ManMachine
@max@manmachine.me
Welp. Bedroom TV is dying. Which is something I can't afford to replace, but I need it for my sleep hygiene and mental health so I guess we're replacing it anyway
I hate piece of shit "smart" TVs
@eniko I know you aren't in the US, but I see old dumb tvs at thrift stories and charity shops all the time for pretty cheap. Might be worth a shot if you have any near you.
Maybe since smart TVs need RAM and storage the shortage will bring back dumb TVs
@eniko I sadly more suspect they're just gonna raise the prices and tell everyone who doesn't capitulate to get fucked
@eniko My home office's "bench monitor" is a corner-mounted 42" "Insignia" brand TV from about 10 years ago. It has no smarts, and its defining feature is it can handle nearly any mode. DOS 320x200 @70Hz? No problem. I'm pretty sure TVs like that aren't even made anymore, and if they are, they'd be impossible to search for.
Might have fixed the TV? God knows how long that'll last though
By fixed I mean I swapped out the plug converter (Cyprus is in the EU so everything comes with EU plugs but all the outlets are UK style) and also swapped it to a different spot on the power strip
Can specific plugs on power strips fail?
@eniko
Yes, individual outlets on power strips can fail. If that happens, you should replace the power strip. IMO
@eniko are there burn spots on the plug tongs? The socket could be loosy-goosey with its contacts.
@eniko Yes.
While melting your outlets should be quite rare, sometimes the contacts in a given outlet will loosen over time and/or oxidize, so it’s not all that uncommon for specific plugs / outlets to fail.
@eniko you may have success looking on craiglist or similar for 2nd hand "digital signage" which is both built to last and also lacks any/all "smart" features.
those that are "smart" often have normal linux-capable PCs in them: https://youtu.be/q9a3dCd1SQI?t=1902
@eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place What about a monitor and a mini PC running linux
@Stomata oh I don't use the "smart" bits, I use a mini PC
It's just that "smart" TVs are more prone to malfunction
My favourite piece of internet today is the theory that Jesus was actually a type of yeast.
Turns water into wine
Floats on water
Makes bread for 5000 people
Put in a cave for 3 days and lo - he has risen!
Jesus was a sourdough starter.
Also this would imply: We should be calling him 'Mother' not 'Father'
@Buster and the holy trinity is obviously a mesophilic symbiotic culture, a holy union of Acetobacter, Candida and Lactobacillus. Like kefir, combutcha or others
RE: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@eniko/116092832806158728
what about a dungeon diving game with life sim aspects where you get isekaid into a fox girl in a dungeon town where everyone's a girl
| yes: | 313 |
| other (comment): | 10 |
| show results: | 17 |
Closed
look i have a fucked up definition of tiny and quick ok
@eniko that's what the "q" in "qbasic" stands for right? so by definition anything you make in it is quick
@eniko can some of the townspeople be theys
like golems own the laundromat or something
@eniko You seem like a game developer who could make a life sim about rocks entertaining. Fox girl land, let's Goooooooo!
@eniko Like a queer furry Rune Factory? And we'd get to liberate monster girls from the dungeon to build up the town and/or household? And with cooking *and* fishing *and* dating minigames? And possible to complete with pacifist conduct? And at least one shroomie or woodie girl? Okay, those might be rhetorical questions.
@eniko What about the neighboring town? How far do you have to go to find a guy? Are they at the bottom of the dungon?
@kertinker what neighboring town >_>
@eniko you're asking on queer fedi, you already know the poll results
@eniko
Here's my idea. Something between Snake and that Tron lightbike thing.
..So, foxes supposedly pair for life, right? I'm thinking you move a fox girl character around a play field, trying to match with another static fox girl on the play field. Maybe they can have matching colors or attire. As you move you leave behind a colorful trail, and when you match they hold hands, leaving the trail in place. You have to match new fox girls, navigating around the previous trails and pairs.
RE: https://ravenation.club/@etherdiver/116093503048964424
This ended up being an excellent demo of the Cosmos's ambient capabilities/proclivities. Highly recommend if you make drifty/spacey music and are remotely interested in this device.
Today's Strream is a special request video! A follower asked for a Cosmos demo that was a little more "ambient" than my last one, so I pulled out my biggest "ambient" gun, the Soma Terra, for some hot Soma-on-Soma action!
I'm gonna put the Cosmos thru its ambient paces today, so come watch and ask questions/make requests!
Starts at 12:30 PST!
I have run out of edam
@max I got a ball of it as a present from @karyxdragon and @abby for christmas. Out came the industrial cheese wire...
RE: https://mendeddrum.org/@fanf/116090957426748922
30-year-old analysis of RISC vs CISC still reads well!
though it's fun to see which RISCisms have died out, such as "Do NOT support arbitrary alignment of data for loads/stores"
in reply to »@david_chisnall @regehr @dougmerritt i still refer back to john mashey’s risc-vs-cisc analysis from the 1990s https://www.yarchive.net/comp/risc_definition.html
in which he counts instruction set features to demonstrate that risc and cisc correspond to real phenomena and aren’t just marketing
but the main reason i like it is because these days programmers get the impression that risc vs cisc is arm vs x86 but they are really bad exemplars, because arm is the least riscy risc and x86 is the least ciscy cisc
much better exemplars are mips and alpha vs vax and 68020
unfortunately mashey didn’t include arm in his analysis so the reader needs a fair amount of knowledge to fill in the gap
then there’s amd64 and arm64 which postdate mashey’s analysis and are even closer to the middle ground
there’s clearly a thesis/antithesis/synthesis but the synthesis hasn’t been given a catchy name so it is talked about in risc-vs-cisc terms even tho that no longer makes sense
eg wrt addressing modes the convergence looks like base + offset * stride, not just an address as in risc, and no indirection or other extraneous memory accesses as in cisc
and things like plenty of registers, 0 or maybe 1 memory accesses in most instructions, complexity is ok if it’s register-to-register, simd is great
@regehr an old colleague of mine once said "these days they're all MISC architectures."
You know what time it is.
NEW MOON TONIGHT!
Be careful, cyber-sibs!
Ignoring the many very serious ethical issues associated with LLMs and similar technology, how useful do you consider them?
| Worse than useless: | 185 |
| Basically just a toy: | 118 |
| Useful in limited cases: | 223 |
| Pretty Useful: | 28 |
i’m so old, i remember when computers got cheaper over time
jwz » 💀 🌐
@jwz@mastodon.social
@rstevens Most people include the Epsilon Georg which should not have been counted
Totally normal Power Macintosh G3 “beige” desktop, now with a PicoIDE. 👀
inventing mathematics was a mistake
Call me old-fashioned, but "I rented a robot that wrote some code" doesn't seem like participating in FOSS in good faith.
Because of your generous support during our Kickstarter, all of the games in Ollie’s Arcade are now free to play in the App Store! 🕹️
We’ve begun working on adding Frenzic to the roster and later a new dungeon crawler that’s gonna be a blast. Stay tuned but for now enjoy the free air, our friends!
logging in to my sysadmin job
Reluctantly crouched at the command line
Desperately typing to keep it online
A green light flashes, the systems come up
Churning and burning for the latest markup
Deftly inserting some Python or C
While guzzling down a coffee or three
Reckless and wild, he pours through the code
His prowess is potent, an effortless flow
As he speeds through the lines, the servers go down
As 404 errors are suddenly found
The department is empty except for one man
Still loading and coding as fast as he can
The sun has gone down and the moon has come up
His coffee gone cold long ago in his cup
But he's typing and striving, debugging the terms
And thinking of someone for whom he still burns
He's going the distance
He's coding in C
He's all alone (all alone)
All alone in his time of need
It's very annoying the way I have to get half way through writing a long detailed explanation of why someone is wrong before I figure out why they're right.
@simontatham happens to the best of us. sometimes you get lost a little and end up taking a more circuitous route towards understanding, but there's no shame in that.
@simontatham
It's annoying, but it's good that you have a way that you figure out that you're wrong, and if I understand correctly it's even before you get into the public debate.
@simontatham I didn't quite do that yesterday, but I did reply to a post to assert that, unlike France, Germany only has one time zone. I then had to go off and check
Yes, Germany does have only the one, and France does have ... 12!
@simontatham It can go something like this:
(1) You work out what the right answer to something is.
(2) You remember the right answer, but forget the detailed reasoning. From now on you just know what the answer is but would be pushed to justify it.
(3) A few years pass.
(4) Someone claims that your right answer is wrong. You can't instantly see what's wrong with their argument, but you know that you know the right answer, from way back.
There are two possible scenarios.
(a) Yes, you're still right, and the "someone" has come to the wrong conclusion by repeating, yet again, the age-old mistakes whose details you've forgotten.
(b) The world has changed. The "someone" is, now, right, even though they wouldn't have been a while ago. You'd better try to recreate your age-old reasoning and spot the assumption you made that was true then but is not true now.
@simontatham But dude, that counterfactual is so useful. Not only did you convince yourself that they’re right, but now you know how to walk others through it!
@simontatham Hah, I have had that myself. Or working for hours on a comment, because I don't find the right words, and then I realise that is because actually I don't have anything relevant to say.
Pick the best fallacy
| Sunk Cost has been my favorite since 1982: | 371 |
| Proof by Assertion is best: | 65 |
| Why y'all hate Strawman so much: | 76 |
| I just heard about Recency Bias: | 152 |
| If you don't vote Ad Hominem you're ugly: | 91 |
| Any fallacy fan knows No True Scotsman is best: | 191 |
| God told me Appeal to Authority is his favorite: | 112 |
| "Vote for False Attribution" - Abraham Lincoln: | 69 |
| The best is Circular Argument because it's awesome: | 205 |
| Category Error is the prettiest fallacy: | 94 |
| You said Tu Quoque so I did too: | 30 |
| C'mon vote Bandwagon everyone's doing it: | 125 |
| Vote Slippery Slope, next thing you're doing drugs: | 204 |
| I like turtles and also Non Sequitur Fallacies: | 241 |
| If Appeal to Probability can be chosen then it is: | 70 |
| Motte-and-Bailey is best, but I meant kinda good: | 72 |
| These are all bad and wrong, vote Fallacy Fallacy: | 352 |
Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ISO_7010_W071.svg
Author: Wikimedia Commons user Clemenspool
CC0 (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en)
thinking about putting my aseprite qbasic BSAVE format export script on git. wondering if i should do it as a gist or as a full repo. it's less than 90 lines of lua so a repo feels overkill but gists arent very discoverable
what do fedi
| gist: | 9 |
| repo: | 67 |
| some secret 3rd thing: | 17 |
| i just like voting in polls: | 33 |
Closed
you're not allowed to vote "some secret 3rd thing" without telling me what the third thing is!!
@eniko does the whole thing fit in one post on your instance? 
@eniko my suggestion is chuck it in whatever form makes best sense for it to you, then link to it in a big collection page named something like Eniko's Stuff
@eniko Is it likely to see much revision? If so, I'd vote for a repo.
If it's likely to be largely static and not need any history? You have a website!
@JeremiahFieldhaven hm it might grow. though it might also not >_>
@eniko repo only if you think you'll edit it a lot in the future, because then people could see the edit history more easily, which might be educational
@prahou@merveilles.town big CONTROL vibes
@louis i don't know what that is :')
@prahou@merveilles.town I'm talking about the CONTROL game, where awesome posters likes these ones can be seen throughout the office
jwz » 💀 🌐
@jwz@mastodon.social
Zipbomb JSON.
Someone who is not me should formulate a maximally-malicious JSON file. I made one with a nesting depth of ~182 million, but "jq" gives up early, at only around depth 3,000. So one trick would be to find the right balance of nesting and array length that stays under typical parsers' limits as long as possible, while requiring as much RAM as possible to get there.
https://jwz.org/b/yk2x
jwz » 💀 🌐
@jwz@mastodon.social
Ok FINE, since you have all failed me, I wrote my own JSON bomb generator. https://jwz.org/b/yk2x
@jwz I can't help but smile a little that people are still using perl to make the internet a better place.
@jwz in Perl no less!
jwz » 💀 🌐
@jwz@mastodon.social
@jsatk I like languages that are *stable* and don't require me to have 7 different versions installed at once.
@jwz brother I hear you. As someone who has written JavaScript for 17 years I’m exhausted by all the changes to it and node.
#retrocomputing folks: I'm trying to get a sense of the proportion of people here who are into a given class of retrocomputer today but didn't experience the machines when they first came on the market. I want everyone's input! Please boost!
This poll is about the early consumer home computers released between say 1977 and 1994.
Minicomputer poll: https://oldbytes.space/@fluidlogic/116026497511100991
32-bit home/personal computer poll: https://oldbytes.space/@fluidlogic/116026605156645610
| I had access to an 8 or 16-bit computer during their heyday: | 786 |
| I did not have access to an 8 or 16-bit computer during their heyday: | 60 |
| 8 or 16-bit computers had their heyday before I was born or when I was an infant: | 175 |
"AI is built on the collective knowledge of humankind."
No. Nononononono. It is not built on _knowledge_, it it built on _data_. And not everyone's experiences are available as data, many communities are excluded. Also: "Collective" implies some sort of collaboration and shared activity. But "AI" is just accumulation by a few powerful.
So No. It's not collective but extractive, not knowledge but data, not humankind but the hegemonic western view. Everything in that statement is wrong.
jwz » 💀 🌐
@jwz@mastodon.social
@tante I have been reliably informed, since the 80s, that knowledge is data with parentheses around it.
#poll for all you beautiful hard working professional computer touchers out there:
"my day job has me making the world a ____ place"
(be honest, don't just repeat what your CEO says)
| better: | 438 |
| worse: | 93 |
| not better not worse but a secret third adjective: | 337 |
| my mental health depends on me not examining this: | 332 |
im doing a thing on a linux vm at work and forgot everyting lol, less than a year since i stopped using linux and can barely remember a thing
maybe i need to get a vm or something for practice
This textbox is a message and part of a system of messages. Java is installed on over three billion devices. Java is found everywhere, even in your car. We thought we were a powerful culture.
Condensed Flexflex, after Guido de Boer
It's so weird that a lot of people think the quality of software is measured in how often it gets updated—it's literally the opposite.
@thomasfuchs If the quality of software is literally measured by how infrequently it gets updated then Internet Explorer is high quality. Don't think so.
Software update frequency has little to do with quality. Software updates often do tend to make software better, at least in open source where entshittification does not play a role. Frequent updates also mean software is actively developed, which is also a good thing.
@thomasfuchs idk, vim and now neovim have been getting updates forever, and they are pretty high quality.
Update frequency either way isn't a very good metric. Maybe bugs and security vulnerabilities needing frequent patches, but never getting them is just a program not being used or not maintained.
I think it's actually pretty hard to judge it unless you have access to the source.
@thomasfuchs A problem that recently came up is that some educational establishments will not allow use of software that hasn’t seen a release in more than two years. This was preventing some teachers from being able to use Inform in class, so now there’s discussion about having a release of Inform just to satisfy the bureaucrats.
(Shh, nobody tell them about TeX.)
@mathew @thomasfuchs In the UK, educational establishments have to comply with Cyber Essentials. Off the top of my head, you technically can't have software that's over a year out of date (which sounds wrong now I write it down); and worse, any software updates have to be deployed within *two weeks*.
The Internet where we go back to running our own servers, age verification by "these are my friends I've known for years"
RE: https://mastodon.social/@verge/116041069446538092
lol fuck that i aint doing that
@eniko Finally something* I can point to when people whine about me bitching about Discord and not wanting to sign up to any channels there
* Other than **gesticulates vaguely at everything** which they see as illegitimate commie nerd type whining that has no real consequences despite an ever flowing stream of evidence
@eniko Ah, so the question "should I make a discord channel for my game" somehow just answered itself
@eniko it’s still a problem if you want a community on there, but apparently it’s pretty easy to bypass https://80.lv/articles/people-are-using-garry-s-mod-to-circumvent-the-uk-censorship-law
something I've been thinking about is how, when I teach a class, I tell the TAs to never, ever touch the keyboard when they're helping a student with an assignment. not even once! because as soon as someone else is driving, it becomes real easy for the student to stop thinking and just let things happen.
kind of like what happens when we use a coding assistant.
You know, a glass teletype. That toy that kids keep calling a "monitor," even though we all know monitors are reference speakers used in audio production.
[…] I’m anti-the branding of it as “artificial intelligence”, because it’s not intelligent. It’s a form of machine learning. “Generative AI” is just a very good Markov chain that people expect far too much from.