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@mhd I mentioned this demo to a friend the other day.
This was the demo that marked where demos truly went from being technology hack demonstrations with some level of presentation to being cinematic presentations showing off technology hacks.
(a technlogy hack being "look, we can do X polygons at Y fps on Z platform, we can show U colors on V video mode", and a cinematic presentation being a multimedia show with integrated and cohesive music, video, narrative, pacing, story beats)
@mhd Yes! State of the Art was definitely art over tech. I don't remember which one I saw first.
If I'm thinking of an Amiga demo that would be the equivalent mix of art and tech as SR, that would be Desert Dream by Kefrens. The music still pops up in my head sometimes, especially Checknobankh.
State of the Art: 1992
Desert Dream: 1993
Second Reality: 1993
Right around 1993 was a very particular era.
@sun It was good because I could tell my dad to just reply to this chat message with your email message and I'll see it right away without losing it in a sea of other messages.
And then as the next step I could install it on his phone and enter his existing email credentials, and he could see my messages to the family in a better way, and still interact with the others who weren't onboard yet.
Now that onramp is gone, and it's just another WhatsApp.
Youtube automatic subtitles make it seem that the President of the European Commission is Ursula Thunderlion.
For a brief period, the had a communist monarchy, with the British Queen as official head of state
And it worked! The Crown reluctanly accepted the communist rule, but when a military junta took over, the Queen's representative orchestrated a US invasion, and constitutional monarchy was restored.
Checking his messages at the urinal.
DUDE. Take these 20 seconds of Zen in your life.
I think I can mostly predict what the camps will be and what they will say, but I'll still be interested to read it and learn something about where I stand.
@brettm It was hilarious to me when I discovered (back in 2016) that a build of 32-bit Chromium could not be *linked* on a 32-bit system.
This is next level.
The scripts used to fetch the data, collate it into a DuckDB database file, construct the views on that DB, and then do the statistical analysis on that data, were indeed written by GLM 5.1, as was the HTML and much of the original prose for the final report webpage you're looking at right now.
This is the first time I hear about GLM. So China (Z.AI) has an LLM that has a Claude-like profile, and offers a lightweight offline model.
I did not have "rsync discourse" on my 2026 bingo card.
I don't quite know how to handle what an amazing album "90125" is.
I can go for years not listening to it, and then it pops into my mind, I listen to it and it's like, why do I listen to other music, this is such a masterpiece. This is my favorite song! No, this is! Wait, that's on here too?!?
If you took almost any song on this album and put it on another *very good album* by any artist, it would be the best song on that album, really stand out. The harmonics, the rhythm, the production ... out of this world.
I first heard "90125" on my elder brother's bedroom stereo 40 years ago, and it is so very 1983, but also so modern.
Some people rail against how modern K-Pop albums are overproduced with 200 layers of harmonics, but I love that shit. And 90125 stands up to that, it is so dense, so crafted, the voices such precision instruments, it's unlike anything else from that era.
And then you listen to 9012Live. How did they do those songs live?! The mind boggles.
@sun I can't claim to have studied it, but the vibe I have received is that the Mandate of Heaven has pretty much always been invoked in retrospect. If you need to invoke it to try to undermine a would-be usurper, you've pretty much already lost.
The tie to secularism may be overplayed, but I find it interesting. Either way, Chinese history seems to be one of actual meritocracy, more than any other nation-state I'm aware of.
@Emmanuel Florac — 2026-02-14 12:15:33
Arnaud Bertrand (@arnaudbertrand): This is probably the single feature that makes China most unique as a civilization in human history: it is pretty much the only one where religion never had a say in political affairs.
We often wrongly believe that China's secularism came with Communism but this couldn't be more wrong. The roots are far, far more ancient than this.Think about any other civilization - India, Persia, ancient Egypt, European civilization, the Incas: they all had a priestly class that held considerable political power. China? Never.
Never, ever? Actually China, in its very early history, had a brush with theocracy during the Shang dynasty in the 2nd millennium BC. And it is precisely this episode - or rather what came afterwards - that decisively de-linked religion from government affairs.
How so? Because around 1046 BC, the Zhou overthrew the Shang and immediately faced a big problem of legitimacy. The Shang had claimed to rule because Heaven had chosen them. If that were true, then the Zhou had just committed the ultimate act of sacrilege. How do you justify going against God’s will?
The answer the Duke of Zhou (who can thus be credited as the - perhaps unwitting - inventor of secularism) came up with was essentially to say that Heaven's mandate is not a birthright but a contract - conditional on the virtue of the ruler and good governance.
It might not sound like much but this idea completely changed the whole equation: suddenly the legitimacy of power didn’t rest on God’s will but on man’s moral judgement, on whether the ruler had virtue (德, Dé) and governed well. Which meant that, ultimately, the people - as opposed to a God - became the arbiter of whether a ruler is legitimate.
If there is one single decision that most shaped China's destiny as a civilization, it's probably this one. And, as I explain in my latest article, it ultimately shaped all of us in profound ways: through a chain of events involving Jesuit missionaries, Voltaire, and what French Enlightenment thinkers called "l'argument chinois" ("the Chinese argument"), it is this very idea that ended up secularizing Europe too and drove the Enlightenment movement.
That's the topic of my latest article: the origins of China's secularism, how it shaped three thousand years of Chinese civilization, and why - far from being a belief in nothing or an absence of belief as it's all too often depicted - it's on the contrary a faith in humanity itself.
Read it all here 👇
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