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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • TREK: Total Interface

    It’s Total Launcher with an LCARS theme.

    I’ve been using it for 4 or 5 years now across two different phones.

    I absolutely despise the entire smartphone menu paradigm so this is as close as I can get to departing from it and sticking with something static that doesn’t move about or spontaneously change behaviors every third update.

    That’s a static menu system sorted, now if I could just get my pixel 8 pro to stick to 30 minutes screen timeout after I set it once, that’d be great. It flips back to 30 seconds nearly every time I put it down and sometimes while I’m holding it.

    Why isn’t there a developer option for “never let the phone change settings on its own”?


  • I’m curious. Economically speaking, what would happen if Nvidia pulled a “Steam” and had a “February sale” where some models of video card were discounted enough to lead to a massive spike in sales numbers? A big enough discount to generate a greater total net return on sales for the quarter despite the fact that they were sold at a lower profit margin per individual sale? Assuming limitations like “you must create an account with a residential shipping address that can receive no more than x cards at the discounted price per street address” or some such to limit scalping, would simply showing increased profits do them any good?

    Or is the problem due to a lack of product quantity?



  • terraria for minecraft + metroidvania

    This…shines a totally new light on a bunch of decisions that originally made me fairly upset and caused me to quit playing the game.

    I played the game with nearly every free moment I had between the time I bought it in 2012 and the 1.2 release in October of 2013. Multiple worlds. Multiplayer sessions with players in several countries possibly requiring port forwarding and VPN tunnels if I remember correctly, and all of it stopped dead for me when I had to quit focusing on creating and exploring and was instead spending most of my time struggling to survive.

    There were enemies before, and you could find one of the three bosses and just… Not go there, but 1.2 really made combat the forefront of the game and killed it for me entirely.

    In the intervening 12 years. I’d be surprised if had more than a couple of hours into the game.

    Viewing it through the lens of a metroidvania where you craft your own progression is not something I’d considered before.

    I might actually go back to the game on the rare occasion I’m in the mood for something like that.

    Thank you for the insight, while it probably sounds silly, it gives me some perspective into something that was so jarring it still causes me to panic when a game announces combat where combat was not previously the focus (I’m looking at you, Dyson Sphere Program 😄) and I really appreciate that.




  • Find an open source project that’s coded in your language of choice that you both care about (edit – or that looks interesting to you, at least) and want to add functionality to.

    Download a working copy, then, since you’re learning with this, pretend the repo doesn’t exist anymore and you’re on your on with your self-imposed assignment.

    Figure out what functionality you want to add, start with changing or augmenting something simple, and figure out where that would go in the existing code, and make it happen.

    See if you can manage to Google search your way past any errors you run into, preferably alternating between ai answers and things like stack overflow posts, only instead of copy-pasting the code that errors out (or the solution code you get from ai or posts) actually step through things and figure out what the “solution” code is doing differently and ask yourself why and how that makes a difference or has a different effect from the code that generated the error in the first place. Then decide whether it’s actually likely to fix the error or not. If you think it’s going to? Try using it.

    If it works, make sure you understand why.

    If it doesn’t, try to figure out why not.

    Keep going until you have a working new feature.

    Then try a more complicated feature.

    After a few of those, try tackling some of the bugs in the repo.




  • I personally feel like anyone who’s not a bigot IS by nature a feminist at least in a solidarity for the ENTIRE human race sense, but keep in mind, this is coming from my perspective as a male, so I might be missing something by virtue of it not regularly impacting me personally.

    I’d love a less-abused word, personally.

    As a guy, I don’t think I’d WANT to call myself a feminist, lest I be incorrectly associated with the likes of Joss Whedon, Neil Gaiman, or a whole host of other clearly NON-feminists who hid behind the word to cover their actions.



  • Determining the 3d structure of a protein took yearsuntil very recently. Folding at Home was a worldwide project linking millions of computers to work on it.

    Alphafold does it in under a second, and has revealed the structure of 200 million proteins. It’s one of the most significant medial achievements in history. Since it essentially dates back to 2022, we’re still a few years from feeling the direct impact, but it will be massive.

    You realize that’s because the gigantic server farms powering all of this “AI” are orders of magnitude more powerful than the sum total of all of those idle home PC’s, right?

    Folding@Home could likely also do in it in under a second if we threw 70+ TERAwatt hours of electricity at server farms full of specialzed hardware just for that purpose, too.



  • the brutal trolling in Ultima Online made me quit

    I’m sitting here thinking “I don’t remember it being TOO bad…”

    and 4 or 5 guys on horseback come and fuck your shit up for an hour or two

    Oh. Yeah.

    There’s a reason someone (Midas?) once parodied the entire steppenwolf song…

    Well

    You don’t know what

    We can find

    Why don’t you die for me little n00b

    On a magic Corp Por ride



  • So, I kinda had this problem myself at one point a decade and a half ago, only it was booze and serviio.

    I ended up taking an old tower I had, installing Ubuntu on it with no Xwindows or GUI of any kind, set up ssh, and unplugged the monitor, keyboard, and mouse and accessed the Ubuntu box only from a putty session on my windows box.

    Then, when I wanted to do anything on the Linux box I’d ssh in and command line it. And Google and try again until I got it right.

    I turned it into a domain controller for the windows boxes (well, login server via ldap) and had an irc bouncer and a bot on it, among other things.

    All while still drinking and streaming video.

    I can’t say what the magic bullet will be for anyone else, but I was able to learn by removing my “crutches” until it just… Clicked for me. YMMV but don’t stop trying.


  • Until he wasn’t.

    Lucas was eventually quite against large swaths of the EU.

    It doesn’t change how many people enjoyed it.

    I think we can both agree things would be vastly different if Tolkien were still alive, but what I sincerely doubt anyone can agree on is what that would look like.

    Just look at how many origins there are for orcs.

    Not even Tolkien was a Tolkien purist, read some of his letters where he explained the overarching subject matter.

    Originally, the Hobbit wasn’t intended to be connected to the Middle Earth stories of involving sauron and the rings at all, he didn’t even think it was set in the same world at first.

    I think getting all up-in-arms about stuff that was still evolving and growing until the moment he died is a bit ridiculous.

    Rings of Power is definitely MORE THAN ENOUGH into the realm of “in the spirit of” for me to personally find it highly enjoyable.

    I’m having a hard time figuring out why so many people seem to have such an abiding need to specifically shit into other people’s bowls of Wheaties the instant they find out they poured them from the box with the Harfoot biathlon team on the cover, though.

    Considering the amount of whipped-up outrage I saw years ago when the first picture of a black female dwarf was revealed, I’m finding myself wondering if a bunch of actual fans are getting caught up in a driven sentiment that has nothing to do with fandom for Tolkien’s actual work and more to do with a few overly vocal groups finding every niche, crack, and crevice they can to put a negative spin on representation in any form.