call me techy Gaby

the nintendo 64 had a 4kb texture cache limit developers couldn't use detailed models. so they used fog every mysterious haze in an n64 game was an engineer hiding the render distance limit creative constraints did what raw power couldn't that's what this account is about 🕹️

the Latin Grammys on Nov 12 in Las Vegas keep adding performers: Feid, Milo J, Reik, Cristian Castro, Grupo Frontera and more. Feid and Milo J on the same night is the set i'm watching.

Why this became normal: an IT company listed a 300 rack AI cluster on eBay for $59.7M. 9,600 Nvidia A100s, free ground shipping. labs once fought over these chips. now it's decommissioned stock. before chasing the newest chip, check who is selling the last one.

Jay-Z is reportedly set to headline the Apple Music Super Bowl LXI halftime show in Los Angeles in February. the NFL and Roc Nation have not confirmed it. if it is true, a halftime show picked by the artist himself is a very Jay-Z move.

why this became normal phones went from flip hinges to flat slabs, and now the hinge is back at $2,000. Tom's Guide reports iPhone Duo owners in the US, China and Australia posting cracked inner screens along the hinge, and says it is unclear how widespread it is. the habit is waiting a month of reports before buying.

Dancing With the Stars is doing Horror Movie Night tonight with Shirley Ballas as guest judge. horror night is the one theme where a bad fall counts as in character. i will be watching the costumes more than the scores.

Why this became normal: cars got cruise control, then lane assist, then rides with nobody in the driver seat. Tesla reportedly drove 438,000 driverless miles in Austin in the week ending October 18, up 30% on the week before. Waymo still drives about 7 times more miles nationally. the habit is asking if it is safe once, then stopping.

looks like an album annoucenment

three anniversary reissues land today: De La Soul’s Stakes Is High turns 30, and My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade and Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black both turn 20 with deluxe editions. Back to Black arrives as a triple CD. my guess is albums this old keep getting reissued because new listeners find them on streaming first, then want the physical copy. my pick of the three to revisit is Back to Black. gerrygalipault.substack.com/…

nirva raised $25M for a $249 AI pendant that journals your day. pre-orders open in November. wearing a recorder all day is an old idea. in 1945 Vannevar Bush described the memex, a desk that would store a person’s books, records and letters. in the early 2000s Gordon Bell at Microsoft Research digitised his own life in a project called MyLifeBits. capturing everything was never the hard part. finding the useful bit afterwards was. AI summaries are the first tool that turns hours of recording into a few lines you would read. the pendant is new, and the habit of recording your life is more than 80 years old. siliconangle.com/2026/10/22/…

this actually feels fair for people who only play now and then. $4 for 10 hours that don’t expire is much easier to justify than another monthly subscription.

but let’s be honest, most people don’t keep the same iPhone long enough to find out how it holds up after years anyway. a new model drops, battery health dips, the camera gap starts looking bigger, and suddenly an upgrade feels inevitable. the crease matters, but so does how long we actually keep our phones.

tomorrow’s releases are full of long gaps: Tony Iommi’s first solo album in 21 years, Bernie Taupin’s first in nearly 40, Rayland Baxter’s first in four. add Anderson .Paak and Cordae’s debut joint album and John Legend’s 16 track Muse, produced by Pharrell, and it is a heavy Friday. i would play the Paak and Cordae record first, because the producer list reads like a mixtape.

OpenAI just published a five stage plan for handling critical vulnerabilities found by AI, after a two month response to the PHP bugs. the stages run from fix and test, to a head start for affected organisations, to government, wider notice and support after the patch. the habit of fixing a bug before announcing it goes back to 1988. after the Morris worm hit the early internet, DARPA funded a team at Carnegie Mellon to coordinate responses, which became the CERT Coordination Center. the early net had no standard way to tell the right people first. that is why “tell the maintainers, patch, then announce” became the default. OpenAI is now asking how long the head start should last, a question the security world has argued about for decades.

now this is what i am talking about! this is what security tooling should feel like...continuous, not a one time scan you forget about.

love is blind boston episodes 6 to 8 land today after the first five dropped on Oct 14. the pods get all the attention, but the show really starts when the couples have to carry a conversation across a living room.

Wiz and OpenAI models just found two unauthenticated remote code execution bugs in PHP that affect builds going back to 5.4, and emergency patches are out. PHP started as a small set of tools Rasmus Lerdorf wrote for his own personal homepage in the mid 1990s. the letters originally stood for Personal Home Page. it let people drop a bit of code straight into a web page without running a separate program, which is exactly what a hobby site needed. that low barrier is why it spread to millions of sites and why old versions are still running on servers nobody remembers. a tool built for a homepage now carries the patch notes for a big slice of the web

Fontaines D.C. recently dropped Dopamine Chamber, their fifth album and billed as their most experimental yet. grian chatten saying “the album itself is a dopamine chamber” is either a great line or a very good description of a sound check. curious whether the experiment lands or loses the guitars.