“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
-- The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Random House, 1996
Reposted from last year because it's so damn accurate and needs to be read more widely.
For most of its history, buying and selling packs and boxes of trading cards was a game of chance with neither the buyer nor the seller knowing the results.
“The product is designed to be a mystery,” said Keith Irwin, the general manager of Industrial Inspection and Consulting.
And if it wants to stay that way?
“They’ll need to find new packaging solutions,” he said.
IIC went from a company focusing primarily on industrial X-rays and CT scans within the medical and aerospace fields to potentially taking the cover off the trading card industry without taking the cover off any product at all. And in the process, they say, their company — with no prior connections to the trading card industry — has earned thousands of satisfied customers in the collectibles space. All electing for a sneak peek at their cards before tearing the packs or boxes open, circumventing the mystery that has long been a central element of these products.
The service caters to high-end products manufactured by Topps, Panini and Upper Deck, with the technology best suited to reveal cards in densely packed configurations. Take a 2023 Panini Flawless Football First Off The Line case for instance. Each case comes with two boxes. Each box comes with one pack of 10 cards. At $15,000 a case, it certainly makes economic sense that collectors are willing to pay IIC the going rate of $650 per case of that product to get a CT scan and see whether there’s something inside that they want, or to keep the package sealed and sell it on to someone else.
Salient discussion at the link re the ethics and economics of this practice. Just the existence of this technology and the possibility that packs have been non-invasively scanned can really crater the asking price for "unopened" packs of cards.
Is every civilization doomed to rise, but then inevitably fall? Is there some ideal form of government that will allow a civilization to avoid collapse? How can we explain why some civilizations flourish and expand While others stagnate or are easily conquered? These are vital questions that humans have pondered for thousands of years and they remain urgently relevant today.
Anacyclosis, which was conceived by Greek historian Polybius during the middle Hellenistic period, describes how society follows a simple cycle in which the three basic forms of government: democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, give rise to their degenerate counterparts of mob rule, oligarchy, and tyranny/demagogy before the cycle starts up again.
Political power rests in the hands of the people equality and freedom of speech typically form two of the cornerstones of democracies for a time there is harmony and prosperity, but soon corruption again creeps in. Later generations who have grown up always enjoying freedom of speech and equality begin to take these rights for granted and no longer guard or value them. Greed leads to inequality and affluence fosters a sense of entitlement. Both create resentment among the populace. Deceitful and shameless leaders arise who play upon these feelings by making extravagant promises vowing to shower the people with gifts but in reality these men are only concerned with increasing their own power.
Yet, Aldrete, who greatly is informed by history, reassures that this too shall pass and the cycle will repeat itself again.
Remember it’s easier to make sense of the present if you know about the past
We've all heard the old adage about monkeys at typewriters, sometimes expressed as a million monkeys (as above, via Savage Chickens), or as infinte monkeys, or as a monkey for infinite years. Recently, Australian mathematicians have reconsidered the Finite Monkeys Theorem, and calculated that "given the expected time until the heat death of the universe, we demonstrate that the widely-accepted conclusion from the Infinite Monkeys Theorem is, in fact, misleading in our finite universe." Their data as applied to various works of literature -
Sadly, I have lost my favorite cartoon on the subject. It depicts a monkey turning in his paper to the teacher, who reads "To be, or not to be, that is the glbiftza" and tells the monkey "Sorry, try again." Bob Newhart worked the same joke into one of his standup monologues.
A tip of the blogging cap to John Farrier at Neatorama for the via.
Reposted from last year to add one more cartoon variation on the joke:
Anyone else feel like the past decade has been one of the gradual normalisation of privacy-defiling practices? If so, you'll be saddened to hear that Mozilla is binning the 'Do Not Track' (DNT) privacy option in version 135 of Firefox. It's already gone in the Nightly developer release and it should be gone from the standard release on February 4, 2025, when 135 launches.
The Mozilla Do Not Track support page states (via The Register): "Starting in Firefox version 135, the 'Do Not Track' checkbox will be removed. Many sites do not respect this indication of a person's privacy preferences, and, in some cases, it can reduce privacy.
"If you wish to ask websites to respect your privacy, you can use the 'Tell websites not to sell or share my data' setting. This option is built on top of the Global Privacy Control (GPC). GPC is respected by increasing numbers of sites and enforced with legislation in some regions."
This might initially sound like not such a bad thing, the way Mozilla talks about it. But it is, in my opinion, part of a broader trend to bait and switch general privacy concerns for more specific ones. Let me explain.
DNT is a request header that asks sites you visit—you guessed it—not to track you. Websites can then decide whether to adhere to this request, but the idea is to make it so users can easily signal to sites their privacy preferences without having to set these preferences for every site. Whether sites have to adhere to these requests would then be a legal matter depending on the laws in different regions and so on.
(Image credit: Future)
While it's true that most sites simply ignore these requests, I'd argue that's a legal or enforcement issue and not an issue with the DNT request specification itself. This is in the same way that there's nothing wrong with requesting people don't punch you in the face. Even if people keep ignoring that request and get away with it, the request itself is reasonable, don't you think?
The argument, or at least the implication, seems to be that we shouldn't worry because Global Privacy Control (GPC) is the new replacement for DNT, and it's better respected by websites and sometimes actually enforced.
This might be true, but seemingly buried in the small print is the crucial fact that GPC doesn't as sites to stop tracking you like DNT does. It asks them to stop selling the data that it does track. Its specification refers to "do-not-sell-or-share" interactions or preferences, not do-not-track ones. Bait and switch, much?
This is, of course, better than nothing. And it's perfectly fine for those who were only concerned about their data being sold. But I'd bet that at least some users who were keen on DNT didn't want their data to be tracked at all, in principle—at least not by default. It's not just that users might want privacy in the relation between themselves and the site in question, protecting information from outside sources. It's that they might want privacy full-stop, including from whichever website they're visiting.
Plus, opening the door to "tracking, but not selling" could still mean companies you aren't aware of accessing your data, because a website might not sell your data but might give it to a partnered company, for example. The corporate world is wild, and you can bet if there's a way around things, some companies will find it.
It's not as if DNT was in principle unenforceable, either. Only last year a German court ruled that LinkedIn had to listen to DNT requests.
Whether the trend towards swapping out general privacy concerns for more provincial ones is a sign of people throwing in the towel on general privacy because it's difficult to enforce, or whether it's people and companies actively deciding to allow companies to continue to guzzle our data, it doesn't matter. The result is a continued normalisation of privacy erosion.
Of course, Mozilla might not intend any of this, and it might just be a "well, what's the point anyway?" response to DNT not being taken up by websites and courts at large. But I can't help but wonder: Why bother removing the setting instead of having it as an additional option? GPC and DNT request headers could both exist side-by-side.
One might argue that a DNT setting could mislead users into thinking that their activities aren't being tracked when actually it depends on the website adhering to the request. But surely that's something a simple warning could fix. And at any rate, the same would be true of GPC.
Mozilla was the first to implement DNT, so it'll be particularly sad to see the option disappear from Firefox for that reason, too. Here's hoping something better comes along, something which is legally binding and easily enforceable. I won't hold my breath, though.
While billionaires stash fortunes in offshore havens, the IRS is targeting gig workers who make a few bucks answering questions on a platform where people earn side income by sharing expertise.
A federal court in California has authorized the IRS to demand records from JustAnswer. — Read the rest
Join Tom the Dancing Bug Nation. SIGN UP FOR THE INNER HIVE and you'll get each week's Tom the Dancing Bug comic at least a day before publication. Plus other exclusive content like extra comics, commentary, juicy gossip, puzzles, recipes, and coded instructions from the underground resistance. — Read the rest
The PC gaming icon that is Half-Life 2 recently celebrated its 20th anniversary, and Valve pulled out all the stops with a major new update integrating the game with its episodes and adding a commentary track. The studio also released a two-hour documentary about the making of the game and what was going on at Valve during its development, which is absolutely crammed with fascinating digressions about the challenge it set itself. And one of them was lighting.
The development of Half-Life 2 was rooted in what multiple staff describe as "the tech wishlist", which would take six years to fully realise and was absolutely foundational to what Valve wanted to achieve with the game.
"[It] was a main feature that the light felt very, very realistic and intuitive because of the Source engine and the work, the collaboration between artists and engineers," says Half-Life 2's lead artist Viktor Antonov, before introducing our hero. "Ken Birdwell, he was a fan about photography and getting the lighting right."
Ken Birdwell was one of the earliest hires at Valve (he left the company in 2016) and, like pretty much every Valve employee, wore multiple hats over his time there: But he can fairly be described as an extraordinarily talented computer engineer. The now-defunct Half-Life website had a potted biography of Birdwell that listed some of his projects: "in-circuit emulators (CodeTap), 3D surface reconstruction (Surfgen), 3D prosthetics design tools (Shapemaker), and satellite networking (Microsoft's Broadcast PC). He also wrote one of the first graphical shells for multiplayer online games for Compuserve's Sniper."
Antonov actually undersells the photography angle. Birdwell worked for TeleCalc (a B2B software company) in the 1980s, and clearly saved up enough cash to pursue his passions after leaving: From 1990-94 he studied painting, photography, and animation at Evergreen State University, and was awarded a Bachelor of the Fine Arts degree. Getting back to Valve and Half-Life, this saw him primarily working on the first game's animations and AI (as well as having the idea for the G-Man). When Half-Life 2 rolled around, there was probably no-one in the world more suited to pursue the cutting edge lighting Valve was after. Sure enough, he immediately noticed a problem.
"The math that we were using was wrong," says Birdwell. "And not only that, the math that everybody was using was wrong. And then as I started to correct it I realised just how bad it was… and then I fixed it and suddenly everything looked great!
"I had to go tell the hardware guys, the people who made hardware accelerators, that fundamentally the math was wrong on their cards. That took about two-and-a-half years. I could not convince the guys, finally we hired Gary McTaggart [from 3DFX] and Charlie Brown and those guys had enough pull and enough… I have a fine arts major, nobody's gonna listen to me."
Let's just pause on that aside. Birdwell smiles while delivering the last line, which we'll allow because this guy fixed the math being used for lighting so hard that the manufacturers of graphics cards had to change their math. I found this thought too fascinating to leave alone, and sought out Birdwell to ask if he could expand a little.
"It's a bit technical," begins Birdwell, "but the simple version is that graphics cards at the time always stored RGB textures and even displayed everything as non linear intensities, meaning that an 8 bit RGB value of 128 encodes a pixel that's about 22% as bright as a value of 255, but the graphics hardware was doing lighting calculations as though everything was linear.
"The net result was that lighting always looked off. If you were trying to shade something that was curved, the dimming due to the surface angle aiming away from the light source would get darker way too quickly. Just like the example above, something that was supposed to end up looking 50% as bright as full intensity ended up looking only 22% as bright on the display. It looked very unnatural, instead of a nice curve everything was shaded way too extreme, rounded shapes looked oddly exaggerated and there wasn’t any way to get things to work in the general case."
Birdwell says this remains "a super common graphics mistake" and even today certain areas of programming require the coder "to keep in mind that all the bitmap values are probably nonlinear, you can’t just add them together or blend them or mix them with linear calculations without considering what 'gamma space' you're working in."
The good news is that "modern graphics cards know all this now," and at runtime automatically convert any non-linear formats "into a nicely behaved linear floating point value inside the graphics card before the math happens, so it's way easier. But that's now."
The reason it is that way now is probably a fine arts major.
"All through the '90s up to maybe the early 2010s it wasn't the case," says Birdwell. "You had to be super aware of what 'gamma space' you were in at each step of the process or things would look super weird.
"The problem was, when I pointed this out to the graphics hardware manufacturers in '99 and early 2000s, I hit the 'you've just pointed out that my chips are fundamentally broken until we design brand new silicon, I hate you' reaction. That wasn't a fun conversation. It went through the stages of denial, anger, bargaining, etcetera, all in rapid succession with each new manufacturer.
"I was very happy to pass off those conversations to the newly hired HL2 graphics programmers Gary McTaggert and Charlie Brown, who worked through it all step by painful step over the years."
While trying to get in touch with Birdwell I found an unrelated patent granted to Valve in 2007 on which he's listed as the inventor. Patent #20070195090 is for "Determining Illumination of Models Using an Ambient Framing Abstractions" and summarises itself as "a system and method for determining light illumination on a model in a virtual environment." It goes into great detail about Birdwell's exact innovation and, even if this isn't anything to do with what he's describing above, it's clear the man is some sort of god of videogame lighting.
Producer Bill Van Buren says elsewhere in the documentary that there were three key principles to Half-Life 2 and the lighting was part of the first. "To make something that was immersive," says Van Buren, "visually really rich and appealing, something more like you would see in a film, and the art direction and the tech to make that happen."
Valve certainly achieved that: Half-Life 2 still looks amazing today. And there are many, many people responsible for that achievement. But Ken Birdwell is why the lighting looks so good, and he did such an outstanding job that you can probably argue every game since has benefitted from it: Or, to put it another way, our graphics cards certainly have.
In an act of incredibly targeted pettiness, the developers behind a Half-Life 2 mod that's been available since 2022 have managed to ban a select group of YouTubers from playing the latest version of their work. The mod in question, Half-Life 2: Overcharged, is an "overhaul modification" that adds new enemies and weapons as well as restoring some cut content, promising new ways to play and so on (thanks, RPS).
Except it wasn't all that great. Looking over the user reviews, people generally seem to have had some fun with Overcharged but reckon it could've used a bit more work, and doesn't live up to some of the more grandiose claims. So far, so normal: There are a thousand mods that fit such a description.
Certain YouTubers who specialise in playing and talking about Half-Life 2 mods made videos about Overcharged in the time since its release, and they weren't very kind to it. Again, pretty normal. But last month the Overcharged developers released a 2.0 update for the mod, promising fixes for many of the issues raised by players, and when certain YouTubers went to try this out, they got a nasty surprise.
For them, loading up the mod sees the game crash, and subsequently display an error message that says "STOP talking SH1T about us!"
YouTuber NoClick is one of those affected, and initially assumed this was just a problem with his installs or the mod… before realising that the error message is perhaps a little too pointed. Checking in with some other Half-Life 2 fanciers, he realised that fellow YouTuber Radiation Hazard also had this issue, and in fact four YouTubers in total were targeted in this way.
How? "There is proof the Half-Life 2: Overcharged developers used my SteamID, Scolcer's SteamID, Keron's SteamDB and Radiation Hazard's SteamID to ban us from playing the mod," says NoClick, linking to the mod's code which shows it running checks for all of the above Steam IDs, and referring to them as "anticitizens."
"You fixed absolutely nothing," says NoClick in his video about Overcharged's 2.0 release. "I gave you valid criticism and you only took it as an insult." Rather brilliantly, NoClick then devotes the next ten minutes or so of the video to highlighting various bugs and glitches in Overcharged 2.0, which does rather prove his point.
The most obvious thing to say about this is that it's so absolutely, utterly petty that it almost raises a smile. But targeting your critics is never a good idea, and using YouTuber's Steam IDs to ban them from playing your mod is just asking for trouble.
Sure enough, anyone with an interest in Half-Life 2 modding is now very mad with the team behind Overcharged. The ModDB page is now overflowing with negative reviews of the mod, many containing the line "the sun is leaking" in reference to one of Overcharged's more notably lighting glitches, while others are more concerned about whether this falls under Steam's definition of malware.
I couldn't put it better than redditor Upreality: "Script kiddies vibes from this lmao, did they think nobody would just apply basic reverse engineer[ing] and load the binary in IDA to check from where the string comes from?"
This temporarily made Overcharged 2.0 quite popular on ModDB, but only because people wanted to roast it. "Right now it is the number 2 most popular mod on the entire site, and it's literally all just people shit talking them," notes KoopaCL on the Half-Life subreddit. "Most comments seem to be 'the sun is leaking' and all tags to find it are stuff like 'virus', 'manchildren', 'malware' etc."
Let us end with some of those user tags mentioned by KoopaCL: These are community-sourced labels that help users understand the content of a given mod on ModDB. For Half-Life 2: Overcharged, we now have the following tags:
Literal man children
Garbage
Actual dogshit
Malware
Overcharged more like undercooked
Being the second most popular mod on ModDB might usually be considered a good thing, but in this case it seems more like a way to get Valve's undivided attention on your HL2 modding career—and not in a good way.
Join Tom the Dancing Bug Nation. SIGN UP FOR THE INNER HIVE and you'll get each week's Tom the Dancing Bug comic at least a day before publication. Plus other exclusive content like extra comics, commentary, juicy gossip, puzzles, recipes, and coded instructions from the underground resistance. — Read the rest
If you already have a machine powerful enough to play modern games you can stream the action to TV sets or portables. The Raspberry Pi makes a good game streaming box, reports Ars Technica's Kevin Purdy, and now can function as a Steam Link, compatible with the most popular platform's software. — Read the rest
History repeats itself in Rogue Point, the new "roguelite tactical co-op shooter" for up to four players from Black Mesa creators Crowbar Collective, narratively at least: Alexander the Great is dead, and in the wake of his passing a coterie of generals and familial dynasties go to war to claim his power for themselves.
Alexander, as depicted in Rogue Point, is in fact "the CEO," the unnamed richest man in the world, and the pretenders to his throne are the "cutthroat conglomerates" who wage their Diadochi Wars in the most 21st century fashion possible: Via the MERX app, which enables them to "order private mercenary armies as easily as ordering takeout."
You are not actually one of the "Merx" in this scenario, but rather an "elite independent vigilante squad" determined to end the corporate wars by declaring war on the corporations. A little counterintuitive there, but if you want peace you have to justify the means, or something like that.
Anyway, as one of the not-Merx you'll square off against multiple classes of enemies, each presenting a "unique threat" in missions set across four separate locales: The airport, mall, office, and oil rig. That's not a huge variety of environments in which to run and gun, but this is where one of Rogue Point's roguelite aspects kicks in: "Each sprawling map is reshaped by the game's Parametric Design System, offering new strategies and challenges with every play," the Steam page states. "The constantly evolving gameplay ensures every mission feels as thrilling and unique as your first, keeping the excitement alive in every campaign."
There looks to be a strong element of Rainbow Six to Rogue Point, as each mission begins with a planning and loadout stage, and it's "purpose-built to reinforce teamplay" rather than just four guys running around blasting the hell out of everything that moves—although how that works out in practice, we will have to wait and see. Players will unlock weapons, cosmetics, and campaign modifiers enabling them to build unique loadouts for each mission, all of them leading into "the ultra-hard Endgame Mission," which I have to imagine will have a new and better name by the time Rogue Point launches.
Unlike Rainbow Six—Rainbow Six Siege, anyway—Rogue Point will not support PvP gameplay. "The core of the game is in PVE and that is what we want to focus on," Crowbar Collective said. "We will keep an eye on community feedback, but we think that type of experience can already be found elsewhere."
"We cannot wait to go in depth about the game, and everything we learned while creating a new IP (as well as turning Crowbar Collective into a full time development studio)," CEO and Project Lead Adam Engels said. "Just like Black Mesa, we want to heavily involve the community in our development and updates. Our community was critical in the Early Access of Black Mesa and having [publisher] Team 17 as a partner for Rogue Point helps us focus on development and community feedback."
A release date for Rogue Point hasn't been announced but it's expected to be out sometime in 2025, initially in early access. Pricing also hasn't been revealed, but it will apparently be a buy-to-play game: Crowbar Collective said it currently has no plans for in-game purchases.
Look, I don't ask for much in life. I'm the sort of person that's quite happy with a little house in the suburbs, a brilliant gaming PC, and the odd cold pint of beer. But if someone, anyone, is looking to buy me a luxury holiday gift this year, I'd like to add one large item to my wishlist.
Wayne Enterprises Experience is offering ten honest-to-goodness Batmobiles for pre-order, built by Action Vehicle Engineering, and I'll be honest with you here, it's the thing my heart desires most in life (via The Register). While the Nolan Batman films varied in quality, one thing I think we can all agree on is "The Tumbler" Batmobile design was cool as hell—and now it looks to be a reality, I'd be a fool not to put my hand up for one.
All you'd need to spend is a mere $2.9 million dollars. I know that's not exactly chump change, but look what's being offered for the money: It's powered by a 6.2L LS3 525 HP V8 engine, features a paddle-shift transmission, and includes "advanced software upgrades" (whatever that means), a smoke-screen delivery system, and imitation gun turrets. Be still, my ever-aging heart.
The weight is estimated to be 5,511 lbs (1,387 lbs less than a top-spec Cybertruck, I hasten to add), and it's made of a combination of kevlar, carbon fibre and fibreglass with an aeronautical-grade steel frame. Plus it's got disc brakes all-round—which is the sort of detail I love added to the spec sheet of a Batmobile. What else was it supposed to have, drum brakes? A boat anchor? Anyway, let's continue.
I haven't even got to the interior yet, which is described as "authentic...with bespoke seating trim" and features a digital dashboard, "premium GPS", one-way mirrored glass screens and a two-seat configuration. It's only available in left hand drive though, which is a bit of a downer for someone living in the UK, but I think it matters not.
(Image credit: Wayne Enterprises Experience)
Those huge wheels should have no problem running over the top of cars ahead of me, and if I owned one of these I would make it my business to ensure I became the biggest traffic violation possible. Yes, it's very unlikely to meet road safety standards, err, anywhere, but who's realistically going to pull over Batman?
Everyone knows he's out there fighting for justice, so I think we can all agree we should let the man continue on his path of morally dubious destruction.
My only slight hesitation (ok, perhaps it's a large hesitation) is that all this seems a little bit too good to be true. I can't quite shake the feeling that the end result might not live up to expectations when it's eventually heaved off the back of a truck onto your front lawn.
Oh, and it doesn't shoot flames. But hey, in this one specific instance I'll put aside my hard-hewn scepticism and take a punt. All I need is the cash. So again, friends, relatives, oligarchs, should you be reading, sign me up now. I promise I'll never ask for anything ever again.
There’s an open pit in the middle of our office plan that drops down into a bunch of very sharp spikes that kill you instantly. This is bad. People keep falling in there and dying. Someone put a sign up, the other day, all bright yellow so you can’t miss it, that says “Beware!!! Spikes!!!”
The office immediately split into two factions over it. One says that if anyone falls in the spike pit it’s their own fault for being so stupid and not watching where they’re walking, so we should remove the sign. The other says that the sign is an insult, there shouldn’t be a spike pit in our office at all, and having the sign up like that is just normalising the existence of the spike pit, so we should remove the sign.
We ended up removing the sign. Probably for the better. Still… for a while there it looked like it might have worked…
Nobody has ever been capable of writing a scathingly harsh and well formulated satire about the perils of modern capitalism, that doesn’t just get immediately one-upped by some random food service worker talking about their actual week.
Where is Half-Life 3? It's been a joke in the gaming community for years, and for good reason – and no, Half-Life: Alyx doesn't count. Today, on the 20th anniversary of Half-Life 2… well, Half-Life 3 wasn't announced, but it's something almost as cool. — Read the rest
Whoever the next editor-in-chief of Scientific American turns out to be, they would be well-advised to make sure their criticisms of MAGA supporters aren't too spicy. Laura Helmuth resigned Thursday after posting, then deleting a furious rant about the "meanest, dumbest, most bigoted" voters and "fascists" who turned the White House over to right-wingers and conspiracy theorists. — Read the rest
Gamers, claimed by mainstream media to have broken hard to the right in last week's presidential elections, are now alarmed that the import tariffs proposed by their favored candidate will sail quickly into being with Republicans controlling the White House, both branches of Congress and the courts. — Read the rest
ALT
