Poster for the TV show cop rock, featuring head and torso of four tightly grouped, uniformed police officers and the stacked words COP and ROCK in block silver lettering with gold lightning bolts on either side of "COP" and a gold underline below "ROCK". The uniforms are short-sleeved. There are three men and one woman.

In 1990, ABC executives bet on "Cop Rock", a weekly police procedural that was also a musical.

Think CSI: NY, but they break into power ballads and gospel numbers 5 times per episode.

That really happened.

(For any confused youngsters: broadcast networks back then ran on nepotism and cocaine.)
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To those mid-tier bands that complained so much about piracy in the '90s, are you better off with streaming and almost no piracy than you were with physical media sales and some piracy?

My friends in the music industry tell me the '90s with piracy was a far better deal for writers and performers.

"Clavicular's friend Androgenic reveals the pentastack looksmaxxers use to stream."

This was here, on Bluesky. I can't even begin....

What the fuck does that even mean?

I Feel So Sorry for My A.I. Sunglasses

"So what do my miraculous sunglasses tell me? Many things. They inform me, in the voice of Princess Anna from “Frozen,” that my dog is a golden retriever mix (he is not) and that a tree I am looking at is probably an oak (it is not). They tell me to walk north when I know I should be walking south."

"Disney has laid off nearly the entire visual development team at Marvel Studios. Only a skeleton crew remains in place to coordinate hiring on a per-project basis...."

Full-time VisDev offers world and character consistency you can't get with project-by-project.

The worst kind of cost cutting :(

Black Sabath's "War Pigs" is a masterpiece.

The Coolies - Crack Pipe (Burnin') YouTube video by ByTorTheCatfish

mood

Man Who Threw Molotov Cocktail At Sam Altman’s Home Claims He Was Following ChatGPT Recipe For Risotto SAN FRANCISCO—Following reports that a 20-year-old man had been arrested for throwing a Moltov cocktail at Sam Altman’s home, the suspect stated Monday that he only initiated the attack because he was...

The Onion's still got it.

"We're going to put you all out of work over the next few years. We've got no plan for that beyond getting richer and more powerful. Take up any concerns you have with your city council or something."

Then they feign surprised when people retaliate.

RESIST (in what ever way feels right to you.)

I really should get that "guy throwing Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's mansion" t-shirt made. No reason not to capitalize on his misdeeds and the resulting misfortune that's befalling him.

Maybe a riff on the Banksy Molotov work would work.

Six weeks ago, Claude users reported degraded model capability. An Anthropic marketing replied saying users were imagining things.

Today, confronted with evidence, Anthropic says it did make changes, to "lowers total cost for users across the request mix."

These AI companies cannot be relied upon.

How I understand Tolkien's Orcs. Happy to be corrected.

Orcs and Goblins are the same race, probably the corruption of Elves or Humans by Morgoth.

Uruks are larger, stronger Orcs.

Goblin-men and Half-orcs are Saruman's Orc–Human hybrids.

Uruk-hai are Saruman's improved, sun-tolerant Orcs.

The Low Spark Of High-Heeled Boys YouTube video by Traffic - Topic

Hammond through a fuzzbox is such a trip.

These AI companies, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc. keep telling the press their programmers no longer write code and it's all prompting, but where are all the customer testimonials saying the same. Any I've seen written about are been dwarfed in volume by all the self promotion.

CNBC: Sam Altman's house was targeted with a Molotov cocktail

I think a t-shirt with a guy throwing a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's house would probably sell well. I'd buy one.

Reuters: John Deere agreed to pay $99M into a fund to settle a 2022 right-to-repair class action lawsuit, and make digital repair tools available to farmers for 10 years

A win for right-to-repair.

It's easy to hate on robots when the worst people in the world are building them for ill, drones blowing up schools, laundry folding humanoids reporting our home lives to Big Tech, but we don't have to accept that. Robots could be awesome. R2D2 is awesome. Data is awesome. Let's build toward those.

Making movies is hard work. Even that one that recently let you down, teams of people busted their asses to bring it to us. Be disappointed, but don't drag them on effort because it didn't land for you.

I worked with a really neat guy at Mozilla named Jesse who wrote early fuzzers, tools that feed apps random data to break them, often exposing security bugs. Some industry players warned that fuzzers were too dangerous to share because bad guys might find bugs. Today, fuzzing is a standard practice.

Thanks, Fabrice.

Screenshot of the start of Metroid from console-classics where you can play classic arcade games online.

Hold my calls.

console-classics.com/retro-games/...

Thanks. That's one I hadn't even heard of. I'll definitely check it out. Spotify migration sounds great.

Something I hadn't considered was migration. I wonder how easy the platforms make that. Are there standards? Documented vendor formats? APIs?

Thanks. I've now heard that from several people. I think Bandcamp and Tidal are coming out on top.

After the web and mobile revolutions, Silicon Valley ran out of ideas, but not money. We got a decade of gilded garbage like NFTs and the metaverse, a trash heap that proved to be a perfect breeding ground for snake oil. Sam Altman didn't just thrive there; he became the biggest weed in the lot.

I'm sorry, "thought partner" is not a real thing. You check in on startup pitch decks. You're an advisor.

Black was the development trunk, where most of our progress happened. Red was the managed periods with limited changes.

Alphas and betas came right off the trunk (actually, very short-lived branches) and major releases stabilized on tightly managed branches, letting the trunk plow forward.

Diagram showing Mozilla code check-rules between Mozilla 1.2 and Mozilla 1.5 Alpha, with branches and code freeze checkpoints for product stabilization of Mozilla 1.3 and 1.4 and their alpha and beta development phases.

Mozilla development schedule diagram I made and maintained in the summer of 2002 for our text-heavy roadmap document.

Our system was pretty simple. Developers landed code with standard code review except during stabilization periods for releases where the project committee's approval was required.

Pinball Map The Pinball Map website and free mobile app will help you find places to play pinball! Pinball Map is a high-quality user-updated pinball locator for all the public pinball machines in your area.

If you've only played pinball on a computer, and never at a pinball machine, you've missed out on about 50% of the joy.

Ronan Farrow on Sam Altman:

"We interviewed more than 100 people... a majority of those people really did say some variation on the theme of: he's a pathological liar."

"multiple people... used the term 'sociopath.'"

Thank you!