I wrote an article about the SEGA Saturn.

For years I read that the 3D capabilities of the Saturn were kind of hacks added on top of a 2D machine, in reaction to the Sony PlayStation. This story always puzzled me because it didn't make much sense.
So I dug about the Saturn and wrote this article in which I try to demonstrate that the Saturn was designed, from the beginning, to be able to produce good 3D for its time.

Of course there are plenty of comparisons with how the PS works 😉

https://www.xtof.info/Yes-the-SEGA-Saturn-was-designed-with-3D-in-mind.html

#retrogaming #sega #saturn

it is curious how many people feel they need to ask me why #curl is not moving off #GitHub

The cold and boring answer is money. GitHub sponsors us with a crapload of CI infra that there is no other company even close to doing.

So while they may be an AI-first delusional company, they help our project so much more than all other hosting sites combined.

It would be reckless and irresponsible of us to ignore this.

One of the hidden gems of being on Fedi is that people here are, generally, not falling for the LLM hype.

So we don't get much in the way of deepfake videos, or other AI slop, coming down our timelines (or at least, I certainly don't; no one I follow is making or boosting AI slop).

I was just watching a video warning about this, and the creator said "we've probably all been swarmed by those ads using deepfakes to push dodgy financial schemes" - I'm like, what? we have? - "and further, deepfakes of politicians all over social media, being pushed in front of us". Again, I"m thinking "Wow, that's not my experience of social media."

But this is my only social media site, really. I don't count Discord; those are basically closed systems. They don't push anything in front of you you didn't already want there.

Which just struck me as interesting. Throw in a really good ad-blocker, and I just don't see any of this shit going around.

And, à propos de rien, I use a web client for Fedi. Which means I get to see my adblocker adding up all the ads it's blocked at the top of each page.

I love coming over to the Fedi tab, because the adblocker counter remains firmly locked on zero.

Opened up Instagram to see a number of friends clustered in Las Vegas.

This is a problem. No, not because Sin City. Because Instagram apparently opted in everyone.

Turn it off under chat.

me: computer, please read this text file and count how many times each letter appears as the first letter in a word

computer: no problem. like five lines of python and a few seconds to execute on huge documents.

me: computer, please do the same thing but split the words into syllables and count the letters at the beginning of those instead

computer: I'll need several hundred megabytes of language-specific database files and machine learning models, and the process will get OOM'd by the kernel before it outputs anything

#linguistics