This is so great. Another fun trick we used in the 90s was palette animation -- by swapping the palette you can create incredibly cool effects at a low runtime cost.
Changing the pallette mid-frame is fun, too. You have to pay a lot more attention to timing since you don't have a copper (like the Amiga) on the PC, but it's still feasible.
it used to be a hardware thing, so if your pixels were represented by a nibble, and the definition of the color for each of the 16 possible value is in table the hardware references, you just update that table (on a vsync, or even an hsync) and you could get cool animations effects (for the time)
random example from the Atari 800xl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPjLZ4MVKCc (you can see how slow it is to draw a scene, but the animation effect due to pallete rotation is really fast).
Recently I've been thinking about the nerds/hippie dichotomy from that book. Really missing the anti-authoritarian streak that was so formative in the early computer industry.
But that communication is clearly intended to be confidential. Also isn't having one attorney on a multi-party communication marked confidential sufficient to create privilege?
When I worked at two different FAANG companies, both legal orientation sessions taught this specific scenario as an example of something that's not attorney-client privileged.
If you email your lawyer to ask legal questions, that's privileged communication.
If you just cc a lawyer on a thread while you talk to other people, adding the lawyer doesn't make the conversation privileged or protected.
Fifty years ago this week, The Byte Shop opened its doors, becoming one of the epicenters of the personal computing earthquake that reshaped our world. A secret rebel base for a generation of hackers, engineers and tinkerers who would go on to build many of the technologies you now take for granted, it’s most famous today as the launchpad for the Apple-1.
Paul Terrell's Byte Shop was a nondescript El Camino Real storefront filled with early 8-bit computers, racks of electronics components, soldering irons and supplies, and some of the strangest and most wonderful people. This was a hangout for members of the Homebrew Computer Club. I know Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Lee Felsenstein, Chris Espinosa, and Andy Hertfeld were regulars. In the photo linked at the URL above, that's infamous phone phreaker John Draper (Captain Crunch) sitting in the window. There’s probably many others from here on HN.
This Sunday we’re throwing a party to celebrate the occasion, at the DoubleTree Hotel at the San Jose Airport, from 12–6. The afternoon will include:
* Meet-and-Greet Reception featuring demonstrations and displays of early personal computers by their original designers, plus autographed copies of period advertising.
* Books, products, and memorabilia, including computer books and hardware available for purchase.
* Silent auction of collector memorabilia signed by the designers, running throughout the afternoon.
* Stage presentation and Q&A, narrated by Lee Felsenstein of Homebrew Computer Club fame, with participation from the "Apple-1 Garage Gang” and other dignitaries, both in person and virtually.
* Tribute honoring the pioneers who helped shape the birth of personal computing and are no longer with us.
Zynga was acquired by Take2 in 2022 and is very much alive today.
IMHO the "predatory business" period of Zynga (e.g. the Tiny Tower vs Dream Heights) was prior to the arrival of team who executed the turnaround discussed in the interview.
By predatory I meant addiction driven free 2 play games where players are encouraged to spend money on "coins" or whatever to speed up the game, gain more turns, or skip boring parts, with a lot of grinding. A kind of gameplay that preys on addictive personality and relies on "whales" to spend money they don't have.
Have they changed this? What good games not following this scheme have they done since 2022? A sibling commenter mentioned Zynga now does mobile casino games, which would indicate they continue to be predatory.
I really think videogame companies like Zynga are not worth saving: they deserve to crash and burn.
It would be next to impossible for anyone without insider knowledge to prove that to be the case.
Secondly, benchmarks are public data, and these models are trained on such large amounts of it that it would be impractical to ensure that some benchmark data is not part of the training set. And even if it's not, it would be safe to assume that engineers building these models would test their performance on all kinds of benchmarks, and tweak them accordingly. This happens all the time in other industries as well.
So the pelican riding a bicycle test is interesting, but it's not a performance indicator at this point.
