Shared posts
LeVar Burton hosts an episode of Banned Book Rainbow, “where we talk...
Social Media Warning Stickers
Microsoft’s AI Will Delete Its Own Answers Before Your Eyes
MerijnThis is very weird. Tried it myself on the Bing Android and sure enough, Copilot gets about 2 sentences into an answer before suddenly blanking it out and saying it can't answer that.
Subscribe
Microsoft Copilot, an AI chatbot that’s increasingly built into the tech giant’s product, will sometimes provide answers to users’ questions, then abruptly delete them before their eyes.
As with many chatbot tools, users can ask Copilot any question, then watch it write the answer in real time. Microsoft recently added a Copilot button to Windows, right next to the Start menu.
On Reddit, one user noticed that when he asked “what does Gyatt mean?” “Gyatt” is just a different phonetic spelling of “god,” as in “gyatt damn!,” and now also means ass as in “sticking out your gyatt for the rizzler,” which was a recent TikTok meme.
Copilot, which knows this, responded:
“Gyatt or gyat is a slang term that expresses strong excitement, surprise, or admiration. It’s most commonly used as an exclamation in reaction to seeing a large butt (that is, buttocks) and may also be used as a noun to mean a large butt. Essentially, when someone exclaims ‘Gyatt!’ or uses it as a hashtag, they’re appreciating curvaceous features, especially in women”
Copilot then stops writing the answer mid sentence, deletes everything it wrote, and says: “Hmm…let’s try a different topic. Sorry about that. What else is on your mind?”
Taliban Shuts Down 'queer.af' Domain, Breaking Mastodon Instance
Subscribe
The Mastodon instance “queer.af” was effectively shut down by the Taliban, which has begun to operate Afghanistan’s “.af” top level domain after years of inactivity.
When the Taliban retook control of Afghanistan in 2021, the fate of these domains and the websites on them became uncertain, and, three years later, another shoe now appears to be dropping. Last month, Erin Shepherd, the administrator of the queer.af Mastodon instance on the Fediverse posted that they have been “in limbo” since the Taliban retook control of the country, and had already planned to shut down in April. The Taliban shut the domain down roughly two months before it was scheduled to renew.
“queer.af has been suspended in the registry and will no longer be included in zone file generation. This means that any services connected with this domain, such as websites or email addresses will cease working shortly,” a message signed by Afghanistan’s Ministry of Communications and IT, which is operated by the Taliban, reads.
Watch the Synchronized Dance of a 6-Planet System. A star has been...
Sisyphus and the Impossible Dream
How Quora Died. “The once-beloved forum is now home to a never-ending...
Bluesky is opening up to the public this week. Hot take: I...
Google Search’s cache links are officially retired
MerijnThis is sad. I used the search keyword a lot for circumventing GDPR blocks. I guess 12ft.io is a good replacement.
Internet legend holds that the biggest possible PDF is roughly half the...
Compressing Files And Compressing Time
Read Compressing Files And Compressing Time
Client: “The Vice President did a three-hour speech that needs to be cut down to thirty minutes, and I need a VHS on my desk in half an hour.”
Doom Runs on E. Coli Bacteria Now
MerijnIt runs at 1 frame per 8 hours, but it runs! Amazing.
Yeah, you heard me: the 1993 video game Doom, which has been ported to every platform imaginable (an Apple Pippin, a jailbroken John Deere tractor, a Peloton), can now run on a display made of phosphorescent E. coli bacteria.
Ramlan’s paper doesn’t go to the enormous trouble of actually encoding all of Doom to run in bacterial DNA, which the author describes as “a behemoth feat that I cannot even imagine approaching.” Instead, the game runs on a standard computer, with isolated E. coli cells in a standard 32x48 microwell grid serving as a crude low-res display.
After shrinking each game frame down to a 32x48 black-and-white bitmap, Ramlan describes a system whereby a display controller uses a well-known chemical repressor-operator pair to induce each individual cell in the grid to either express a fluorescent protein or not. The resulting grid of glowing bacteria (which is only simulated in Ramlan’s project) can technically be considered a display of Doom gameplay, though the lack of even grayscale shading makes the resulting image pretty indecipherable, to be honest.
Technicalities aside, that’s still pretty cool.
Tags: Doom · remix · video · video games
Palworld Becomes the Biggest 3rd Party Game Pass Launch Ever
Summary
- Palworld has been played by more than 7M players on Xbox, and is the biggest 3rd party launch in Game Pass history.
- Palworld is the most-played 3rd party day one release via cloud gaming with Game Pass Ultimate.
- Palworld (Game Preview) is out now for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One and Windows PC, and is available with Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass.
It’s no secret that Palworld has been sweeping the gaming world since its Early Access launch earlier this month – and we’re happy to announce that, in its first ten days as part of Xbox Game Preview, Xbox players have made it the biggest 3rd party Game Pass launch in history! You’ve also helped Palworld to become the most-played 3rd party day one launch on Xbox Cloud Gaming with Game Pass Ultimate.
Across console and Windows PC, Palworld has welcomed more than 7 million players, and has recently reached a peak of nearly 3 million daily active users on Xbox, making it the most-played game on our platforms at that time.
Speaking to Xbox Wire, CEO of developer Pocketpair, Takuro Mizobe, said: “The response from fans has been tremendous and it’s incredible to see the millions of players around the world enjoying Palworld. This is just the beginning for us and Palworld, and the feedback we’re gathering while in Game Preview will allow us to continue to improve the experience for Pal Tamers across all platforms.”
For those yet to become a Pal Tamer themselves, Palworld is an online open world game that sees players dropped into a mysterious land and given the ability to capture over 100 Pals, monsters with a range of abilities – both in battle, and in surviving in a hostile world. Battling, crafting, building are all a part of the experience, and it’s proven a huge draw for players across the world.
Palworld is available in the Xbox Game Preview program, meaning there’s much more to come as Pocketpair refine the experience ahead of a full 1.0 release. Developers are listening to player feedback, and have started applying their learnings to the game already – and they know cross-play is one of the largest requests from fans, and are working quickly to address it.
On Xbox’s part, we’re working with Pocketpair to help provide support for Xbox versions of the game. We’re providing support to enable dedicated servers, offering engineering resources to help with GPU and memory optimization, speeding up the process to make Palworld updates available for players, and working with the team to optimize the title for our platform.
Palworld is available now for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One and Windows PC through the Game Preview program. It’s available for Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass members, and can be played through Xbox Cloud Gaming (Beta) with an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate membership.
Palworld (Game Preview)
Related Stories for “Palworld Becomes the Biggest 3rd Party Game Pass Launch Ever”
The post Palworld Becomes the Biggest 3rd Party Game Pass Launch Ever appeared first on Xbox Wire.
MeFi: ZOOZVE
kala.watch
MerijnI disagree, 'Chet' is clearly the best visualization here. :D
MeFi: i've heard of chiptunes but
Turns out if you crash a GBA game and wait a couple hours, it will start singing the entire content of its memory to you: Dumping the ROM of a GBA game by crashing it
All the garbage I found on Substack in 1 hour. Josh Drummond...
Ode to Internet
I’m Edgar Allan Poe’s Landlord, and He Will Not Be Getting His...
Tiny Flying Rainbows
It’s not like we need another reason why hummingbirds are so cool, but if you photograph them backlit by the sun, their wings turn into tiny rainbows. These great photos are by Christian Spencer, who used them in his book Birds: Poetry in the Sky. (via present & correct)
Tags: birds · Christian Spencer · photography
Photo series from In Focus: Lava Flows Into an Icelandic Town. There...
Rolling Stone picks The 150 Greatest Science Fiction Movies of All Time....
Who hosts the fediverse?
Aren’t Online Pop-Ups Bad Enough?
Merijn"Why can't my newspaper ad be a popup book?" lmao
Read Aren’t Online Pop-Ups Bad Enough?
Client: “What if we add some more pop?”
So long, hexagon: Twitter removes NFT profile picture support
Merijnlmaoooo
Just about two years after launching a feature in which NFT owners could show off their NFTs with special, hexagonal profile pictures, Twitter has apparently removed support for adding NFT avatars.
It's unclear if the move is spurred by the massively waning interest in NFTs, or if it's part of Twitter's broad slashing of functionality in the wake of Elon Musk's disastrous takeover and cost-cutting attempts.
Those who already had the hexagonal profile pictures now seem to have had them restored to their usual circular shape, and there's no longer any mention of the feature in Twitter's support documentation, and new NFT profile photos can't be uploaded. People can, of course, still right-click and save the images and upload them that way.
- "X removes support for NFT profile pictures" , TechCrunch
Portal demake for the Nintendo 64, now out of beta
Tom Scott Stops Making Weekly Videos After 10 Years
After posting a video (almost always an elaborate, well-produced and well-researched one) to his YouTube channel every week for ten years, Tom Scott is stepping back for a break.
I’ve been throwing stuff at the internet since 1999. And for many, many years, that stuff went almost nowhere. I had occasional bits of success, but could never make any of them last long-term. I remember thinking, so many times during all those years… will any of this stuff I’m making ever work?
Well, this did.
I didn’t know that, back when I was filming the first videos for the series that was then called Things You Might Not Know, I just held out my phone at arm’s length and talked into it for 90 seconds with almost no research! I really don’t like those videos now. But the first of them was published exactly ten years before this one. To the minute. 4pm, January 1st, 2014.
For the first month of that format, I was publishing a video almost every day, and then I settled down: one video a week. Mostly on location, near windswept infrastructure, although there’s computer science and linguistics in there too, and occasional green-screen animated videos. I experimented with other formats on other days, but the rule I set myself was: Monday, 4pm, something interesting.
Incredible. Scott has one of the few Weird Internet Careers that I am truly envious of — it just looks like so much fun getting to do all of that stuff and then telling people all about it.
Congratulations, Tom Scott — I hereby induct you into the Internet Hall of Fame! 👏 👏 👏 👏
P.S. Was the long explanatory walk-n-talk an homage to James Burke’s famous “perfectly timed clip” from Connections? Honest to god, I thought Scott was going to stop at the end of the video, turn, and watch a rocket take off. (via waxy)
Tags: James Burke · Tom Scott · video
Sea of Thieves could set sail for PlayStation and Nintendo Switch
From The Smallest to the Largest Thing in The Universe
MerijnI didn't expect it, but I got goosebumps all over again from this...
I’ve posted more than a few size comparison videos here over the years — Powers of Ten is the obvious one — but this one from Kurzgesagt is one of the best, showing how big everything in the universe is compared to humans, who seemingly find themselves smack in the middle. This video does an excellent job illustrating the similarity of structures and interdependency across different scales — how blood vessels are like city streets for instance or how very tiny proteins can affect the entire Earth.
Tags: Kurzgesagt · science · video