A good reminder of where true joy comes from

A good reminder of where true joy comes from

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The joy that many saints describe cannot be found in electronic devices, spending hours in front of a screen, endlessly scrolling on social media every day. These activities waste precious time we could spend cultivating authentic friendships, spending quality time with family, and prayer. Joy can not be found through drug or alcohol use, promiscuity, superficial relationships, obsessions about our image. Neither can it be found in wealth, beauty, and fame – for ultimately we leave this all behind.

In the end, only your personal and real relationship will remain when you die. How are you and God doing if you met Him today?

Fans say AI made Doctor Who is better than BBC has made in years

Fans say AI made Doctor Who is better than BBC has made in years

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Want to see where AI is taking us? How about allowing fans to actually take over a show heading down the tubes and generate better shows than the BBC. The Unmade Season (website) created a 100% AI generated 50 minute episode of Doctor Who that takes off after David Tennant’s reign called “The Curse of Kilmorag”

Even more amazing, he did it largely at his own home setup with local versions of LTX 2.5 and MiniMax models, using minimal amounts of external data centre resources.

The BBC’s new director general has described a 50-minute AI-generated episode of Doctor Who as “pretty good,” and suggested that the technology now enabled the creation of content “at the standard of a Hollywood studio.”

What does this say about current professional Hollywood and TV show runners when a fans are so upset at what you’re generating that they now start making episodes that rival professional productions on their home PC’s? When one fan creates an episode at home that gets over a million views when you spent literally millions on an episode of the actual show and only got a total of 3.48 million views (including later streaming watches).

World Humanoid Robot Games 2026

World Humanoid Robot Games 2026

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The World Humanoid Robot Games got a lot of press and internet meme videos on their sometimes comical failures, but these achievements are nothing to scoff at. Robots are performing amazing acts of agility and speed – beating the human world record 100 meter sprint by over a second. Boxing, soccer, running, high jumps, tai chi – these are some pretty impressive feats.

Instead of just random clips, I wanted to see the whole show and managed to dig up these full clips for the various days competitions.

Fuzzy Childhood memory unlocked

Fuzzy Childhood memory unlocked

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I remember catching these short animations as part of PBS when I was a kid. The catchy little song about Simon and his pictures taking him over the ladder were part of a series based on the children’s books by Edward McLachlan and originally shown on British Thames Television.

More lives of laid off tech workers

More lives of laid off tech workers

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Jae Park was laid off after 18 years at a leading tech firm – ironically after leading the internal AI taskforce. He’s trying to make a crowdsourced app in a last desperate attempt to get income going.

His story is becoming all too common in high tech as wave after wave of layoffs take jobs away, and AI reduces the need for big teams down to just 2-3 developers.

It’s worth seeing how real lives are being affected by this massive industry shift.

Bodycam audio

Bodycam audio

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I’ve written about this crazy game in development before, but their developer videos are really stepping things up a notch in realism.

Most games try to make guns sound cinematic by bringing big bass, big punch, and a big Hollywood explosion. But real guns don’t feel cinematic. They feel dangerous because in real life a gunshot isn’t just a sound but a shockwave. The first time you hear a real weapon fired near you, it’s usually terrifying.

In asking what modern games are missing, these guys made some great analysis of real gunshots and have made some interesting progress in their own version of environmental sound mapping that seeks to simulate interaction with the environment. Sound Rendering has been researched for over a decade, but there wasn’t really the compute to pull it off in modern games that were mostly focused on visuals.

This is still largely the case, but we’re starting to have more and more compute overhead – and I love how they’re not just following the crowd but trying to ask how to make something even better.

Their solution seems to have a good balance of simulating physical reality with real-time compute tradeoffs. Still – it’s great seeing people pushing the ball forward when too many games just end up playing like Call of Duty.

Portland’s ‘silicon forest’ is sliding downhill fast

Portland’s ‘silicon forest’ is sliding downhill fast

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CBRE’s Scoring Tech Talent 2026 report, Portland now ranks 34th out of 50 top North American tech markets. This ranking represents a steady downward slide for the “Silicon Forest,” which sat at 24th place just a few years prior in 2023.

Major layoffs at Intel and Nike as well as dramatically increasing costs of doing business in Portland (taxes) have seriously impacted Portland. While Nike often goes through more regular cycles of layoffs, Intel’s major decline of nearly 40% of it’s staff is not likely to turn around anytime soon as the company continues to hemorrhage billions in losses every year.

Personally, I used to go to Portland coder and technology meetups every night of the week I wanted. Pre-covid there were multiple meetups per night every day of the week to choose from: startup talks, programming language groups, tech talks – you name it. Now, I’m lucky to find one useful one a week; with many nights have NO tech meetups.

There were tons of startups in downtown buildings. Now Big Pink’s floor of startups is almost completely empty. Small tech companies have long since left Portland’s unfriendly taxes and business climate when remote work became a thing.

Smart TV’s: always monitoring hackable spyware (of course)

Smart TV’s: always monitoring hackable spyware (of course)

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Gamer’s Nexus set up their LG and started watching what it sends. Turns out – it can capture just about everything – even when unplugged and off. Samsung TVs were also just busted for recording audio and screenshots.

Basically smart TVs are full computers – with all the same kinds of vulnerabilities hackers can exploit. Most TV companies do a terrible job validating and updating their TV software. With the flood of CVE’s that have been coming out every week, it’s extremely likely your TV is vulnerable and can be turned into a remote listening and watching device.

It’s not like this is new or people haven’t been warning you about this for over a decade. But now it’s getting real. I’m curious when the next hacker will turn your TV into a bitcoin miner, spam server, or even record all your living room conversations for blackmail.

I absolutely believe that high-profile targets like politicians, actors/actresses, CEO’s, investment bankers, and other high profile people could easily become targets. TV’s and smart devices are probably the least secured devices in your home.

In the future, the billionaire’s home (because millionaires are so last year) won’t live in a smart home – they’ll have 70’s era appliances that just turn on/off with a mechanical switches and have an old tube TV with no smart features.