NotAwfulTech

You may remember this youtuber from such famous videos as "Harder Drive", "Uppestcase and Lowestcase Letters", or "30 Weird Chess Algorithms". He tends to put out videos around once a year, often about not-awful machine learning.

This time it is a video about solving a horrible high dimensional optimization problem involving convex polyhedra. As well as 100% clearing Call of Duty Black Ops: 6.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH4MviUE0_s

Tired of going to Scott "Other" Aaronson's blog to find out what's currently known about the busy beaver game? I maintain a community website that has summaries for the known numbers in Busy Beaver research, the Busy Beaver Gauge.

I started this site last year because I was worried that Other Scott was excluding some research and not doing a great job of sharing links and history. For example, when it comes to Turing machines implementing the Goldbach conjecture, Other Scott gives O'Rear's 2016 result but not the other two confirmed improvements in the same year, nor the recent 2024 work by Leng.

Concretely, here's what I offer that Other Scott doesn't:

• A clear definition of which problems are useful to study
• Other languages besides Turing machines: binary lambda calculus and brainfuck
• A plan for how to expand the Gauge as a living book: more problems, more languages and machines
• The content itself is available on GitHub for contributions and reuse under CC-BY-NC-SA
• All tables are machine-computed when possible to reduce the risk of handwritten typos in (large) numbers
• Fearless interlinking with community wikis and exporting of knowledge rather than a complexity-zoo-style silo
• Acknowledgement that e.g. Firoozbakht is part of the mathematical community

I accept PRs, although most folks ping me on IRC (korvo on Libera Chat, try #esolangs) and I'm fairly decent at keeping up on the news once it escapes Discord. Also, you (yes, you!) can probably learn how to write programs that attempt to solve these problems, and I'll credit you if your attempt is short or novel.

Another excellent piece from Iris Meredith - strongly recommend reading if you want an idea of how to un-fuck software as a field.

stumbled over this in my feed earlier, looks interesting

A crossover between Godot and Blender was not on my bingo card for 2025, but I'm still pretty happy to see - not just because we got a cool little game out of it, but because interop between the two got a major boost.

seen via this

might be a cool thing some here may enjoy contributing to

Good news: a portable version of the LEGO Island decomp just came out, meaning ports to other OSes or devices are now possible.

Hell, there's even a browser port now, available at https://isle.pizza/. If you wanna learn more about the decomp, check out the video I linked.

Just ran across this and figured I’d link to people, looks interesting

“Not awful” is maybe a bit suspect, but at least they’re entertaining :)

I forgot to post it here earlier but it's revision weekend!

That ain't clickbait, Xe Iaso's personally-made anti-scraping measure (originally made to deal with Amazon overloading their git server) has ended up being used by the literal United Nations.

I recommend reading the full blogpost, its a wild ride.

This video was recommended to me and I found it quite sweet. Ben is a non-verbal quadriplegic who requires 24 hours care. His brother and caretaker created a custom software for him that can be controlled with two buttons. It has quite a lot of features by now, there is a keyboard with text-to-speech, movies and even some simple video games.

in the spirit of this post, but from the other side

I have a shitdroid that I can't root because the vendor sucks, but google can go fuck themselves too. combined with that I haven't androided much for about a decade and know nothing about the current ecosystem.. I'm looking for good alternatives to a few things. free/foss preferred but I'm pragmatic over picky - if there's a good paid option I'm willing to consider it

immediate known requirements include contact sync, calendar (more business than personal but either works if it's good). maybe also other things I should know about?

judicuous preference to things that support open protocols and self-hosting (i.e. anything that has to use their service to operate - no go)

tell me about good apps! I know about syncthing and photosync

For anyone not in the know, EasyRPG is a free and open-source reimplementation of the RPG Maker 2000/2003 engine. Its a pretty cool little community project, I recommend checking it out.

Fun fact: somebody managed to pull off deferred rendering on the Nintendo 64. And its let them show off impressively high-res textures at pretty solid framerates.

I didn't think this is techtakesworthy, nor is it a sneer, more a airing of perspective, as wanky as that sounds

The gist: Software, or generally computation, can be categorised as a type of building material rather than a type of product in itself.

This framing opens up the view that design within the software industry begins with an assumption that software was the best means for the supposed purpose.

Foundationally, design is the deliberation over the best means to satisfy a given purpose. In reality most design projects begin with limitations to the means available.

Regardless, the knowledge that software is one of many possible means should not be ignored.

To accept "software is eating the world" as a positive movement is to skip the most important choice of any design process. The means that best satisfies the given purpose at that point in time.

The same ignorance of that choice led to plastic eating the world as well.

The means for satisfying a purpose are not limited to building materials. It can be any effort that influences a situation rather than building a thing, physical or virtual.

The goal is to have as open a design process as possible to allow for the most appropriate means to be discovered.

Also audio available here: https://pnc.st/s/faster-and-worse/63b3904b/software-as-material

Just a guy making desktop software that solves a problem. Its 2025 and what used to be normal, selling software without subscription that you run locally on your computer, is now a unique feature.

Another banger video from f4mi, showcasing some pretty creative ways to sabotage slop summarisers/scrapers.

Sidenote: I was right - anti-scraping measures would make use of feeding false info to scrapers.