a little bummed there are no build instructions for readtape on macOS.
Readit Newscodezero commented on Unix V4 Tape from University of Utah archive.org/details/utah_... · Posted by u/belter
This is my favorite song, and I'm delighted to hear it as a chiptune! amazing work!
codezero commented on Coursera to combine with Udemy investor.coursera.com/new... · Posted by u/throwaway019254
I was a Udemy instructor for ~10 years selling tech courses but focused more on delivering courses through my own site for the last ~5-6 years.
Something never felt right with how Udemy promoted courses. I used to have a top selling course there, selling thousands of copies a month and now it gets basically no sales but it's still one of the highest rated courses in that niche on their platform. It's just no longer ranked or promoted by Udemy, for years.
I have no evidence of this but my personal opinion is their ranking is probably not fully automated and they have special offers and deals with certain instructors and if you're not a part of this club, oh well.
Again, it's all speculation but I can only go by what my numbers are. They were small scale life changing and now nothing but the quality of the courses I produced didn't change. It doesn't make sense. Of course it could be one big coincidence too, but this has been tracked and analyzed over years.
Not sure if anecdata helps but when I worked at Quora udemy course link spam was one of the higher volume sources of spam. It’s possible other courses are doing better because they pay people to link spam.
I love this but also funny that it includes the Nia and NATS posts from today.
codezero commented on Fara-7B: An efficient agentic model for computer use github.com/microsoft/fara... · Posted by u/maxloh
Are there any agentic models like this that would work for controlling input in arbitrary video games? I've been wanting to have an AI play Kerbal Space Program because I think it would just be pretty hilarious.
codezero commented on Show HN: Safe-NPM – only install packages that are +90 days old github.com/kevinslin/safe... · Posted by u/kevinslin
Does anyone have any statistics on how long a compromised package has been in the wild on average?
Cool tale! I have observed a mix of viable and unreadable user-burned CD media from the late 90s and early 2000s. It definitely depends on the quality of the media, quality of the burn/drive/laser, and how well it was stored interim.
My oldest disc is some bright blue Verbatim disk my childhood friend made for me so I could play our favorite game at home pre-2000. I have a bit-perfect copy, but the actual disc still reads fine in 2025 when I last tested it.
Yep, quality is definitely a factor here, as much as it can be. We had NSF funding pre-2008, so there was plenty of budget for quality media. We spared no expense, and while I stayed in a $60/night hostel in SF for conferences, our rewritable DVDs were the best money could buy at the time lol.
Thank your procurement agent and hvac guy.
My team used to maintain go-kits for continuity of operations for a government org. We ran into a few scenarios where the dye on optical media would just go, and another where replacement foam for the pelican cases off gassed and reacted with the media!
I was the procurement guy for many years, and we had no HVAC guy - we were in a state university, and there was nothing special about the DVDs we bought, they were from Newegg and other retail places, we did buy the most expensive ones because our grants allowed us to, so maybe that's a factor.
I have no doubts (hence my anecdata statement) that there could be bad DVDs in there, or that maybe over a longer time horizon that the media would be cooked.
> It is a '70s 1200ft 3M tape, likely 9 track, which has a pretty good chance of being recoverable.
Not old enough to have this kind of knowledge or confidence. I wonder if instead one day I'll be helping some future generation read old floppies, CDs, and IDE/ATA disks *slaps top of AT tower*.
Just anecdata, but I had this concern when I worked in academia and we backed up all our data to writable DVDs. I was there 10 years after the start of the project and I periodically checked the old DVDs to make sure they weren't corrupted.
After 10 years, which was longer than the assumed shelf life of writable/rewritable DVDs at the time, I never found a single corrupt file on the disks. They were stored in ideal conditions though, in a case, in a closed climate controlled shelf, and rarely if ever removed or used.
Also, just because I think it's funny, the archive was over 4000 DVDs. (We had a redundant copies of the data compressed and uncompressed, I think it was like 3000 uncompressed 1k compressed) there was also an offsite redundant copy we put on portable IDE (and eventually SATA) drives.
codezero commented on Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race nbcnews.com/politics/elec... · Posted by u/jsheard
for people making $1M/year, yeah, I think that was one of his campaign promises that helped get him elected.