CoreDump

The lovely Fei-Yen from Virtual On: Oratorio Tangram for Arcades!

>First, we’ve discovered that about a quarter of all the internet connection in or out of the house were ad related. In a few hours, that’s about 10,000 out of 40,000 processed.

>We also discovered that every link on Twitter was blocked. This was solved by whitelisting the https://t.co domain.

>Once out browsing the Web, everything is loading pretty much instantly. It turns out most of that Page Loading malarkey we’ve been accustomed to is related to sites running auctions to sell Ad space to show you before the page loads. All gone now.

>We then found that the Samsung TV (which I really like) is very fond of yapping all about itself to Samsung HQ. All stopped now. No sign of any breakages in its function, so I’m happy enough with that.

>The primary source of distress came from the habitual Lemmings player in the house, who found they could no longer watch ads to build up their in-app gold. A workaround is being considered for this.

>The next ambition is to advance the Ad blocking so that it seamlessly removed YouTube Ads. This is the subject of ongoing research, and tinkering continues. All in all, a very successful experiment.

>Certainly this exceeds my equivalent childhood project of disassembling and assembling our rotary dial telephone. A project whose only utility was finding out how to make the phone ring when nobody was calling.

>Update: All4 on the telly appears not to have any ads any more. Goodbye Arnold Clarke!

>Lemmings problem now solved.

>Can confirm, after small tests, that RTÉ Player ads are now gone and the player on the phone is now just delivering swift, ad free streams at first click.

>Some queries along the lines of “Are you not stealing the internet?” Firstly, this is my network, so I may set it up as I please (or, you know, my son can do it and I can give him a stupid thumbs up in response). But there is a wider question, based on the ads=internet model.

>I’m afraid I passed the You Wouldn’t Download A Car point back when I first installed ad-blocking plug-ins on a browser. But consider my chatty TV. Individual consumer choice is not the method of addressing pervasive commercial surveillance.

>Should I feel morally obliged not to mute the TV when the ads come on? No, this is a standing tension- a clash of interests. But I think my interest in my family not being under intrusive or covert surveillance at home is superior to the ad company’s wish to profile them.

>Aside: 24 hours of Pi Hole stats suggests that Samsung TVs are very chatty. 14,170 chats a day.

>YouTube blocking seems difficult, as the ads usually come from the same domain as the videos. Haven’t tried it, but all of the content can also be delivered from a no-cookies version of the YouTube domain, which doesn’t have the ads. I have asked my son to poke at that idea.

Click it.

I have this in my playlist of vintage videos to play in the background on the CRT in the Kama Arcade! 😅💜🕹️

A thing that is funny about Max Headroom being used to hock Coca~Cola is that Max Headroom was a cyberpunk dystopia TV series written to criticize network television and the society that it was fostering.

Max Headroom was supposed to be the announcer for a British MTV channel. They made a show to introduce the character, and in that initial version he's left with Big Time, the pirate TV broadcasters, ostensibly to announce Reg's music videos.

Then, they decided to bring it to the US as a show. They sort of tricked a few different companies to fund it for different reasons and ended up getting a TV and Advertising deal. But, they had no real story beyond the idea of him existing.

So, they re-shot the initial show with mostly American actors, and cut the part where Max ends up at Big Time. But, the Coke deal was already signed.

THEN they had to come up with a story, and discovered that no one had really even asked what it was about outside of Max being a parody of a 'talking head'.

The satire of the networks and commercials came last, when they suddenly had no time to write scripts or shoot episodes.

The production was a mad dash, and so they sneaked all sorts of bullshit in. They'd deliver episodes to the censors minutes before the deadline, forcing them to rush to make cuts and only having time to do a single re-cut, allowing a lot to slip through.

The show hadn't been watched by almost a single network exec when it was greenlit for a second season. They just knew Max as a commercial property, not realizing he was taking the piss out of them week after week.

Finally, everything came crashing down. Ratings weren't making the cut, it was up for review, and someone at the network Finally tuned in to see what they'd been broadcasting.

It was shut down suddenly, in the middle of filming an episode.

There's a whole documentary, interviews with the cast, etc ...

There has never, in history, been a time where it is cheaper or easier to install Linux, and run an Open Source forum to invite friends to.

for example, we have a microscope that is perfectly functional, good microscope, but its software is abandonware because the company refused to maintain it. the company is still in business, still makes essentially the exact same software, but they made all of the old tech incompatible with new software to force people to buy the new microscope tech. it would cost a quarter million dollars to replace this microscope. this perfectly good microscope.

They required having tech from the past sixty years ready at a moments notice (if X fails, try Y, then Z, etc). A lot of the older digital methods are all abandonware, sitting on computers developed in 1991 because they couldn't figure out how to safely transfer or migrate them to newer hardware (or even knew they had! found a server from '95 at the back of a closet somehow still running! connected to a powerstrip from '89! I kept the powerstrip, it's so chunky.)

One of my favorite jobs was figuring out how to get this software that had virtually no documentation remaining (likely buried in the office, but I never found it), or instructions, or really anything to a modern, more resilient, system. The company went out of business in '93, and the only known developer I could track down was in a retirement home.

I did eventually shift it over to run in a container/emulator for DOS, but it was a nightmare (one I loved) that took me months of hacking things together to figure out how it all went together.

They were down to a few of these disks and the company no longer existed.

Well, I ran a hacker BBS and using MASM to Crack games was a hobby of mine, so I told them I'd give it a shot.

So, of course, a bunch of devs just started throwing it at their projects to see what it could do.

It wasn't useless or terrible, but what CC does is it spins up a bunch of concurrent requests to Claude. So, one call will come up with a list of 20 things to look at, then it'll send 20 requests, each of those might spawn another 10 requests, etc ... and you're paying for each 'token', which is some fraction of a word, that it generates.

If you say 'Give me a code review of this large codebase', it might spin up hundreds of requests all spending money.

We had it for a week before management rushed to shut it off, and no one had really had a chance to do anything more than 'play' with it. It turns out most developers all did the same requests, like, 'Claude, code review this huge codebase', then glanced at the results, went to lunch, and forgot all about them.

I don't know what we spent, but it was significant and nothing of value was generated.

We need to go back to private forums.

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

The Broadway Arcade, Broadway & West 52nd St, New York (1990)