text_garden's recent activity

  1. Comment on Stop Killing The Internet: No digital ID and no age verification in ~tech

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    Not discussing ideas because they're "not going to happen" is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Social change happens because the ideas of it happening gain traction and popular support. If we wipe...

    Not discussing ideas because they're "not going to happen" is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Social change happens because the ideas of it happening gain traction and popular support. If we wipe ideas off the table because they weren't already there when we got there, they can't.

    2 votes

  2. Comment on Stop Killing The Internet: No digital ID and no age verification in ~tech

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    I sincerely believe that the social media that openly thrives on manipulation is one of the major negative social forces right now, and that we should be dealing with it as though it was a...

    I sincerely believe that the social media that openly thrives on manipulation is one of the major negative social forces right now, and that we should be dealing with it as though it was a military threat or a plague. Conceding that kids shouldn't use it and implementing bizarre and ineffective measures to prevent kids from using it is a weak and pathetic response. Ban all collection and resale of user data as well as any kind of content- or user-aware advertisement and the commercial incentive for this manipulation vanishes. It will kill a whole industry, but it deserves to die painfully. Everyone in it deserves to be as economically bankrupt as they are morally bankrupt.

    4 votes

  3. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

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    Thanks! It's a difficult question because most of it has sunk in at a slow pace over a long time for me and I don't have a very focused learning approach, but a couple of books I've read that...

    Thanks! It's a difficult question because most of it has sunk in at a slow pace over a long time for me and I don't have a very focused learning approach, but a couple of books I've read that touch on this are Processing by Ira Greenberg (ISBN 978-1590596173), which contains some interesting creative programming art exercises for the Processing programming environment, and Thinking Forth by Leo Brodie (ISBN 978-0976458708) which mostly concerns software design using Forth. But Forth is a very niche way of approaching this kind of programming.

    In general for visual arts with programming I think it's to good to have a basic grasp of the basics of linear algebra and some trigonometry, so that you have a bit of a toolbox of concepts you can break things down into.

    With Forth Salon specifically, it's a very experimentation friendly environment and there's (or at least was) a quiet little community around it. When I was more active there we'd trade greetings via code comments, create derivative works and I imagine we all sat and tried to decipher each other's source code, which is quite difficult with these stupidly dense Forth programs.

    1 vote

  4. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

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    As a sidenote, Forth Haiku Salon is really cool. The primitives are quite simple, but with the right factoring you can produce intricate effects with very little code. I've made a bunch of stuff...

    As a sidenote, Forth Haiku Salon is really cool. The primitives are quite simple, but with the right factoring you can produce intricate effects with very little code. I've made a bunch of stuff with it over the years:

    As you can see my programs are also mostly "write-only" with this approach to naming things and factoring :)

    1 vote

  5. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

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    I've previously made an extensible Forth-like language with very few built-in primitives to facilitate calls, branching, returns and jumps, as well as corresponding syntax in the compiler for...

    I've previously made an extensible Forth-like language with very few built-in primitives to facilitate calls, branching, returns and jumps, as well as corresponding syntax in the compiler for looping, if statements and subroutine definitions, using Zig. At compile-time, a caller-defined set of primitives defined as functions can be injected which then get inlined into both the virtual machine and the compiler so that the functions appear as callable words in the interpreter. The first application of this was a WebAssembly module that could produce an array of lines via source code passed to it, used in a web application that presented a canvas where those lines were drawn and an interactive interpreter where you could define how, procedurally.

    I've also previously made a multithreaded mandelbrot fractal renderer. A thread pool is created and an array representing the output bitmap as an array of jobs, which the workers can allocate chunks from. Any contention over the bitmap is limited to a single atomic read-and-add operation after which they have exclusive access to the chunk.

    Last week, I combined these two projects into a multi-threaded interpreter of a significant subset of the Forth Haiku Salon Forth dialect. The workers again pull chunks of the output bitmap as jobs, and they each run an instance of the VM for the language and receive an instruction array at startup, so that compilation only happens once.

    The Forth Haiku Salon is presumably implemented using fragment shaders in WebGL which is an obvious choice for this kind problem where the value of an individual pixel is effectively a pure function of time and its location in the bitmap, but I have previously made a single threaded interpreter for the same language in C.

    The results were very good in my view, but I haven't benchmarked and compared it to my first interpreter yet. Implementation this time, not including the extensible language base and job queue stuff which I'd already implemented for other projects, took a couple of hours instead of a couple of days.

    One quality of my old interpreter that is different in the new one is that it doesn't have subroutines. The definitions are instead expanded in-place as macros. I wonder if this is good or detrimental for performance. Intuitively, jumps causing random access to the instruction array is slow, but maybe the programs also usually fit neatly into the cache, and have a better chance of doing so without expansion. There are too many other factors to test this in benchmarking.

  6. Comment on We economists have done the maths: ‘growth’ is a doomed strategy – there is a better way in ~finance

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    Well, that's not how I wrote it. It's not a proposal in any way, and it's not a criticism of the general concept of markets. For the record I thnk a market where the means to profit from anything...

    Well, that's not how I wrote it. It's not a proposal in any way, and it's not a criticism of the general concept of markets.

    For the record I thnk a market where the means to profit from anything but the production of goods and services were much more limited would also be much less susceptible to bubbles and crashes. I don't propose to know what measures would effectively produce such markets.

    Markets where you can easily capitalize on things that aren't productive enable profit from things like debt and speculation, which from an empirical point of view seemingly inevitably produce situations where markets go crazy for other reasons than changes in the forces of production. This is a criticism of a specific aspect of some kinds of markets, not of markets in general.

    2 votes

  7. Comment on We economists have done the maths: ‘growth’ is a doomed strategy – there is a better way in ~finance

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    Is there something you want to say about financial markets that actually pertains to the comment you're replying to, or am I just a soapbox for neoliberal talking points here?

    Is there something you want to say about financial markets that actually pertains to the comment you're replying to, or am I just a soapbox for neoliberal talking points here?

    2 votes

  8. Comment on We economists have done the maths: ‘growth’ is a doomed strategy – there is a better way in ~finance

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    Yes. I'm not sure how that relates to the message you replied to, which doesn't suppose that this is or isn't the case. It's not a "luxury belief" that we can achieve better circumstances for poor...

    When you write “growth of the economy as a whole,” do you mean for the entire world?

    Yes.

    `Generally speaking, less economic growth in one country doesn’t imply more economic growth in a different country.

    I'm not sure how that relates to the message you replied to, which doesn't suppose that this is or isn't the case. It's not a "luxury belief" that we can achieve better circumstances for poor countries without a growth of the economy regardless of whether that's true.

    It’s more like economic setbacks are sometimes contagious. Example:

    I would rather call the Asian financial crisis a financial setback that only had economic effects because we've made finance instrumental to how we allocate and govern economic resources. That's not an inherent property of an economic system, but a political choice. When access to economic resources is governed by financial investment driven by less than perfect information and financial gain as the goal rather than real need, bubbles and financial contagions are inevitable. It was the financial problem that spread, causing similar economic effects in other countries.

    8 votes

  9. Comment on We economists have done the maths: ‘growth’ is a doomed strategy – there is a better way in ~finance

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    Every time I hear a politician talk about "creating jobs" as though that is inherently good no matter what, I'm thinking that if I start vandalizing people's property, I will be able to help...

    Every time I hear a politician talk about "creating jobs" as though that is inherently good no matter what, I'm thinking that if I start vandalizing people's property, I will be able to help create more jobs. Repairs, manufacturing replacements, cleanup...even the opportunity cost of taking the time to deal with the vandalism would effectively create more jobs and stimulate the economy. Disregarding the externalities of creating new things to replace broken ones, vandalism targeted at people with a lot of money in particular is a utilitarian dream. For someone with more money than they can spend, the cost of the vandalism will be a minor inconvenience. They will employ workers to deal with it, who will get paid and then pay it forward to other workers via their consumption and taxes.

    However, I don't see how anyone could deny that poor countries are severely lacking in economic growth of nearly all kinds. To say that we don't need any more economic growth seems like the sort of "luxury belief" that would only make sense to rich people in rich countries.

    That doesn't inherently require a growth of the economy as a whole. There is already a huge amount of capital concentrated where it's not needed. Also, even where valuable resources are available in poorer countries, in many cases they are carefully funnelled into rich countries where their capital value is realized. Equitable redistribution might have been a solution to this problem under a system which doesn't reward greed and concentration.

    7 votes

  10. Comment on What game are you terrible at? in ~games

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    Counter-Strike. I just don't have the precision and reflexes, and any game that gives such a massive advantage to the first player who is able to click on the other player's head is going to be a...

    Counter-Strike. I just don't have the precision and reflexes, and any game that gives such a massive advantage to the first player who is able to click on the other player's head is going to be a game largely about clicking on heads to the detriment of other mechanics. Meanwhile, being worse at clicking heads means you'll have to wait longer between playing and actually having a chance to improve that skill.

    At mid-level play a game like Quake 3 is more tactically interesting and doesn't punish players for being bad with too much downtime. Someone who is the better shot can be matched by someone who knows better what fights to pick and when to retreat to recover health and armor or find a better weapon. Someone who is more careful not to die can be matched by someone who takes more risks and dies more often but also gets more kills. Wiggling back and forth in place so as to avoid getting your head clicked is not a viable strategy when there are rockets.

    3 votes

  11. Comment on The Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group in ~science

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    Most of us have probably seen them without spending even a minute to consider their origin, their lifecycle or their reproduction. I used to see them feeding on practically every breadbag, but...

    Most of us have probably seen them without spending even a minute to consider their origin, their lifecycle or their reproduction. I used to see them feeding on practically every breadbag, but their population is steadily shrinking in favor of more wormlike parasites which now take their place on breadbags.

    Which species is more common where you live? Where do you find them? I have collected a few specimen of what I think are Admordorsum floridensis but the differences between other species are subtle.

    3 votes

  13. Comment on Elon Musk on tomatoes in ~food

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    "What could it cost, $10?" energy

    "What could it cost, $10?" energy

    16 votes

  14. Comment on How often are you eating plant based meals? in ~food

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    I have some friends who prefer vegan food, and it would be when I eat with them, which is not very often. I do eat a bunch of food without meat, though, but there's usually dairy or eggs in it in...

    I have some friends who prefer vegan food, and it would be when I eat with them, which is not very often. I do eat a bunch of food without meat, though, but there's usually dairy or eggs in it in some form or another.

  15. Comment on Any significant changes to Tildes are extremely unlikely in ~tildes.official

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    The constant struggle of software vendors to gain ground in the attention economy has somewhat conditioned us into thinking that software that isn't constantly evolving is as good as dead. A piece...

    The constant struggle of software vendors to gain ground in the attention economy has somewhat conditioned us into thinking that software that isn't constantly evolving is as good as dead. A piece of software which initially releases with tons of shortcomings that are then addressed in subsequent updates is more exciting and garners more attention than a piece of software that just works well out of the box.

    There is however software that functionally stands to gain little from more attention, especially without the commercial incentive and explicit goal to sell access, more copies or ad spots. Consider Tildes as both a piece of working software and a community. It's the community that drives me to engage with the software, not the other way around. The software just has to let me do that in a convenient way, which I think it has successfully achieved. This simple relationship really only looks odd through the lens of commercial social media, where dilute content exists as much if not more to drive users to engage with software.

    Resist the urge to worry and embrace finished software!

    21 votes

  16. Comment on Suggestions for a LAN party in ~games

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    Liero via WebLiero works on anything with a modern browser. It's based on an old game which is best described as real-time Worms. We used to huddle in front of a single keyboard to play the...

    Liero via WebLiero works on anything with a modern browser. It's based on an old game which is best described as real-time Worms. We used to huddle in front of a single keyboard to play the original, but this version has online multiplayer as well as controls that can be mapped to gamepad buttons.

    Also can't go wrong with Worms itself, which I will now describe as turn-based Liero. Worms Armageddon or Worms: W.M.D. are great. They both support a maximum of six players, but could be great for a 1v1 tournament. More clients can join in and spectate without playing. It also works hot seat, so you could play from just one computer. Worms Armageddon won't run natively on Mac, but I think there are tools to run Windows games in Mac.

    For Doom and Doom 2, you can check out Odamex for playing Doom and Doom 2! That said, there is an officia port of both games which is probably a bit easier to set up. I recommend Greenwar and Greenwar 2 if you want to play deathmatch.

    I don't have a Steam deck, but assuming that you can run whatever Linux/Windows software you want on them, Quake 3 via ioquake3 and Unreal Tournament '99 are great PVP games that support MacOS as well as Linux and Windows. I think anyone playing either of these games with a Steam Deck without also using a mouse and keyboard will be doing so with a significant disadvantage, though.

    I like Overload but haven't tried multiplayer myself. It's a relatively modern clone of the old game Descent, which is a sort of space ship FPS where you can move along and turn around any axis. I don't know how that works out for their new architecture but presumably there's some compatibility layer for older software?

    2 votes

  17. Comment on Suggestions for a LAN party in ~games

  18. Comment on Browser fingerprinting demonstration in ~comp

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    I will note here that the directive which mandates "cookie banners" in the EU is technology neutral in this respect, despite people commonly referring to cookies specifically in the context of...

    So we decline the cookie banners. We hunt for the reject all button. We feel a little safer.

    I have some bad news.

    Modern browsers don't really need the cookie anymore.

    I will note here that the directive which mandates "cookie banners" in the EU is technology neutral in this respect, despite people commonly referring to cookies specifically in the context of GDPR. Insofar they comply with EU law, these banners concern the use of any information stored on the user's terminal.

    From the ePrivacy directive:

    (24) Terminal equipment of users of electronic communications networks and any information stored on such equipment are part of the private sphere of the users requiring protection under the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. So-called spyware, web bugs, hidden identifiers and other similar devices can enter the user's terminal without their knowledge in order to gain access to information, to store hidden information or to trace the activities of the user and may seriously intrude upon the privacy of these users. The use of such devices should be allowed only for legitimate purposes, with the knowledge of the users concerned.

    5 votes

  19. Comment on Why does Opera GX rarely come up in browser discussions? in ~tech

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    I can't really take closed source options seriously. The browser handles a lot of very private information that's too important to me to leave to random proprietary freeware. It seems like a...

    I can't really take closed source options seriously. The browser handles a lot of very private information that's too important to me to leave to random proprietary freeware.

    It seems like a better model to me that the browser vendor publicly distributes the source code, making both it and the work on it open to public scrutiny and analysis, while the OS vendor builds it and distributes the binary package.

    3 votes

  20. Comment on Albums based on a recurring musical phrase in ~music

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    I've been listening to Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds lately, and that uses a few recurring motifs throughout the whole album, to great effect. Sits in a weird space between disco and progressive...

    I've been listening to Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds lately, and that uses a few recurring motifs throughout the whole album, to great effect. Sits in a weird space between disco and progressive rock.

    The Snow Goose by camel opens and closes with the same haunting melody.

    4 votes