1984, Jet Set Willy was released. A great game that every kid at school wanted. Of course we all wanted a copy, but it cost £8 here in the UK, which was several weeks' pocket money.

Copying games then involved finding a kid whose Dad was seriously into Hifi and had a stackable stereo system, then we'd copy it with their tape to tape system. But JSW had this as the cassette inlay.

How this works? When the game loaded after about 10-15 minutes, it would ask what colours were in Grid square A5, or H9 etc. Get it wrong twice and the game would exit and you'd need to start over.

(If you're wondering what happens if you're colour blind - you could write to the publishers and if they accepted your complaint, they would ask you to send them the game and would give you a cheque to cover the refund)

Of course, kids are determined and inventive, and this was well before photocopiers or digital cameras, so we would spend our lunchtimes with pencil and paper writing down every single combination...

It was a good game, with some great music, but really really hard.

(Credit to https://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue45/2/1.html for the picture, and the page also goes into more depth)

• Clone any voice with just a 3-second audio sample
• Fine-tune parameters (temperature, top-k, top-p) with quality presets
• Generate complete podcasts from just a topic – AI writes the script, assigns voices, and synthesizes everything
• 10 languages supported (Korean, English, Chinese, Japanese, etc.

Currently uses gpt5.2 for script generation, but the architecture is modular – you can swap in any local LLM (Qwen, Llama, etc.) if you want fully local.

cross-posted from: https://feditown.com/post/2498813

https://archive.ph/Qnh6q

okay, first off: hey, what the fuck?

mozilla has a A THOUSAND FOUR HUNDRED MILLIONS of dollars? what were all them cookie sales for thunderbird? oh yeah, they have this shell game of interlinked but not really entities so you can play whack-a-mole till the death of the universe.

and they wanna burn it dicking around with AI? fuck each and every ghoul steering that ship into the abyss, and they can take Gnome's fucking shaman or whatwasit with them.

is everybody insane, "silicon valley" was supposed to be a satire, these cretins make mike judge seem like a prophet...

Al Jazeera has condemned YouTube’s compliance with an Israeli law banning the network’s livestreams in the country, warning that the move signals how major tech companies can be “co-opted as instruments of regimes hostile to freedom”.

YouTube’s submission to Israel’s ban became apparent on Wednesday, days after Israeli Communications Minister Shlomo Karahi ordered a 90-day extension of an existing ban on the network’s operations in Israel, blocking broadcasting and internet companies from carrying the network’s content.

Award-winning Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda has said she has been permanently banned from TikTok, days after the social media platform was acquired by new investors in the United States.

Owda, an Emmy Award-winning journalist and contributor to Al Jazeera’s AJ+ from Gaza, shared a video on her Instagram and X accounts on Wednesday, telling her followers that her TikTok account had been banned.

Netanyahu met with pro-Israel influencers in New York in September last year, telling them that he hoped the “purchase” of TikTok goes through.

“We have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefield in which we engage, and the most important ones are social media,” Netanyahu, who is a war crimes suspect, said at the time.

“The most important purchase that is going on right now is … TikTok,” Netanyahu added. “TikTok, number one, number one, and I hope it goes through, because it can be consequential.”

cross-posted from: https://feditown.com/post/2486567

The Q Continuum should sue

The United Kingdom’s controversial rollout of facial recognition technology will rely on software that appears to have already been deployed in Gaza, where it is used by the Israeli army to track, trace, and abduct thousands of Palestinian civilians passing through checkpoints.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced on Monday that British police would massively increase the use of facial recognition technology used for surveillance purposes.

Mozilla published a new State of Mozilla. It’s absolute slopaganda. A mess of trippy visuals and corpo-speak that’s been through the slop wringer too many times.

cross-posted from: https://feditown.com/post/2475594

Humans only observe