Andrew Conlin's blog

~ / archive / 002 - Trains, iPods and plagiarism
2023-12-10
1 minute

Hello again. Lots more interesting stuff this week, so I’ll jump right in.

This is a fascinating Mastodon thread. A very impressive reverse engineering of some train software, showing that it was deliberately designed to brick itself when being fixed at third-party repair workshops. Capitalism makes people do silly things.
A mammoth article by Emily Gorcenski, dissecting the recent A”I”¹ “revolution”. It is meticulously researched, and gets deep into the motivations behind the grift.
Next up, a technical breakdown of the inner workings of Shazam. This is always something that I have been amazed by, but never looked into the technology behind it. Who knew that Shazam used to be a phone number you could call? I’m certainly too young for that.
Something a bit different: I learned this week that you can play (online!) chess from you command line, through telnet and freechess.org. Just run telnet freechess.org 5000 and play some games. I love things like this, and that they continue to exist.
A tool for easily dithering images, very cool.
I learned this week about the Rockbox project, which is custom software for mp3 players (inlcuding iPods!). Here is a thread from Daniel Stenberg about how the iPod was “rockboxed”.
I was too quick to use “mammoth” earlier. For the final link today, this is a mammoth deep dive into the problem of plagiarism on YouTube. Some incredible stuff in here, and it is very interesting throughout, despite being almost 4 (four) hours long.

Thanks for reading!
A.

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