I've seen a huge amount of videos of sports fans having melt downs when their team/player loses, to the point of destroying their own TVs and attacking their guests. I have to believe gambling is a factor in this behavior.

For a while I worked at what was then the Sperry Rand Corporation (now Unisys) which had some pride in their heritage as the descendant of the Univac Corporation founded by ENIAC inventors Eckert and Mauchly. In a glass case there was a vacuum tube circuit said to be a memory unit of the original ENIAC. No one seemed to know much about it, casting doubt on the claimed provenance of the device.

The tube circuit resembled the ones shown in the photo linked below (although none of those in the photo are from ENIAC).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Women_holding_parts_of_th...

Did any other old timer like me get reminded of Creative Computing magazine?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Computing_(magazine)

How about opening up the game for humans to play? Can you beat your AI?

I am so glad we have automated away game playing so that I can just sit around and be a lifeless vegetable

Even if you don't have a telescope or binoculars, you can still enjoy naked eye star gazing. The book that got me started and which I highly recommend: The Stars: A New Way to See Them by H. A. Rey

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stars:_A_New_Way_to_See_Th...

https://archive.org/details/stars00hare

These are also available in the excellent Stellarium software: https://github.com/Stellarium/stellarium-skycultures/blob/ma...

I recognize H. A. Rey only as the author/illustrator of Curious George, had no idea he published anything else of note. Looks like my library has a copy. Thanks for sharing!

Yes, he is the same author. You will recognize his drawings in the Stars book.

Just to get your nostalgia juices flowing again, someone recreated the Defender sound engine in the browser.

https://www.zapspace.net/defender_sound/

Thank you, I always loved the Defender sounds

This is really cool. I love the spectrogram visualizer.

I don't care to start a debate about who first invented television when, but I remember hearing (conformed by wikipedia [1]) that Leon Theremin, inventor of the musical instrument named after him, demonstrated mechanical television at roughly the same time.

[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Theremin

Funny you bring Leon Theremin up. I just showed a friend of mine The Thing[0] today.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)

Making AI companions is becoming a widespread little hobby project. Many have created them and shared instructions on how to do it. My preference would be to use local resources only (say, with ollama), they can even be made with voice recognition, TTS, and an avatar character.

While I have not interfaced my AI with all the services that Clawdbot does (WhatsApp, Slack, etc.) I don't think that is too much of a stretch from my very simple build.

I also would like local LLMs - but that's hardly the biggest issue with these projects?

You point it at your email, and you've opened a vector for prompt injection and data exfiltration - all as an integral part of the features you want (read my emails, send some emails).

Your local LLM won't protect you there.

You could probably write some limited tools (whitelist where mail could be sent) - but it goes against the grain of "magically wonderful ai secretary".

Security is not a convenience.

There is a video update from the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center. (I could only find this on Facebook) https://www.facebook.com/reel/1190509063198524

I'd be more concerned about just slop, whether AI or human created. And the fact that Youtube content is overwhelmingly slop - regardless of creator type - is not news at all.

There's good stuff too if you are a bit selective.