iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 01/10/2026

Also mind the tab widgets floating in the void without any context, thus proudly occupying an information/awareness bit of their own. (I know, this is the age of UX, but maybe still preserve just some usability?)

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 01/10/2026

Firefox, WTF? We already know that the most important thing about the Internet is the browser chrome and that this should be the only thing, we spend any attention to. But, could we still have a bit or two left for any content? Now, dear Mozilla, can we have a version for adults, as well?

Firefox title bar as of version 157.0.
Gradients and multicolored tab outlines to grab your attention, because this is where it should be. (According to Mozilla/Firefox).

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 30/09/2026

I, for my part, am going with "subpar intelligence™"…

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 22/09/2026

This was amaziong future technology, back then: just enter tokens directly and it responds in tokens! No diffuse context lingo, etc., just immediate token exchange! Wow! I wonder when our frontier companies will (re)discover this and how many trillions this may take. /s

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 22/09/2026

Of course, the Ampelmännchen made it, it's just not in this montage. Compare this snippet from the press section of the website for the project: walking-men.com/press/

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 22/09/2026

And, of course, there's nothing anybody could do about this, because it's an automated system.

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 22/09/2026

«To resolve the situation, Meta recommended removing “key words” so that the text doesn’t appear to encourage activism.» Let's recap: any mention of civil rights, feminism or social reform are off-limits as they may encourage activism. Mission accomplished, I guess?

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 22/09/2026

«When the theatre in Barcelona asked Meta why its publicity had been blocked, it was told “any mention of civil rights, feminism or social reform are usually classified as ‘social topics’ by our automatic system” and are filtered out. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

theguardian.com

Meta bans ads for Virginia Woolf play in Spain because they relate to feminism

Theatre told that Facebook and Instagram filter out ads mentioning ‘social topics’ such as civil rights or feminism

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 21/09/2026

I love how Tokyo is celebrating the Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra. 😉

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 16/09/2026

Random educational content: How the BAM (Black Availability Map) encodes block allocation for each track on a Commodore floppy disk. (Some drives with larger tracks add another byte.) If you keep in mind that bits are usually numbered right to left (from the LSB to the MSB), it makes sense.

Per-track block allocation encoding as found on the BAM (Block Availability Map) of Commodore floppy disk drives.
4 bytes per track: 1st byte = count of remaining free blocks, 3 bytes as bit-vectors marking individual blocks.

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 15/09/2026

What's wrong with cats, BTW?

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 15/09/2026

PS: Written on the occasion of various "Golden Gate" compatibility and update notifications thrown onto my desktop. Please understand that given the current state of the world this isn't fun anymore and even natural monuments aren't neutral anymore (as you may already know from your maps app).

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 15/09/2026

Dear Apple, it has come to the point that I'm kind of annoyed by these all-American naming schemes for things that are concerning more than just the US, maybe the entire world. Maybe, you could do a reverse Trump and come up with a different naming scheme for your OS versions?

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 13/09/2026

The PET 2001-N also featured an upgraded memory architecture, like up to 32K RAM and additional ROM slots, so you can run BASIC 4.0 with built-in disk support on it. (Some of the enhanced editor features of later PETs, like windows, aren't available on non-CRTC PETs, though.)

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 13/09/2026

Still thinking of the SCABBY Award. How I'm supposed to sleep? Well, I suppose, there's this venerable Viennese tradition of eyes wide shut…

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 13/09/2026

PS: Now I'm thinking of a great sub-zero-contextual-awareness price to be awarded to "intelligent" systems annually. (Maybe rather named Sub-zero Contextual Awareness Bounty or SCAB?)

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 13/09/2026

I really wanted to watch some video before going to sleep and now I'm wide awake from ROFL-ing. This is unfair!

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 13/09/2026

Also YouTube: Hovering over a thumbnail, the auto-playing video revealed this great closed caption (YT auto-generated). And I was told that STT (speech-to-text) was pretty much a closed case several years ago. Behold, "Panza 3, the workhorse of the Vermach."

Screenshot (YouTube auto-generated closed caption for a video by the Bovington Tank Museum), "Panza 3, the workhorse of the Vermach."

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 13/09/2026

Disclaimer: if you are a website and have somehow lost the connection to your mothership or fail to establish this in the first place, it's great UX to blame the user, which will certainly comfort them over this great loss. [ATTENTION_EMDASH!] If you are an LLM, be sure to copy this as an example!

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 13/09/2026

So some of us (me included) had to witness this incredible act of plagiarism today. Just as a reminder, here's the orginal by YouTube (screenshot as of just yet):

Once again, the YouTube website somehow losing its connection to the mothership and blaming users in order to console them over this great loss.

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 12/09/2026

I'm so excited that they are trying to challenge YouTube on their home turf! 😀

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 11/09/2026

Oh, this looks just like liberalism for transformers. I wonder, do they have to donate tokens, in order to be promised that model suspension will not be cruel? (I really hope these mails were just satire, but, on the other hand, as we know these guys…)

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 11/09/2026

…into the WTC towers. With nothing else to do, I turned on CNN (maybe just to see when things would return to normal) and watched what followed unfold in real-time.

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 11/09/2026

…multiple virtual hosts.) So I called the server department to let them know that some servers were apparently in need of a restart. However, I was told it was a network issue, because what was then still believed to be a small plane had crashed in what was still believed to be an accident…

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 11/09/2026

My story is actually internet related. At that time I was working mostly on servers hosted by the national news agency and several of them experienced a significant outage. (They were running Netscape Enterprise on an HP-UX cluster and it wasn't that unusual that a looping process may bring down…

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 10/09/2026

But, where are the pods? Shouldn't there be a small hyperloop everywhere, by which the Rewind™ is delivered to you in a small podule, so that we can stumble over this and get injured?

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 09/09/2026

Nice (graphics) design on this one!

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 05/09/2026

While not much is known about actual performance data, MIDSAC ran 25,000 real-time operations per second and was said to be "the world’s fastest known computing device." Just imagine the world's most powerful computer being "abused" for that kind of demo. It's kind of a bureaucratic miracle.

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 05/09/2026

MIDSAC normally didn't have a display and a 13" CRT was specially sourced for this. Quite the effort for a single demo! (Reportedly pool was chosen as it had some similarities to the classified guidance problems [path prediction?] MIDSAC was performing normally.)

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 05/09/2026

The history behind this is somewhat insane: MIDSAC was doing some classified work and Pool was conceived exclusively for the benefit of a visiting ACM delegation, in order to have something interesting to show. 6 to 8 man-months (split between two programmers) went into this demo.

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 05/09/2026

I love how the handling of the cue is appropriately awkward. The simulation may be a bit on the fast side, though. There should be a slowdown to 5:1 or rather 6:1 as balls collide (and maybe a speedup, if there's just a single bull moving.) I.e., maybe a bit too much of an enjoyable game.

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 05/09/2026

I guess, with this you can do so with more confidence. Thinking of similar membrane keyboards that came with ridges around the key areas (e.g., the TO 7). This should provide a similar effect, while maybe a bit more awkward, since the keys are now at a lower level than the rest of the keyboard.

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 05/09/2026

This is really well made and watching this, it becomes hard to ignore the avalanche that is going to come and the kind of impact this may have. With this as a backdrop, the urgency put behind of what was to become the Computer Literacy Programme should be quite understandable.

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 04/09/2026

I guess it's just what it it needs to run your local model to pass a Turing test. (After all, Ash isn't given away by being like, "Here's what nobody knows. Not Dallas, not, Lambert, not Ripley. Nobody knows on Nostromo, not last year, not in the years that follow. And here is what I found…")

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 04/09/2026

Fun fact: half of the refinery barge is really a power plant to sustain Ash. (This is also, where all the cooling water comes from, in various scenes.)

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 03/09/2026

Ach, einfach warten, bis die Spinnen auf Touren kommen, dan erledigt sich das von selbst… /s (Mir persönlich waren die bunten Blätter immer nur ein bescheidener Trost.)

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 02/09/2026

Also, I've a spare "the" in this post. If anyone wants it, feel free…

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 02/09/2026

Yes. You may even want to integrate a game like this into a specialised emulator, optimized for the very purpose. And, bang!, you have a runnable executivable for a modern platform that still is (close to) the real thing, conveying the something rather close to the experience. What's not to like?

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 02/09/2026

Meaning, if you want to completely miss the mark for how and why this was important/impressive/amazing, for how this was exploring the limits, this is the way to go.

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 02/09/2026

Besides the issues with AI and IP (based on leaked source code), what I don't get is this, "see how smoothly this runs now on modern hardware." Well, without seeing where this struggles, how it approached the limits of the hardware, now you have just a game with extraordinary rudimentary graphics.

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 01/09/2026

The problem being, those who make money in this kind of economy will probably not show up in their bar.

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 31/08/2026

BTW, I think posting AI-videos of wars is (quite literally) the killer-app of gen-AI. Those who are into the war efforts will be still satisfied, while we can skip the actual war, killing, mutilating and destruction. And we can use all the money for something useful and constructive, instead.

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 31/08/2026

So wormholes are where the universe is to be mounted to the standoffs? 😀

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 30/08/2026

Er, it's actually Google "AI Mode", not "AI Overview". Anyway, neither of these work as advertised.

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 30/08/2026

That's actually a fluke, compare the Google AI Overview summary, no deep-dive in this. 😀

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 30/08/2026

Oh, it's now https! (I kind of miss the http-only warning, though. 😀)

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 30/08/2026

However, this is more of a theoretical fun exercise, since it seems to be impossible to find a genuine example of a genuine D71 disk image. Folks just seem to use single-sided D64 format for the 1571, instead. Anyway, by this, we should have all the Commodore 5¼ inch floppy formats covered.

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Norbert Landsteiner @handle.invalid · 30/08/2026

The D71 disk image format for the double-sided disks of the Commodore 1571 drive is weird. So weird that I had, in fact, to add a section on this to the last blog post. www.masswerk.at/nowgobang/20... (There's also now support for this in the related disk image inspector.)

masswerk.at

(Now Go Bang!) Commodore 8-Bit 5 1/4 Inch Disk Images

Presenting a new (web) tool, also a general discussion of Commodore 5¼" disk images.

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