pseudolobster's recent activity

  1. Comment on gb-recompiled - Translates Z80 assembly directly into modern C code in ~games

    pseudolobster
    Link Parent
    Nah, a chip as popular as the Z80 or the 6502 or the 8086 etc will have enthusiasts who sketch out every single logic gate on paper if they have to. Then they can reimplement it on a FPGA or...

    Nah, a chip as popular as the Z80 or the 6502 or the 8086 etc will have enthusiasts who sketch out every single logic gate on paper if they have to. Then they can reimplement it on a FPGA or whatnot.

    The Z80 has definitely been reverse-engineered to such a point as clones are 100% accurate.

    Honestly, fuck Zilog, their CPU design has been known since the early 80's, it's basically open-source at this point. It's like 8086 without the 6.

  2. Comment on gb-recompiled - Translates Z80 assembly directly into modern C code in ~games

    pseudolobster
    Link Parent
    Wait... what? I didn't know we were talking about the PS2. The Z80 was a processor used in things like the original GameBoy or the TI-83 calculator we all used in highschool, and people continue...

    Wait... what? I didn't know we were talking about the PS2.

    The Z80 was a processor used in things like the original GameBoy or the TI-83 calculator we all used in highschool, and people continue to use to this day because Texas Instruments has government contracts that mean they never have to upgrade their shit, which means you can still find a Z80 processor being made today for about four bucks, despite it being a 45+ year old part.

    3 votes

  3. Comment on What radicalized you? in ~talk

    pseudolobster
    Link
    Late 90's punk music. To some degree it started with like the Tony Hawk Pro Skater soundtrack kind of stuff, but eventually Propaghandi, Anti-Flag, Dead Kennedys, etc. A lot of people in this new...

    Late 90's punk music.

    To some degree it started with like the Tony Hawk Pro Skater soundtrack kind of stuff, but eventually Propaghandi, Anti-Flag, Dead Kennedys, etc.

    A lot of people in this new generation seem to forget how subversive music has been over the years. I see a bunch of people freaking out because a spanish language artist performed a super positive song talking about the struggles of people in Puerto Rico at the superbowl.

    Back in my day we had anarchist punk bands openly calling for the downfall of the government, capitalism, and western society in general. Back then you could openly support these bands without fear of repercussion. Hell, they were played on the radio and included in That's What I Call Pop #43 or Big Shiny Tunes, etc.

    Nowadays I feel like the way the internet is being policed we can no longer even say things like "Fuck George Bush!" online because we're currently being monitored by hundreds of different agencies.

    So I guess I've been radicalized twice now. Once, 20 years ago for the whole political situation, now a second time re: the internet.

    21 votes

  4. Comment on Lenovo’s new ThinkPads score 10/10 for repairability in ~tech

    pseudolobster
    Link Parent
    I also felt this was a little suspicious. They're talking about LPCAMM2 RAM as a huge benefit. As I understand it, it's currently only made by Micron, and currently only used by Lenovo. When I...

    I also felt this was a little suspicious. They're talking about LPCAMM2 RAM as a huge benefit. As I understand it, it's currently only made by Micron, and currently only used by Lenovo.

    When I looked it up, the fourth search result is this video, made by iFixit, sponsored by Micron and Lenovo.

    I mean, I guess it's a cool new form factor for ultra slim laptops that's not soldered... But as far as I know Thinkpad T/P series has never had soldered RAM. Neither have HP Elitebook/Zbook, or Dell Latitude/Precision. Professional grade laptops have always been super repairable. In fact, I recall Elitebooks from the 8000 series until the 800 G1 series had sliding, spring loaded latches to open them literally toollessly. You could upgrade RAM with literally nothing but your bare hands and a stick of RAM.

    They're bragging about an M.2 slot. This is completely bog standard on anything that's not an ultrabook/mac. Every professional laptop will have one. Am I out of touch here? Has something changed very recently? I thought only ultra-slim or Apple laptops typically have soldered SSDs.

    And then, if you're bragging about eliminating "bulky" SODIMMs for this new proprietary RAM format, why are you also bragging about using M.2 slots that are roughly the same physical height?

    I dunno, maybe I'm a cynical old man (I am) but something about this partnership and this review doesn't pass the sniff test.

    I'm also not influenced by the fact that my current daily driver is a specced out Thinkpad P15 Gen2 that has had to be sent in for warranty 4 times now and has huge unsolved problems with nearly every linux distro. I'm still willing to believe I'm an outlier and that Thinkpads are really the best at linux support and I've just been incredibly unlucky.

    2 votes

  5. 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

  6. 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

  7. 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

  8. 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

  9. 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

  10. 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

  11. 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

  12. 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

  13. 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

  14. 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

  15. 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

  16. 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

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

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

  19. 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.

  20. 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