Artificial intelligence (AI) models used for a simulated war game escalated conflicts by threatening nuclear strikes in 95% of scenarios, according to new research from King’s College London.
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I'd do anything for feedback on how you use this. Especially if you work with data daily.
Work messaging for humans and AI agents
Aiming for a 10 year life-cycle for smartphones
How Wisdom Gets Text-to-SQL Right in Production: Inside the Adaptive Context Engine
You know how people say: "I bought 3 bitcoins," "I invested in bitcoins," "I'm stacking satoshis," "I transferred bitcoins to my wallet," or "I mined bitcoins"? However, all of this is a misconception because no bitcoins or their fractions (satoshis) actually exist. The piggy bank is empty. The misconception stems from a post by an unknown programmer who claimed to have invented a payment system that transfers money. But all his invention does is maintain a decentralized database over a peer-to-peer network that shows which numbers belong to which addresses. People came to believe that this network and its underlying protocol, collectively known as Bitcoin, record an amount of money, namely these bitcoins (abbreviated as BTC), in the database. But that money is not there. For instance, people often claim they have bought digital money, even though nothing digital exists in proportion to the assigned numbers. A person whose address is assigned the number "50" cannot show fifty files, data structures, or software products. There are no digital "bitcoin objects" that can be mined, bought, owned, moved, or used. It is even more obvious that nothing physical exists. Despite media illustrations of metal coins stamped with the '₿' symbol and frequent claims that one is buying something comparable to collectibles or commodities, no fifty tangible units of any kind are stored or reserved for the person next to whose address stands "50." The most common misconception, however, is that people believe they have bought something akin to fiat currencies, e-money issued by companies like PayPal, tokens, or even stocks. Yet, all of the above are instruments of liability, where the holder derives a benefit upon the fulfillment of that liability. Stocks track a company's obligation to its shareholders. When companies decide to distribute profits, execute stock buybacks, or liquidate the business, they are legally required to make direct payments to shareholders. PayPal’s e-money and tokens, like casino chips, track the issuer's obligation to redeem them for a specified amount of fiat currency. Fiat currencies track the obligations of those who took out loans from commercial and central banks. Before repaying their loans, these debtors provide goods, services, and labor to holders of fiat currency, or, in the case of the state, the settlement of tax liabilities. If debtors default on their payments, banks seize their property, offering them at auctions to holders of fiat currency, providing them with a benefit in that way. That unknown programmer, through his invention, does not track anyone's liability whose realization would provide a benefit to the holders of Bitcoin addresses. Therefore, there are no bitcoins to be mined or bought. What people are actually doing is giving away electrical energy, money, goods, and services, and the Bitcoin network numerically tracks this act of gifting. Through a collective narrative and storytelling, this act is publicly misperceived as an investment or a purchase. Centralized exchanges reinforce this misconception most aggressively by displaying the "BTC" ticker and USD side-by-side on trading interfaces. This is a visual lie, where the interface assumes that "something" stands behind the letters "BTC," just as a liability stands behind "USD." Even critics participate in the misconception. For example, by speaking of an "overvalued currency," they assume its existence. They call the act of gifting "overvaluation," even though there is no digital, physical, or legal thing that the user has received and could value. You cannot say the price is too high when there is nothing to compare it to. Since there are only numbers in a database, the word "overvalued" makes no sense. You cannot overvalue the number 50; it is simply 50. In short, this entire misconception boils down to people gifting existing wealth to one another in the hope that tomorrow someone else will gift them more, all while convinced they are investing in the money of the future. It will all collapse when the public realizes that this money simply does not exist. submitted by /u/BinaryLyric [link] [Kommentare]
Short-form writing just got much more popular, with the low attention span of people with TikTok and YT shorts.
Free TRON security platform: scan wallets for AML & phishing risks, audit TRC-20 approvals & smart contracts, decode transactions before you sign. Read-only, no registration.
Describe what you want to trade. Halcyon builds the bot, the dashboard, or the alert. No code.
Phones and Phonies Commodore Shenanigans Through The Ages June 2026 Phoning it in? A year ago, in June 2025, youtuber Christian Simpson announced his acquisition of the Commodore brand. At the time, the business idea seemed to be to sub-license said brand to various independent hardware manufacturers. I speculated a bit about this back then, but there seems to have been a strategic pivot since, and no sub-licensing materialized. Instead, we've seen the launch of the Commodore 64 Ultimate. The Ultimate is a brand new C64-compatible computer built around already existing offerings in the form of a case, a keyboard and an FPGA hardware implementation. The Commodore-branded version brings them all together in a convenient bundle and sales have, at the time of writing, just about surpassed 26,000 units. This is well-deserved: It's a good product offered at an attractive price. Since the launch of the C64 Ultimate, there's been much speculation about what the next product would - or should - be. My view, then as now, is that the Commodore brand is at best a thin veneer, and that it's not required to create great new retro hardware or selling attractive machine bundles - as proven by the Commander X16, MEGA 65, Minimig, MiSTer FPGA, Retro Games' THEC64, and many more. The fun and magic we associate with these old machines is created by ourselves, not by a logo on their case. In my previous text about the brand acquisition, I mused about "the inevitable course of action to branch out into other ventures, diluting the brand and possibly alienating the core fanbase." This is exactly what seems to have happened with the latest product launch - a flip phone named Callback. The first ever Commodore branded phone, from 1983, was created to circumvent Canadian telecomms legislation. Full story (and image source) available here. The Callback is a modern-ish phone in a retro-ish flip phone case, with the unique selling point that social media and web browsing are completely disabled at the system level. No more Facebook, Google and Instagram in your pocket: a "digital detox" device with modest specs and a tiny screen, but a rather hefty introductory price of $500. The reception has been mixed, to say the least - but to understand why, we must take a stroll down memory lane. Commodore Shenanigans Through the Ages After Commodore went bust in 1994, German PC manufacturer ESCOM eventually won the bidding war over its remains. This made sense, since original Commodore-branded PC:s had been popular in Germany, where Commodore had also operated a large factory. ESCOM then expanded too rapidly, bought a chain of UK computer stores, and went bankrupt in 1996. At this point, the Commodore brand and other intellectual property went separate ways: Tulip Computers acquired the brand, and Gateway 2000 bought the rest of the intellectual property (including rights to the Amiga brand, operating system code, and much more). Since then, these subdivided IP estates have bounced around between various more or less incompetent and/or legally belligerent actors. Thus, before Simpson bought the Commodore brand, it was widely acknowledged that it had become something of a bad joke, recycled for a variety of purposes and slapped on everything from document shredders to MP3 players - some good, some bad. Below are a few of the more interesting ones: Commodore Multimedia Keyboard and Commodore MIDI Keyboard (1997?) These are possibly from the time when Tulip Computers owned the Commodore brand and put it on everything under the sun. Commodore 64 Web-IT (1998) An "appliance" computer for web surfing and email, woefully underpowered for the C64 emulator that was dutifully bundled along with it. It's claimed somewhere that ESCOM licensed the Commodore brand to the Web-IT manufacturer, but this doesn't add up with the timeline: ESCOM went bankrupt in 1996, and Tulip acquired the Commodore brand in 1997. C64 Direct-to-TV (2004) An ASIC implementation of a C64, stuck inside a joystick that connected directly to a TV set. It sold like hotcakes, not just because it offered affordable casual gaming, but also because passionate hardware engineer Jeri Ellsworth snuck some updated hardware features in there, along with solder points for floppy- and keyboard connectors. Appreciated by normies and die-hard fanatics alike, this is one of the few truly successful products sanctioned by previous brand holders. Commodore PCM30 (2005) This is a small media player with 30 gigs of storage, released during the heydays of DivX movie piracy. Various MP3 players were also launched around the same time. Whether or not these devices sold in any significant quantities is hard to say, but if they did, it's safe to assume it wasn't because of the brand. Commodore 64x PC (2011, 2021) A modern PC in a C64 case. These were originally launched in 2011, priced at $595 for the Intel Atom-based entry-level machine. There seems to have been quite a bit of interest in this initial model, with about 20,000 orders placed on its launch day. Ten years later, it was re-launched through a kickstarter campaign that reached its funding goal with 538 backers. This updated model is still available for purchase with about the same price tag as the 2011 one. These are machines with limited appeal. Hardcore C64 fans want the real deal (or, indeed, an Ultimate), people who settle for software emulation can run that for free on any PC they already own, and those who just want a family home computer won't go looking for a chunky 1980s-esque device running a small-time Linux distribution with window animations, translucency and pixelated fonts all dialed up to eleven. This is a purely aesthetic choice for people with ample amounts of both desk space and disposable income. Despite regularly hanging out with some of the most zealous and devoted Commodore fans and collectors in the world, I've never seen one of these in the wild. Commodore PET Phone (2015) A dime-a-dozen smartphone with a Commodore logo on the case, for good measure. Upon its release, the retrocomputing world reacted with a shrug, and people hunting for a good deal on a phone probably went looking elsewhere. This phone wasn't released by the holders of the official-lineage Commodore brand at the time, but rather a motley gang of Italians who seem to have duped the local authorities into letting them register the Commodore brand with a logo that differs slightly from the original one. They have since started selling Commodore-branded OEM laptops, accomplishing nothing but an even bigger shrug. Phone Home This brings us back to the present day, and the new Commodore Callback. Previous revivals of the Commodore brand have, as we've seen, often been crash-and-burn cash grabs, randomly throwing a logo on things and hoping it will stick. This has rightfully been met with ridicule from the C64 and Amiga fan base, but whatever people thought about them at the time, these antics have been easy to ignore. The new Commodore, however, has asked - nay, intensively begged - for the core fanbase to care. And that's put them in a bit of a pickle. Following up a success like the C64 Ultimate is hard. A next logical step might be to do something similar with the Amiga, but that platform is a harder nut to crack. The C64 was a relatively static architecture, whereas the Amiga was updated several times with new graphics chips and CPUs, making it harder to pick a model to reproduce. There are also various companies claiming ownership of the IP, and there's no apparent drop-in FPGA-based motherboard replacement for the original form factor, like the one that was used in the C64 Ultimate. These products are also natural one-time purchases with a fairly limited consumer base. Alas, once you've started a company and plowed a few millions of dollars into a brand acquisition, the moolah must flow. That means launching new products, even if they won't appease those who view themselves as the target audience - especially not if they're a gang of nitpicking computer nerds, and especially not if you've actively courted them with promises of not attempting any silly cash grabs, and extra especially not if you've created a barrage of commercials promising to revive their happy computer childhoods. Meme Marketing The situation is indeed exacerbated by the intense marketing of the new Commodore. Plenty of the old Commodore nomenklatura has been rustled up and put on display, including legendary Amiga engineers, old Commodore bosses, an actor from the geek cult TV show Silicon Valley, and even Commodore founder Jack Tramiel's son, Leonard Tramiel. The related Youtube videos and commercials really are something else. They feature not just clips from silly old Commodore ads, but also footage looking like private home videos, depicting 1980s high school life, and Christmas present unwrappings in the style of old home computer ads. There's also big flashing texts asking if we remember our first kiss, pull quotes from magazine articles about social media addiction, modern laptops displaying stressful cavalcades of AI slop and social media notifications, and close-ups of tear-filled eyes with accompanying prose intended to evoke powerful nostalgia. (Ironically, some of this footage looks AI generated.) Of course, we're then promised a panacea for all of this, if we just open our hearts and wallets. I personally loathe this type of advertising, and it automatically puts me on defense: There's something deeply unsettling - even sickening - about selling a supposed digital dopamine detox through the use of fast-paced Youtube videos that are so blatantly designed to tug on our heartstrings through rapid-fire emotional imagery. That, of course, doesn't mean they can't be effective. Thus, new Commodore has made a big fuss about how everything was supposed to be fundamentally different this time, only to launch a product that very much looks and feels just like the kind of silly old schemes everyone's grown all too tired of. It's a tricky position - though entirely one of new Commodore's own creation - and even if this turn of events somehow felt inevitable from the start, I can understand those who react with genuine surprise and disappointment. Flip Flop? I won't speculate about the viability of the Callback phone as a product. Perhaps it's capturing the essence of the present, and will prove itself a timely companion to the ongoing digital detox trend and discussions about age restrictions on social media. Perhaps it's an overpriced gimmick, and perhaps those who buy one will, after a while, miss their web browser and the ability to reliably access digital ID services, online banking, mobile payments and Slack group chats with friends. The hardware is probably fine: it's built around a MediaTek Helio G81 SoC, which seems competent enough. The price, on the other hand, is a possible pain point: At US$500 (that's including a waitlist discount), it's more than twice as expensive as an Honor X5c Plus - a smartphone based on the same chip. My personal take is that if you actually, deeply, want to quit social media but haven't already, is a $500 phone really going to help? I guess it's a sign of the times as good as any: why close down your Facebook account for free, when you can try to consume your way to a better life? Then again, there's always been a market for supposed quick fixes to hard life problems. What Would Commodore Do? It's important to remember that the original Commodore wasn't some cosy underdog company with a heart of gold. The engineers working there may have been passionate and highly competent people who loved cold beer and warm hardware, but at its height, Commodore was a multi-national, multi-billion dollar company run by famously ruthless businessmen. The fact that Thomas Rattigan (from PepsiCo) was hired as CEO after the departure of founder Jack Tramiel gives a fair hint that Commodore wasn't really an engineering-centric company: They were in the business of making money, not beloved childhood memories. Indeed, during its original 29-year run, Commodore put its name on everything from typewriters and filing cabinets to wristwatches, pocket calculators and 486 PCs (the nemesis of the Amiga if there ever was one). Thus, discussing if the Callback is a worthy legacy, and what the old Commodore would have done with it, is pointless: if there was a potential profit, there was an interest. Even the new Commodore, despite its promises, isn't run by a gang of fun-loving hardware gurus who party hard and work harder. Instead, it's quite predictably in the hands of people who want to make money, just like before, just like every other company out there. I'm sure there's something to be said here about sleeping dogs and dead horses. Personally, I'm perfectly content with the fact that my old Amigas still work fine, and that there are numerous products out there for replacing or mending the parts that that have broken or will break. Incidentally, none of them are Commodore branded.