They say they used a paid actor. Of course, even if that’s true, it’s not particularly hard to find someone with a similar pitch, accent, and timbre, and then finish fixing it to make sure it’s as confidently soothing as the NPR voice you wanted to steal in the first place. I suppose in one sense it’s not utterly different from hiring a soundalike, but now the soundalike is damn near perfect (the clips in the article are VERY similar and feel more like the difference in recording equipment than anything else) and doesn’t need to actually be available to perform for new impressions. Yet another example of “withstand motion for summary judgment, string it out, lobby against future guiderails” as the totality of Silicon Valley’s legal philosophy.

Maybe it can repost racist MAGA slop, creep on the granddaughters of ex-girlfriends, and put private messages into the public feed, just like your dad!

Stratasys and Ultimaker already killed it.

This is pretty much what I said to my wife while scritching my dogs. First it’ll just be expanded to missing kids and olds, because of course everyone wants to reunite families, but eventually it’ll be something that “law enforcement” can request for whatever the hell they want, because after all they’re the good guys keeping us safe!

I was using a 2012 “vintage” minitower PC that originally came with Win7 as a crappy little plex/local FTP/Minecraft server, and I had been wanting to try MacOS after not seeing it for a while, so I got a Mac Mini with an M2 in it, and while I’ve hardly stressed it, it seems really nice. It’s small and completely silent, and if I did want to use it more, Apple has certainly tried to keep their walled garden pretty and well-organized.

Both things could be true.

7-11 theoretically already has it for their app; you scan with your phone and pay with Apple or Google Pay. The only thing is that you’re supposed to sort of wave the completed transaction at the cashier as you go, but the only reason you’d really need to use portable self-checkout is if the cashier is busy, and when they’re busy they don’t want you breaking in line or to stop what they’re doing to see that you’re showing them a plausibly legitimate checkout screen.

In a completely, utterly, definitely unrelated story, I got accused of shoplifting by a 7-11 cashier the other day.

I hadn’t actually looked up any numbers on the RAM shortage. Less than a year ago I got 2 8GB sticks of no-name PC3200 DDR4 for less than $25. I didn’t even really need it for my use-case, but it was so cheap that “why not” felt like a perfectly viable reason to upgrade to 32GB total. Six years ago I got the original two-pack of 8GB sticks for $75. Now that same amount of old-ass DDR4 would be $90-$100. Jeezus. No upgrades for me for a while.

This is my experience. I do CAD in Windows, but Orcaslicer only works properly in Linux. On Windows, it tends to crash when I tell it to generate gcode for anything but the smallest prints.

Just as well, really. It reminds me to reboot, so I haven’t tried to fix it.

“Language models don’t apply to us because this is not a language problem,” Nesterenko explained. “If you ask it to actually create a blueprint, it has no training data for that. It has no context for that…” Instead, Quilter built what Nesterenko describes as a “game” where the AI agent makes sequential decisions — place this component here, route this trace there — and receives feedback based on whether the resulting design satisfies electromagnetic, thermal, and manufacturing constraints… The approach mirrors DeepMind’s progression with its Go-playing systems.

This is kind of interesting and cool, and it’s not a hallucinating LLM. I’ve designed a couple of simple circuit boards, and running traces can be sort of zen, but it is tedious and would be maddening as a job, so I can only imagine what the process must be like on complex projects from scratch. Definitely some hype levels coming from the company that give me pause, but it seems like an actual useful task for a machine learning algorithm.

Very cool, but is anything as cool as that Space Wars Computer Space cabinet in the same scene?

My summary of MCAD suites is getting pretty long in the tooth these days, and IIRC one or two of the niche ones are simply not available anymore, but it still might be useful.

For what it’s worth, I use Alibre Design in Windows, and do STEP touchups and smaller projects in Linux (where I spend most of my time) on FreeCAD. I just really like the timeline and workflow in Alibre, and it very rarely crashes.

For your edit, you don’t want the direction of shear forces right along the layer lines. This is less pretty but will be much stronger for the intended purpose.

HTC had quite a run there. I still miss my HTC One X, back when it was actually interesting to get a new phone. These days I routinely forget which iPhone it is that I have.

I haven’t really thought about anything remotely in spitting distance of sim racing since I was playing XBox One Forza games (mostly the Horizon one that is set in the Riviera-ish region) with a Thrustmaster TMX (I think?) clamped to a Home Depot Fliptop table.

This looks really cool. May I assume the Moza drive unit was the priciest component?

My groom’s cake at my wedding was Tux.

I’m not even particularly hard core, lol. I still dual boot my desktop because of CAD, and I have to look up most console commands more complex than cd and cp and apt, but I’ve been using Linux off and on for over twenty years.

While I’m glad they aren’t entirely ignoring the elephant in the room, what I’m humbly suggesting is that they’re wrong. It’s a rather inadequate compromise, and you might as well just use RetroArch on a tablet, which could get closer to the original screen size anyway.

If the gameplay itself hits your nostalgia feels, then okay, modern gear can make it playable and… fine. But vector CRT games were just so deeply tied to the way the CRT worked that you can never properly capture their spirit in raster form, especially on a tiny and so-so panel. I’m not even much of a purist, but vector is special and this… isn’t.

Experience the spirit of the original Vectrex

AMOLED display with a resolution of 800×600

These two thoughts are not compatible.

I’m not Brazilian or French, so my main memory is walking past the boxes on the store’s video games aisle. The graph paper pattern on the labels was cool.