---
title: 002 - Trains, iPods and plagiarism
layout: post
---
Hello again. Lots more interesting stuff this week, so I'll jump right in.
- [This](https://social.hackerspace.pl/@q3k/111528162462505087) is a fascinating Mastodon thread. A very impressive reverse engineering of some train software, showing that it was deliberately designed to brick itself when being fixed at third-party repair workshops. Capitalism makes people do silly things.
- [A mammoth article](https://emilygorcenski.com/post/making-god/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email) by Emily Gorcenski, dissecting the recent A"I"[^1] "revolution". It is meticulously researched, and gets deep into the motivations behind the grift.
- Next up, [a technical breakdown](https://www.cameronmacleod.com/blog/how-does-shazam-work) of the inner workings of Shazam. This is always something that I have been amazed by, but never looked into the technology behind it. Who knew that Shazam used to be a phone number you could call? I'm certainly too young for that.
- Something a bit different: I learned this week that you can play (online!) chess from you command line, through `telnet` and [freechess.org](freechess.org). Just run `telnet freechess.org 5000` and play some games. I love things like this, and that they continue to exist.
- [A tool for easily dithering images](https://seleb.github.io/ordered-dither-maker/), very cool.
- I learned this week about the [Rockbox project](https://www.rockbox.org/), which is custom software for mp3 players (inlcuding iPods!). [Here is a thread](https://mastodon.social/@bagder/111538350617290554) from Daniel Stenberg about how the iPod was "rockboxed".
- I was too quick to use "mammoth" earlier. For the final link today, [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDp3cB5fHXQ) is a ***mammoth*** deep dive into the problem of plagiarism on YouTube. Some incredible stuff in here, and it is very interesting throughout, despite being almost 4 (four) hours long.
Thanks for reading!
A.
[^1]: It is artificial, but certainly not intelligence. Just statistics.