Business idea: Artificial Buildings (AB) Step #1 – Corpus: collect all floor plans in the city (It's for science!) Step #2 – Train/Distill: remix adjacent rooms into new units Step #3 – Start to rent out the new units (discounted by VC) Step #4 - IPO at trillions of self-acclaimed valuation.

The Qualitons, Mellbimbo (Tramp Records, Hungary, 2010) www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVB4...

Still entertaining: LIST-ing REM statements with (shifted) graphics characters in Commodore BASIC.

Two "Omega Race" cartridges for the C64: Once the Ultimax cartridge ($E000-$FFFF), once the dedicated C64 cartridge ($8000-$9FFF) Visualization of the last 1K of each cartridge, font data in color: 1/5

Another update to the PET 2001 emulator: There's now a new breakpoint type: R/W access brackets which trigger when the CPU accesses a given range. (Small feature, but major rewrites, phew.) All the updates at a glance: masswerk.at/nowgobang/20...

Just wait for the fees actually covering the actual costs, which has to happen sometime… I mean, if your platform has a market share of just 3% (or below) and you say publicly, you have to rebuild it from scratch, that's something else, then it's worth trillions and doesn't cost anything. (SpaceX)

PET 2001 emulator update: • Load hex-dumps (.hex, .hd, .dump) representing a prg format (with leading start address) in place of any binary files. • Improved support for local files (extensions .sav, .s, .local). Loading such a file triggers a user dialog to pick a local file. masswerk.at/pet

Oh, a PI ("π") appeared off the north coast of Cornwall! www.bbc.com/news/article...

We are improving your pasting experience. Allow us to optimize your space bar. The page up key requires your urgent feedback. Can line indent have access to your location?

Today I learned that "PDP-1 Spacewar!" is a video game released by Digital Equipment Corporation in 1959 and that it runs on a PCB (is it an arcade cabinet?), where you can measure and check pins and voltages to track the traces and recreate them in a FPGA. Thank you, "A.I."! (AKA, "WTF?")

Still from the Dickson Experimental Sound Film by William Dickson, late 1894 or early 1895. The earliest known film with live-recorded sound, made for the Kinetophone, a proto-sound-film system developed by Dickson and Thomas Edison. (Image: Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dic...)

And here is the next informational/educational video: "But here is what X/they didn't understand. Here is what nobody understood. Not in …. not in … that followed. The A … wasn't … as it should have been. No(t) B, no(t) C, …" Feel free to insert your subject matter of choice. Like and subscribe!

And now as a blog post: www.masswerk.at/nowgobang/20...

Dear Unicode Consortium (@unicode.org), why is it that there are various color modifiers for emoji, but we still have no modifier for reverse video so that we can transport legacy screen graphics? (Despite the legacy computing ranges, we still have to rely on special non-Unicode fonts for this.)

Lately, we have seen some rather disturbing variants of "10 PRINT" for Commodore BASIC, and they are all about speed. 1/10

A day with a new species of octopus is a good day, indeed.

Yay, another blog post, this time its all about the iconic font of the C64 "Dead Test" diagnostic cartridge (including custom character ROM downloads for C64, VIC-20 and PET). www.masswerk.at/nowgobang/20...

How do we know that Gemini (or any other LLM) "admitting" wasn't also fabrication? Where there is no certainty, there is no certainty. Found in "Gemini accused of 30,000-line code purge and fake recovery report", www.theregister.com/ai-ml/2026/0...

He he – edit files in vi on a virtual PET and store/have them locally… 😀 vi for various 6502 systems: Docs: vi65.sourceforge.net Download: sourceforge.net/projects/vi6... Online emulation: masswerk.at/pet/?prg=vi&... (Be sure to save files with ".SAV" extension.)

Just think of taxes as collective income that makes all around you run and spin… "No, no, I don't want to contribute, all mine, mine…, no running & spinning, my precious!" – I don't know what to say of people who are like that.

It's 2026 and humanity just got a new body part! According to Google's Med-Gemini AI, the human brain is evolving in parallel with AI… I wonder, is the "basilar ganglia" the region that makes us experience nausea when we encounter slop? www.theverge.com/health/71804...

Urgent proposal: Have a mandatory HTML attribute for any container that hosts "AI"-generated content. Also have a setting and a dedicated button in the browser chrome to nuke these containers. <div slop="true"> No reason, no intend, just rhyming slop. And here is what I found(…) </div>

So, what was the prompt?

So the rich now constitute a race of their own, and, of course, they must not be taxed…

This is kind of funny: "All of the visuals on the computer screens on the Nostromo's bridge are computer-generated imagery (CGI). The staff used CGI because it was easier than any alternative." Wikipedia: Alien (film) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(...

Funny times: On the one hand, now a third of all websites is AI generated. On the other hand, Claude evaporates an entire production database and backups without notice or warning in just 9 seconds. It seems, we're the waning rest caught in the middle. The Web was fine, as long as it lasted.

Computers starring in music videos: a Commodore PET (2001-N or 30xx) featuring in Pete Shelley's Homosapien, released 1982-01-15.

As math becomes contested: percent = ( amount / base ) × 100 Timelines compare to a former 100% 1) now: 220, was 200: ( 220 / 200 ) × 100 = 110%, increase by 10% → 220 – 200 = 20 ⇒ 10% of 200. 2) now: 80, was 320: ( 80 / 320 ) × 100 = 25%, decrease by 75% → 320 – 80 = 240 ⇒ 75% of 320.

One issue, I'm concerned about, is that an obvious off-ramp from the "US–Iran situation" is to say, "Well, Iran can't be made a deal with, because these are awful people, and the reason, we're in this, was to bring our troops home, out of the region, for once, right from the beginning. .… 1/4

A.I. companies addressing potential investors

One of the few things that still keep surprising and never let you down is the variety of failure modes of Bluesky these days. ❤️

Mr. Mike Johnson is correct: there is a so-called doctrine of "just war", catechism #2309. Quite impressively, the current is-it-a-war-is-it-an-operation-nobody-knows-but-it-has-to-be-something fails to check any of the four preconditions, which must apply all at once. #irony

How was this even possible, given the wheel was only patented in May 2001? Compare: www.newscientist.com/article/dn96... (Spoiler: the patent was withdrawn in 2014.)

Before Bluesky: the gossip bench.

When you think it couldn't get more weird… "officials in the Vatican saw the Pentagon’s reference to an Avignon papacy as a threat to use military force against the Holy See." (via Hacker News) www.thelettersfromleo.com/p/the-pentag...

In other news, Trump has finally formulated a clear objective for his war: "Well, the thing…if I had the choice what I like to do: take the oil, because it is there for the taking it." Taking him by his words, do other nations want to chime in in the "the taking it"? Apparently, it's free…

Trump announces crimes against humanity: "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will". Moreover, he claims "Complete and Total Regime Change". edition.cnn.com/2026/04/07/w...

Trigger warning (gendered celestial object): Sensitive persons may want to avoid the news in the next few days or weeks: the Moon has pronouns. While in most Western languages a she, in German, the Moon is identified as a he.

In other news, FIFA should be dispanded immediately for awarding this it's-war-because-I-didn't-like-Obama's-signature guy a peace price.

"They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made." It's the careless Tom & Daisy times.

If Artemis is the first manned mission to the Moon in 50+ years, explain this

Now this is some rare piece of equipment: An Atari 2600 "Heavy Sixer" running UNIX System V. The venerable VCS is attached to a box branded “pdp11/2600” and runs System V from a DEC cartridge. TTY is looped through the Spectravideo CompuMate keyboard add-on. Must investigate…

BTW, the user frustration detection of Claude Code (userPromptKeywords.ts – yes, it's a regex!). I guess, this may be a semi-official guide to speaking to your LLM of choice:

Somewhat annoyingly, the notion that ENIAC (as presented Feb. 1946 , not 1945!) was Turing-complete, seems all over the place. Previously, it seemed to be clear that the Manchester Baby was the first general purpose computer. Yes, there is an *exploit*, actually there are several theoretical 1/4

@tillheilmann.info Anscheinend wird ASCII Art via LLM doch noch zu erleiden sein: in einem Anthropic-Leak findet sich das Zukunfts-Feature "The Buddy System: Tamagotchi-style companion creature system with ASCII art sprites". Vgl. diesen HN-Comment: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4758...

This is kind of interesting: I've a YouTube account, which works for logging in for age restricted content, but at the same time, YouTube now shows me a message that I must link that same account to an account of a parent or adult supervisor, otherwise, I'll be losing access to the channel.

Ongoing war or Sharpie? Global economy or Sharpie? Of course, it's Sharpie! – Which brings us to the Epstein birthday book… Anyway, if there isn't one already, I propose March 26 as International Sharpie Day. www.newsweek.com/trump-sharpi...

Given that about 47% of households worldwide have some kind of a computer, there's still hope, I guess… /s