pseudolobster's recent activity

  1. Comment on Tell me about your favourite web-based logic puzzles! in ~games

    pseudolobster
    Link Parent
    Offtopic but I think it's really great that @powerlanguage has created a whole genre of web games called "dles" because of wordle. I remember my interactions with him as a great dev/admin on...

    Offtopic but I think it's really great that @powerlanguage has created a whole genre of web games called "dles" because of wordle. I remember my interactions with him as a great dev/admin on reddit back in the day, up in the ranks with @deimos in terms of awesomeness factor.

    I can't be more happy that this genre has persisted.

    1 vote

  2. Comment on British Columbia announces it is making daylight time permanent after years of promises in ~society

    pseudolobster
    Link Parent
    Haha that site unlocked a core memory. That's the site with some great info about the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus.

    Haha that site unlocked a core memory. That's the site with some great info about the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus.

    3 votes

  3. Comment on British Columbia announces it is making daylight time permanent after years of promises in ~society

    pseudolobster
    Link Parent
    Yeah I guess the only reason I have "Set time automatically" is for DST. I guess I can just remind myself to change the time if I visit Alberta. I'm definitely not visiting Washington any time...

    Yeah I guess the only reason I have "Set time automatically" is for DST. I guess I can just remind myself to change the time if I visit Alberta. I'm definitely not visiting Washington any time soon.

    I do know that with the default settings my clock automatically gets changed once I get to the Kootenays, so I assume the same thing would happen close to the US border. (for half the year, anyway)

    3 votes

  4. Comment on British Columbia announces it is making daylight time permanent after years of promises in ~society

    pseudolobster
    Link
    This is great news! The only thing that's a little concerning is if I get too close to the border I often pick up US cell towers, and I worry that my clock will jump back and forth. Washington,...

    This is great news! The only thing that's a little concerning is if I get too close to the border I often pick up US cell towers, and I worry that my clock will jump back and forth.

    Washington, Oregon, and California, if you're reading this you're welcome to join us, presuming you ever get a functional Congress again.

    7 votes

  5. Comment on Tell me about your favourite web-based logic puzzles! in ~games

    pseudolobster
    Link Parent
    I love this one. Once you figure out all the patterns it adds another layer of puzzle to regular minesweeper. I suggest not looking up the patterns and mechanics, but rather you should follow the...

    I love this one. Once you figure out all the patterns it adds another layer of puzzle to regular minesweeper.

    I suggest not looking up the patterns and mechanics, but rather you should follow the hints within the game. Particularly, once you fuck up, study the board after it's revealed.

    Anyway, I guess by beating it perfectly while getting all the achievements in one go, you don't mean getting a perfect score of 265 or whatever, since I still don't know exactly why I don't get that every time I win (unless I clicked on a brick or leveled up with health remaining).

    2 votes

  6. Comment on Ponderings on unicode support on the site, re: punycode, tags, etc in ~tildes

    pseudolobster
    Link Parent
    You're absolutely not wrong about that. Watashi wa baka gaijin desu. I only know a tiny bit about the Japanese language, nothing formal, mostly through cultural osmosis from watching anime. I'm...

    This betrays a lack of familiarity with romanization of Japanese specifically.

    You're absolutely not wrong about that. Watashi wa baka gaijin desu. I only know a tiny bit about the Japanese language, nothing formal, mostly through cultural osmosis from watching anime.

    I'm just saying this is like the most ideal case possible for transliteration. It's already messy, but every other case is going to be magnitudes worse.

    It's just, like xn--x8xoq871v or whatever is not readable, nor was it ever meant to be read by humans, so there's got to be a better way.

    I'm not sure what library tildes uses for input validation but who knows maybe there's a newer version that supports unicode or converts to/from punycode. Just throwing it out there. Who knows. A moose emoji breaking the site prompted some folks into submitting a pull request that got merged with the site's code last year. Anything is possible.

    4 votes

  7. Ponderings on unicode support on the site, re: punycode, tags, etc

    ~tildes Ask
    So here's a dilemma I'm not sure what to do about. It's really minor, and in the long run who cares, but here's the thing: Today a link was posted whose link is a URL in Japanese katakana...

    So here's a dilemma I'm not sure what to do about. It's really minor, and in the long run who cares, but here's the thing:

    Today a link was posted whose link is a URL in Japanese katakana characters. Since DNS only supports ASCII characters, those URLs get encoded as punycode. So, the site's URL gets translated from https://マリウス.com/hold-on-to-your-hardware/ into https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/hold-on-to-your-hardware/.

    This is a hacky solution from 20 years ago. It works, but nowadays browsers automatically translate "マリウス" into "xn--gckvb8fzb" transparently, so you never really see the "xn--gckvb8fzb". Unfortunately, Tildes' tag system is one of the parts of the site that only accepts roman characters, so there's no way to tag something with like source.マリウス.

    So what do we do here? Tagging something with source.xn_gckvb8fzb is obviously not ideal.

    In this case, Japanese in particular has a neat and tidy solution. Romanji. Every katakana character is a syllable, and each syllable has another character or pair or characters using English glyphs. So, マ, リ, ウ, ス is: Ma, Ri, U, Su, or "mariusu", the Japanese pronunciation of the Roman name Marius.

    So, if we want to transliterate the word phonetically (ie: in Japanese at least, converting the katakana glyphs directly into their romanji equivalents), we should tag it source.mariusu, or if we want to translate it, it should be source.marius.

    A lot of other languages with non-roman letters are not going to be as clean since they don't have a clear transliteration of their character set into ASCII, but in the case of Japanese, I dunno, it seems like it's begging to be converted into romanji. I really just don't know though. It's a dilly of a pickle.

    ANYTHING must be better than linking to source.xn_gckvb8fzb since that's literally encoded gibberish not meant to be read by humans. Not quite sure what the alternative should be though.

    Anyway, thank you for coming to my TED talk.

    29 votes

  8. Comment on Minecraft running on Sega Saturn in ~games

    pseudolobster
    Link
    This is really interesting, it's just a shame the author locked all the info behind a patreon paywall. I'd be interested to know how they did this, but instead we just get a playthrough.

    This is really interesting, it's just a shame the author locked all the info behind a patreon paywall. I'd be interested to know how they did this, but instead we just get a playthrough.

    1 vote

  9. Comment on How many Hosers are there on Tildes? in ~talk

    pseudolobster
    Link Parent
    I initially read "hoosiers", saw the comment count, and wondered if there's really that many people from Indiana.

    I initially read "hoosiers", saw the comment count, and wondered if there's really that many people from Indiana.

    4 votes

  10. Comment on How much "boilerplate tax" different languages have: a 400M LOC analysis in ~comp

    pseudolobster
    Link Parent
    Right? I feel like #include <stdio.h> could be considered boilerplate but return(true) should not be. Also some javascript weirdos like to do: if (true) { doSomeFunction(); } That's 75%...

    Right? I feel like #include <stdio.h> could be considered boilerplate but return(true) should not be. Also some javascript weirdos like to do:

    if (true)
{
    doSomeFunction();
}

    That's 75% "boilerplate" when it's functionally one unique line so long as doSomeFunction is a unique name.

    Judging this based on percentage of LoC is a terrible metric, and I'm not even sure ML tools are capable of knowing the difference.

    5 votes

  11. Comment on I'm back in ~talk

    pseudolobster
    Link
    Welcome home! We're still the slow lane of the internet. We never "took off" as a "reddit replacement" but we've managed to retain a core group of quality posters with high effort content and...

    Welcome home!

    We're still the slow lane of the internet. We never "took off" as a "reddit replacement" but we've managed to retain a core group of quality posters with high effort content and conversations.

    41 votes

  12. Comment on List animals until failure in ~games

    pseudolobster
    Link Parent
    I got into a sea-creature vibe then ended up spending 30+ seconds trying to spell "anemone". What I thought was fascinating were these suggestions it gave me at the end: I noticed along the way...

    I got into a sea-creature vibe then ended up spending 30+ seconds trying to spell "anemone".

    What I thought was fascinating were these suggestions it gave me at the end:

    To remember how to spell “anemone”, consider the etymology: the Latin anemone; from Greek anemonē meaning “wind flower” or “daughter of the wind”, from anemos meaning “wind”. anemos comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *ane-, loosely meaning “to breathe”. This root is used for what seems to breathe: in other words, the animate, which comes from anima (meaning living being, soul, mind, passion, courage, anger, spirit, feeling) which comes from *ane-. Another word that comes from anima: animal!

    I noticed along the way there are a lot of easter egg sorts of things where if you say "cicaida" the response will be "Don't you just love their songs". This became impressive when I read this:

    Uses Wikipedia and Wikidata, plus a lot of hand-tuning. No LLMs involved.

    Obviously someone put a lot of work into this to give specific advice on how to spell "anemone"

    3 votes

  13. Comment on Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech to World Economic Forum in ~society

    pseudolobster
    Link Parent
    No need to guess. They've got a three-word-slogan about it: Workers, not WEF (because of course they do) (emphasis mine) There it is. Also the first time I've read the word "highfalutin" from an...

    No need to guess. They've got a three-word-slogan about it: Workers, not WEF (because of course they do)

    Whereas the Liberals frequently attend World Economic Forum conferences in Davos to give lectures on their radical woke agenda and hobnob with celebrities.

    (emphasis mine)

    There it is. Also the first time I've read the word "highfalutin" from an official party platform. So there's that.

    10 votes

  14. Comment on Cow astonishes scientists with rare use of tools in ~science

  15. Comment on Scott Adams dead: Dilbert creator was 68 in ~comics

  16. Comment on "Visa" gift cards - What should I be looking at? in ~finance

    pseudolobster
    Link Parent
    Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm fairly certain merchants typically pay no fees on refunds. They only pay on credit purchases. Debit purchases (like gift cards typically are) don't incur any...

    Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm fairly certain merchants typically pay no fees on refunds. They only pay on credit purchases. Debit purchases (like gift cards typically are) don't incur any percentage-based fee like credit purchases do. Refunds cost the retailer nothing.

  17. Comment on "Visa" gift cards - What should I be looking at? in ~finance

    pseudolobster
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    I'm sure you're not wrong, processors probably hate that, but I don't actually know how much info is transmitted from the POS to the pinpad. I'm definitely sure that when you're processing a...

    I'm sure you're not wrong, processors probably hate that, but I don't actually know how much info is transmitted from the POS to the pinpad. I'm definitely sure that when you're processing a refund no invoice number or transaction number or whatnot is sent to the pinpad.

    I'm sure the credit card processors hate processing refunds in general. It makes them no money. They have a pre-determined idea of how much profit they'll make from every transaction on their machines, so if you're using the machines in a way that doesn't make them profit, it's considered an expense, and the shareholders hate that. However, it's not until you have more refunds than purchases that they'd cancel your merchant account.

    Anyway, I'll bet if you find some Lebanese man who owns a bodega that sells vape carts and has a bitcoin ATM, I'm sure you could ask him to refill your prepaid card for a dollar or two.

    2 votes

  18. Comment on "Visa" gift cards - What should I be looking at? in ~finance

    pseudolobster
    Link
    I've recently discovered that those visa gift cards are actually refillable. I'm not sure if it's a service any retailers actually provide, but I recently worked for a point-of-sale company where...

    I've recently discovered that those visa gift cards are actually refillable. I'm not sure if it's a service any retailers actually provide, but I recently worked for a point-of-sale company where I needed to troubleshoot an issue with prepaid cards. I ended up buying a $20 Vanilla visa card, spending all the money on it during testing, then refunded the money I spent testing to the card.

    What I realized after the fact is, I wasn't refunding a specific transaction, I actually had ten or fifteen transactions and I just hit refund, $20, manager code, ok, and it put twenty bucks on the card. Incidentally I ended up defrauding a dollar or so since I realized there was as small balance left, leaving my $20 card with $21.39 or something.

    Any retailer could take twenty bucks cash, hit refund on their machine, and put that money on the card.

    I'm not sure if this is helpful or not. Like I said I don't know if this is a service any retailer actually provides.

    1 vote

  19. Comment on Hi, how are you? Mental health support and discussion thread (January 2026) in ~health.mental

    pseudolobster
    Link Parent
    Hey, thanks for your supportive words. It's really not anyone in my life that's negative. It's just, I spent 8 months looking for a job, found one, got laid off within 2 months. Now I need to find...

    Hey, thanks for your supportive words. It's really not anyone in my life that's negative. It's just, I spent 8 months looking for a job, found one, got laid off within 2 months. Now I need to find another one, except my unemployment benefits have run out. So now I need to find a new job, this time with zero income.

    3 months ago my roommate moved out unexpectedly, and I've been trying to rent his room ever since. It's been a shitshow though, since people on facebook marketplace have been flaky as shit. I've collected two damage deposits, signed papers, etc, only to have people bail out at the last minute. So, last month I had to pay $2500 to rent the entire house by myself. Bills are coming up and I have the choice of paying them or eating food. I've got a friend who can probably help me out with rent for next month, but not the full $2500.

    So basically I have fucking clue what I'm going to do. It's either I sell my car for a couple months rent or I move into it and idk, try and sell all my stuff, abandon what I can't sell or fit with me in my vehicle.

    My stress and frustration is entirely financial and has nothing to do with other people.

    It's chipping away at my sanity and I'm struggling not to let depression take over, but I haven't given up yet.

    7 votes

  20. Comment on The "why does this movie exist" scene in ~movies

    pseudolobster
    Link Parent
    This actually happened in the opposite order, if you can believe it. As I recall Snakes on a Plane was a working title for a script that was in pre-production. Samuel L Jackson happened to knew...

    This actually happened in the opposite order, if you can believe it. As I recall Snakes on a Plane was a working title for a script that was in pre-production. Samuel L Jackson happened to knew the director and signed on without even reading the script. When a list of movies in production was leaked, someone from a forum, I'm thinking Something Awful, though it could have been 4chan, started making memes about it.

    The working title was so dumb, with a star like Sammy J attached, that it was prime meme fodder. The memes generated so much publicity for the film that they went back and rewrote it to match the tone of a schlocky B-movie, specifically adding that line to match the tone of the memes. I think the original was supposed to be a lot more serious of a serious thriller, and the actual title would have been something like Pacific Airlines Flight 141 or something like that.

    11 votes