Are they going to be pissed that I host a wasm copy of Mario 64 on my blog that is served from someone else's repo on github? I feel like Microsoft is sort of on the hook for it.
I'm trying to make a push to get richter/antiquake to compile to wasm. I think I can knock it out this month. I just want to host my own Slide Quake server on a Cloudflare worker.
This cuts so deep. You just framed a loss I've experienced and haven't found a simple way to express. You defined the trend that destroyed the interesting internet I loved. Thanks.
This is really fun. I like this. I'm going to work it into my production pipeline and I think it'll be the secret like brown butter. It's unique, has some history, and flavor and will be fun when wired up to my streaming rig / audio reactivity.
Well, there's always Unreal, Godot, and Unity. Ambient is something very different and takes advantage of WebGPU and WebASM to deliver a networked 3D gaming experience in the browser. IMO this is a fantastic example of what our whole internet is only just now capable of in a nice little package. Sure both Unreal and Unity will export to web, but there's a whole lot in between loading one of those up and shipping it.
You should try out the Ambient quickstart. You won't regret it.
One of the other important things is not too out-shadow people's own creativity.
If you start with high-content flashy demos that paint a certain picture, people aren't going to activate their own thinking-muscles & dream up their own uses. Having lo-fi roughed out assets is less intimidating and more open ended for the target audience.
Ambient does a much better job imo targeting people who would use it & be excited, by turning off & turning away the those who just want to be razzle dazzled by flashy demoes. That shit is actively harmful to have as your audience.
Last year I partnered with a friends company to try to build a general AI management platform and I've always felt that this stuff is very occult in nature but with all the buzz around new LLMs and stuff I leaned in really hard on the occult imagery for the design part of it. The project didn't continue, but I'm going to keep that in my pocket and try to reform it.
Time to start building an AI pendant that is active attacks against surveillance that broadcast distortion and garbling above and below the human voice level to harmonically distort recordings in a known space without disrupting human communication. You can overdrive tiny speakers or disrupt known NLP algos, both, whatever.
Or maybe every house needs a Cone of Silence like in Get Smart.
A long time ago I had an idea after leaving DEFCON about making a standard gizmo, something like a lapel pin that connects via whatever to whatever supercomputer someone is carying in their pocket and that thing presents an obvious color code. Lets say 4 quadrants with a circle in the middle. I think ideally it would be like epaper with maybe a backlight option. Non intrusive but could be vivid. This could let people know in polite society if they did not want to be recorded, were recording, how they were recording, etc. Obviously this doesn't stop anyone from doing whatever, but you can monitor signals from people and if someone is doing something they say they aren't that can be shared. You can also transmit information like PGP public keys via ultrasonic handshake or whatever.
I mean, day to day I could see never needing it but going into the office, taking the train, going to court, going to a concert, there are a lot of ways something like that could be very useful and if adopted at any sort of scale could error check and blacklist bad actors.
I've been working on things that basically do that for a decade. I mean I didn't really think of this specific application initially but I did kind of.... rotating parabolic ultrasonic arrays something something. I'm looking for partners and investors!
I recently threw up a hackaday for my development cyberdeck and am sifting through all the stuff from over the years to finally get this to market. With the new CloudFlare AI workers, a whole bunch of the infra I used to have to maintain is a moot point so I'm looking to really hit it hard in Q1 2024.
Yeah. I'm working on that. This isn't really a pitch and you probably wouldn't want my cyberdeck. It's my dev workstation and yeah, no one wants that. I mostly mentioned it just because I'm getting to a phase where I am interested to get eyes on the weirder parts. Honestly, the concept itself is kind of a filter. If you look at it and get why you would want it, then we should probably talk, you're likely doing some weird stuff yourself!
The real pitch is working towards seamless natural user interface for streaming composite spatial data. The easiest thing to explain that people will get is architectural pre-visualization. You've got plans and lot lines, input plans, it generates a structure, that's a known solution, easy peasy. That is layered over GIS data from whatever source. Construction is underway, I can do drone surveying and flightpath automation to do photogrammatry or NeRF or whatever to build and overlay the model from the scan. Simulations are easy for erosion, or looking at the light at different times of year. I can drop ship you a 3D printed architectural model or some sort of widget. If you point your phone at that widget, you can interact directly with the information. Standard AR fare, you can go onsite and see the AR stuff. Builders can take scans of things in production and combine them. Yadda yadda. I have a company that is selling basically that. But to get to there, what I'm after is real time streaming composites with effortless and inexpensive mcguffens.
Composing things for a real time stream to be delivered for people to look at needs to have sort of LOD fallback. Streaming compressed point clouds that can be altered in real time, cameras that can be controlled or tabbed through, pulling video from multiple sources and muxing all of that into a cohesive digital product attached to a physical / inexpensive medium that a person can interact with. To build these things I've also had a focus on audio reactivity. Composition based on the sounds produced in the real world and in the digital world. Say 20 people have the same mcguffin, they can all fiddle with parts in place on their desktop as an AR or VR experience, or they can just open up a browser and mess with the world like a traditional video game. Or there can be a stream of 4k to Youtube or Twitch or whatever and that can be synced up to augment.
This is a long term study on what I don't like about modern computing and what I want to see. The stuff that makes money is high throughput distributed GPU compute and GIS mapping. These days people also want LLMs in everything so I've got the stack to produce that and it pays the bills.
The parts are really starting to fall into place though and I expect I'll have my "killer demo" by the end of the year. The problem is with this really is that I can't point to something and say "it's like that" because it doesn't exist and no one else is trying to do anything similar as far as I can tell.
Ok, now I understand. There was a European consortium working on this a few years ago for product development in the automotive and aviation industry. I think Barco had the lead on that.
I'll do some digging on the euro consortium, it wouldn't happen to be AliceVision would it? That's more a euro university group, but I could see them being related.
I wrote an article for 2600 when I was like 14 years old. A friend of mine who was 16, we would drive into the big city to this coffee shop and play chess, pretend like we were adults who did other cool things and were not children, and drink chai tea. They installed a public internet access vending machine one day. It ran windows, I was in the thing by rebooting it by unplugging the thing and letting the UPS die the first night I saw it but it was always there so I kept messing with it. I eventually had remote access to it and an FTP and one day we showed up and the back of it was off, my friend quickly found a locksmith up the street and I took the lock off the back and we went and made keys and brought it back. After that we would just open the back and plug into the netgear switch that was bolted inside. If anyone asked we would tell them we worked for Advants. No one cared.
I was a little baby boy, I loved 2600 magazine. I still love pay phones and own a few and am now alright at picking the Matco. Which can be tricky because the model used in most US pay phones are designed to destruct if manipulated. Really good lock cylinders. If you're securing a door and have a choice. Get a Matco. Or you know, whatever you need for your application.
I wrote up the story and sent it off and never thought they'd publish it. Like two or three quarters later me and some friends were at the mall and we met up with another dude and he was sitting reading 2600 and was like "is this you?" and I was like... "YES! Where is my tshirt and back issues?" and when I got home they were there. I've long lost the shirt. I hope someone has it that loves it.
Kevin is Free of the mortal coil. I know this whole hackery thing from that time is.... It's just not now, but it's so fundimental to what I am and it really is my secret ace in the hole. I've never been an intruder or cyber criminal but I did steal a lineman's handset from a telco truck and a 7/16 thin wall deep socket driver from my step dad's workbench and would go just sit in our neighborhood trunk and listen to everything and dial into PBXs both with garbage laptops and DTMF or voice. I spent a LOT of time on BBSs and wardialing to find weird corporate BBS terminals. I was probably at the absolute end of that being a thing. I had a couple buddies that were of a similar mind and we would dumpster dive reams of paper from big tech companies.
It was fun. I think there are aspects of that that we scrubbed off the communication networks that really are positive feedback loops. I miss yelling into the void and sometimes getting a shout back. I remember the first time I trunked to free long distance. Early VoIP. I'm not old enough to have even ever had even a red box work for me. I have built quite a few and all the other boxes as well. Lesson learned phrak. Rainbow Box. Shout out to RedBoxChiliPepper. Old enough to have tried enough times in weird ways and have an operator tell me that will not work and if I'm gonna play on the phone I should do better.
A buddy of mine was taking some Japanese classes and we called japan and an old Japanese man answered the phone and my said "mushi mushi" and the man kept being way too polite and confused. My friend overhyped how much he'd paid attention in class. Maybe not way to polite for an old Japanese man as well. Knowing what I know now, this was pretty rude and weird culturally I guess, but also no one was making Japan calls for free yet. We recorded it on a tape player and later played it for a friend that was fluent in Japanese and he told us we kept saying "bug bug" to the man.
Hack the Planet.
EDIT: If anyone has a Kevin Mitnik lockpick business card, I'd love to buy it from you. I near missed him twice at DEFCON and always just assumed I'd see him some other time and then 2020 and I don't do conferences anymore. RIP Kevin. You mean a lot to me.
This is clever but obfuscation at the rendering layer is a thing that has bitten me enough that I can't get behind it or recommend it to anyone. Clever though. I think maybe some thought could be put into the font beyond the ligatures too. Keep up the good work though, people should be making more experimental fonts. Typography is so foundational to everything we understand as humans in this post post-modern world but also... you know.... since cuneiform. So while practically I think this idea is problematic, I think it's important work and it sparked some thoughts in me.
