Welcome to the Recommended Links of the Week! Fake loading bars, the world's oldest joke, a radio blackout, and the secrets of the Rhind Papyrus, to start the conversation. Discover the rest yourself – that's what we're here for. Enjoy!
This Week's Links
Developers admit that loading bars in video games have always been fake: "Progress bars in video games have existed for a long time, serving millions of players for decades, for example, to know how long it will take for the game we want to play on our PC to install. Progress bars that are fake, as a group of developers, mostly independent, have recently admitted, revealing the industry's worst-kept secret."
Not smiles, but cultural biases of artificial intelligence: "For example, as a group of researchers noted in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, in an article about smile perception across cultures, a well-known Russian proverb says 'smiling without reason is a sign of stupidity'. In countries like Norway or Poland, it seems strange and is perceived negatively when someone smiles at a stranger on the street. Even Darwin wrote about 'the great class of idiots who are those who smile constantly'."
Windows, what happened to you: 20 years ago you opened applications instantly and now you're going at a snail's pace: "Julio Merino is a software engineer born in Barcelona who currently lives in Seattle. A few days ago he decided to do an experiment. He rescued an old PC from 2000 with a Pentium at 600 MHz, 128 MB of RAM, and a traditional hard drive. Upon turning it on, he discovered something astonishing: Windows NT 3.51 applications (freshly installed) opened instantly. This user wasn't satisfied with that and wanted to repeat the test, but with a slightly more modern operating system."
A Chinese AI creates the first processor without human intervention: "It is 4,000 times faster than ChatGPT": "China doesn't have access to the best AI hardware in the world, which NVIDIA provides with its A100 and H100, but that isn't stopping its development. As we saw a few hours ago, the US and Europe are preparing a One-Two Punch to bring it down, and proof of the reasons they want to stop it at all costs is precisely something like what we're about to see today. And that is that China already has an AI that can create processors fully automatically and that is 4,000 times smarter than ChatGPT. Such is Qimeng No 1."
A giant solar flare causes a partial radio blackout on the planet: "A region of the Sun known for its intense activity and named AR 3354 released a class X solar flare on July 2, 2023. This class represents the maximum energy intensity our Sun can generate, highlighting the extraordinary magnitude of the event. The flare reached a power of X1.0. The X class describes the most intense flashes, while the number provides more information about their strength. An X2 is twice as intense as an X1, an X3 is three times as intense, and so on."
Why are Bulgaria's parks full of chess players?: "Initially they only play among themselves, although occasionally they allow strangers to sit down for a game in exchange for a symbolic tip. But they insist they don't do it for money. If the weather permits, they spend the whole day playing in the park, from 10-11 in the morning until the light starts to fade. None of them work; they are retirees, and there are no women among them. Beggars play sporadically, but almost always they just watch from the background."
Star-Lord (1976) – Various authors: "Peter Quill is a jerk whose mother Meredith died when he was still a child and whose alien father he didn't meet until adulthood. These are the facts that all versions of the character known as Star-Lord have preserved over the decades. Beyond that, however, his past, abilities, and very nature have depended on whoever was writing his adventures at any given time and on the medium in which they were told. The version presented nearly fifty years ago, the one seen in today's Marvel comics, and the one portrayed by Chris Pratt in the Marvel Cinematic Universe are all very different."
The oldest joke in the world: "It is necessary to note that the Sumerian joke about the fresh fart constitutes the oldest known joke preserved in written form, but obviously this doesn't mean it was the first joke in history, but rather the first that someone wrote down for the enjoyment of future readers. Because it would be absurd to assume that millions of jokes were not told before, jokes transmitted orally and lost forever because no one was paying attention to write them down."
The secrets of the Rhind Papyrus, the largest known document on Egyptian mathematics containing 87 problems and the value of pi: "Arithmetic, geometric progressions, fractions, trigonometry, linear equations, area calculations... A book containing nearly a hundred math problems on all these subjects could be a real nightmare for more than one schoolchild, but also a useful document for their teachers. In fact, the so-called Rhind Papyrus, written three millennia ago in Ancient Egypt to serve as a teaching manual for teachers at a scribe school, would be closer to the latter."
Old age and death explained to children - The last episode of "Once Upon a Time... Life" (1986): "For all this, it is gratifying to find works in which, from a general perspective, children are not treated as idiots —being individuals and therefore deserving of the utmost respect—, even more so on difficult topics derived from social flaws. Just as my mother's answer remained in my memory, that memory was also indelibly occupied by an episode, specifically the last one, of Albert Barillé's brilliant series, Once Upon a Time... Life (1987)"
Top Secret (1984): Following the enormous success of Airplane! (1980), its directors and screenwriters, the ZAZ (as the trio commonly known as David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker), considered making a film that combined World War II movies and rock and roll, but they couldn't make it work. While they weren't hitting the right note, they decided to make the short-lived series Police Squad! (1982), and wisely avoided making Airplane! II (1982). But it wasn't long before they got to work on the film that was destined to be a comedy classic, Top Secret (1984).
William Burroughs - Ayahuasca and Time Travel: "HE HAD ESCAPED FROM MEXICO, WHERE he was to face trial for the murder of his wife, Joan Vollmer, while still in love with a thin, bespectacled, almost transparent young man named Lewis Marker with whom he had made a first trip to South America. William S. Burroughs was far from home and felt like an invisible, ethereal man, staying in a small room on José Leal Street in Lima in early May 1953. In exile, he came to Peru seeking ayahuasca. But previously he had planned to settle in Ecuador or any country below latitude 0°, looking for a place "where he truly belonged"."
Videos
All-purpose salsa (terrifying, by AI), fictional weapons by size, restores mammoth tusk, Nopuko roller coaster in 5K POV, animated dancer, little octopus, selling to 500 people per day, fastest lap on the Isle of Man, a metal song about the love he has for his cat, 100 people screaming, an exoskeleton for his dog, flying a plane designed in 1910, elephant with a new toy, finds a playmate, the lowest car you can drive, carving a traditional Japanese mask, the Earth's mantle under Antarctica, making bricks in nature, when Orson Welles came to the defense of Clint Eastwood, the Secret War for Xbox, remote work in construction, throwing cars off a cliff, and Dagon - H.P. Lovecraft (animated short).
Galleries
Strange ceramics, parallel dimensions, a captivating world, books in the world, figurative sculptures, (NSFW) erotic can (NSFW), Lisa Odette's 3D art, humans after all, Stallone by Warhol, the mysterious circle, Animated Dump and Visual Dump.
https://old.neoteo.com/distrosea-como-probar-una-distro-de-linux-sin-instalar/Enough! Too much for today. Thanks for your visit!
