Windows Title Borders

Daniel is now one of my favorite people:

This approach works for Windows 11 as well, except, of course, they moved all the options around, but they aren't too hard to find.

Who thought not having a border around your windows was a good idea?

I've worked with excellent UI and UX people.  They think about things I don't think about.  It's great.

But at some point, I think, at big companies especially, when the UI is already generally good, the UX people have nothing to do, so there is the temptation to make changes, because, well, that's their job.

I'm reminded of a saying I was told when I worked at Virgin Interactive:  Hire 90% of the people you need.  The result is people who are highly engaged and 10% of what businesses do is bullshit anyway.

Security Now!

I always wondered if the Security Now podcast name was inspired by Seinfeld's "Serenity Now!"

But anyway this happened:

The full video episode is here:

https://twit.tv/shows/security-now/episodes/980?autostart=false

and the show notes are here: 

https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-980-notes.pdf

And just so you know, in the meantime the patch has been pushed out, and the answer is "yes", turning off the Wi-Fi adaptor blocks the attack.

They joke a bit about "why not just turn off the entire computer" but it's a real use case where a laptop is used as a remote access machine and connects over ethernet (at a home, say), but the Wi-Fi is left on because why would you ever turn it off?  Well, now you have a reason.

Full Self Driving (FSD) - Unsupervised

It's been in the news that Elon Musk announced that he will announce Tesla robotaxis in August, 2024.  Everyone thinks is he is full of shit, basically, because he has been full of shit about Tesla car autonomy for a very long time.

He might still be.

But!  Here's what I think he will announce and why Elon might have less shit in him this time.

He recently announced that Tesla is no longer "hardware constrained" for car training.  But Tesla has been hardware constrained for car execution for a very long time, since they shipped a bunch of hardware without fully understanding how their software stack was going to work.

And the latest Tesla "full self-driving", renamed to "FSD (supervised)", is really good.  The big change was shifting (heh) away from a combination of neural network and logic in code to executing entirely out of the neural network.  The result is pretty human-like driving.  And it's pretty good at unprotected left turns.  I have a buddy Eric R who lets his Tesla drive him all over the place - freeways, side streets, and even across country.  He says you have to watch it like a hawk but even then it is less stressful than actually driving.

A couple of years ago two other buddies told me they had the "maxed out" FSD and both of them said they stopped using it after it tried to kill them three times.  Which, BTW, it's probably worth pointing out that the Tesla statistics that say FSD is safer than human driving are nonsense, because anytime (in the past at least) that anything interesting happened, it was turned off.  So, sure, it was good at the easy stuff.

So, overall, big improvements in FSD, and my view is that the limitation now is the hardware in the car.

I think the robotaxi announcement will basically reflect the technology they have now but with a major upgrade to the in-car computing and maybe better sensors.  And I think it will be pretty good!  And the new thing will be called "FSD - Unsupervised."

As for the sensors - Elon has said that if you don't solve vision, then you haven't solved anything.  I don't agree with that, but even if that is your view - that the car shouldn't need more sensors than a human (wait, humans have two eyes, and Tesla's have, what, eight? [oh well]) - then you should add in sound and vibration.  I get lots of hints from how the road feels when I drive.  And I think the recent horrible accident from the Cruise vehicle where it dragged a person under the car could have been prevented with more tactile sensors.

BTW, Cruise, the GM self-driving company, has offices right near us at work.  We had a picnic out on the lawn and a bunch of them came out and sat with us.  One of the things I learned as we swapped stories about our respective businesses is that the the Cruise car is always computing an escape plan if something goes wrong, like it loses compute power.  And I think that is what happened after that car accident - it flipped into "escape plan" mode to pull over without considering that it was dragging a body.

I have to admit that accident really bummed me out, because at the time (this is years ago) I was very impressed at how they had a built-in safeguard like that.  And sadly, maybe it backfired.

One more thing.  Back in 2005 an autonomous car succeeded in the DARPA Grand Challenge.  I thought, yay, we're almost there!  And I took into account something Bill Gates said (I think it was Gates), that people overestimate what is possible, computing power wise, in five years, but underestimate what is possible in ten years.  So I thought, yay, in ten years, we'll have self-driving cars!

Well, shit.  That didn't work out.  I should doubled those numbers again.

Update 2024-06-17: AS PREDICTED: Elon Musk Reveals the First Details About Hardware 5 Autopilot Computer and Sensors

Update 2024-12-06: ALSO AS PREDICTED:  After promising full self-driving updates for years, Elon Musk finally admits that most existing Teslas may never be able to drive themselves 

Update 2025-01-31:  Elon Musk finally admits that Tesla will have to replace its HW3 self-driving computers

Alias PowerAnimator 6.0 - those were the days

 

Luxo Jr.

I went to my first Siggraph in 1987.  There was a panel on animation and one of the panelists was a young man who had made a CGI short about a lamp that plays ball with his son.

Performance Graph

I don't recall what this graph covers!  It's from a Guild Wars 2 stress test before launch.  Maybe CPU cores in use?  It would have made Jackson Pollock proud.

Quick iPad Sketch 2013

I handed my iPad (one of the original models - 64 GB!) to my daughter who made this quick sketch of me.

Seattle Museum of Communications

 

Early days of Twitter - before the fail whale

 

People used to bitch when Twitter went down.  Then they started putting up the fail whale, which was cute, and everyone said, "Ahh, how said, Twitter is done."

Gilligan!

Not sure why this exists where it exists ... but this was on the wall at Microsoft Studios (not to be confused with Microsoft Game Studios - these were video studios).  It's a map of Gilligan's Island.

spwnn - reading list

spwnn - the "shallow pair-wise neural network"

My articles about it in chronological order:

spwnn - 40 years in the making

spwnn - main algorithm at github

spwnn - the fundamental question

spwnn - fun with letter pairs

spwnn - fun with golang

spwnn - iterating quickly to finish this thing

spwnn - big 370K word dictionary

spwnn - awkward word anana

spwnn - fun with aws lambda

spwnn - embarrassingly parallel

spwnn - delightfully parallel

spwnn - aws sweet spot

spwnn - more cpu core scaling tests

Compact

I also tossed some CDs.

Floppy

I threw out a lot of floppy disks last year.

I have to admit I miss the flying toaster screensaver.

Windows 95

I did a lot of beta testing (particularly audio cards) for Windows 95 and they invited me to the launch event!  The one that Jay Leno MC'd!  And I just recently moved to Redmond (as our neck or the woods was called back in the day) so it was just a short drive over to campus.

Oh Maya, please don't crash on me

For years I have wanted to write a song about how bad I feel when certain programs crash on me.  The Maya 3D art package has a human name, so it seemed like a good candidate for a parody song.

But I could never get it to gel.

So I asked ChatGPT to write it.

Verse 1:

I was lost in my creation,
Maya was my destination,
Every stroke was pure elation,
I felt the passion, I had the vision.

Chorus:
But then Maya crashed on me,
And my work was gone you see,
All my progress was in vain,
Maya crashed and caused me pain.

Verse 2:
I tried to salvage what was left,
But the damage was too much to bear,
All my art was now bereft,
Maya had betrayed me, it wasn't fair.

Chorus:
But then Maya crashed on me,
And my work was gone you see,
All my progress was in vain,
Maya crashed and caused me pain.

Bridge:
I know it's just a program,
But it felt like a part of me,
And when it let me down like that,
It hurt more than it should be.

Chorus:
But then Maya crashed on me,
And my work was gone you see,
All my progress was in vain,
Maya crashed and caused me pain.

Outro:
Maya, Maya, why'd you crash on me,
I thought we had a connection, can't you see,
But now I'm lost and feeling incomplete,
Maya, please don't crash on me.

[Edit 2025-07-28 Wait, wat?  I just discovered I had previously written this:  
https://drstephencw.blogspot.com/2006/05/ode-to-maya.html  ]

Pirates vs Ninjas

 

In 2013 I thought it would be cute to make a "pirates vs ninjas" joke since "pirates vs. ninjas" was a popular meme at the time.  

The idea of this joke (not an actual recommendation to behave a certain way!) was that you could stop software piracy by going dark and not bragging about it, which unbelievably, a lot of people still do.

Okay, it's not the best joke.

But!  I was at a party where a person responsible for Microsoft licensing and reducing piracy saw my shirt - she interpreted it as, "Stop software piracy by being a super cool ninja that tracks down piracy and stops it."  Which I think is a legit interpretation.  

"Applying Game Design to Virtual Environments" - 1998

A colleague at work, HH, found this article I wrote in 1998!

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/applying-game-design-to-virtual-environments

It was originally a chapter in a book Digital Illusions.

My weenies blog post from 2000 (and amazingly the picture links work):

https://s3.amazonaws.com/above-the-garage.com/wienies/index.html

I could never find a definitive way to spell weenies.  

Programming Retreat

I've mentioned I did some work on spwnn during a programming retreat in 2018.

The place I stayed was in the middle of this satellite view:

The internet was provided by an old-school (not Starlink) satellite.  It was just good enough that I could look up articles about Go and AWS but not fast enough to be distracted by anything else.

Sometimes I would have visitors in the evening.

Each day I would drive to Clifton, Az, for lunch and coffee.

You can rent it if you'd like (click picture to go to AirBnB posting).

FancyZones Hack!

I often remote to another Windows desktop machine (or something that looks like one!).

A common problem is how do I remember what machine I am currently using?  They tend to look terribly similar.

Introducing my FancyZones hack.  Basically you install MS PowerToys and start using FancyZones.  

• Create a layout that is two zones:  one is most of your screen, and the other is a small strip along one side.  I chose the right side for the thin vertical strip.  
• Set your desktop background colors to something obviously different on each machine:  I have blue for home and red for one of my remote sites.  
• Put all of your windows into the big zone (using shift-drag on the title bar).  This will leave a colored outline around your desktop and you can quickly see which machine you are on.  
• Bonus - take the second small zone you made and put Wordpad in there and in big vertical letters put the name of the machine.

I remember back in the day we would do something similar with coloring the title bar, but Windows changed so that it's harder to edit the title bar color and it tends to lose its color when it is not the selected window.  This new approach is more "in your face" which I find helpful.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious NFT

 As best as I understand things, an NFT - "non-fungible token", is a string put into the blockchain.

Art NFTs are URL strings which point to the JPEG (or whatever).

The URL might break - what you really "own" is the string.  Actually putting the JPEG picture into the blockchain is very expensive because of the size.

I thought … why not put words or phrases into the blockchain?  Then you own that actual string.

My first choice for a word:  supercalifragilisticexpialidocious .

Ideally Disney issues the NFT for supercalifragilisticexpialidocious so it has a valuable origin.  (Anyone can issue a token for a word, but the whole point is to own the "official" token issued by the IP owner; as far as I can tell [I am not a lawyer] there is no trademark on supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.)  Fans would love it!  Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious has the benefit of being unique in Disney lore and instantly recognizable, so it's a good one to start with.  Other obvious choices would be "hakuna matata" and "The code is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules."

I thought this ideas was genius, and I hope someone at Disney agrees.  So far all of the computer savvy people I've bounced this off were unimpressed.  

But maybe they just aren't Disney fans.