I would say that all the best elements from the wrong trousers train scene were already done two years earlier in "The Good The bad and the Tigger" from the New adventures of Winnie the Pooh.
Its not the elements, the idea of "Laying track infront of a toy train" is a pretty obvious idea. What makes the Wallace and Gromit scene so classic is the direction - by which I mean camera angles, camera movement, edits, and the 'acting' which are all akin to a hollywood action sequence but (somewhat absurdly) set in a claymation world. Think about the part where gromit goes under the table -
- you see gromit glance up, his eyebrows communicate that he's seen something challenging
- shot of table approaching, an impossible forest of wooden legs
- shot from the side of gromit (impossibly) finding a winding path under the table, brows furrowed but determined
- shot of wallace at the back of the train, from the side, following the same path
- shot from under the table, facing forwards, seeing our heroes continue into the room
That just one four-second segment of the chase. Its an absolute masterclass of editing and camera angles. And its also impossible, but it makes sense to the viewer.
Also, consider that of the three characters in the chase, only one can talk. Gromit expresses everything with his eyes and body language. And the penguin has barely any facial expression at all, just two black eyes. Mostly the penguin's emotions are expressed through neck movements. But nonetheless he's a classic antagonist.
I have just looked it up what you're referencing, and I disagree.
The W&G train scene is a chase sequence. It has derring-do, thrills and spills. One moment the baddy is ahead, the next moment the goodies are ahead... high-octane stuff. The WtP cartoon doesn't have any of that, it's a sedate cartoon for kiddies. Tigger standing next to the train and carefully placing train tracks before the train gets there is nothing like Gromit sitting on the train and having to franticly lay track.
Well, there is one similar joke where Tigger quickly lays down train tracks in front of a running toy train before it runs off of the tracks. That might have been an inspiration, who knows, but it's executed very differently either way:
... and then the episode becomes a parody of Westerns as it switches to the "imagination vision" of the characters, and the story and gags are not really comparable to The Wrong Trousers at all after that.
I mean, I watched taped episodes of The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh religiously as a small child and has strong nostalgia goggles for it, and even I don't think that it is on the same level. Even childhood me would have agreed: I remember loving and enjoying this episode (just like all the others), but the first time I watched The Wrong Trousers as a child I was genuinely laughing so much I had sore core muscles the day after, because I had never seen a film that funny and amazing before in my life.
Yeah, zstd is awesome. I built a webapp that uses it via wasm and the decompression speed is incredible, so much so that I store everything in zstd and decompress it on the app load. My wasm binary also does advanced search and tag insertion and stuff in addition to zstd but it's only 38kb. I wish zstd was supported natively by web browsers. The 8kb implementation of zstd is only half as slow as wasm, so even that is still viable.
Good point. Looks like it’s related to window size (incl for lzma btw). Lzma stays 0.9 and goes to 88.5 post 8.8M gap. Zstd -14 is close to lzma up to 4.4M where it jumps to 91.5. 14L seems to be the best overall for this scenario staying at 1.9.
After trying to use libreoffice for typesetting and it being a pain to get the styles and formatting right I switched to Typst. Pretty impressed by it's Khmer language support. A lot lighter than latex or sile.
Have you ever noticed that nothing is actually ever better in the app. In the web browser I can change to desktop mode and access all the features they don't have in the app, also in the browser I can block ads.
Actually, it is. Your behavior can be tracked better, re-engagement through push notifications and ads. It's just not better for you. But aren't we all trying to maximize shareholder value anyway?
Yeah, last year I discovered that AI writes better rust than C, so I switched to rust and it made some quick good code that it couldn't do in C.
But when I wanted to optimize and edit and reorganize bthe code it was difficult, so I did a rewrite in C and it was lighter and faster and simpler and less headache.
> [L]ast year I discovered that AI writes better rust than C
I am not doubting your anecdata. I am curious about the why. C is so simple compared to Rust. Yes, I understand it is much more dangerous, but I am genuinely surprised by your discovery. Also, the open source training base in C is massive; I assume still much larger than Rust.
> The best argument for Rust in 2026 is not memory safety or performance. It is that AI writes better Rust than it writes C++. The compiler feedback loop is so tight that models self-correct in real time. Every error message is a free training signal. Rust was accidentally designed for AI-assisted development 10 years before anyone knew that mattered.
This quote bothered me when I read it because it offers no evidence as to why LLMs are better at writing Rust than C++. LLVM can compile Rust (rustc) and C++ (clang) and should offer equally compelling error messages. C++ has notoriously hard-to-read (for humans!) template error messages, but that should not be a big issue for an LLVM. When I am stuck on a compiler error, I often turn to an LLVM and they can quickly make good suggestions.
Not everything should taste like spicy pickles
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