USPTO Dossier Summary: https://globaldossier.uspto.gov/result/application/US/190097...

USPTO US 19009708 Documentation: https://globaldossier.uspto.gov/details/US/19009708/A/111855

USPTO EP 25191927 Documentation: https://globaldossier.uspto.gov/details/EP/25191927/A/130945

  - Misrepresents a material (non-trivial) fact in order to obtain action or forbearance by another person
  - The other person relies upon the misrepresentation
  - The other person *suffers injury* as a result of the act or forbearance taken in reliance upon the misrepresentation.

  - Recovery of damages in the amount of the *difference between the value of the property* had it been as represented and its actual value
  - Out-of-pocket loss, which allows for the recovery of damages in the amount of the *difference between the value of what was given and the value of what was received*.

18 U.S.C. § 1343

  (...)'any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises'(...)

[1] https://gifcities.org/search?q=torch

Part I found a bit difficult was using background images, rather than using links, and performing x and y shifting to minimize the use of enormous aspect ratio image files (really long strip of image sideways).

Finally settled on something that looks like:

  .fire_torch2.trch_sprt {
    position: absolute;
    width: 24px;
    height: 53px;
    bottom: 0px;
    left: 0px;
    background-image: url('../items/fire_torch2_sprite.png');
    background-position: 0px 0px;
    background-size: 120px 265px; /* 5 columns * 24px, 5 rows * 53px */
    animation:
      fireTorch2SpriteX 0.55s steps(5) infinite, /* 1 second to complete one row */
      fireTorch2SpriteY 2.75s steps(5) infinite;
    display: none;
  }

  @keyframes fireTorch2SpriteX {
    from { background-position-x: 0; }
    to { background-position-x: -120px; } /* 5 columns * 24px */
  }

  @keyframes fireTorch2SpriteY {
    from { background-position-y: 0; }
    to { background-position-y: -265px; } /* 5 rows * 53px */
  }

  .fire_torch:has( .Lntrn_fire_swtch:checked ) .trch_drk { display: none; }
  .fire_torch:has( .Lntrn_fire_swtch:checked ) .trch_sprt { display: inline-block; }

Further, since the sprite sheet is actually 120px x 265px to handle 5 rows of 5 frames, it then requires a somewhat complicated @keyframe definition setup. It actually needs one x-loop that's short, and loops endlessly, going through the full 5 frames, and a second 5x step length y-loop that then iterates once every full x-loop.

Actually imagery and animations that can be played with can be found here: https://araesmojo-eng.github.io under "Lantern Tests Menu"

NOTE: Needs the lantern to function and light the torches. Requires other minor puzzles on the website.

Does not look like it. Appears to be Bluetooth 5 and Bluetooth LE only.

https://github.com/gbdk-2020/gbdk-2020/tree/develop/gbdk-lib...

Unfortunately, the 2D imposter mode has pretty significant difficulties with arbitrarily rotated 3D. The GBDK imposter rotation demo needs a 256k cart just to handle 64 rotation frames in a circle for a single object. Expanding that out to fully 3D views and rotations gets quite prohibitive.

Haven't tried downloading RGDBS to compile this yet. However, suspect the final file is probably similar, and pushing the upper limits on GB cart sizes.

Probably could have been written that way though, since it is spinning the camera view rather than the object.

  - You invite someone to sit in your living room
    - There must have been a reason to begin with (or why invite them at all)
    - Implied (at least limited) trust of whoever was invited
  - Access enabled and information gained heavily depends on house design
    - May have to walk past many rooms to finally reach the living room
    - Significant chances to look at everything in your house
    - Already allows skilled appraiser to evaluate your theft worthiness
  - Many techniques may allow further access to your house
    - Similar to digital version (leave something behind)
      - Small digital object accessing home network
      - "Sorry, I left something, mind if I search around?"
    - Longer con (advance to next stage of "friendship" / "relationship", implied trust)
      - "We should hang out again / have a cards night / go drinking together / ect..."
      - Flattery "Such a beautiful house, I like / am a fan of , could you show it to me?"
  - Already provides a survey of your home security
    - Do you lock your doors / windows?
    - What kind / brand / style do you have?
    - Do you tend to just leave stuff open?
    - Do you have onsite cameras or other features?
    - Do you easily just let anybody into your house who asks?
    - General cleanliness and attention to security issues

  - In the case of Notepad++, they would also be offering you a free product
    - Significant utility vs alternatives
    - Free
    - Highly recommended by many other "neighbors"
  - In the case of Notepad++, they themselves are not actively malicious (or at least not known to be)
    - Single developer
    - Apparently frazzled and overworked by the experience
    - Makes updates they can, yet also support a free product for millions.
    - It doesn't really work with the friend you invite in scenario (more like they sneezed in your living room or something)

Couple follow on questions. What are the test conditions like? Is the test basically a static air test with a fixed engine and a 500 mph duck / goose carcass striking an operating engine? Or do they put it in a wind tunnel to simulate high speed wind forces also?

Also, what's the method of actually firing and accelerating a duck / goose carcass up to airline speeds for impact. Did this a bit for NASA impact testing, and we tended to use peel away sabot rounds to throw bricks at objects.

Also, borders a bit on a Monty Python joke, yet is there a regulation duck / goose? They can vary pretty wildly in size / weight. 5lb, 10lb, 20lb? Are they firing all the way up airline cruise speeds (500-600 mph? or just take off / landing runway issues?

Finally, being in the industry, any idea on what's been going on with the engines peeling off airplane wings, like that Louisville, Kentucky cargo plane? That seems like a rather drastic failure mode, since apparently there were cracks in the mounting and people just weren't checking?

After a bit of searching, apparently it's part of the L4 OS family. (More Unix) Wikipedia has a summary in the L4 microkernel family article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family#L4Ka::Pi...

  glimpsed a pale shape moving through the trees. (actual text)

  just at the edge of sight—a pale shape, slipping between the trunks (not extraction)

And, yes, Nvidia's in the middle of a class action lawsuit for using Anna's Archive. Mildly funny. They even warned Nvidia it was illegal "You realize this is all pirated material, right?"

Court Filing: https://torrentfreak.com/images/naznvid-amend.pdf

Tom's: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

Digital Music: https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2026/01/23/nvidia-accused-o...

Meta's apparently also, yet it hasn't resulted in a court case, yet. Also kind of funny. "Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right. LOL Emoji" 82TB of data with a decent amount from Anna's Archive.

Tom's: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

  - The combined market cap of NVidia ($4.35T), Apple ($3.88T), and Google (Goog, $1.9T+Googl, $3.62T) shares combined.
  - An amount larger than Every world stock market on Earth, except the NYSE and NASDAQ (the next closest is Shanghai at $9T)
  - ~5 months worth of all trades (market volume) on the NYSE ($2.685T/month)
  - ~1/10th of ALL world stock markets market capitalization.
  - ~1/2 the United States yearly Gross Domestic Product
  - 130x Spotify's own market capitalization (total stock value outstanding)
  - ~766x Spotify's own yearly revenue for 2024 ($16.96B)

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-26/power-lin...

and then checked over at Commonwealth Edison Company for the price trends. Hit -$0.068 / kWh on Jan 25th, and -$0.141 / kWh on Jan 26th, 2026.

Average yearly prices for 2025 hovered around $0.03 to 0.04 / kWh for comparison. Both negative (effectively being paid to use electricity) and wild price swings with the winter storm (also made it up to a high of $0.20 / kWh before collapsing negative).

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46772241

Points: 2

# Comments: 3

The large chip looks like it's purposely placed to intercept every single incoming signal, and then route them through afterward. Just because they're "experts" does not mean they notice issues that a "naive" observer might have noticed. Get lost in the trees.

It looks like a big chip for doing "secret spy stuff".

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=financial+real+estate+warnin...

Reuters, 8/9/2007, "House bubble could be a self-fulfilling prophecy", https://www.reuters.com/article/world/house-bubble-could-be-...

"experts fear is that excessive focus on the issue could generate enough fear among homebuyers to lead to the first-ever nationwide housing drop"

"Alan Greenspan doubts there is a national bubble but warns repeatedly of "froth" in local housing markets and imminent regional downturns."

"Barely a day goes by without blaring headlines about housing bubbles in newspapers and magazines."

NBC News, 8/10/2007, "High-risk mortgages turning into toxic mess"

"the option and interest-only ARMs held by more creditworthy borrowers loom as another calamity in the making"

"If the worst fears about these loans materialize, the economic damage would likely extend well beyond the United States because much of the debt has been packaged into securities sold to pension funds, banks and other investors around the world who were hungry for high yields."

"there is still reason to be alarmed because the trouble with option and interest-only ARMs still appears to be in its early stages"

"Those loans are begging to blow up. This is a true financial crisis"

However, this site [1] shows several categories for taxation that might be hidden to falsify the taxation basis. Cash, Inventories, Household Goods, Luxury Clothing. Admittedly, it seems like there would be a greater percentage of items left behind in some of these locations, since there often tend to be something. Yet, for taxation avoidance purposes, maybe they're very motivated to recollect everything that was hidden.

[1] https://ehs.org.uk/taxation-and-wealth-inequality-in-the-ger...

However, for many the result is that the color choices are akin to a posterization filter in photoshop, where the nearest color is simply chosen. Often, there's actually the freedom 'available' to define a character set and choose at least a background / foreground color, with some kind of dithering pattern.

Sometimes the character set that can be defined is limited, so it has to be chosen carefully. Yet there's improvement from a 'large blobs of color' poster result to a smooth dither tone change.

The problem with the quantization result, is it just snaps to the 'nearest'. So even for relatively large areas of slowly gradiating color, if you only have one 'nearby' color, everything inbetween just snaps to that single color choice. You might have red, with slowly increasing green / yellow, yet it will always just snap to solid red.

This example from the Vic-20 kind of shows that issue. Large areas where it posterizes severely.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/32/Screen_c...

Dithering suggested is something like this (greyscale example) except with choosable foreground / background (maybe 3-4, although less frequently)

https://araesmojo-eng.github.io/images/GreyScale_Dithering.p...

This example from the Vic-20 game Tutankarman shows that kind of approach. Varying amounts of dither and color used in dithing give the impression of changing skin tones.

https://www.neilhuggett.com/vic20/tutankarman03.png

They're both the Vic-20

Or the Super Nintendo Entertainment System https://github.com/alekmaul/pvsneslib

Or the Gameboy / GBC, Sega Master System, Gamegear, Nintendo Entertainment System https://github.com/gbdk-2020/gbdk-2020

Or the TurboGrafx-16 / PC Engine, Nintendo Entertainment System (alt), Commodore 64, Vic-20, Atari 2600, Atari 7800, Apple II/IIe, or Pet 2001 https://github.com/cc65/cc65

Or the ZX Spectrum, TRS-80, Apple II (alt), Gameboy (alt), Sega Master System (alt), and Game Gear (alt) https://github.com/z88dk/z88dk

Or the Fairchild Channel F https://channelf.se/veswiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

Note: Some are slightly pre-1999 (all these, I have at least successfully made a "Hello World" with)

----------------

If they're really wanting 1999, that's the 5th to 6th generation console range with Sega Saturn, PlayStation, Nintendo 64, and Dreamcast. (on these, only recommendations, no successful compiled software)

Playstation is really challenging and remains so even in 2026. Lots of Modchip and disk swap issues on real hardware. Possibilities: https://www.psx.dev/getting-started and https://github.com/Lameguy64/PSn00bSDK

N64 is less horrible, and there's quite a few resources: https://github.com/DragonMinded/libdragon and https://github.com/command-tab/awesome-n64-development

Sega Saturn is still pretty difficult. However, there is: https://github.com/yaul-org/libyaul?tab=readme-ov-file and https://github.com/ReyeMe/SaturnRingLib plus the old development kits from the 90's are still around https://techdocs.exodusemulator.com/Console/SegaSaturn/Softw...

Dreamcast is similar to the Saturn situation, yet strangely, a little better. There's https://github.com/dreamsdk/dreamsdk/releases and https://github.com/KallistiOS/KallistiOS along with the official SDKs that are still around https://www.sega-dreamcast-info-games-preservation.com/en/re...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_8-bit_computer_hardwar...

Note: If you happen to know how to do multi-color dithering with some of these that would actually make significant improvements on some of these old picture hardware tests.