Much like a football club buyout TBH, buying an entertainment business by raising a large amount of debt against its ongoing cashflow. Anyway, end of (some kind of) an era. Hopefully the $210 a share will help some employees cope with the inevitable mass layoffs. www.bbc.com/news/article...

Saudi-led group completes $55bn purchase of gaming giant EA

The deal takes the maker of titles including The Sims and EA FC into private ownership - and loads it with debt.

bbc.com

Waiting for feedback about your latest software release candidate is a *very* anxious business indeed. www.patreon.com/samaaron/pos...

Sonic Pi v5 Release Candidate 8 | Sam Aaron

Hi everyone, hot on the heels of RC7 is RC8. This primarily addresses an issue on macOS with Bluetooth headphones, but the audio pathway ha

patreon.com

Bring AI agents to enterprise workflows! 🏢 Learn how building agents with Gemini Enterprise drives real business value in Google Cloud's 90-minute course. 🔗 www.skills.google/paths/3546/c...

Don't look now, but the world has now installed 3TW of solar. Took 10 years to get from 100GW to 1TW. Less than 3 years to get to 2TW. Less than 2 years to get to 3TW. Analysts expect *9TW* by 2036.

The World Crossed a Major Solar Milestone. No One Noticed

The next phase of the boom may reveal a shift in who is gaining access to the technology.

bloomberg.com

BP quarterly profits up from $2.5bn to $5.73bn as Iran war sends oil prices soaring. Shell doubled its net profit to almost $10bn. High bills fuelling poverty and misery for households and businesses. Boon for execs and shareholders. Must levy 100% windfall tax on oil, gas, energy companies.

BP profits more than double as Iran war sends oil prices soaring

Energy company’s $5.73bn quarterly profits come after Shell posted second highest quarterly earnings on record

theguardian.com

It's a peculiar summer (year) in the #Arctic. This is one of the largest contrasts in sea ice conditions that I can remember seeing between the Atlantic (near record low) and Pacific sides (highest in decades) + Concentration = fraction of sea ice + Another July view at zacklabe.com/arctic-sea-i...

old metal gear schematic sheet

the oscilloscope can produce mind-boggling effects 💀

EA officially goes private tonight, meaning: - EA will no longer trade on the NASDAQ for the first time in 36 years - All stockholders of EA (including many employees) will receive $210/share - EA will take on $18 billion (!) in debt, putting it on the hook to pay ~$1.8 billion/year in interest

Is Russia helping Iran? Duh Is China helping Russia? Duh Is it possible for too many western analysts to live in the delusion that China Russia and Iran can be separated/played against each other? Duh www.reuters.com/world/middle...

EXCLUSIVE: Iran strikes on CIA facilities prompt questions about possible Russian role

Iranian drone attacks on CIA facilities in the Gulf have prompted U.S. intelligence analysts to investigate whether Russia assisted by providing targeting information or ​advanced drone technology, sa...

reuters.com

My latest explores why Ukraine chose to formalise its long-range strike architecture, assesses how the new command can add to Ukraine’s strategic and political endeavours, and what Western militaries should learn from Ukraine’s example. mickryan.substack.com/p/ukraines-l...

Ukraine's Long-Range Strike Command: Institutionalising Deep Strike

After years of technical and tactical innovation, as well collaboration between Ukrainian organisations and foreign agencies, Ukraine takes the next step in its long-range strike endeavours.

mickryan.substack.com

Tweaked the repo for Speculation - the emulator page has been moved to the repo, so I can deploy it quicker. I'll be adding more features, such as being able to select emulator files, in the near future. The new link is here: breakintoprogram.github.io/emulator-z80/

GitHub - breakintoprogram/emulator-z80: Speculation is my Sinclair Spectrum Z80 emulator written mostly as an exercise in C/C++

Speculation is my Sinclair Spectrum Z80 emulator written mostly as an exercise in C/C++ - breakintoprogram/emulator-z80

github.com

I just found out that today (Monday, August 3, 2026) is the 20th anniversary of Pandoc, the Universal Translator of Text Formats. I’ve used ion a few projects, including a docs management system that’s still in use at a very pricey cruise ship company. Read here: www.globalnerdy.com/2026/08/03/h...

Happy 20th birthday, Pandoc! : Global Nerdy

One of the bragging points of digital information is that it’s supposed to be possible to convert it from one format to another. Actually doing the conversion is often where theory runs headlong into ...

globalnerdy.com

If you have a jailbroken M1/M2 iPad, you can now run honest to goodness full-blown modern macOS on it. Only catch is that it only works with iPadOS 16. 🤯 github.com/nfzerox/Virt...

GitHub - nfzerox/VirtualMacOniPad: People have dreamed of running macOS on iPad for more than a decade. Today, that dream comes true. With Virtual Mac, iPad finally breaks free from iPadOS, enabling p...

People have dreamed of running macOS on iPad for more than a decade. Today, that dream comes true. With Virtual Mac, iPad finally breaks free from iPadOS, enabling pro apps like Xcode and Terminal ...

github.com

Left, right, whatever, I just want graduate students posting their papers here

A crucial thing about Bluesky was that the scientific community migrated to it en masse as soon as it opened its doors. There are left wing scientists and right wing scientists and scientists who try to pay no attention to politics. What they all have in common is that they are rationalists.

The Verge@theverge.com · 2d ago

Bluesky's new CEO Toni Schneider on the platform's reputation for being a liberal bubble: "Yes, we definitely want that to change. It is already changing. It certainly wasn’t designed to attract one specific group of people."

public libraries ftw

“Kyiv may be in the best position in the war since 2022, but the Kremlin believes it will crush the will of Ukraine & its friends this winter. Russia may be struggling, but Putin has not exhausted his options. He still wants to fight for as long as possible.” www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/why-...

Why a Weaker Russia Keeps Fighting

Putin sees little need to negotiate.

foreignaffairs.com

"While the sector experienced a modest post-COVID bump in activity (...) data show that the country's domestic aviation emissions have declined in each of the past three years, descending 22% during the period 2023 through 2025." #Sufficiency works, if we dare. climatetrace.org/news/austria...

Austria and France banned short-haul flights to boost train travel and reduce emissions. Did it work?

Climate TRACE data point to encouraging outcomes, with much greater emissions reduction opportunity if such a shift were widely adopted globally.

climatetrace.org

Slides for SIGGRAPH 2026 Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games course's talk on SPEEDING UP PATH TRACING VIA ORCA (ONLINE RADIANCE CACHE ACCELERATION) by @jontology2.bsky.social from EA SEED are now online - enjoy!! advances.realtimerendering.com/s2026/index....

Slides for SIGGRAPH 2026 Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games course's talk on SMOLDER — REAL-TIME VOLUMETRIC EFFECT RENDERING IN GLACIER AND 007 FIRST LIGHT by @lexdev.net from IO Interactive are now online - enjoy!! advances.realtimerendering.com/s2026/index....

Call for testing: OpenBSD vmm(4)/vmd(8) fd-ification www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=a... #openbsd #vmm #vmd #virtualization #virtualmachines #testing #newcode #development #security #freesoftware #libresoftware

All shall love her and despair!

Ted Underwood@tedunderwood.com · 2d ago

It's nice that The Odyssey is getting its day in the sun as a synecdoche for history. But when this summer is over, it's back to the relentless, remorseless rise of Jane Austen.

There is no version of yourself you could become that would satisfy the people who hate you. So you might as well be who you are.

"The #climate we live in today is the least extreme climate you will experience in your lifetimes because of ongoing fossil fuel emissions."

Ed Hawkins@edhawkins.org · 5d ago

The missing words in the climate conversation are not human-caused climate change, but fossil fuel emissions. By Hayley Fowler and myself: theconversation.com/was-this-hea...

My quote of the day Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going. Paul Theroux

I'm not sure folks have realized just how crazy the second half of 2026 and 2027 will be for global temperatures – on the back of a record-smashing El Niño event. Here is my latest estimate of where both years will end up compared to global temperatures since 1850.

My newest Citation Needed project made an appearance on @lastweektonight.com! It’s a work in progress, but you can see the new interactive version of my map of the Trump family’s crypto ventures at map.citationneeded.news.

This week’s story is about Trump’s sprawling and ethically compromising cryptocurrency projects, how they’ve created massive conflicts of interest for the Trump administration, and why the pages of Trump’s bibles might be sticky. Ok fine, we think it was Craig.

QRP with your most popular piece on bsky - This little foraging boar has gotten the most love I think.

Guillaume Bonnet@zazb.bsky.social · 5d ago

QRP with your most popular piece on bsky - My D&D characters from 1995 to 2023 on a single page! Those I played for more than a few sessions at least.