IMHO, the most interesting thing they did was with the palette. They were obsessed with getting not just images snapped by the satellite as the sky, but having them actually look good, and even a "smart" mapping algorithm to the in-game palette wasn't good enough for them. So they wrote an algo to simultaneously choose a palette for both the colours in the satellite image and the colours in the game's graphical assets so it would pick colours best for both of them, and then remapped both the satellite image and the game's assets to this new palette. Also, normally satellite images are denoised on the ground, but a partner had gotten a machine learning denoising algo running on the satellite.

One thing they weren't able to deal with was that the game tiles the sky background, which is fine because it's a tileable image, but obviously random pictures of Earth aren't (except the nighttime images, which are all black!). If they had had more time, I imagine they would have set up something like heal selection to merge the edges, but one of the problems was that in order to take images of Earth, the satellite had to be oriented in a way that increased its drag and accelerated its deentry... so ironically, playing DOOM was accelerating the satellite's doom.

Here's a presentation from Ólafur.

Oh, you want profit? This is a surveillance spyware wrapper around the entire MacOS user experience - so if you thought Microsoft's Copilot Recall was invasive monitoring, you haven't seen anything yet.

If Apple won't monetize a user panopticon and partner with governments to do it, OpenAI will be right there, to take the cash.

Sears used to own a bunch of real estate and a trucking fleet. This let them ship things anywhere in the country in a reasonably timely fashion and keep costs low on both ends. They did absolutely, pathetically flub web sales, but it really wasn't too late to fix that. They at least had done the work of getting the product information digitized, even if the web site was otherwise a loss. (It really was terrible, and so were the prices, wtf.)

You didn't need to have a dependency on Clippy, just a prohibition on uninstalling it. Personally, I never liked it, and disabled it after a few days, but many organizations have a stricter configuration policy.

???
Apple bought Next, but I believe that MS developed it's own software after the first few years. Not that I agree any of it is "a great product", but at least until around 1995 most of it was pretty usable. (At that point I switched to Apple for a few years before moving on to Linux, so I don't know about recent MS products, but I'm pretty sure most of them were developed in-house.)

I will argue against strict adherence to this statement. Gnome applications written to the project guidelines have become very fine, since the introduction of GTK-4 and libadwaita. I prefer many of these to their equivalents on MacOS.

It's true that most of these fall into a general category of "utilities", and that Windows enjoys a broader ecosystem driven by commercial incentive. But Windows programs are hardly "better' for this, and the widely varied usability is generally sub-par compared to level that's become norm for Gnome/Adwaita software.

Compared to cryptocurrency, LLMs are dramatically useful. They don't do just of the things their proponents claim they do, and probably never will, but at least they do some things. Cryptocurrency is only a way for a different group of assholes to get rich enabling crime. It does nothing you couldn't do with just another normal fiat currency.

Even if it's all true, it's all irrelevant. Not only are these problems not those problems but we don't have decades. It's small comfort though that the ultra wealthy won't get what they want because even if they killed off literally all of the rest of us, AGW would not stop.

Sears did not "fail", they were willfully destroyed by a vulture capitalist.

Explain why relying on storage is a bad thing when renewables plus storage are cheaper than nuclear. Explain it like you're twelve, because mentally, you are - nuclear is shiny so you want it.

China was working to self-sufficiency anyway. Unstable trade wars and tariffs have just made that more blatantly important.

Having a rotating camera, or multiple cameras, doesn't seem ridiculously hard. The problem is quickly interpreting the received images. (Knowing the distance helps a lot in that regard.)

Seems like they've been doing it since 2008. Is there a ten year statute of limitations or something?