There’s a story in one of the comments about an IBM mainframe that shouldn’t be missed

Never heard of it but poking around their website it looks interesting; how do you like it?

Some of the digital de-aging the VFX companies do is really impressive, and having the full catalog of TNG shows and movies to reference they could probably make it darn near seamless. I remember watching some behind the scenes feature on what they did for Captain Marvel and they were explaining they wanted to de-age Samuel L. Jackson to about the time he did Jurassic Park, but they couldn’t really use that footage for reference because he was using prosthetics and makeup to play a character older than he actually was at the time. They had to kind of cobble it together using films before and after for reference to approximate the age they wanted.

I had an old one that was DE-9!

Oh man, I think I played that in elementary school!

That last line *chef’s kiss*

I really need to look into getting Civ 2 running. Maybe just set up an old VM for it. Civ 3 was probably my favorite, but there were a lot of concepts I didn’t understand until playing 3 and I’d be curious to see how I fare in 2 now. Plus I love that old aesthetic of games with a user interface like every other program on Windows.

Not wearing pants on camera is as old as TV itself. Always enjoyed this episode of Mayne Street highlighting this phenomenon and the problems when anchors no longer got to sit behind a desk. Also, rewatching this and realizing it has a couple people who would go into more noticeable roles on Parks and Recreation.

Gotta keep your phone in landscape mode for the Zoom call!

Thank you!

Oh wow, I thought I read it was university studies (which I’d still say is more important priority-wise), but that’s really young!

Flack? Giving someone some slack is giving them a break. Giving someone flack is giving them a hard time. If something’s outside someone’s control, giving them slack about it is a kind thing but giving them flack would be unfair.

I’m going to guess, based on the only other comment on this post from @Blaster_M@lemmy.world, that the “beloved” qualifier might be overselling the level of appreciation for Unity. Either it’s not actually that beloved by Ubuntu users or there is only a relatively small number of people for whom Unity truly is beloved. In any case I’m guessing it hasn’t had enough users to justify funding from Canonical.

In fact, just looking up Canonical on Wikipedia to verify the company name and see if they were for-profit I found this:

Canonical achieved a small operating profit of $281,000 in 2009, but until 2017 struggled to maintain financial solvency and took a major financial hit from the development of Unity and Ubuntu Touch, leading to an operating loss of $21.6 million for the fiscal year 2013. The company reported an operating profit of $2 million in 2017 after shutting down the Unity development team and laying off nearly 200 employees.

I think the alternative history is the city-states instead of larger nations? I haven’t played it so I don’t know for sure

I’ve read that line from Parks and Rec was unscripted and improvised by Chris Pratt

It may be surprising to learn that very basic, low-level support for M3 has existed for quite some time now. m1n1 is capable of initialising the CPU cores, turning on some critical peripheral devices, and booting the Asahi kernel. However, the level of support right now begins and ends with being able to boot to a blinking cursor. Naturally, this level of support is not at all useful for anything but low-level reverse engineering, but we of course plan on rectifying this in due time…

I mean I think it was basically a dictionary lookup, nothing like the negatives we see with today’s LLMs

Just as an addendum, the letters predate touch tone phones by a lot. They were originally used for the central office prefix, which in a lot of smaller places was also just the town name. If you were within the town you could just use the 4- (or later 5-) digit phone number of the person you were calling, but if you wanted to call the next town over you would need to dial the 2 numbers corresponding to the letters or tell the operator the name and number, like “Lakewood 2697”. That’s my understanding, anyway, from talking to people who lived in that time or seeing it in movies.

Yes, 8477. And back when SMS text messaging was a new feature on cellphones, the earliest way to enter the letters was to hit the number multiple times until the right letter was on screen. So to write “cat” you would hit 222 2 8. This was time consuming, so when features like T9 Predictive Text came along it really helped improve texting in the pre-smartphone era.

[A] ton of games were released on Steam this year. Valve’s store has seen nearly 13,000 game launches since January 1, 2025, according to Steam data hound Gamalytic, and a majority of those games went straight under the couch to be forgotten for the rest of time like lost batteries.

This sounds like too many games are being made. I suppose a lot of these are hobby/passion projects or learning exercises people have made, but that has to be more games than there is any viable market for.