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James Brown

@ancient.bsky.social

youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@ancientjames email: inquiries@ancient-workshop.com

301 Posts1239 Follower195 Folgt
Richard Easther@rjme.bsky.social · last wk.

I make this plot each year for our "intro to rocket science" course. It's remarkable that as many rockets go to orbit from New Zealand as from Russia – but on a per head basis we stand alone. This is an amazing place for a small country to find itself, and we should be making the most of it...

Two graphs, both showing the number of launches to orbit per country per year. New Zealand is 3rd= with Russia in terms of the absolute count, but way ahead in a per capita plot.
Alasdair Allan@alasdairallan.com · 3w ago

In 1988 a company that made record turntables built its own CPU, because it hated its factory software. It failed. Every one of those ideas ships today. Hardware memory safety. Garbage collection in silicon. Persistent objects. Chips shaped to a workload. negroniventurestudios.com/2026/07/18/t...

The computer at the bottom of a canal

Somewhere at the bottom of the Forth and Clyde Canal, buried in the silt, there is a box of custom silicon that was right about almost everything. Back in 1988 a Scottish hi-fi company shipped a proce...

negroniventurestudios.com

James Brown@ancient.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Just hit the stage of bringing up a new display device where it looks awful, and I'm not yet sure whether there's a bug or if that's just as good as it's going to get.

ModernDayNTK@modernday.ntk.net · 3mo ago

as @robmanuel.b3ta.com‬ has noted, there was a lot of "you must get online" marketing in the early-ish years of the WWW - and before that, entire government campaigns to "make the most of the micro[computer]" in the 1980s. Yet neither Ofcom or DCMS have demanded a BBC LLM - sort it out you cowards!

Adam Conover@adamconover.net · 4mo ago

I don't recall any previous transformative technologies that had to be sold to the public so hard. No one in 1999 was going, "Guys. Cell phone? It's coming, whether we like it or not. I think it's important, FOR WOMEN ESPECIALLY, to learn about cell phone. So that we're not left behind!!"

James Brown@ancient.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I have a big blister on my thumb because I was filming myself tapping a whole lot of holes and didn't want to change my pose or break the rhythm. I always film myself tapping holes, and I've never once found the footage interesting or included it in the final edit.

James Brown@ancient.bsky.social · 3mo ago

It took a surprising amount of effort to achieve this crappy result. It's rendering 4000 views simultaneously per frame (effectively 120000 fps), on a Pi 4. Complicated by no viewport arrays or layered rendering support, and clipping in the fragment shader added seconds to render time.

James Brown@ancient.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I just tried using the robot to write some 3D code. It didn't work at first, and when I pressed it, it said maybe it had got confused between column-major and row-major, and to transpose it and see if that worked. That's it. I've been replaced.

Jolisa Gracewood@nzdodo.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Uh-oh. Do we need a new version of @magnets.eurosky.social’s brilliant observation about how climate change will manifest? In a surreal twist, people are now doubting footage that is both very real and very close to home—a result of AI imagery poisoning the waters: www.tickaroo.com/e/GCRysAwNeu...

Image of Wellington floods so incredible people couldn't believe it was real

Image of Wellington floods so incredible people couldn't believe it was real An image of a street in Wellington's Berhampore suburb shows cars being swallowed by flood water.The photo was taken by Bib...

tickaroo.com

The thread o’ tweets@threadotweets.bsky.social · last yr.

Magnets @PerthshireMags climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you're the one filming it