| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-10-30, 08:39 in First! (revision 1)
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 Post: #1 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
I was tempted to make a post when I signed up, but the board was so clean and fresh and new, I couldn't quite bring myself to do it. I guess now I need to figure out this crazy new user interface. EDIT:Does AcmlmBoard track unread posts? Is there a "threads with new posts" page, or only the "last posts" page? The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-10-30, 11:46 in First!
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Post: #2 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Kawa is a gracious host and went to great lengths to make people feel comfortable, including copying avatars across. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-10-30, 12:02 in Surprisingly popular software
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Post: #3 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
There's a lot of projects I've worked on that I've put a lot of effort into, that I wanted to succeed, that I hoped would be useful to people and make the world a better place. None of them have achieved any level of popularity that I know of. On the other hand, nearly a decade ago I got interested in bitmap fonts and wrote a quick-and-dirty Python library for working with fonts in the Adobe Glyph Bitmap Distribution Format, originally intended as a way to upload fonts to laser-printers, but eventually becoming the official font format for X11. Since I wanted to use it in various projects (a tool to convert Mac NFNT fonts to BDF, and a tool to convert the OS/2 Warp system font to BDF), I uploaded it to the Python Package Index, where it got a non-zero number of downloads, which I assumed were just companies that automatically mirrored every package on PyPI just because. Turns out, people actually use it. Somebody filed an issue a week or two ago asking for a port to Python 3, and luckily I had an old half-finished branch with Python 3 support I could finish off and merge, and made a new release. Then last week somebody dropped by and said they wished the library had some documentation, so I spent a few days writing up an API reference. I'm very surprised, and quite gratified, but I'll be disappointed if I never manage to make anything more useful than *this*. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-10-30, 12:42 in First!
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Post: #4 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Posted by Screwtape Turns out it *does* track unread post, or at least "new posts since you last visited" and puts a little indicator on the left of the forum and the thread. But you can't click on it to take you to straight to the new post. :( The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-10-30, 23:42 in First!
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Post: #5 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Posted by Kawa Awww, yiss! The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-10-31, 23:04 in Board feature requests/suggestions
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Post: #7 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
I think Last Posts now lists *threads* with new posts, but only links to the *last* new post instead of the *first* unread post. But now that the forum has an RSS feed, my RSS reader (hi, NewsBlur!) will do the unread tracking for me, so I don't mind if it the forum doesn't. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-11-01, 03:06 in Board feature requests/suggestions
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Post: #8 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
It's 2018 and emoji works beautifully in elinks, so +1 for removing smilies. Not sure what Jistuce's beef with the YouTube tag is; I like getting to see the thumbnail and title of a thing before I actually click the link to watch it. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-11-01, 05:10 in Zink, an OpenGL implementation on top of Vulkan
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Post: #9 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Not strictly-speaking emulation as such, but emulators need to display their video output somehow, and if you're emulating a 2D console you don't need the power and flexibility of Direct3D 12, or Vulkan, or Metal, you just want to draw a single textured rectangle with hardware-accelerated scaling. OpenGL 2.1 is a nice middle ground API - it's pretty easy to draw a textured quad, but it also has access to vertex and pixel shaders so you can get quite fancy output if you want. Some authors have been scared off OpenGL 2 because the classic, easy API was deprecated in OpenGL 3, and presumably driver authors would eventually drop support for it. Enter Zink, an OpenGL implementation on top of Vulkan. I think this means that on Linux, if a driver implements mode-setting and Vulkan, they'll (someday) get hardware-accelerated OpenGL for free (courtesy of Zink) and hardware-accelerated 2D graphics for X11 (modern Xorg implements the classic 2D drawing APIs on OpenGL). The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-11-01, 06:59 in First!
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Post: #10 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Wikipedia has a long list of places the song has been used since it originally hit the charts; I'm guessing most uses today are references to one of those (and in particular, Family Guy) rather than directly referencing the 1963 original. Man, what time to be a musician, though: hear some other band singing a song at a concert, sing it yourself at your next concert with some ad-libs when you can't remember the words, have it hit #4 on the Billboard Top 100. It's like Hamsterdance but thirty years earlier. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-11-01, 08:30 in Games You Played Today REVENGEANCE
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Post: #11 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
I've been following a popular Dungeons & Dragons stream for a while, and right now they're having a cross-promotion with another D&D licencee, the game Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms. Since playing Idle Champions earns resources that my fave D&D players can use in their game, I figured I'd give it a try. As the name might suggest, it's an idle game: instead of making numbers go up, you're trying to make numbers go up faster. Resources are constantly being generated, but not fast enough to buy all the things you could possibly buy. To gather resources faster, you must spend resources on upgrades... but the further you progress, the more outrageously-expensive upgrades you see. To save up for that next big upgrade, you can try to deploy your resources a little more efficiently, or you can just leave the game running for a while. If leaving the game running overnight doesn't make much practical progress, there's usually a way to "reset" a game, earning a permanent multiplier to resource generation that means your next game will go a little faster than your previous. The challenge of an idle game comes from the bewildering array of things you can do, each of which have their own byzantine payoff rates, so it's not at all obvious where to allocate resources. For example, each party member in Idle Champions has a "level" which determines their HP and damage output. Levelling up a party member costs gold, and each successive level costs exponentially more... but different characters's levelling costs rise at different rates. The amount of HP and damage they get per level is *also* different per character, so it's very, very difficult to know whether investing X gold in one character or another is a better deal. And then some characters buff other characters, each character has a branching upgrade path, where each branch emphasises different kinds of buffs... it's crazy complex. The best thing about Idle Champions is that they've managed to make a certain amount of the complexity understandable. For example, with "characters" who have "levels" and "HP". Also each adventure has a fixed formation, and each party member can be placed at any point in the formation. A lot of buffs are of the form "buff allies in the same column" or "buff allies at least two or more positions away" or "buff self if surrounded by at least three allies", so while the buffs and their overlapping effects are complex, you can at least get an idea of what options might be good ideas without having to do all the calculations. The worst thing about Idle Champions is it feels a bit exploitative. It's fundamentally built on exponentials, a thing that humans are generally bad at, so practise isn't going to make you much better at playing. The only sure-fire way to make progress is to invest time, and humans are notoriously impatient, so the game (of course) has various microtransactions to speed up the waiting process. As far as I can tell, pretty much everything you can buy can also be earned in-game, except that earning an item generally takes more time than it saves, so I'm not sure that actually counts. The worst thing about me playing Idle Champions is that it's a continual distraction. I could answer an email or work on a project or go for a walk, or I could just tab back to Idle Champions and see if I've earned enough money for the next upgraed yet. If I haven't, maybe I'll just move some characters around the grid a bit to see if I can buff my average DPS without spending anything. Then I'll try to go back to what I was doing, but in a few minutes I'll check again, just in case. It's like the evils of social networking, without even being sociable. As idle games go, it's got a cool licence and a smooth reward treadmill and maybe kinda supports your favourite D&D streams, but right now an idle game is not a positive addition to my life, and if you're in anything like my situation, I can't recommend it. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-11-01, 11:41 in Board feature requests/suggestions
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Post: #12 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Have you considered rewriting it in Rust? The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-11-02, 04:39 in Emulation is for NERDs.
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Post: #13 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Today somebody pointed me to the existence of Nintendo European Research & Development, who started out as Actimagine and invented the video codec used to put Spongebob videos on the GBA, and later got bought out by Nintendo. Most recently, however, they created the emulators used in the NES Classic and SNES Classic. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-11-03, 01:48 in Emulation is for NERDs.
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Post: #14 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Is there a blogpost or something about the "glFinish trick" that I could read to find out more? The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-11-03, 01:51 in Board feature requests/suggestions
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Post: #15 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
The RSS feed is broken at the moment:Posted by "PHP" The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-11-03, 02:37 in Board feature requests/suggestions
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Post: #16 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
How is this possible? You're supposed to be asleep dammit! The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-11-03, 20:35 in Embedding roms in images
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Post: #17 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
That's pretty cool! Although I imagine it's still a bit restrictive, since SNES emulators tend to change their behaviour based on the total file-size. Of course, if SNES ROMs were themselves a container format, including board metadata, emulators wouldn't need to autodetect the size and you could embed them in whatever you like... but if SNES ROMs were a container format, adding extra blobs like that wouldn't be a challenge. A slightly more useful hack might be embedding a SNES ROM in a PDF: now you can't lose the manual for your game! The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-11-04, 01:01 in Embedding roms in images (revision 1)
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Post: #18 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Yeah, ZIP and PDF files are the most common file-formats that you read from the end instead of the beginning, and for the same reason: to allow modifications to be efficiently appended to a document without having to rewrite the whole structure. Persistent data structures, but on disk instead of in memory. EDIT: You may also enjoy reading the journal PoC||GTFO; for example, issue 0x02 is a PDF, ZIP file and bootable disk image for QEMU. The most recent edition is a PDF, ZIP and HTML file, but it exists in two variants with different MD5 hashes, but the same SHA1 hash. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-11-05, 05:35 in The Copyleft Bust Up: loopholes, licenses, and realpolitik
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Post: #19 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
I was pretty fascinated by this article about the recent "extreme copyleft" licences from companies like Redis and Mongo. It's pretty long, so here's my summary: Back in the day, using a piece of software meant running it on your computer, or combining it with software you wrote, so other people could run it on their computers. The GNU General Public Licence was designed around those use-cases, but although software freedom activists liked it, nobody else did. Permissive-licence fans felt it was too restrictive, and businesses felt it prevented them from making money. Later, a new way to use software became popular: you could run software on your computer and provide a service to other people. The software freedom activists hated that, since it meant the other people couldn't run the software on their own computers, so they came up with the Affero GPL. Software freedom activists liked that, big businesses that *used* software hated it (because it made the software difficult for them to build on), but small businesses that *sold* software to big businesses loved it, since they could sell the big business a licence exemption. Most recently, another new way to use software has become popular: you could run software on *somebody else's* computer and provide a service to yourself. The software freedom activists are fine with that, because there's no technical restriction preventing you from running that software on your own computer and being in control of your destiny. The small businesses hate it, because the big businesses actually making money are the cloud providers, and they aren't building on top of the software, so they don't need to buy license exemptions. So now there's a divide: the software freedom activists are perfectly happy with the current state of affairs, but the companies that actually derive economic value from copyleft are bitterly frustrated. And so those companies are trying to come up with a third main branch of open-source licence: permissive to build on and integrate, but restrictive to use as-is. The permissive licence fans will predictably hate it for being too big and complex, the software freedom activists will hate it for restricting the wrong things, but the term "open source" is now sufficiently economically important that those groups don't get much say in whether this new thing will be officially "open source" or not... The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 18-11-07, 10:37 in Board feature requests/suggestions
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Post: #20 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Posted by DonJon If you see somebody being toxic, let me know. It's better for toxic posters to be rehabilitated or ejected than filtered. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
