Excellent reference.

DOOM... on a Vectrex.

"Roberta Williams is the most influential woman in pre-2000 gaming history - or maybe ever?" -- What do you think? Fair call? Roberta Lynn Williams is an American video game designer and writer, best known as co-founder of Sierra On-Line and creator of the graphic adventure genre and the King’s Quest series. She was born February 16, 1953, in Los Angeles and grew up in La Verne, California. As a child she was quite shy and imaginative and invented fairy-tale adventures for her family. After high school she worked as a clerk and later as a computer operator and COBOL programmer. I assume most here have no clue what COBOL was/is. As so many legends from that golden era, Roberta did not have any formal training as a game programmer. In 1979 Ken brought home an Apple II. Roberta became hooked on the text adventure Colossal Cave Adventure and wanted a version with pictures. She designed the story, rooms, puzzles, and drawing, while Ken took care of the programming. The result was Mystery House (1980), widely credited as the first graphic adventure game. It sold well enough that they founded On-Line Systems that same year. The rest is history!

"People aren't ready, this is gonna change everything" You know what people weren't ready for? Fucking mammoths. Tigers eating them. Monkeys ripping their arms off. The black plague. The ice age. Smallpox. Vikings pulling up on the beach. Drinking water that gives you diarrhea until you die. Getting a scratch and losing your whole leg. The Mongols. The Spanish Inquisition. One volcano can send us back to the dark ages and these safety guys are gonna be shocked. Oh the robots didn't kill us? It was a volcano? Imagine their disappointment as the hot ash rains down on them. A solar flare is gonna explode your phone in your pocket your legs are gonna be covered in battery acid and your bank account will stop working. You're afraid of a computer program doing math? "Things are moving too fast" homie you live on a rock that periodically deletes everything. You are one the most luckiest entities in a 100 light year radius living during a golden era. Cheer up. My ancestors crossed an ocean in a wooden box because they ran out of fucking potatoes. "The social disruption will be enormous!" Nigga World War 2? World War 2? Hop in the people carrier we're landing on the beach. Are these people out of their fucking minds? Do they not know what we've survived already? A couple decades of air conditioning and people suddenly think oh this is the natural condition of mankind. No. We used to have eight kids because seven didn't make it. You're gonna be fine. Man the fuck up. Accelerate.

Today, Pioneer Labs is announcing our first step towards terraforming Mars. 🚀🌼 With equipment that fits in just a single rocket launch, we can convert Martian dirt, water, and air into enough building materials to construct a small city on Mars. To do it, we made the first microbe for Mars. We found the best microbe on Earth and used evolution to teach it how to source all of its nutrients directly from Martian materials. The first astronauts will be greeted with safe shelter already filled with water, oxygen, and rocket fuel for the return journey. This is the first step toward using biology to make Mars a friendly place for life. It lets us live off the land and helps us build the next great frontier. It's the first of five organisms we need to green Mars ⬇️

Just connected my Grok Bot to 𝕏 Money. And I think this is one of those things that may sounds small to many people until you actually use it… I can now send $ money to someone just by telling my bot what I want to do. I don’t need to open another app. I don’t need to search for the payment tab. I don’t need to jump between screens or tabs. I just type the instruction in plain English and Grok Bot handles it through 𝕏 Money, and the payment immediately goes through. So today, I sent Elon $4.20. With a note telling him that, “Testing 𝕏 Money connector w/ Grok Bot” It worked beautifully… I realize this could one day completely change the way $ money moves. Today, moving $ money usually means stopping what you’re doing, opening a banking or payment app, finding the person, entering the amount, checking everything, and hitting send. Now imagine your Grok Bot already understands what you want. You can say things like, “Send this person $20.” “Pay this bill w/ a pic” “Split dinner between everyone here.” “Send my contractor the usual $ amount.” “Move some $ money into savings.” And your Grok Bot handles the work through whatever financial account, while you stay in control of the approval. Now, instead of humans learning how to use financial software, the software is learning how to work for humans. And as Grok Bot gets smarter and 𝕏 Money grows, I think this is where things will get really interesting. 𝕏 already has communication, creators, businesses, communities and people spending hours talking to each other every day. Now add $ money. Then add an AI/Grok Bot that can understand what you want and help move that $ money for you effortlessly. Payments stop feeling like a separate thing you have to go do… and just becomes part of the normal conversation. I think this could be a big deal for 𝕏 Money. If 𝕏 Money grows into one of the world’s largest financial platforms, I think Grok Bot could become the primary layer people talk to when they want anything done with their $ money. Grok Bot, hooked up with 𝕏 Money is a BIG deal…

The world's oldest café has one item on the menu. It has been in Kyoto since the year 1000. Not the 1900s. Not the 1800s. The year one thousand. It's called Ichiwa. A tiny tea house by a shrine gate, run by the same family for 25 generations. They sell aburi-mochi: little rice cakes on bamboo skewers, grilled over a charcoal fire, covered in sweet white miso sauce. That's it. That's the menu. It has been the menu for a thousand years. When this shop opened, Vikings were still raiding Europe. The samurai class didn't exist yet. And a family in Kyoto lit a charcoal fire and started grilling mochi for tired pilgrims. That fire has customers to this day. Reporters have asked the family the secret to surviving a thousand years. The answer is almost embarrassing in its simplicity: they never expanded. Never franchised. Never added a second item. They decided one small thing mattered, did it perfectly, and kept doing it. For a millennium. My favorite detail: across the street stands their rival, a shop selling the same mochi since 1637. Four hundred years old, and the neighborhood still thinks of it as the new place. An order costs about three dollars. You sit on a bench by an old shrine, and you eat the exact same warm, smoky sweet that a dusty traveler ate in the year 1000. Some countries put history behind glass. Japan hands it to you on a skewer and asks if you'd like more tea.

NeXTcube, 1990. Steve Jobs' black magnesium cube, the machine Tim Berners-Lee used to invent the web.

One of the men who invented the transistor stood at a Bell Labs blackboard and explained how it works. AT&T kept the film. Almost nobody watches it. Walter Brattain shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics for the transistor. Every chip training every model in 2026 descends from what he built with Bardeen and Shockley in 1947. This is 28 minutes of the inventor teaching semiconductor physics himself. Properties, simple model, history, impact, new phenomena, written on the board in his own hand. Watch the section where he draws the crystal lattice and shows what an electron and a hole actually do inside it. The abstraction most engineers carry around, drawn from scratch by the man who found it. An embedded engineer I know watched it twice and said 28 minutes of chalk beat a semester of textbook diagrams. Free on YouTube from the AT&T archives, 10 chapters, black and white. Everyone uses his invention. Almost nobody hears him explain it.

A guy just turned standard home Wi-Fi into a radar that sees through walls. Over 62,000 stars on GitHub for a system that tracks humans without using a single camera lens. It doesn’t just know you’re there. Watch what happens when a person lies down on a bed in another room. The AI instantly maps their exact posture, tracks their breathing, and calculates their heartbeat in real-time. No optical surveillance, no privacy leaks - it just analyzes how your body disrupts ordinary radio waves. The whole thing runs on a tiny $5 microchip. Traditional security requires a direct line of sight and invades your personal space. Now, your Wi-Fi router is a camera that sees through solid brick.

Palantir sells governments a war room that costs millions a year. So, a guy named Elie just rebuilt it, put it on GitHub, and gave it away. It's called World Monitor. Open it and you get a live 3D globe with 500+ news feeds pouring in across 15 categories, all summarized by AI as they land. > Military movements. > Economic shocks. > Natural disasters. > Cyber incidents. > Flight paths. > Shipping lanes. + 56 different map layers you can stack on top of each other. It scores 31 countries on a stress index and updates the number as things happen. It watches 29 stock exchanges, commodities, and crypto in one panel. It runs local AI through Ollama, so you can use the whole thing without a single API key. Native desktop app for Windows, macOS, and Linux. 25 languages. Works out of the box after one clone.

What an incredible honor, and DOOM is the only video game on the list! Congrats to DOOM devs, players, modders, and the entire games community. This one is for all of us. Thanks @GenePark @washingtonpost!

A 43-year-old engineer stood on a stage in 1968 and, in 90 minutes, invented the future of every device you own, and made $10,000 for it. His name was Douglas Engelbart. He had spent six years in a Stanford Research Institute lab chasing an idea his bosses openly called a waste of money. He believed computers should make ordinary people smarter, and that the way to do it was to let humans point, click, link, share, and edit on a screen in real time. Nobody thought this was possible. Computers in 1962 were room-sized calculators run by men in lab coats. The idea of a person sitting at a desk and using their hand to move something on a display was not on any engineering roadmap anywhere in the world. Engelbart built the roadmap himself. By 1968 his team had prototyped the mouse, hyperlinks, video calls, collaborative document editing, and the graphical user interface. They had built it all in one lab, on one grant, under constant skepticism. He booked the biggest computer conference of the year to show it off. He sat on stage in front of a thousand engineers with a headset on and a wooden box with two wheels next to him. He moved a cursor for the first time in public history. He clicked a word and jumped to another document. He video-called his team 30 miles away and co-edited a file with them on screen while the audience watched. The industry now calls that afternoon "The Mother of All Demos." Then nothing happened. Well, not nothing. His funding dried up. His team was hired away by Xerox PARC. Steve Jobs walked into PARC in 1979, saw a computer built on Engelbart's ideas, and turned it into the Macintosh. Bill Gates followed with Windows. Both men became two of the richest people alive. Engelbart's total royalty from the mouse was $10,000, paid once. The patent expired before the mouse became a mass consumer product. He never made another dollar off it. He spent the rest of his life trying to remind the industry what he had built it all for. He wanted computers to help humanity solve the hard problems, not sell ads and steal attention. He gave that talk for 40 years. Most rooms clapped politely and moved on. He died in 2013. The phone in your hand, the mouse under your palm, the video call you took this morning, the doc your team is editing right now: all of it is running on things one man demonstrated in a single session in 1968. He got $10,000. Everyone else got the internet.

Between 1985 and 1995, Lucasfilm Games (later LucasArts) basically created gaming history with everything they touched. Look at that list and name me a single one that sucked. No annual subscriptions. No in-game transactions. No DLC. No Sign Up/Login Just a beautiful box with disks, a thick manual, and a poster - and it was actually yours. You owned it. You didn't just “lease” it. Anyone who ever held one of those boxes in their hands knows exactly what I’m talking about. By the way, the heaviest of the bunch was Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe… its manual ran over 300 pages!

The simulation writers are throwing everything at the wall for the season finale of Earth.

"Multiplayer games today are soooo much better and more fun than in the past" -- Are they? Multiplayer in the 70s meant you met your friends at their place, got the Atari out, and took turns playing Space Invaders for high score bragging rights. Multiplayer in the 80s meant you met your friends at their place, got the NES out, and took turns playing Super Mario Bros for high score bragging rights. Multiplayer in the 90s and early 2000s meant you met your friends at their place, hauled your heavy-ass desktops over, setup the LAN, and battled it out in Age of Empires. Multiplayer today means you turn on your PC, and play online... in multiplayer but by yourself. So, is multiplayer gaming really better today than all those years ago?

The game that started it all. 🚀🚀🚀 Happy 30th to @Quake - This was the best game ever released and the impact this game created is still in my eyes unmatched to this day. Skill gaps in this game are surreal and players would constantly give massive respect for insane shots and creativity. Happy Birthday 🚀

In honor of Quake's 30th birthday, here's the most updated version of the Quake family tree that I could find online. If it's a first person 3D game, it's most likely got some of Quake's DNA.

Yup. In this case, the driver manually overrode self-driving by pressing the accelerator all the way to 100% of the accel pedal in this residential area. They reached a speed of 73 mph during the crash, and had the accelerator pressed even after the crash.

The fear mongering nut jobs have no use for engineering, innovation or facts.

China added a Germany-sized low carbon electricity grid last year. Nearly 500 TWh more generation, almost all solar and wind, built in factories that still burn coal. Carbon payback came in under two years and power sector emissions still fell. Germany already had zero carbon nuclear power. It shut the last plants down in 2023 because ideology demanded it. Higher prices and more coal and gas backup followed. One country scales clean energy through ruthless pragmatism. The other commits economic suicide and calls it environmental virtue. The West is economically self-destructing by submitting to blue haired lesbians on SSRIs.