2025-05-16 08:00:00
Did you know that Github, which is owned by Microsoft, is being overwhelmed by AI scrapers, which are developed (among others) by Microsoft? Oh the irony!
You know, I briefly considered adding a category called Enshittification for all the "why AI is terrible and everything is going to shit" articles that I keep seeing every single day, but I vowed to be less negative recently, so maybe that's not a good idea after all. There's also a limit to how much of this stuff I want to read and frankly I think I have reached that limit, so I stopped collecting this type of links.
... but I also said that I would still make fun of the awful people in the world, so here's some Sam Altman content nevertheless :)
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2025-05-11 08:00:00
This week, May 8th, marked the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II in Germany, one of the most devastating and atrocious wars in human history during which millions were brutally murdered and much of Germany and in fact Europe was left in ruins. In Germany, we simply call it "The War" and everybody knows which war is meant, even though some people would like nothing more than to make it fade into history, or they simply deny that it was as devastating as it was.
I could write a long essay about the rise of fascism and what it can ultimately lead to, and it would be very fitting for the times we live in - but you know what? I really don't want to. Instead, I thought we'd do something different today, and I'd take you for a walk.
I live in Nürnberg (Nuremberg), a city that played a special role during the Nazi regime from 1933 to 1945 (Nazi by the way stands for National Socialist; the full name of Hitler's party was NSDAP, Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei - National Socialist German Workers' Party). It was the city of the Nazi party rallies, it is the place where the Nuremberg laws that laid the foundation for the persecution of the jewish population were signed, and because of this it was also where the Nuremberg trials were held after the war.
And it is one of the cities that was hit the hardest during the allied air strikes of 1944 and 1945 which left most of the city in ruins.
After the war the city was rebuilt, and nowadays there isn't much that immediately reminds us of the years of the Nazi regime... unless we look a little closer, and that's what I want to do today.
Wherever we are in the city, we never have to walk far to discover the first reminders of the events that happened, but we have to look at our feet because they are on the ground and they're easy to miss if you don't pay attention to them.
This is called a Stolperstein (pl. Stolpersteine, "stumbling stones"). They can be found all over the city and in fact in many German and European cities. They're an art project by the artist Gunter Demnig. Every Stolperstein is made by hand and is set into the pavement in front of the homes of people who became victims of the national socialist dictatorship.
This particular Stolperstein can be found in front of an otherwise completely unremarkable apartment building in a completely normal street. The inscription on it reads
$175 was the paragraph that made homosexuality a crime. KZ means Konzentrationslager (concentration camp), Mauthausen/Gusen was a concentration camp in Austria. Incredibly, this man spent almost a decade in prison and different concentration camps, all of which he survived. He died a few days after being liberated, coincidentally on this day 80 years ago.
I already mentioned that much of the city was destroyed during the final days of the war. The worst bombings happened on January 2nd 1945 when the centre of the city was hit, leaving thousands dead and tens of thousands homeless. Here's how the city looked in 1945 (source):
Today the city is rebult, some buildings were restored in their original form but a lot were newly constructed in the 1950s and 1960s. And so, if you know what 1950s post war architecture looks like, you can still clearly see which parts of the city were destroyed and which were spared.
This is architecture from around the turn of the century (the year 1900). With the industrial revolution the city grew beyond the limits of the old city walls and so just outside of the history city centre you can find a lot of quarters with this particular style of architecture. These buildings survived the bombings and thank god they did, because they look absolutely stunning.
But if we literally just turn around and look down that same street in the opposite direction, this is what it looks like:
That's architecture from the 1950s. These buildings were constructed without any of the flashy ornamentations of the past because they needed to be built fast and they needed to be functional.
You can also often see inscriptions like these on the side of buildings:
Both say that the buildings were rebuilt in 1957 and 1949-50, respectively.
If you look at old pictures, you can go to the same spot and see a before/after. Take a look at this square, this is Egidienplatz (picture on the left taken from this book):
You can tell it's the same square by the rider's statue (depicting emperor Wilhelm I.) which survived the war and is still in the same spot. The buildings are completely different though because they didn't survive and were reconstructed. You might also notice that the decoration in the old picture is a little... uncomfortable to look at today.
(I also found this picture of this square from 1945. Here's the same view 80 years later.)
Some things however were never rebuilt and were left as they were:
These are the ruins of Katharinenkirche (St Catherine's Church). It is the church of an old monastery that was built during medieval times. The church was consecrated in 1297 and stood until 1945 when it was almost completely destroyed during the air raids which left only the outer walls standing. Nowadays the ruins are used for open air events during the summer, and there are often concerts, theatre performances or screenings of classic movies in there.
The rest of the monastery fared a little better, was restored and today houses part of the city library, which is one of my favourite places in the city.
This is Hans-Sachs-Platz (square), just a few steps away from the main city square in the historic city centre. Before the war, Nürnberg had quite a substantial Jewish community, and there were multiple Synagogues throughout the city. This is the location of the Hauptsynagoge (main Synagogue). Except there is no Synagogue anymore, because it was demolished and torn down by the Nazis in 1938, interestingly even before the November pogroms later that same year. The rest of the buildings on this square were destroyed during the war and all the buildings that are now on this square were built after the war.
To the right of the red building is a little memorial for the Synagogue that I walked by a hundred times without really paying much attention to it until I sought it out for this picture.
Here is what the square looked like before the war and with the synagogue still standing - and it must have been an impressive building to look at! (source)
When the war started, bomb shelters were built everywhere throughout the city. And because bomb shelters are massive objects with incredibly thick walls, they survived the destruction (naturally) and were not torn down afterwards either, so they are still here. You just have to know where to look...
This entrance is on a strip of grass right in front of the city wall. If you passed it by, you might wonder for a second where it leads to and then probably forget all about it. Maybe it's a utility room for the metro, which runs right under the street to the right?
Well it's actually the entrance to a bomb shelter. After walking down this flight of stairs there's a door and another flight of stairs, and the shelter stretches under the grass and the paved way all the way to the small house in the back behind the two old ladies in the picture.
Today it's used as a rehersal space for local bands, and there's a number of rehersal rooms in there which is a great use for a building like this.
This might look like a normal apartment building at first glance, and that's because it was renovated and restyled in the late 90s. But it's actually also a bomb shelter, just one that wasn't built underground. There's a number of these high-rise shelters in the city, and this is one of them. It becomes a bit more apparent that it was indeed a bomb shelter if we look at it from the other side:
And then there's also things like these that you can sometimes find on the sidewalk next to a building. "Luftschutz" means "air raid protection" and it lets us know that the basement of this house also served as a bomb shelter.
There's one more heritage from the war that isn't immediatly visible, but we're regularly reminded of it in the news: Undetonated bombs.
Thousands of bombs were dropped on the city, but not all of them exploded and many were never found because they disappeared under all the rubble or under overgrowing vegetation, and so they just remained whereever they fell. And that's where they still are to this day.
We're periodically reminded of their existence however because whenever there's a construction site, there's a high chance that an old WWII era bomb is found, and then the neighbourhood has to be evacuated and the bomb has to be defused. It happens a few times a year, the last one was found in December. 1000 people had to be evacuated for a short while, and it was defused without a problem, as is usually the case. A few years ago though one detonated in Munich during excavation work, so these things remain dangerous even many decades later.
I read an interview with the Mayor of Nürnberg once where he estimated that there could still be up to a thousand undetonated bombs hidden all over the city. Still armed, still full of explosives, still dangerous, rusting and rotting away. In 2012, again in Munich one couldn't be defused and had to be detonated on site. There's a video of it on Wikipedia here, and... that's a serious explosion. And this is just one bomb going off!
And so as I return home from this little trip through the city, I wonder over how many bombs I've walked today without realising it, and how close the nearest one to my house is. It could be hundreds of metres away, but it could also be right in my back yard. It's best not to think about it too much.
The war might have ended a lifetime ago, but some of the scars that it left remain a lot longer than that. And so, despite some very loud voices saying the opposite, I believe it is important to remember and to keep the memories alive, and to stand up to fascist ideologies whenever we can, so that something like this will never happen again.
Just so we don't end on such a depressive note, and because the weather is really nice, I thought I'd also share a few pictures I took along the way to hopefully lighten the mood again.
This is Weissgerbergasse, a street in the historic city centre that survived the war and is hands down the most beautiful street in the entire city.
And here's a look up towards the castle, and a panorama of the city as it can be seen from up there.
Oh, and one more thing. I have a confession to make.
This wasn't a walk.
We went by bike :)
2025-05-09 08:00:00
Billionaires are evil, AI is terrible and the MAGAs spare no effort to demonstrate their utter incompetence to the world. Why do I even bother coming up with a new intro every week? I could just reuse this one over and over again, it always fits. But there's also old MacOS stuff, old digital cameras, weird circuit boards and weird Windows bugs that kept me busy and entertained this week, and I hope you'll enjoy some of this, too.
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2025-05-06 08:00:00
What do you do when you have to stay home from work because you're sick, but then you get bored just sitting around doing nothing? Of course, you mess around with old computers. What else would you do?
So I dug out this ancient white MacBook I bought a few years ago:
It's a MacBook 1,1 with a 2GHz Core2Duo CPU and 2GB of RAM. The battery is long dead as is the optical drive, and it has a few weird stains and blue colour blotches on the inside that I can't get rid of, not with Alcohol and not with Acetone, but otherwise it's in pretty good condition. The plastic isn't cracked, the hinges are fine, the screen looks fine after the backlight tube had some time to warm up... it's a nice computer.
It had Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.8 installed which is the last supported version, but it originally shipped with Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.7. I wanted to see what it looked like when it was brand new and so I set out to install a version of OS X Tiger on it. The only problem is, I don't have any of the original restore CDs, and the optical drive doesn't work anyway. But surely there are ISOs available online that I can just write to a USB stick and install from there, right?
Well, yes and no.
There are a bunch of different versions of OS X Tiger available as ISO and DMG images on archive.org, and I naively assumed that I could just download one of them, write them to a USB stick with dd (on my normal Linux PC) and then the MacBook would happily boot from that, but it didn't. Either the drive wasn't even recognised by the MacBook as a boot drive or if it was, it started to boot but then failed before it reached the first screen of the installer. And yes, I made sure I got the Intel versions. So it isn't quite as simple as that.
But it is simple if you know where to look and what to do. After a lot of googling and asking around on Mastodon I ended up on this page from the Hackintosh community which describes exactly what to do and also includes a link to a fully featured tested and working installation image. You can create a USB installer from this image, but you need a working installation of MacOS for this to work. I still had Snow Leopard running on that MacBook, so it wasn't a problem.
So here's the steps very briefly:
sudo asr restore -source /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ Install\ DVD -target /Volumes/MyVolume -erase -noverify
And bam, that's it. It took a while to write the image to the USB stick because it's 12GB and this old Mac only has USB 2.0 ports, but after it was done I had a working USB installation medium.
I rebooted the Mac, held the alt key as it restarted to get to the boot selector, selected the USB drive and it booted into the installer without any problems and the installation worked without a hitch. A few minutes and one reboot later the introduction video started, I went through the initial setup (there is a screen which "requires" you to enter your phone number, address and so on - press cmd+q to get out of it) and there we are:
Glossy Aqua interface, brushed metal windows, blue wallpaper... it's all there.
I was never a Mac user, not back then and not now, but I always loved the look of these early Mac OS versions. I even had my Ubuntu themed to look like this around 2007/2008.
So now I can finally do what I assume all the cool kids with their MacBooks did back in the day. Create a website with iWeb, record some music with Garage Band, get an old camcorder and shoot cool skateboarding videos that I can then cut with iMovie and burn to DVD with iDVD...
You know what, I wrote that out as a joke, but it actually sounds like fun. Maybe I should do this.
Well, maybe not the Skateboarding. I'm in my 40s. Some things are better left to the youth after all.
2025-05-04 08:00:00
Recently I watched a few videos about how programmers back in the early days of video gaming, as well as demo coders today developing for old hardware, were using every trick in the book (and quite a few tricks that weren't in any books) to make video games and demos as visually appealing and interesting as they possibly could and to make it appear as if the hardware was doing things that it shouldn't technically be able to do.
Here are a few examples of videos to illustrate what I mean:
In order to make these games and demos look the way they do, the coders had to write highly optimised code in assembly language that often needed to be accurate down to the individual clock cycle of the CPU because some events have to occur at the exact right time for the effect to look good. On CRT displays, for which these devices are designed for, the screen is drawn from top to bottom with an electron beam. For some effects to look right, the content of the video buffer, which holds the image that is drawn on the screen, needs to be manipulated while the image is being drawn on the screen, which requires very precise timing.
This got me thinking that optimising code and writing lean and resource-efficient code in the first place seems to be a dying art. It's still necessary for programming embedded devices which typically have a very limited amount of program memory, RAM and processing power, but PCs (and Macs) these days have almost unlimited processing power and memory compared with the systems of the past. Terabytes of drive space, gigabytes of memory and clock speeds measured in gigahertz, not to mention multicore CPUs with 8 or more cores on a single chip would have blown every 80s programmer's mind; they would have had no idea what to do with this any more than I would know what to do if somebody landed a spaceship in front of my house and handed me the keys.
But not to fear, coders have found ways to use all these resources by writing gigantic applications that require huge amounts of disk space, RAM and processing power and still manage to feel slow even on high end computers. I get to enjoy the full Microsoft 365 experience at work with Windows 11, Outlook, Teams, Sharepoint, the entire office suite and on and on, and even on a powerful machine all of this just feels way more sluggish than it should. If I installed a copy of Windows 7 with contemporary versions of Outlook, Office and Skype on this computer, it would absolutely fly and I could do everything I'm doing now, but faster. I mean, even just a right click on the desktop sometimes takes an entire second before the menu appears. That doesn't seem to me like there's particularly well written code running behind it. Microsoft's CEO agrees ;)
Ok, I'm starting to rant now. My point is, programmers these days (and I'm including myself in this too) might do well to occasionally take some inspiration from coders of the past or demoscene coders and after implementing something, take a moment to look over their code and ask themselves "is there maybe a more efficient way to do this". Because chances are there is, and at the end of the day a lean and well optimised codebase is something that everybody benefits from. Unfortunately it seems that with the advent of AI assistants and vibe coding we're moving further and further from this idea, but one can hope...
2025-05-02 08:00:00
That was a week, huh? There was quite a bit more online drama than I would have liked, which isn't saying much because I like exactly zero drama. And evidently I'm not the only one because a few good people deleted their online presence this week, which is a real shame I think, but also completely understandable.
But I already ranted about this, I'm glad there's other ways to keep up with people and there's still enough interesting stuff around the internet that I want to share with you. There's some free music, everybody was SHOCKED to learn that the people who told us that downloading movies and music is stealing are hypocrites, and maybe one of us will find an old soviet space probe in their backyard next week.
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