While it's a little interesting to see how they re-interpreted it on the less powerful hardware (as someone who remembers the original demo well), for the most part the results aren't that great. A lot of the cool-looking effects have been replaced with much less impressive interpretations, and some of the sequences are so messy and low-framerate that if you don't know what it's supposed to look like already, you probably wouldn't be able to figure it out.

I don't know what kind of competition this was against to be declared the winner, but it seems like if you were going to remake a demo for the Apple II, maybe picking something a little simpler and actually doing it justice would have been a better choice.

This is a good example of one of the major pitfalls of using ChatGPT to write code -- since it's trained on a bunch of code scraped from the internet, much of it badly-written, it makes the same mistakes that novice programmers make.

The author of the article claimed that writing the code to accept a number with two digits after the decimal would have taken them "two-to-four hours of hair-pulling" (this was to replace three lines of code), so he obviously doesn't have the ability to determine whether the solution that ChatGPT spit out was any good or not.

Part of the point is that since this energy is going to be used for heat anyway, so you don't have to convert it back again. With that in mind, it's certainly possible that this is more efficient and cost-effective than a rack of Li-ion batteries.

Although the author of the article presumably doesn't understand that, since while energy storage in sand makes sense in some circumstances, it certainly can't replace li-ion batteries for most uses.

The competitors never really pulled much of the traffic; what really pressured them to drop the beta was that the comment section became a complete wasteland with huge amounts of anti-beta spam and moderators playing along by modding down on-topic posts and modding up the anti-beta posts. One of the editors took to moderating everything critical of the beta down, but found that they couldn't keep up against the prevailing opinion.

The other time something similar happened was when SourceForge (part of Dice, same parent company as Slashdot) started bundling malware with the GIMP, and the /. editors refused to post anything about it. Again there was a revolt in the comment section until they finally relented and allowed a post about it.

Definitely some parallels to the reddit situation, although I don't know that the reddit userbase can come close to working together like that.

It's not "allowing the protests" when you remove the moderators engaging in the protests and replace them with people more amenable to doing what they're told.

Well, it's no longer just hearsay. I went through a couple days ago and deleted all my posts. (I did not delete my account, though.) I checked that they were gone.

Today I checked again, and ... all my posts that I deleted are resurrected.

I do go through and delete my older posts about once every six months. Ones that I had deleted previously are still gone. So it looks like they are restoring old posts from a backup before this whole thing blew up, probably to try to limit the damage from so many people mass-deleting their content.

There's been at least a few reports from people claiming that they recently (in response to the changes) deleted their accounts and posts, and reddit reinstated them. It's hard to be sure that's true, though.

Except switching phone providers might take a total of an hour, if you spend a lot of time researching your options. The difficulty involved is nothing like the difficulty involved in moving to a new home.

Prime is $140 a year, not $200. $180 if you insist on paying monthly (but then why are you quoting a yearly price?)

Probably it wouldn't. I'm not very interested in it either.

They're pretty obviously not examining a subset of drives that are representative of all hard drives. They're only looking at drives that failed (so leaving out all drives that are retired without failing) and also only examining ones that are sent to this company for data recovery.

There might be some useful data to gather from this, but the conclusion from the Ars Technica headline "HDD average life span misses 3-year mark" is obvious nonsense.

Wrong! Biden voter here.

Idiot.

So, if Biden is going to take the credit if a recession is avoided, will he step up and take the blame if there is a recession after all?

This scenario that you keep imagining (you seem to be very proud of coming up with this possibility since you keep reposting it) requires the owner of the original car to come up to the car and not be able to figure out that it's not the one he's looking for.

Why would the thief even bother looking for a matching model car to stash the airtag on? One it's out of the car you stole, who the hell cares who finds it?

Hardly the "most likely" scenario. The "most likely" one is the one involving a "really dumb car thief", since most car thieves are, in fact, really dumb.

You don't have to make it hard enough that the bad actors can't abuse it profitably -- you just have to make it hard enough that it's easier for the bad actors to just go somewhere else. Sort of like "I don't have to outrun the bear -- I just have to outrun you."

Was the video produced by Duncan Hines or Betty Crocker?

Today's boxed cake mixes are reasonably good (I use them more often than not when I want to make a cake), but all you have to do is eat a cake made by a professional baker vs. one from a boxed mix to realize that the boxed mix certainly doesn't have the advantage.

Just take a look below at all the people commenting who support Apple forbidding use of particular software on devices that they've purchased.

Tribalism leads to some really weird results sometimes.