| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-05-31, 02:33 in Sales and giveaways
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 Post: #261 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Reposting because I am a chump who can't find his own damn giveaways thread: Obduction (a surreal adventure game made in 2016 by the creators of Myst) is free for 24 hours on GOG. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-05-31, 08:49 in Mozilla, *sigh*
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Post: #262 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Posted by sureanem I mean, it doesn't strictly speaking matter whether that particular person was joking or not. There's six billion people in the world; I guarantee that there are people out there who genuinely believe the software industry's reverence for C is an instance of toxic masculinity, and I guarantee that there are people who genuinely revere C in a toxically masculine way. Both extremes are cartoonishly exaggerated (most of the time) and also perfectly correct (in a few tragic cases). My apologies if you didn't intend it this way, but to me it looked like you grabbed some evidence that was ambiguous, or at best ha ha only serious, to use as proof that some group you don't like are terrible people. And even if it was absolute, undeniable proof, why bring it up and sour the thread with needless vitriol? Believe it or not, buying your way out of resource limits is legitimately the easier option: it's work for your administrators, so it doesn't cost you developer effort, and the money spent is effective immediately, instead of after a six-month hiring-and-interviewing effort, and another six month training effort, and another two or three years on-the-job experience Yeah, which would make sense, but does Facebook really add features at such a high rate that it'd be infeasible? They already maintain one version in parallel for the third world (not making this up) because the real one got too bloated. Opportunity cost, man. Sure, they probably have enough engineers on staff that they could build a dozen Facebook Messenger clients in parallel, as long as they stopped doing everything else, but that's too high a cost for the expected benefit. Why hire even one engineer to work on rewriting an app when you can just get one of your existing admin staff to slot some extra meetings with standards bodies into their schedule? But after a few iterations of Moore's law, IE6 and XP have become paragons of bleeding-edge optimization. If Microsoft had just never tried to force Vista (which of course it would always have done since it was inevitable and had to happen), then computers would have gotten cheaper and bloat would have forcefully been kept down. If you're suggesting that sticking with IE6 and XP as hardware got faster would have left more computing resources for apps, why do you think apps wouldn't get even more bloated even faster when they didn't have to compete with the OS for resources? If you're suggesting that sticking with IE6 and XP would have meant hardware improvements would go towards cheaper, more power-efficient hardware instead of performance, then we wind up with cheap hand-helds that run XP as sluggishly and crashily as a 2001-era desktop PC would? Uh, thanks but no thanks. XP is just as much of a bloated, buggy mess as Windows 10, and Windows 3.1, and every other version: as much as they could get away with. If you claim that XP on modern hardware is elegant and optimised, you're really saying "I am OK with wasted resources as long as the total waste is less than X%", which is exactly what Microsoft believed when they were making XP in the first place, except that they probably used a bigger value for X than you did. But for the browser to block [cryptominers] (while not blocking ads) is incomprehensible. Advertising is a centuries-old industry, which just about every human interacts with regularly, as a customer or as a consumer. Meanwhile, cryptocurrencies are mostly known for Internet scams and ransomware. It's the same reason alcohol and cigarettes are freely available while other equally- or less-harmful substances are banned: nothing to do with the substances themselves, everything to do with tradition. It's the demands from the web developers (who are too incompetent to write good anything, which is why they're webdevs in the first place) that someone else optimize their shitty code driving it See that thing there, where you imply an entire group of people are incompentent, just based on their profession? That's kind of a dick move, you know? If you don't like the idea of C programmers being blanket-accused of toxic masculinity, maybe don't sink to the same level? All you can hope for is that the future turns out closer to Psycho-Pass than Brave New World, although there's not really anything you can do to change it either way. An optimistic perspective could be that things will get far worse, so you should better enjoy things while they last. The optimistic perspective is: you might not be able to change *every* circumstance, but there's always *something* you can change for the better, either for yourself or for other people. If you focus on the impossible things, everything you look at is doomed. If you focus on the improvable things, everything you look at is getting better, or could get better, or is already better, and that's a much healthier and much more *practical* attitude. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-06-02, 12:42 in I still HATE smartdevices
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Post: #263 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Posted by tomman I'm using a music player from F-Droid called.. Odyssey, I think? Yeah, it's all "material design", but I think it was the first I found that correctly sorted my albums by disc number then track number, so it wouldn't play disc 1 track 1 immediately followed by disc 2 track 1. I think it does assume the pop-music artist/album/track hierarchy, though. :/ - Simple Gallery Pro: The non-Pro version is at Google Play, but it has been superseded by the Pro version... which is payware there! But on F-Droid it's free and open source software, go figure. Barebones, just as it should be - simple but not to the point of being extremely dumbed down like the average application nowadays. Aside of not being able to setup wallpapers for the lock screen, it does its work and nothing more. I'm using that too, I think (it just calls itself "Gallery" in the app list and doesn't mention the full name on the About dialog, but it's one of the Simple series of apps). It lets me browse my media files without having to hunt through the filesystem, but allows me to exclude album art from my music folder. I also replaced the stock Android camera app with "Open Camera" on F-Droid. It does all the magic gubbins so that the "camera" icon on the lock screen starts it up, and the "gallery" button in Open Camera correctly opens Simple Gallery. I'm quite pleased with the combination. I've come across a few apps that are paid in the Google Store, but free for F-Droid users. I guess the app authors figure F-Droid users are more likely to submit bugfixes or at least well-written bug reports in lieu of cash. Either way, I'm not complaining.
I'm using Termux for this. It's actually a good deal more powerful than just an SSH client - it's a full Debianised userland running on the Android kernel, so you can run bash and Vim and whatever on your phone... but in practice, I just have the "Termux:widget" add-on installed, so I have a button on my home screen that automatically connects to my home server via SSH and Mosh, and does "tmux attach" so I can read my email and check out IRC and everything else on the go. I'm also quite fond of SyncThing - install on your phone (it's in F-Droid!) and your home PC (it's in Debian!) and once they're connected, every time you change a file on one it'll be copied to the other via WiFi or whatever. Beats the heck out of digging out a USB cable to get the photos off your phone, or get music on. Another tool I've started using is Orgzly. It's a bit over-complicated and clunky for a TODO list manager, but the lovely thing is that instead of storing your TODO items in an internal database or trying to sync them to your Google Calendar, it stores them in perfectly readable plain-text (specifically, in the format used by the popular org-mode plugin for Emacs). Even better, it can be configured to save the file to a directory managed by SyncThing, so if something happens to my phone, all my notes are backed up and readable without special software. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-06-02, 12:44 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
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Post: #264 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
PDFs of the abandonware Sailor Moon table-top role-playing game (you know, like Dungeons and Dragons, but... in sailor suits). The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-06-03, 11:13 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
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Post: #265 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
A bunch of professional voice-actors play a three-hour game of Tales of Equestria, the official My Little Pony tabletop RPG. If you watch it with kids, the bawdier jokes *should* go over their heads. Probably. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-06-05, 12:05 in Please help me with some PCB/Board issues
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Post: #266 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
The board names in Super Famicom.bml aren't just documentation, they refer to the board definitions in boards.bml. In particular, the only mention of "BA3M" in boards.bml is "SHVC-BA3M-(01,10)", so putting "SHVC-BA3M-20" into Super Famicom.bml isn't going to do anything good. This goes back to "higan's database is a record of the things byuu has personally dumped"; if byuu hasn't personally dumped a game from a SHVC-BA3M-20 board, then that board isn't going to be in his database, and other games won't be able to use it. (In case anybody is wondering whether SHVC-BA3M-20 is a totally made up board identifier, SNES Central has a photo of one) Likewise, the only mentions of "1L5B" in boards.bml are "SHVC-1L5B-(11,20)" and "BSC-1L5B-01" (that last one is SD Gundam G Next with a Satellaview slot). There's no SHVC-1L5B-02 because byuu hasn't dumped one yet, although it is definitely a real board. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-06-06, 06:47 in Please help me with some PCB/Board issues
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Post: #267 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
If I recall correctly, byuu's process for dumping games involves reading the entire 16MB address space of the cartridge, then analysing the extracted data to figure out the original content and mapping. For example, if the upper 8MB of the address space is an exact copy of the lower 8MB, then it's probably an 8MB cart whose memory-mapping ignores the most significant bit of the address bus. If you understand the theory of how each board works, you could write your own board description; if you don't understand the theory you could probably get a good idea if you had the pinout of the cartridge connector, the ROM chip, and a multimeter in "continuity tester" mode. But byuu prefers to be brutally empirical about these things rather than guessing based on his own understanding. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-06-06, 08:45 in Something about cheese!
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Post: #268 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Posted by sureanem Fair enough. Short of cheating (which is feasible to prevent), SAT is 100% fair. What is "fair", though? An ideal test would be a function "subject skill -> score", but in practice these kinds of tests are usually functions like "available study time -> study effectiveness -> teaching effectiveness -> encouragement -> question comprehension -> ability to handle stress -> subject skill -> score", and each of *those* inputs are themselves functions of other things; for example, a student's ability to understand a question can depend on their physical ability to read (is the printing too small?) and their ability to understand the language (what if the question uses a weird word or grammatical structure only native speakers would be familiar with?) as well as their knowledge of whatever subject the test is testing. In particular, poor people often score poorly on "available study time", "study effectiveness", "teaching effectiveness", and "encouragement", the combination of which can drown out the contribution of factors like "subject skill". At the end of the day, the SAT (and tests like it) can only really measure how good a person is at doing that specific test. It's often unclear how well that particular measurement correlates with things we actually care about, like "how will this student fare at college". And in situations where we know the correlation isn't strong, the easiest, most straight-forward fixes just try to spread the problem more evenly rather than fixing it. How do you mean America's student loan system makes tertiary education far less effective? Perverse incentives, like? Traditionally (and I realise this varies wildly over time and between cultures), universities are centres for education and research, rather than (say) for amassing political or financial power, and so you have traditions like "scholarships" where people who have great potential are literally given money so that they can spend energy on education and research instead of earning money. However, there's always more talented students than rich philanthropists funding scholarships, and a lot of economic potential is wasted. Some countries go to the other extreme, and use tax money to pay for scholarships for everybody that wants one. This is obviously expensive, but new inventions and technologies can make a country vastly more prosperous, and some people feel the potential payoff is worth the risk. As I understand it, America is in the middle. The government has organised for student loans to be available to everyone, and guarantees those loans, so the tax-payer has to pay for it all. However, students are required to repay the loans, and student loan debt cannot be discharged, even through bankruptcy, so these loans don't actually provide the "concentrate on your studies, not your finances" benefit that is the whole point of a scholarship, and so the only people who take out student loans are the ones who were already 90% sure they could afford to go to college. That is, America has done most of the work for a fraction of the benefit. Posted by sureanem On one hand, sure, that's what it means to be a sovereign state. On the other hand, just because a thing is legal doesn't make it right. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-06-07, 11:14 in GNOME: "Please don't theme our apps"
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Post: #269 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Posted by sureanem The thing is, humans hate change, and they are also very, very good at inventing reasonable-sounding justifications for however they happen to feel at any given moment. When some kind of change is announced, it's a safe bet that 90% of the response will boil down to "I hate change" with creative variations. As such, the actual comments themselves are unnecessary; the only interesting information is whether the reactions are significantly more or less than the expected 90% of the total volume. The signals for "this response is not knee-jerk reaction" are things like: longer than average (but not too long), tidy paragraphs instead of sprawling run-on sentences, maybe some formatting like lists and headings, basically anything that indicates the author spent time thinking about the reader instead of scrawling the hottest take they could. None of those things require close reading or empathetic consideration. It's possible some useful and interesting responses get accidentally scooped up with the unhelpful ones, but nothing is ever perfect. As for deleting or at least hiding such comments, if someone is serious about listening to interesting feedback, they'll want to come back and re-read that feedback, and show it to other people. That's a lot easier without the unhelpful distractions, even if only because they don't have to scroll so far. The point is that there's a conflict between the idea of theming, which requires a rigidly-defined list of standard widgets, and the idea that application authors should be allowed to customise widgets or invent new ones if they think it's appropriate. The design of GNOME's desktop (or any desktop) or GNOME's default theme (or any theme) or GNOME's theme API (or any theme API) are not relevant to the discussion, because this conflict has affected every desktop based on every GUI toolkit. It's literally impossible to have a theme so perfect that everybody likes it; the best you can hope for is a theme good enough that changing it is more trouble than it's worth. I'm pretty sure it's also impossible to have a theme so ugly that everybody hates it; Amiga Workbench 1.0 and Windows 1.0 didn't immediately doom their respective product lines. A widget toolkit with a theme engine makes some things awesome and some things terrible; a widget toolkit that can't easily be themed (like macOS and Windows have) keeps everything mediocre. Is that better? Maybe? Sometimes? I'm guessing that the distros' default themes aren't exactly crazy, just making shoddy applications look a bit wonkier than on the dev's machine. On sane DEs like Xfce, I have zero issues of this kind, which makes me think the real issue is that they don't want users to be able to "damage" their precious branding. More likely, Xfce's default theme is close enough to boring grey-and-blue Adwaita that it doesn't cause any problems. Some Linux vendors have much bolder branding, say in brown and orange, and just to stand out they do unusual things like have menus and toolbars in light-on-dark while the rest of the application is dark-on-light. GTK+3's theme engine I guess doesn't make it easy to have wildly different colour-schemes for different parts of the window, so themes that want to do that have to add a bunch of custom rules to tweak each supported application... but there's no way to limit a particular rule to a particular application. So if a standard GNOME app happens to name one of its toolbar widgets "switcher", the Linux vendor theme says "widgets named 'switcher' use light-coloured text". Then a third-party app happens to also use the name "switcher" for some other widget that's *not* in the toolbar, so it winds up with light text on a light background. > There's absolutely no need to start whining about this, when you could just not implement the feature if it breaks your obscure widgets. You do realise that application authors and GTK's maintainers are different people, right? > Unicode was a mistake, and it just keeps getting worse and worse (emoji, RTL, Chinese characters breaking BMP). The Europeans already had ISO 8859-1, the Russians KOI8-R, and for the web there was HTML entities. Since everyone who uses the Internet speaks English anyway, computer localization is just a waste of time and money and unpleasant for generally everybody. It would be far easier if you knew that everything everywhere would be en-US, no surprises. To go from "I do not need this thing" to "None of the six billion humans on the planet needs this thing" is quite a feat of extrapolation. Does it genuinely not occur to you that if you don't understand a thing, maybe you just haven't yet encountered the problem it solves? > In fact, I would prefer it if they picked a language completely at random, even if it weren't English, and replaced the numeric warnings with that. At least you can memorize the meaning of _CRT_SALAMA_HAKUNA_ONYO, and you already got one of the three words down if you watched the Lion King as a child, which is more than you can say for 4996. Not strictly relevant to the point under discussion, but I do want to point out PHP's famous "expected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM" error. > It's a damn shame there isn't any good open-source forum software. GNU Mailman and INN say hi. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-06-14, 08:44 in Please help me with some PCB/Board issues
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Post: #270 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Nothing is ever impossible, but it may be impractical. The bsnes source does contain a copy of boards.bml, but for technical reasons it's not used directly. Instead, a separate tool called sourcery reads a manifest file that directs it to read boards.bml and some other data files bsnes needs, and encode them as C++ source code which is built into the bsnes binary. So, you could hex-edit bsnes.exe to change the embedded board database, as long as you don't change the length. If you were willing to build bsnes yourself, you could modify boards.bml and re-run sourcery to rebuild the resource.cpp file, then build bsnes as normal. Otherwise, I guess you can use higan and just edit boards.bml whenever you want. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-06-15, 01:59 in Sales and giveaways
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Post: #271 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
ToonStruck (a point-and-click adventure game, supported by ScummVM) is free for 24 hours on GOG. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-06-15, 07:39 in Web Browser Discussion
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Post: #272 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
> No, Chrome isn’t killing ad blockers -- we’re making them safer Porqué no los dos? > It sounds a lot like a classic Microsoft stategy. Except that we're talking about Chrome's own extension API. The "embrace" in "embrace, extend, extinguish" is embracing *somebody else's* platform, so you can improve it or at least destabilise it. If anything, it's the "WebExtensions" effort shared by Firefox, Edge, Vivaldi etc. that are trying to embrace and extend Chrome's extension API. > They could definitely have fixed it, just like all respectable C libraries have hand-tuned assembly implementations of memcpy et al. for any CPU architecture of note. It's one thing to have a hand-tuned implementation of memcpy for people to call. It's another thing to find chunks of code that *look* like memcpy so you can silently swap them out for your own implementation, and it's yet another thing when programs deliberately obfuscate their memcpy implementations so that you won't be able to swap them out. > Will Manifest v3 break uBlock Origin? Currently, all adblockers are based on big lists of Bad URLs. Once a URL is added to the list, there's very little incentive to remove it: if a user sees an ad, they blame the adblocker, but if the user's browser is slow, they'll blame the browser (and checking a million useless URLs might still be faster than loading the ad). Manifest V3 seems specifically designed to prevent blockers from using the "big list of Bad URLs" approach, so yeah, I imagine all those extensions will need to be at least redesigned. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-06-16, 01:57 in Web Browser Discussion
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Post: #273 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Posted by sureanem EEE is a notable strategy for *acquiring* the power to extinguish something you don't like; you have to do it slowly in stages so that people don't notice how much power you've acquired until it's too late. Google has always had the power to extinguish adblockers, this is just standard PR where they're trying to find a compromise between what they want and what their customers will accept. I'm suggesting that they should have done something like Decentraleyes but for the whole domain. As in, a request for youtube.com/watch?v=asdasd should be treated separately to asdasd.com/watch?v=asdasd, and instead get served a static implementation of YouTube, just like about:config or similar does. And this should be done for, say, the top 500 websites. I think you missed the bit where websites want to control how they're presented to the user. The only reason Decentraleyes works is because such a small fraction of users use it that it's not worth the effort it would take to undermine. If a major browser started matching "https://youtube.com/watch?v=" and replacing it with some other content, I guarantee YouTube videos would start being served from "youtube.io" or "media.google.com" or something within hours. Obviously, Mozilla would never have done this, Microsoft apparently didn't have the guts, and Google won't bother now that the competition is out of the way. So it won't ever happen. But it should have. It's the next logical step in the development of web browsers. Android already has a system where apps can register themselves as handling particular URLs, so when you browse to youtube.com on your mobile browser, you get a prompt to open the page in the YouTube app. Surely, they can't be using a linear scan? I don't actually know whether any particular adblocker uses a linear scan, but it would be a *lot* simpler than a prefix tree or dynamically building a NFA, and "do the simplest thing that can possibly work" is a common thing that software engineers tell each other. The point is not that a particular adblocker is inefficient, the point (from Google's point of view) is that if/when an adblocker does such a thing, Google gets the blame, and that's unfair. This is Google, a company which makes money off of advertising and has a nigh-monopoly on browsers. Do you really think they're doing this to save ad blocking? Google have presented a list of reasons why their proposal benefits end-users. Anyone with two brain-cells to rub together can come up with other, less-altruistic motivations, but that doesn't make those original reasons wrong or misleading, they're just not the whole picture. The next step would be for some independent group to try and measure things like "how much time and battery does an adblocker take" versus "how much time and battery does advertising take", and maybe experiment with reducing the complexity of adblocking lists to see how much affect that has on adblocking costs, and how far you can trim down the list while still being a net benefit over not using an adblocker. You know, actual *information*. Lining up to yell at Google for being oppressive or adblockers for being wasteful might be cathartic, but it doesn't actually improve the situation. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-06-17, 14:09 in Web Browser Discussion
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Post: #274 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Posted by sureanem If EEE is "stealing something from you", this is "making you return something you borrowed". Just because they both happen slowly doesn't make them the same thing. To me, it just looks like they're moving into the final stages of "leverage Chrome monopoly". It seems very optimistic to say "final stages". "Next stage", certainly. I can guess two possible reasons: one is that they judge that they've outmaneuvered Mozilla and will soon have complete control, the other one is that they judge that the desktop will soon fade into irrelevance and it's important to kill ad blocking to set the stage for ads delivered via DRM. Delivering ads via DRM sounds weird. Does that mean I can hide ads by using a DRM-free display transport like DVI instead of HDMI, just like that breaks Blu-Rays and Netflix? I think Google is pretty confident that they've got the browser market on lockdown and they can now afford to spend effort on what *they* want to do, instead of what their *users* want them to do. You know, like Microsoft did after IE6 was released. The real conspiracy-minded observers might say the timing is "interesting" considering they've just managed to kill off the last non-Firefox competitor. They might also speculate that Google had something to do with Mozilla's decline. Corporate espionage just isn't that expensive, you know. Well, *obviously* Google has something to do with Mozilla's decline - at least for a while, Google would show "why not try Chrome" ads for every non-Chrome browser that visited google.com; Chrome got bundled with a bunch of third-party tools like Adobe Reader, etc. For all its technical skill, Mozilla has never had a very large advertising budget, so when the largest advertising company on the planet picked an advertising fight, it's not surprising they came out on top. The thing that conspiracy-minded observers never seem to understand is that things fall apart. It is the usual and standard behaviour of the universe for things to not go the way we want them to; making some positive thing happen requires substantial effort and organisation. On the other hand, making a bad thing happen requires literally zero effort - let your attention slip for a moment, get distracted, or even just fumble, and your world can change irreparably. I can't find the thread now, but I recall reading a Firefox dev (or possibly an ex-Firefox dev) complaining that even though individual Googlers value cross-browser compatibility and interoperability and all that, Google-owned websites keep working really well in Chrome and wind up sluggish or glitchy in other browsers. It's not because anyone's trying to sabotage other browsers, it's just because if a Googler has to choose between cross-browser bugfixing and something they actually get paid to do, they're going to do the paid work every time. Youtube-dl isn't blocked, and is most likely significantly harder to block. They could just implement that in the browser with fast updates. youtube-dl gets very regular updates to keep it working, and it only has to handle a tiny fraction of the YouTube API. I can't easily find any stats, but anecdotally it's often a few days between youtube-dl breaking and a new release that gets it working again. If YouTube was entirely unavailable in a particular browser for a few days, that would be a Big Deal. The whole point of a web-browser is that you implement HTML, JS and CSS once, and then you can handle all the websites. As much as people complain about HTML, JS and CSS being over-complicated and inscrutable, it's still vastly simpler to implement a web-browser than it would be to implement a custom native UI from scratch for every existing website. The idea that browsers should implement a custom UI for the 500 most popular websites without their knowledge or consent, and transparently keep those custom UIs up-to-date as the websites change their backend is... not so much a cat-and-mouse game as it is Sisyphean. Also, most websites would probably not mind if you still let them update their layouts. I can't imagine many websites explicitly wishing to block Decentraleyes, for instance. I can't imagine websites explicitly wishing to block Decentraleyes without provocation, but I can't imagine websites explicitly wanting to support it, either. The minute some website gets a support call because Decentraleyes has loaded the wrong script, or the wrong version of a script, or even just interfered with the reliability of their analytics, I guarantee they will figure out a way to fix their problem, and it won't involve reporting an issue to Decentraleyes and waiting for them to release an updated version. The next step would be for some independent group to try and measure things... The point is that Google is trying to balance their operational goals with preserving user good-will. If independent measurements show that Google's claims are substantially correct (adblockers do slow browsers down, and can be slimmed down without losing their effectiveness) then everybody wins - Google gets to do their thing, users get faster adblocking. If independent measurements do *not* agree with Google's claims, or even contradict them (adblockers aren't very slow, and they really need very large lists), then Google will need to sacrifice their operational goals even further (good for users) or go full Palpatine (probably a very poor move, at least today, so still good for users). The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-06-20, 09:15 in Games You Played Today REVENGEANCE (revision 1)
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Post: #275 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
So, after a few years in development and a change of devteam, Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night finally came out, and of course I've been playing it. I've very nearly gotten as far as I did in the Backer Beta (I'm up to the second boss, but haven't beaten it yet), and so far I like it! Compared to the beta: - the game no longer gives out weapons like candy, which makes sense, since they're not trying to demonstrate a full game's weapon-set in a short demo anymore - The game seems to be better optimised; the menus and cutscenes still spin my fans a lot harder than regular gameplay, but it seems better than the beta - I think it's maybe *fractionally* easier than the beta was, but it still seems a lot harder than Aria of Sorrow was... although I *did* nearly 100% Aria, so maybe I'm misremembering It's possible part of the difficulty comes from trying to play with a 360 pad, since neither the analog stick nor that d-pad are particularly good for nimble, precise movement. If only there was a way to use my GBA or 3DS as a controller... or maybe I should even try out the keyboard controls. Overall, the game definitely feels like Aria and Dawn of Sorrow, but scaled up. For example, you still have an item shop and a sell/upgrade weapons/souls shop, but now you can craft and upgrade armour and accessories, too - including the ridiculous number of lovingly-drawn food items the game has. To encourage players to get into crafting, there's also a bunch of quest NPCs - one wants you to kill particular monsters, one wants particular equipment, and one wants particular foods... and the reward is other equipment or food, so I can foresee there'll be a bit of chaining going on. There's also a farmer that will grow different kinds of seeds (so far, I've found rice seeds, wheat seeds, and potato seeds) into the corresponding item... although that seems a very, very niche ability. Of all the items in the game, how many could possibly be plantable? Actually, now that there's a Castlevania-style game on the PC, I *really* hope somebody makes a mod that allows the Game Over screen to be skipped. In this (as in Aria and other games), the single most annoying thing about the entire game is having to sit and wait for the Game Over screen to animate in after you die. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-06-21, 03:15 in Final preparation complete! XTREME OCD (revision 1)
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Post: #276 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Were you building higan/bsnes from source, or downloading pre-built binaries? If you're building from source, be aware that often higan and bsnes are built from the same source-code, and which one gets built by default often depends on what byuu happened to be working on at the time. In particular, v106r85 builds bsnes by default, which would account for why it "had the similar looks like bsnes". To be sure you're building higan, you need to say:Looking at the changelog, it seems the last SNES-related change before r85 was r66 which I think fixes a problem with save-states for games that use the SPC7110 chip; everything between those two seems to be MSX/WonderSwan/NGP emulation. There's other minor SNES-related changes in the revisions before r66, too. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-06-21, 06:18 in Web Browser Discussion
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Post: #277 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Posted by sureanem They're similar, but from opposite ends. EEE is all carrot: "change the way you write software, in exchange for these benefits". EEE never (openly) threatens anyone; "extinguish" is supposed to come as a surprise. This is (almost) all stick: "change the way you write software, or we'll break it". The fact that Google is talking about benefits as well is just to sweeten the deal a bit, but the fact that Google has already openly talked about a timeline for removing Manifest V2 support proves this is not EEE. If one reads their annual report they will find hardly anything about browser development, but a lot about their pet projects and political views. You mean the annual report of the Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit organisation that doesn't actually do any browser development? What about the odd empty YouTube div tags to cripple Edge? It's a long way off from CORPORATE ESPIONAGE. Theoretically, GCC needs no comprehension of the standard library at all, but in practice it very definitely wants to know what strlen is and how it differs from any other size_t(char*) function. Pretty sure the C standard is very carefully designed to make this possible, it's not just something the GCC team invented on their own and decided to try out. They could even pull a Judo move and do special optimizations for some stuff that's otherwise extremely slow, then bait web developers into using them. Lots of CSS attributes are exactly that. For example, CSS has "rotate in 3D" attributes you can apply to a particular subtree. It's defined in such a way that browsers can just render that subtree to a texture and draw it to the screen with OpenGL, rather than implementing perspective transformations in pure software. I'm sure someone who's better at thinking could come up with some even better idea, but it's abundantly clear they're not using the resources at their disposal effectively. That's the trouble with trying to keep the moral high ground. Writing them by hand would indeed be a lot of work, but surely you could at least do something like PGO to get a rendering engine specially optimized for nytimes.com whenever you load nytimes.com? For any optimisation, you have to ask: what are the tradeoffs? On one hand we obviously have performance, but the other hand is more obscure. Complexity is a cost (both for browser vendors, and for web developers trying to understand why their site behaves the way it does), inflexibility is a cost (deploying a change is now much more complex than reloading the page), fragility is a cost (do we fail to use our optimised version if NYT adds or removes a redundant semicolon?), and I'm sure there are many others. Is it really going full Palpatine to ignore what some obscure group nobody cares about has recommended? Joe Q. Public won't care and it won't make CNN, that's for sure. How many news sites have already reported on Google's Manifest V3 changes, just based on the possibility that Google is abusing their power? I bet they'd all publish another round of articles if somebody could *prove* Google was up to no good. And Google obviously cares about their public perception, or they would have just straight-up made the change without bothering to give anyone advance notice. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-06-21, 07:52 in Mozilla, *sigh*
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Post: #278 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Posted by sureanem Web development is highly accessible, by which I mean it's really easy to get started. Consequently, it's not surprising that a lot of people have dabbled and gotten bored, or learned just enough to solve a problem that stood between them and what they *really* wanted to do. However, there's a big gap between "web developers often solve simple problems" and "web developers can only ever solve simple problems". Like any other field of expertise, you can dive as deep into web development as you want to go. It's also an excellent starting-point for lots of other fields - once you've got a handle on web programming basics, you might want to get server-side with PHP or Node, get into graphics programming with WebGL or audio programming with WebAudio, whet your Unix whistle with developer tools like Babel and WebPack, and now with WebAssembly there's an easy on-ramp to the world of high-performance pre-compiled languages. (As an aside, it's kind of hilarious how often you'll meet people who claim that "web development is simple" and also that "the web platform is too complex". What platform are the simple web developers developing for? What kind of developers are developing for the complex web platform?) Yes, of course. But if computers get Yx faster, X = X0/Y. 2003 XP wasn't elegant and optimized, but 2019 XP is by virtue of comparison to any other alternative. So, if I have two computers side-by-side and install the same version of the same OS on both of them, it can be bloated on one and svelte on the other at the same time? Just based on whatever the hardware specs happen to be? That seems to be a pretty useless definition of "elegant and optimized". A better definition would be "how many resources do I need to spend to solve the problem I care about". For some problems, like using unsecured WiFi, XP is one of the cheapest solutions there is. For other problems, like "storing files in a subdirectory", XP is ridiculously wasteful and you'd be better off with MS-DOS 2.0. In the other direction, there are things XP just can't do, so for somebody who needs to do those things, it's completely useless. Posted by Kawa I'm using it now. One of these days I'll get around to making a nice Solarized theme. Maybe. Fun fact: Firefox's dev-tools let you add a local CSS file to the current web-page, and when you edit the CSS, there's a "Save" button to write it back to the original CSS file. That should make theme editing much easier. Posted by BearOso I've ranted before about why Firefox isn't Mozilla's purpose (let alone their sole purpose) but skipping over that, I don't understand this reaction. Are you worried that Firefox will have big "UPGRADE TO PREMIUM" ads all over it? The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-06-21, 08:02 in Printer & Scanner Discussion
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Post: #279 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
If I had to guess, I'd say there's probably a feature where you can scan one file, name it "something_0000.png", and then each time you press a button it makes a new scan and saves it to the same location with the same name, but with the counter incremented. If you had a stack of a hundred invoices to scan (or whatever) I can imagine that being quite handy. If that's what it's doing, maybe it's trying to add 1 to 4,198,415 then trying to format the result into 4 digits and overflowing. Kind of weird that it would do that at startup, though, and without being explicitly asked. > Also the PNG files produced by this scanner software can't be opened by MSPaint. They are somehow an unsupported format. I wonder if they're 16-bit-per-channel instead of 8-bit-per-channel. Can you view them in your browser, for example? The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 19-06-21, 08:13 in Games You Played Today REVENGEANCE
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Post: #280 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Posted by CaptainJistuce :<<<<< Posted by BearOso I've heard Bloodstained doesn't support DirectInput pads, only XInput. Does the PS4 controller support XInput? Although I'm on Linux, so I don't really know what the interaction of "kernel drivers making the 360 pad look like any other joystick" and "wine making generic joysticks look like XInput devices" would be. Posted by Nicholas Steel Funny you should mention that; Bloodstained has fighting-game-style attacks for certain weapons. For example, if you're wielding a dagger-class weapon, then you can press ↓↙←Ⓧ to throw it at the enemy, like the classic Castlevania knife subweapon. I do have an old digital-only USB gamepad (i.e. without thumbsticks)... I wonder if that would be any better. Sometimes you need to aim with the right stick, though, so maybe that wouldn't be a great idea. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
