Readit News logoReadit News
AlbertoGP commented on The Quickshot II Joystick   retrogames.biz/products/t... · Posted by u/doener
AlbertoGP · 5 days ago
We had several Quickshot II's at home for our Commodore 64; each broke after a while and we had to get a new one.

It looked and felt fantastic and was cheap, but the garbage switch mechanism was a thin metal cross pushed down onto contacts on the board in such a way that it would inevitably snap and render the joystick useless.

I did what I could as a kid without proper materials or tools to repair them but nothing lasted.

I ended up building my own from scratch with steel and wood, reusing the cable of one of them, and could finally play without fear of breaking and leaving me high and dry.

From my experience with a previous product from Retro Games Ltd, The A500, I expect this one to be much better than the original.

AlbertoGP commented on The Return to Full-Fat Dairy   open.substack.com/pub/rod... · Posted by u/freespirt
AlbertoGP · 5 days ago
The URL is wrong, the right one is https://rodgercuddington.substack.com/p/the-return-to-full-f...

> UK retailers are reporting a striking reversal in dairy consumption patterns. Waitrose searches for full-fat milk increased 417%, full-fat yogurt 233%, and block butter 280% in a single month, while skimmed milk and low-fat yogurt are being left on shelves. This shift represents more than a dietary preference change – it signals a fundamental breakdown in public trust regarding nutrition guidance and reveals profound frustration with decades of conflicting advice.

> This analysis examines the scientific evidence, economic factors, processing implications, and psychological dimensions driving this trend, with particular attention to how changing advice may have eroded consumer confidence in nutritional expertise itself.

AlbertoGP commented on I caught Google Gemini using my data and then covering it up   unbuffered.stream/gemini-... · Posted by u/JakaJancar
s1mplicissimus · a month ago
Talking about human error in the context of LLM response behavior is hilarious. "No, the machine is fine, someone must have used it wrong". Sure...
AlbertoGP · a month ago
That comment to which you replied, and the other thread of responses to it, are quotations of the malfunctioning and homicidal HAL computer from the movie “2001: a space oddisey”.
AlbertoGP commented on Britney Spears' Guide to Semiconductor Physics (2000)   britneyspears.ac/lasers.h... · Posted by u/lachlan_gray
AlbertoGP · a month ago
Around the time this website was made, I was building an application for a big company in Spain that was to run as a Java applet and required the code to be signed.

They did not yet have their own certificates so I had to make my own CA during testing and sign the code, and I wanted to make sure that they did not forget to switch to their certificates later, so instead of signing the code with my name which some bureaucrat might decide to not bother changing, the code was signed by Britney Spears.

They noticed it, got the joke and made sure to switch certificates for the release. Everything went well thanks to Britney.

AlbertoGP commented on Hacker News rewrites post without consent?   news.ycombinator.com/item... · Posted by u/rrwright
rrwright · a month ago
I posted a link to an important Claude Code bug here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45910257 with the original title of "Claude Code Introduces Off-by-One Errors"

It made it to the front page at about #11. Then apparently the editors renamed it to the (less interesting/more convoluted) title of the page it linked to. I didn't cause or approve that change. Why does HN rewrite my post? Is it because it was negative to Claude Code?

Original: https://pasteboard.co/xTjaRmnkhRRo.png

HN edited it to: https://pasteboard.co/rDPINchmufIF.png

AlbertoGP · a month ago
> Then apparently the editors renamed it to the (less interesting/more convoluted) title of the page it linked to.

It is part of the submission guidelines:

> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

AlbertoGP commented on The brain navigates new spaces by 'darting' between reality and mental maps   medicine.yale.edu/news-ar... · Posted by u/XzetaU8
AlbertoGP · 2 months ago
A particularly interesting part that I did not expect from the title:

> Before the rats encountered the detour, the research team observed that their brains were already firing in patterns that seemed to "imagine" alternate unfamiliar mental routes while they slept. When the researchers compared these sleep patterns to the neural activity during the actual detour, some of them matched.

> “What was surprising was that the rats' brains were already prepared for this novel detour before they ever encountered it,”

AlbertoGP commented on Mapgen4 Renderer   redblobgames.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/ibobev
AlbertoGP · 3 months ago
> Overall, I don’t think the LLM saved me any time. I didn’t end up keeping the code it gave me. But it got me unstuck, and that meant I actually made progress.

I haven't tried LLMs yet but this sounds valuable.

AlbertoGP commented on Review: Project Xanadu – The Internet That Might Have Been   astralcodexten.com/p/your... · Posted by u/paulpauper
thinkharderdev · 3 months ago
I read this article earlier today and ended up going down a rabbit hole trying to figure out what Xanadu actually "is" (on a more technical level) but haven't really been able to find much. Does anyone have a good resource for understanding the details?
AlbertoGP · 3 months ago
In 1984 one of the developers of Xanadu at the time, Chip Morningstar, wrote a technical description to apply for funding.

In typical Xanadu fashion it was kept secret, protected by Dark Magick:

> He who transgresses against the propriety of the Information contained herein shall be Cursed! Woe unto all who reveal the Secrets contained herein for they shall be Hunted unto the Ends of the Universe. They shall be afflicted unto the Tenth Generation with Lawyers. Their Corporate Bodies shall be Broken and cast into the Pit. Their Corporate Veil shall be Pierced, and Liability shall attach to the Malefactors in personem. They shall suffer Ulcers and Migraines and Agonies Unimagined. Yea, Verily, for such shall come to pass against all who would Dare to Test the Powers of Xanadu unto their Doom.

It was believed to have been lost forever but in 2019 he found the only known remaining copy, a printout he had at home buried in old stuff, and posted it with OCR in his blog. He wrote:

> At the time, we regarded all the internal details of how Xanadu worked as deep and dark trade secrets, mostly because in that pre- open source era we were stupid about intellectual property. As a consequence of this foolish secretive stance, it was never widely circulated and subsequently disappeared into the archives, apparently lost for all time. Until today!

I took it and made a cleaned-up augmented HTML edition, with additions like Engelbart’s structural statement numbers which allow linking to individual paragraphs:

https://sentido-labs.com/en/library/201904240732/Xanadu%20Hy...

It includes a glossary of terms and detailed explanation of the content addressing “tumblers”, and is the best technical description of Xanadu that I know of.

AlbertoGP commented on German warning day 12th September   iamexpat.de/expat-info/ge... · Posted by u/L_226
zhouzhao · 3 months ago
The actual date it Thu, Sep 11, 2025. 9/11. Why do you say it's 09/12, to not trigger ameritards?
AlbertoGP · 3 months ago
It is indeed the 11th of September, here is the German Government's page about it: https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/leichte-sprache/11-se...
AlbertoGP commented on The man with a Home Computer (1967) [video]   youtube.com/watch?v=w6Ka4... · Posted by u/smarm
AlbertoGP · 4 months ago
That man, Rex Malik, participated in (among other things) the 1982 BBC series “The Computer Programme” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Computer_Programme), typically in a small section at the end on an episode but also as narrator in other parts and is credited as “Programme Adviser”:

Episode 1 - “It’s Happening Now”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtMWEiCdsfc

Episode 4 - “It’s on the Computer”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkXqb1QT_tI

Episode 5 - “The New Media“: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GETqUVMXX3I

Episode 10 - “Things to Come”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLL7HmbcrvQ

u/AlbertoGP

KarmaCake day2090December 8, 2013
About
Personal:

  http://matracas.org
  web@matracas.org
Work:

  http://sentido-labs.com
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/albertogp; my proof: https://keybase.io/albertogp/sigs/FC3caIoRcNTC8tURVvHe_2MUkalyvcJ97B4QIkUp2Zo ]

View Original