I think I have a spare DIP-32 512kx8 SRAM, a result of my rule of "anytime you order from Mouser, order 1.5 to 2x as many as you need in case you bork one and then the project is on hold for weeks"

It would make an excellent caltrop.

It's rather amazing the lengths they went to to make cassettes a thing.

They had some units where they physically spit the tape out, flipped it around, and re-inserted it because they couldn't tune the mechanism to perform well playing in both directions.

Others just flipped the head asseembly.

Genshin works well enough for me in Wine with Lutris gluing together the config.

Kohler is never getting a kopeck of my money.

We put in a fancy one-piece Kohler toilet in the ~2000s.

Never flushed well because it was an early low-flow model and clesrly built for looks instead of functionality. The design provided no purchase for easily removing the seat for replacement, even with the special tool they provided for the task.

We finally broke down and replaced it with an American Standard which at least flushes well.

Maybe there would be more in stock if they didn't CATCH FIRE.

The story seems weird to me.

What kind of paint are they putting on food that wouldn't be at least weird tasting?

And why do you actually care if the kids eat the food, to the level of trying to adulterate it? Isn't it enough from a legal perspective to provide food?

I could see painting sample dishes to photograph for their advertising, to flimflam parents who are actually paying for the service, and then people might complain the actual meal is less vibrant, with far less risk and ongoing cost.

This is a remarkable combination of cunning and stupid.

I'm curious what the economics at Epic are.

I know Fortnite was paying the bills for years, but does it still carry the same weight?

Virtually all multiplayer games atrophy because over time, you have to cater for long haul playets, which makes the barrier for new players' entry high. (Even if it's not a skill or challenge thing, some long games are just a huge time sink to commit to the story or missing time-sensitive stuff.)

Is it just an endless stream of collabs now to bring in a new demographic each week and hope a few stick?

I know Unreal Engine is a revenue dtiver, but it's one that the market is eager to route around.

There probably wasn't a billion dollar idea in there. But there might have been a $100,000 idea in there.

I'm sure there are plenty of people who'd pay $10 once, and a smaller proportion who would do so monthly, for a desktop friend branded as their favourite media character. I'm sure we've been doing standalone toys like that since the 90s if not before.

But they went and nickel-plated the implementation. Was it over ambition, misjudged economics, or a belief the product had to fit into the AI blitz?

The smart plan would have been to bring up a small number of curated licensed personalities. You know Miku would sell, for example.

If you have a target character, you no longer need a LLM. Use a canned base of high quality data or curated sources, and you can drive it with Eliza-style keyword mapping and some undergraduate-project Markov Chain stuff to spin the dialogue a bit.

But they promised arbitrary characters and open-ended conversations, which all but forced dependency on a huge data model of some sort. That's a huge expense to service the long-tail customer who wants to talk to the ghost of Robert Mugabe or the protagonist from a 25-year-old C-tier manhwa, or so you can pivot from asking Batman about the Riddler to his suggestions for replacing the muffler of a Ford Aerostar. Also, you now have a content domain far too broad to fully test and rein in, ending in tragedy for some vulnerable users.

If everything worked just right, it might outperform the local "themed Bonzi Buddy" concept on some sort of Fanboy Turing Test, but was that a battle you even need to win to be a successful product?

Even before the Slop Mandate, I'm not sure I could be less enthused about that product.

Let's cross over the trillion-dollar franchises! That's not the premise for a classic game you'll proudly share with your children one day. It's the premise for a 16-year-old fanboy's first outing on AO3. It's the premise for something that shuts down in 9 months due to declining interest after two half-hearted content updates and nine gacha banners.

Hot take: if your game mechanics and story wouldn't work as an unbranded, franchise-free version, no amount of smearing Darth Vader and the Incredible Hulk on the carcass will make it better. (It will, of course, sell better, because Star Wars and Marvel Boys seem to inexplicably have access to credit cards.)

I would think knowledge work is really compatible with unionization, as it has less "fungible" employees.

If one assembly line shift goes on strike at GM, they can switch in another crew, or hire scabs and get pretty close to back to normal.

If your software dev team goes out, any replacements don't have 200 years of experience on exactly where the bodies are buried in the specific design and architecture. You will suffer ramp-up problems. A strike threat is way bigger, especially if it cuts into keep-the-lights-on stuff like SRE and operations too.

12VHPWR seems to be hubris manifest.

It used to be that the only PSU cables thst regularly caught fire were the $2 Molex-to-SATA converters.

"Kill my boss? Dare I dream the American dream?"