaaany petabytes of storage on launch day. Maybe the label or whoever owns the rights to the track today uploaded whatever they could find online? One way to verify that is checking if the same issue occurs on Spotify or Apple Music.

I was thinking maybe it's a way to save some bytes, like people used to do with undocumented opcodes in 6502 programs.