hdwallpaper:

hunsonisgroovy:

Simple Desktops is a collection of desktop wallpapers curated by Tom Watson designed to make your computer beautiful without distraction.

Steal this idea: using cookies, it’d be trivial to sort content into read and unread. This could aid both the reader who has returned to find a post they’ve read, and the reader who wants some­thing new.

I like this:

Before I get to Mimeo, I want to address my love of pixels. The aesthetics of Mimeo (and Horror Vacui before it) are not born solely from nostalgia. Good pixel art strikes the perfect balance between appreciable craftsmanship and the gestalt. A single pixel out of place, one too few or too many, ruins the illusion. There’s an unmuddied, economy of expression, the thankless result of the limitations of cartridge-based consoles.

And the game sounds awesome:

Mimeo (even the name) started as a Mario clone with a twist: instead of power-ups affecting the player, they affect the entire game world. A story and mythos quickly developed. The so-called Mimeoverse consists of two 16-bit demiverses sharing 32-bits between them. When the evil Kleptopus King, an 8-bit octopus with an inferiority complex, discovers a portal into Mimeo’s realm and begins to syphon off its bits, Mimeo is sucked in and down-sampled to 2-bit. So begins Mimeo’s quest to restore balance to the demiverses.

mrgan:

• Load Balancer
• The Edge Case
• Denial of Service
• The End User
• Greater or Less Than Zero
• The Concrete Superclass
• The Spaghetti Code (released under a pseudonym in 2004, to harsh reviews)
• Slab Allocator
• Greedy Algorithm
• The Cardinal of the Kremlin (due to a misunderstanding)
• Colonel Panic (also misheard)

Haha. Colonel Panic.

jingc:

This Newsweek article from 1995 ended up in my inbox, to my amusement:

We’re promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn’t—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

And a final jab:

The truth i[s] no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

I’m sure I don’t need to point out the irony that this article is pretty much only available online now.

I had a good laugh reading this.

Having years of algorithm development played back in one paragraph is breathtaking.

Steven Levy on how Google’s search algorithm has changed over the years.

Take, for instance, the way Google’s engine learns which words are synonyms. “We discovered a nifty thing very early on,” Singhal says. “People change words in their queries. So someone would say, ‘pictures of dogs,’ and then they’d say, ‘pictures of puppies.’ So that told us that maybe ‘dogs’ and ‘puppies’ were interchangeable. We also learned that when you boil water, it’s hot water. We were relearning semantics from humans, and that was a great advance.”

But there were obstacles. Google’s synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy. The problem was fixed in late 2002 by a breakthrough based on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories about how words are defined by context. As Google crawled and archived billions of documents and Web pages, it analyzed what words were close to each other. “Hot dog” would be found in searches that also contained “bread” and “mustard” and “baseball games” — not poached pooches. That helped the algorithm understand what “hot dog” — and millions of other terms — meant. “Today, if you type ‘Gandhi bio,’ we know that bio means biography,” Singhal says. “And if you type ‘bio warfare,’ it means biological.”

Or in simpler terms, here’s a snippet of a conversation that Google might have with itself:

A rock is a rock. It’s also a stone, and it could be a boulder. Spell it “rokc” and it’s still a rock. But put “little” in front of it and it’s the capital of Arkansas. Which is not an ark. Unless Noah is around.