Video: A CD-R, that's only partly a CD-R

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5ucImqdKbY

Well! There it is! In 1080p, at least - YT is once again dragging on the 4K.

But there it is! Software cracking! Microscope photos! A disc format that Foone doesn't have! (I'll send one to them.) This video's got it all.

I was not planning on having a new video this soon, since I'm ramping up to do my 100K celebratory show next weekend (see notes in previous post - it'll be a live broadcast on the 7th, from about 9:30-6:30 Pacific!) but the perf on the last one was shockingly bad, and I thought it might kill my algo reach so badly that I wouldn't actually reach 100K by the time the show started, which would be: weird.

That didn't turn out to be the case, but I had decided to make a video in the meantime anyway to try to get those numbers up, and here it is.

The story behind this discovery is amazingly banal. That's not meant to be negative, it's just a case where, rather than digging this artifact up via some goofy "met a guy" story or "stumbled on a page in a magazine that led to a revelation" rabbithole narrative, I just... found it on eBay. It was there, and I googled it, and I said "wow, that's unspeakably cool" and then I spent several weeks trying to dredge up details on how it worked.

It turns out the way it works is weirdly simple, and also weirdly stupid, at least for the application they used it for. There are lots of things this technology COULD have accomplished, but this particular use case was one of the worst possible ways to demo it, in my opinion.

I'm almost bummed by how much of this video is about that application, which really almost could have worked with any writable medium, but as I explain in the outro, there's just so little to say about the one property that makes this product super cool, and it was impossible not to dig in to how the actual payload works, given that it was definitely, unquestionably going to be terrible.