Lethal humanoid monsters, weird voice acting (likely not AI though) and “telephone”-distorted audio (it’s not just because I limited the bitrate to 20 kb/s to fit under 10 MiB, the YouTube video is like that). It’s an artistic choice but not a very rare one, so likely not directly inspired by H. P. Lovecraft’s audiobooks.

You are right, QR codes are very easy to decode if you have them raw, even the C64 should do it in a few seconds, maybe a minute for one of those 22 giant ones. The hard part is image processing when decoding a camera picture - and that can be done on the C64 too if it has enough time and some external memory (or disks for virtual memory). People have even emulated a 32-bit RISC processor on the poor thing, and made it boot Linux.

In almost all microwaves, the control circuitry or mechanical switches only ever switch 2-3 power circuits: motor+fan(+bulb sometimes separately) and the heating (transformer+diode+capacitor+magnetron) high voltage circuit. It can therefore only switch the heat between 0 and max, usually in a slow (15-30s period) PWM cycle (that hopefully does not coincide with the tray rotation period). The inputs can be manual only, or sometimes there is also a scale, moisture sensor and microphone, along with thermal fuses for safety.

I think the pizza setting is just generic medium one with short 50% cycles to allow the heat to spread. The popcorn setting can be much more interesting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Limpr1L8Pss

This is GRUB’s final warning before you dig too deep in the OS list. Never hold ⬇️ for more than 45 minutes. If you do, make sure you have punch tape with a bootloader available or you’ll have to manually enter machine code instructions to get your computer back up.

I have a short story too (see below the oath quote). It does not include women because the oath text does not either. You can rewrite it to include gender mechanics (making the patient a woman, perhaps) but it’s probably not worth the effort. For starters, appendoctomy hadn’t been invented back then.

“Could I fuck a female doctor instead?”

“To my knowledge, there aren’t any in all of Pelopones. There is quite a selection of gay men, though. A nearby one is crossdressing, actually.”

You read it wrong. I will include all of it for context, and add commentary. Third paragraph is relevant.

I swear by Apollo Healer, by Asclepius, by Hygieia, by Panacea, and by all the gods and goddesses, making them my witnesses, that I will carry out, according to my ability and judgment, this oath and this indenture.

Religious preamble as standard for its time

To hold my teacher in this art equal to my own parents; to make him partner in my livelihood; when he is in need of money to share mine with him; to consider his family as my own brothers, and to teach them this art, if they want to learn it, without fee or indenture; to impart precept, oral instruction, and all other instruction to my own sons, the sons of my teacher, and to indentured pupils who have taken the Healer’s oath, but to nobody else.

Medical knowledge should be free! You hear that, America?
Also, it’s not “first do no harm”, it’s “first respect your teacher”.

I will use those dietary regimens which will benefit my patients according to my greatest ability and judgment, and I will do no harm or injustice to them.[6] Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course. Similarly I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion. But I will keep pure and holy both my life and my art. I will not use the knife, not even, verily, on sufferers from stone, but I will give place to such as are craftsmen therein.

See, no doctors with knife! You can get another “craftsman” to operate on you but better make sure he is the son of a doctor, because all others have never received medical training (see end of second paragraph) or taken this no-knife oath.

Into whatsoever houses I enter, I will enter to help the sick, and I will abstain from all intentional wrong-doing and harm, especially from abusing the bodies of man or woman, bond or free. And whatsoever I shall see or hear in the course of my profession, as well as outside my profession in my intercourse with men, if it be what should not be published abroad, I will never divulge, holding such things to be holy secrets.

Do no harm, also don’t rape and keep secrets. All good…
Wait! "outside my profession in my intercourse with men”
Every male MD is gay, confirmed

Now if I carry out this oath, and break it not, may I gain for ever reputation among all men for my life and for my art; but if I break it and forswear myself, may the opposite befall me.[5]
– Translation by W.H.S. Jones

Well, this is weird. Imagine you come to an Ancient Greek doctor with abdominal pain…

“One of your intestines went naughty and needs to be removed.”

“Can you do it?”

“No way, I’m a doctor, not a surgeon. Hekates the butcher could help you. He’s great with the knife but I don’t think he can tell the intestines apart.”

“What happens if he gets it wrong?”

“You die.”

“Are you sure it’s that intestine?”

“Most likely. It will not hurt to remove, anyway. The appendix is nothing but a troublemaker.”

“It doesn’t hurt?”

“The procedure certainly DOES hurt but it’s better than what you’d be going through without it.”

“Can you at least instruct Hekates?”

“No, we doctors cannot divulge the secrets of our craft, except to our children. The only doctor I know has a son is 3 city-states away, and the son is terrible at cutting.”

“Can you adopt my son and teach him about the appendix? I could then have him instruct Hekates.”

“I’ll gladly become a stepfather if you let me fuck you…”

“I’m not gay but I guess it’s better than dying…”

“Deal. Meet me after my office hours, I cannot have intercourse with men on the job.”

• Do you think developers have any say in this?
• They have Reddit Premium for free, and most likely an internal version too.

Do you think enough Harry Potter porn is produced to cover a continuous video stream / decent-rate picture slideshow?

Anyway, these could be AI-generated with feedback from EEG.

surgeon

Really? The Hippocratic Oath originally included “I will not use the knife”. A surgeon is very limited without a knife.

Edit: I read the thing and it basically says that doctors and surgeons are separate professions: doctors MUST take the oath while surgeons MUST NOT; this also prevents surgeons from obtaining medical knowledge unless they are a son (or presumably a daughter) of a doctor.

The hole in the fuselage that caused them to be sucked out was actually made by one of them in a suicide/homicide. Very tragic. Somebody invest in mental health please!

Because

1. When the internet was rolling out, a decentralized, open, best-effort solution of TCP/IP thankfully won over telephone companies’ centralized system proposal
2. IPv6 is still not universal for some damn reason
3. Onion addresses solve these problems but good luck getting everyone aboard with Tor
4. You always trade anonymity for reachability, and with the amount of threats, NAT and firewalls have been put up to make it harder for unsolicited requests to reach you by default

Don’t go into Seine, you’ll drown!

(I know it’s pronounced [ˈzaɪ̯nə] 🔊, I can speak German)

Yeah, it’s fun but the temperature needs to be correct. With rising temperature, the paper goes black, light gray, brown and then glowing orange.

The IMU probably drifts by some small percentge but an intermittent GPS signal every few kilometers should ensure that it never gets too far off course.

I am not aware of any receipt printers using lasers - thermal printers have an array of resistors that get hot when necessary. I know how a laser printer works and it is hard to explain in 12 or so words. Inkjets are way easier, you can just say “squirt squirt oops”. Anyway…

1. A photosensitive drum gets a negative electrostatic charge.
2. A laser shining through a rotating prism scans lines across the drum’s surface. This removes charge from parts of the drum that should not be covered in toner.
3. A high-voltage corona wire inside the toner reservoir charges an amount of toner positively.
4. The charged drum rotates past the corona wire, getting covered in toner where its negative charge remains.
5. Paper is pushed against the drum and the powdery toner is transferred to it.
6. The paper continues into a fuser, a little oven where a heating element briefly makes the toner so hot that it melts, its powder particles making a permanent bond among themselves and with the paper. (The heater is usually stationary and heats the paper from below. The fuser drum that pushes paper against the heater can get sticky and pick up some of the toner, making images repeat down the page. This is the most common failure mode that cannot be resolved through regular maintenance such as replacing the toner cartridge and printing cleaning pages. However, almost all laser printers have a cheap fuser module or its drum available so it is usually worth replacing.)

Oh, I forgot about the quality of US infrastrure. If an engineer needs to make a voice call to communicate to unpower the line because a train has derailed, that’s a systemic problem. I think all metros in the EU have telemetry and any major railway implements ETCS. Weird that “safety first” means that schoolkids cannot see the eclipse but public transport infrastructure gets way underfunded.

Also, a certain “blue line” keeps going off the rails in the US. I read this out of context and thought the police staged a riot.

Time travel is a prerequisite but don’t worry, you can just

from __future__ import antigravity

Why? Passenger trains and subways are already very safe thanks to remote control & monitoring systems, Deadman’s switches etc. Many urban rail sstems don’t use drivers at all! Is there a subway accident from the past 20 years that could have been prevented with an extra driver?

Sure, no algorithm is able to extract any more information from a single photo. But how about combining detail caught in multiple frames of video? Some phones already do this kind of thing, getting multiple samples for highly zoomed photos thanks to camera shake.

Still, the problem remains that the results from a cherry-picked algorithm or outright hand-crafted pics may be presented.