So we have NTP begging to raise a grand yet we have hundreds of billions being spent on AI data centers.
NTP might not be able to generate AI cat videos full of hallucinations but it is a vital part of web infrastructure. The same can't be said about today's mega projects.
I liked the Transmeta web page from before they launched. It was just bare HTML with no styling. It said:
This page is not here yet.
The product hype and lack of knowledge about what it was meant that nobody knew what to expect. In these hyped expectations, and with Torvalds on board, everyone expected that everything would be different. But it wasn't.
A similar product launch was the Segway, where we went from this incredible vision of everyone on Segways to nobody wanting one.
The hype was part of the problem with Transmeta. Even in it's delivered form it could have found a niche. For example, the network computer was in vogue at the time, thanks to Oracle. A different type of device, like a Chromebook might have worked.
With Torvalds connected to Transmeta and the stealthy development, we never did get to hear about who was really behind Transmeta and why.
It looks like rather than hiring a designer, they let one of their engineers (or worse, the CEO) design the Transmeta logo. I don’t know what that font is, but it might be even worse than Papyrus.
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A similar product launch was the Segway, where we went from this incredible vision of everyone on Segways to nobody wanting one.
The problem with Segway in Germany was rather the certification for road traffic. Because of the insane red tape involved, the introduction was delayed, and for the same reason nobody thus wanted one.
Yeah, for me Segway has been a great lesson in how patents can hold back innovation. It was a niche player that prevented others from trying to innovate on the form factor for a number of years.
One of the dads at school runs a company that does a nanotech waterproof coating for electronics (backed by patents). I told him that it would be very useful for personal electric vehicles, like electric unicycles. He replied that they looked at that, but decided not to license the tech for that use, because there wasn't enough money in it.
i wonder what the world or progress in general would look like if profit-incentives didn't matter (as much as they do), and instead just "would this take us forwards as societies?"
or in a different way, what are we missing out on just because some people think stuff has to be profitable in order to be "good".
I seriously doubt that was the problem. The issue was always that these things were essentially a walking aid for the price of a motorbike/small car and were particularly useless in Europe where you had to transverse cobble stone roads or take one onto the metro (good luck with that).
They were a complete hype product, their projections that they would essentially replace walking and pushbikes were just crazy. I don't think I know anyone who wanted one for more than as a toy.
As a side note, at a ee department where I was teaching around 10 years ago, one student build one as his final year project. Pretty awesome, he essentially did everything himself from software to all the mechanics/electronics... Worked very well as well.
Horse and buggy isn't quite the analogy, I think it is more like the arrival of junk food, packed with sugar, salt and saturated fats. You will still be able to find a cafe or restaurant where a full kitchen team cooks from scratch but everything else is fast food garbage.
Maybe just the advent of the microwave oven is the analogy.
Either way, I am out. I have spent many days fiddling with AI image generation but, looking back on what I thought was 'wow' at the time, I now think everything AI art is practically useless. I only managed one image I was happy with and most of that was GIMP, not AI.
This study has confirmed my suspicions, hence I am out.
Going back to the fast food analogy, for the one restaurant that actually cooks actual food from actual ingredients, if everyone else is selling junk food then the competition has been decimated. However, the customers have been decimated too. This isn't too bad as those customers clearly never appreciated proper food in the first place, so why waste effort on them? It is a pearls and swine type of thing.
In period I was somewhat in charge of the render queue at a small animation company. I had to get rendered images onto tape, as in Sony Digibeta or better. Before that I had to use film.
We had an incredible amount of fancy toys with no expense spared, including those SGI Onyx Infinite Reality boxes with the specialist video break out boards that did digital video or analogue with genloc. Disks were 2Gb SCSI and you needed a stack of them in RAID formations to play video. This wasn't even HD, it was 720 x 576 interlaced PAL.
We also had to work within a larger post production process, which was aggressively analogue at the time with engineers and others allergic to digital. This meant tapes.
Note that a lot of this was bad for tape machines. These cost £40k upwards and advancing the tape by one frame to record it, then back again to reposition the tape for the next frame, for hours on end, that was a sure way to reck a tape machine, so we just hired them.
Regarding 35mm film, I also babysat the telecine machines where the film bounces up and down on the sprockets, so the picture is never entirely stable. These practical realities of film just had to be worked with.
The other fun aspect was moving the product around. This meant hopping on a train, plane or bicycle to get tapes to where they needed to be. There was none of this uploading malarkey although you could book satellite time and beam your video across continents that way, which happened.
Elsewhere in broadcasting, there was some progress with glorified digital video recorders. These were used in the gallery and contained the programming that was coming up soon. These things had quite a lot of compression and their own babysitting demands. Windows NT was typically part of the problem.
It was an extremely exciting time to be working in tech but we were a long way off being able to stream anything like cinema resolution at the time, even with the most expensive tech of the era.
Pixar and a few other studios had money and bodies to throw at problems, however, there were definitely constraints at the time. The technical constraints are easy to understand but the cultural constraints, such as engineers allergic to anything digital, are hard to imagine today.
It wasn't just Wikipedia, which was a relatively recent addition to the web, everything online was a 'load of rubbish'.
In turn-of-the-century boomer world, reality was what you saw on TV. If you saw something with your own eyes that contradicted the world view presented by the media, then one's eyes were to be disbelieved. The only reputable sources of news were the mainstream media outlets. The only credible history books would be those with reviews from the mainstream media, with anything else just being the 'ramblings of a nutter'.
In short, we built a beautiful post-truth world and now we are set on outsourcing our critical thinking to LLMs.
You would also be surprised at how 'tech savvy' non-tech people are in the UK. It is quite common for non-tech people to screenshot train ticket QR codes just in case they have no signal at the station yet none of the common train booking apps suggest this.
Rest assured, Ryanair knows their passengers very well. They know that every single one of their passengers knows how to babysit a smartphone so the battery doesn't die on their flight. Let's be honest, sudden unexpected incontinence is more likely than a Ryanair passenger fluffing up their pocket device for doom-scrolling.
In my opinion, shipbuilding is different to other industries that the UK was known for.
The UK was once an 'island of coal in a sea of fish'. But we used up the easy-to-reach coal and ate all of the fish. Not only that, we also used up all of the easy to access iron ore.
I am no fan of Margaret Thatcher, however, how would shipbuilding make sense in the UK once the raw materials have to be shipped in from the lowest wage mines on the planet?
It would make more sense to build the ships nearer to the raw materials. Yes I know the Koreans, Japanese, Germans and Chinese have the same resource allocation problems, but the workers were cheaper, offsetting the material and energy costs.
Regarding the UK being 'particularly good at finance, insurance, etc.', London is the portal to tax havens, as in the islands that were the former British empire. The U.S. has some financial regulation that London lacks, hence the arrangement and relevance of London.
I am amazed at how much there is to know about QR codes, particularly if you want them to look pretty.
I want the super succinct QR code and I believe that to be optimal. However, I keep seeing massively complicated QR codes, as if going from 8 bit to 64 bit, and I assume these work well. Given the amount of megapixels in any camera made this century and the prevalence of over complicated URLs in QR form, I am not sure if minimised QR codes have any benefit whatsoever. By minimised, I mean 29 x 29.
On the QR topic, I don't understand how logos in the middle work. You are losing pixels and checks with the logo in the middle which is fine until you make the logo too big.
Also related, imagine you wanted a HN QR code with 'Hacker News' written in the middle. This would work as a box in the middle but would be hard to read. So you can make a line across the middle rather than a box in the middle. This will break the QR code but not if you rotate the QR code 90 degrees first.
Maybe my best option to fully understand the quirks is to start with the QR spec and then to make my own QR codes.
> On the QR topic, I don't understand how logos in the middle work. You are losing pixels and checks with the logo in the middle which is fine until you make the logo too big.
I've been amazed at some of the QR codes I've seen in TV ads. Multiple subdirectories, plethora of parameters containing full city names and redundant zip codes, etc, resulting in massive QR codes that you can't even use from your couch because they're so dense.
It's not just that. It's the resolution of the display device too. It's brightness and whether that is causing bloom. If it's printed small, users may instinctively put the camera too close and it won't be able to focus. People have shaky hands and the image will have motion blur. Glare is a persistent problem with bikeshare apps, where the app turns on your phone's flashlight while scanning for nighttime use, but the QR code is glossy. Codes get scratched up, and the smaller the blocks are, the more they are degraded.
There really are tons of ways QR codes degrade no matter how many megapixels you have, and smaller codes are always going to be more resistant given the same overall physical size.
> Also related, imagine you wanted a HN QR code with 'Hacker News' written in the middle. This would work as a box in the middle but would be hard to read. So you can make a line across the middle rather than a box in the middle. This will break the QR code but not if you rotate the QR code 90 degrees first.
The outside (the parts between the alignment marks) have metadata, separated from the data by a dotted line. If your line touches the metadata that's bad. But as long as you stay within the data block any shape should work as long as you are not modifying more pixels than the chosen level of error correction can handle
Another fun thing are these stable diffusion/controlnet combinations which create QR codes that at the same are AI generated art. e.g. qrdiffusion or qrbtf
You have got the trial version of Wordperfect for free, not sure it has everything (Quattro Pro) since you have to hunt around for other Corel products to get the trial versions (Corel Draw).
It is amazing to think how valuable Wordperfect originally was, for Microsoft to be mean to them, meaning they went from worth billions to worth nothing.
"Marge, I'm pulling an all-nighter for my little girl. Put on a pot of coffee! Drink it, and start making burgers"
I love articles like this one, that inspire me to want to get coding as if it was the most exciting thing to do in the world.
I did subscribe to the newsletter, I bookmarked the page, and I am going back right now to see what else there is to learn from the website. Some of it is in the details, if you subscribe, then you get a sound played. For the last two decades or so, playing sounds without asking the user has been strictly forbidden, but here the rules are known and broken, which I like, as it means I can experiment with this myself and stop being so boring.
NTP might not be able to generate AI cat videos full of hallucinations but it is a vital part of web infrastructure. The same can't be said about today's mega projects.