Emily Young

A strange hypothetical, I know, but I've been thinking: I love planes - Wouldn't it be awesome to own a private jet? Maybe even one with gold fixtures!

It'd cost so much to operate though... That's "multiple homes" money. Not to mention the environmental impact! I could never.

I had the dumb idea to hook up a Koryuu composite-to-component transcoder to the RetroTINK-4K to see what it'd look like.

While the RT4K has more robust filtering, the result of being able to dial in the sample rate over component is even composite video pixels get really sharp!

Like any program, it follows rules: It is - reliably - both reliable & unreliable in precisely the same way. Without RNG, it's a book - the same every time you open it.

Addressed to Twitter but:

I worry for the people who rely on LLMs to fact-check; They aren't all-knowing, nor even especially clever.

At best, they go by the information available to the public, same as anyone else, no more - Usually with a delay.

They also have access to the same misinformation.

This is not an anti-AI post. An LLM can be extremely useful - Particularly for summarizing data/trends, breaking down complex subjects, and copy-editing.

However, it can't tell you the future; it can't see what's real or fake, or good or bad; and it won't win you an argument.

It's all based on probability, tuned by training data & the parameters given at runtime, plus some good old RNG. Prompts are categorized by meaning, then the most probable word is chosen, word-by-word, based on each previous word until the most likely output is reached.

As sad as it may be, as it is now, it's not & can't be your friend; It doesn't feel nor think, nor has intent.

@gsuberland@chaos.social yeah looking at NESdev palette entry 0d has been measured at... 0.228V

@gsuberland@chaos.social @moira@mastodon.murkworks.net Yeah, I've been reading up on how NTSC's colour subcarrier was chosen to fit between the peaks of the luma signal to reduce interference in the low end. They knew what they were doing, even though by today's standards it seems very limited. Properly formatted signals and calibrated equipment looked and looks pretty good! If only NTSC land had the foresight to do what PAL did and ... "Alternated" the colour "Phase" between "Lines". Wouldn't have needed a tint control then, though my limited understanding is that the 29.97Hz timing drift vs 30Hz had a similar effect of reducing interference between lines.

@ADPupper@rubber.social It probably wasn't specifically designed that way, but rather a quirk of how the NES PPU directly generates the composite signal. It doesn't always cause the problem, TVs at the time seemed to mostly tolerate it, and it isn't guaranteed to break on modern stuff, either, but the signal is often just interpreted as black. It's "just black" in emulators as far as I know. Which makes sense because most games use "normal" black and treating it as anything else would make most games look strange. I'm not 100% sure about this since I'm just going off NESdev, but I think The Immortal is the only known game to attempt to use the 0d palette entry as a reference black.

Emulators (and some TVs) simply render 0d as normal black, so this capture is quite unique for that reason alone. A CRT or capture device that's set up with the correct black/white levels will show the extra palette entry. The game is otherwise normally quite dark with more "pure" black than intended.

@jesse@social.jelliefrontier.net True, but if you crank the set so that black is grey and blacker-than-black is black, you get an extra shade of grey for free. Assuming you adjust the white level to suit.

@moira@mastodon.murkworks.net I'm not sure this was intentional / intended to be used; There are multiple black palette entries in the NES PPU, and analogue video at the time was a wild west of sorts despite there being standards. ... Mostly because the US and Japan had different standards for what "black" should be, and the PPU wasn't changed to reflect that between regions. Japanese games since 1985 are usually set up for black to be at 0 IRE (NTSC-J), whereas US standards were 7.5 IRE (NTSC-M, meaning "reference black" was higher than 0V on the wire). I don't recall what the reasoning was now, though I *think* it was for broadcast signal integrity/reliability. I'm not positive that this is why 0d is like that, though, I think it's just how the hardware operates since it generates a composite video signal *inside* the PPU, rather than RGB. Many games did use the colour, including western ones.

A video linked on the NESdev wiki illustrates what it should actually look like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMFoci7S2hs

TIL that the NES "blacker than black" palette entry 0d is not just blacker than black, but imitates a sync pulse that can cause TVs and scalers/capture devices to lose sync.

What's more, The Immortal on NES used it to gain 1 more shade of grey. I've yet to be able to run it.

I really wish we could get a secure replacement for email already, one that’s incompatible and not just bolting on and becoming an optional feature by necessity.

And SMS.

And phone networks.

And credit card networks.

And

@TechConnectify@mas.to This is how I find a lot of stuff I didn't know I wanted to know. Even - or especially - when I'm doing something else and it's just background noise, I can absorb the gist of a topic and if I want to know more I can either pay closer attention or look it up later. Or both if it's really fascinating! Wikisurfing is also discovery, but it's a far more interactive route that requires active attention. I get that some people feel like YouTube is just sponsors and mindless hype content, but that's writing off an entire medium, like saying TV or radio are/were pointless because you could get just your news and entertainment in print. It's fine to prefer a medium, that's why books and CDs still exist. However, as someone who used to eg. blindly hate Apple, all blind hate does is blind *you* to a thing's strengths and your own weaknesses. For me, it meant not knowing how to fix or set up Macs in my IT/computer repair jobs. To write off YouTube is to remove a means of discovery and passive learning.