text_garden's recent activity
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Comment on Sweden's health minister has urged the EU to push ahead with social media restrictions for kids while insisting it be treated as a pressing matter in ~tech
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Comment on Sweden's health minister has urged the EU to push ahead with social media restrictions for kids while insisting it be treated as a pressing matter in ~tech
text_garden Link ParentThe EU is developing a zero-knowledge proof solution for age verification. With zero knowledge proof, proof of age can be given without revealing to the attestation provider why you want to, nor...The EU is developing a zero-knowledge proof solution for age verification. With zero knowledge proof, proof of age can be given without revealing to the attestation provider why you want to, nor to the relying party anything else about your identity. Of course, ZKP means that an age proof could be for anyone.
My main issue with it all is that it makes the barrier to entry higher for anyone wanting to run a service which the EU decides must be age restricted. This benefits large, well established businesses with practically endless resources to implement them, and disproportionately burdens new, small businesses. This is an overlooked issue of the "chat control" proposals as well, and even moreso: a complex technical solution (coincidentally pushed by lobbyists intending to sell that solution as a service) is a form of regulatory capture.
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Comment on Wireless earphones: a belated review in ~tech
text_garden Link ParentThe crucial difference is that there's a significant delay between the physical response of playing the instrument and the audio reaching your ears, in a setting where timing sound is important. I...The crucial difference is that there's a significant delay between the physical response of playing the instrument and the audio reaching your ears, in a setting where timing sound is important. I don't think you need a particularly good ear for it: handfuls of milliseconds of delay can be absolutely jarring. Some musicians may be able to compensate for it in their playing to some degree, but to most, maintaining rhythm is a matter of both feeling and hearing the instrument.
There are other contexts where that level of difference is not as important (e.g. some video games, phone calls) and others where it can be mitigated altogether by delaying whatever it's synchronized with accordingly (e.g. watching a video).
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Comment on Super Mario Bros. Remastered in ~games
text_garden Link ParentThe name and branding is like asking for a takedown request. There's a good reason most recompilation projects use names that don't directly refer to the original titles. Looks fun, so now I have...The name and branding is like asking for a takedown request. There's a good reason most recompilation projects use names that don't directly refer to the original titles. Looks fun, so now I have it downloaded at least!
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Comment on My guess and opinion on the common blockers to Linux adoption in ~tech
text_garden (edited )LinkI'm low key fine with a Linux-based system having the characteristics of the Hole Hawg of operating systems (hilarious read on the power and danger of Unix and the arrogance of its proponents)....I'm low key fine with a Linux-based system having the characteristics of the Hole Hawg of operating systems (hilarious read on the power and danger of Unix and the arrogance of its proponents). Adoption only seems relevant to me insofar that it sustains maintenance and development of the software I use and turns enough vendors onto the fact that there's enough money to make supporting it that I can easily buy or build a computer that'll run it and have a job writing software with and for it, which seems to be the case for now.
What I see as its main practical benefits as a day-to-day operating system over other options doesn't apply to my uncle or my mother. It's largely in software built by power users and enthusiasts for power users and enthusiasts. High configurability, simple ad-hoc IPC via text streams, workflow automation by the same means you use it interactively, high degree of respect and trust for the user. When the trend for a lot of commercial software is to identify and streamline some highly marketable subset of potential workflows at the expense of any other use case, a typical Linux distro software repository or even just a given single GNU tool is a kitchen sink of options tacked on over time by contributors with different ideas of what the software could be used for.
To most people, that would probably lean more towards being a weakness because considered as a design, it's unprincipled and lacks coherence, resulting in software that sometimes defies intuition and discovery by experimentation, something which Windows or moreso OS X are cleverly designed to facilitate.
I'm sure you could build an elegant, coherent desktop operating system on top of a GNU and Linux core, as Next and Apple proved you can do with a Unix-like. There are already some promising projects which I think are getting closer to that end by building their own software suites according to shared sets of design principles and methodologies. Hopefully more people will eventually find it useful enough for their own purposes because of that, but I say that for their sake, because I'm just not very interested in it myself.
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Comment on Looking for some video game suggestions based off some specific parameters in ~games
text_garden LinkI will recommend Solar Settlers. It's a sci-fi board game-like worker placement game where you need to balance production of resources to move workers around, to maintain a workforce and to build...I will recommend Solar Settlers. It's a sci-fi board game-like worker placement game where you need to balance production of resources to move workers around, to maintain a workforce and to build habitats for workers to eventually settle in within a given number of turns. Mechanically simple yet strategically deep and infinitely replayable. Difficulty will ramp up if you start winning, and then jump back down a bit if you lose, so it kind of self-balances to your skill level as you play more and more rounds. Rounds are short and all the context is on a single screen. You eventually get to unlock new alien species to play, so there is some degree of drip feeding new game elements, but not in a way that feels exploitative or particularly limiting.
BrainGoodGames has a few more games that may be interesting to check out as well. Do note that the Linux build is stuck on some earlier version of the game, but it runs well using Proton.
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Comment on Linux noob question regarding full / partition in ~comp
text_garden LinkYou can get an idea at a glance of what's taking up that space using something like qdirstat or kdirstat, which recursively visualize which subtrees occupy most of the partition.You can get an idea at a glance of what's taking up that space using something like qdirstat or kdirstat, which recursively visualize which subtrees occupy most of the partition.
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
text_garden LinkI've mostly been playing Pioneer. It's a Free software take on what is essentially Elite II: Frontier, a space sim set in a future where much of the galaxy has been colonized by humans, You travel...I've mostly been playing Pioneer. It's a Free software take on what is essentially Elite II: Frontier, a space sim set in a future where much of the galaxy has been colonized by humans, You travel around with a ship to make ends meet however you want (trade, mercenary work, exploration, smuggling, policing, assassinations, passenger traffic, courier services, shipping...), with very simple simulations of things like economics, conflict, legal systems and so on. It's all at realistic scales, although you can use some kind of wormhole travel and time compression to make travel bearable. The spaceships have crazy levels of acceleration, yet even so it would take days to do even interplanetary travel in real time.
I enjoy it. Although a lot of its basic concepts are more fleshed out in Elite: Dangerous and its production values are nowhere near that, the relative simplicity and quick startup makes this fun enough in its own right. Very addictive, especially if you have a weakness for "numbers going up". They can do that forever here, and there's always a better ship to buy or some subsystem of the ship to upgrade. If you like the original Elite or Frontier, it's a no-brainer, but I can't make a great case for why you shouldn't play Elite: Dangerous instead.
The greatest weakness is the sound I think. The music and sound effects really aren't to my liking. The lighting and graphics aren't great either, but functional. The ship models in particular are actually pretty great.
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Comment on What's an RPG? (video game) in ~games
text_garden LinkRPGs put players in the shoes of characters and give them a great degree of freedom in deciding in how to approach problems. Traditionally, role playing games ensure that these choices are...RPGs put players in the shoes of characters and give them a great degree of freedom in deciding in how to approach problems. Traditionally, role playing games ensure that these choices are grounded in the characters and the world through the use of systems, a game master and an element of random chance.
Systems govern things like how dexterity affects a character's ability to dodge a blow, how much light a light source provides, how a character's intelligence affects their ability to comprehend information, how much a piece of armor protects you, how fast you can move, how the character learns new skills etc. The game master essentially decides what the world is, what's in it and what happens as the player characters interact with it and narrates it to the players, and takes on multiple roles of non-player characters in the game. The element of random chance ensures that neither the game master nor the players are in complete control of the outcomes of player choices. A player bad at throwing things can throw a knife with the likely outcome of failing but still succeeding by chance.
The systems also typically ensure that player characters can develop and change over time, and the players have to adapt their play styles to accommodate this, but typically also has a great degree of freedom in how a character changes: what weapons and armor they use, what skills they should develop and so on. The players themselves are responsible for maintaining the non-systemic aspects of the character's development: their personality, how they should react to the world and so on.
When these concepts eventually became the subject of single-player computer games some changes were necessary. First of all, the game master had to go and be replaced by more systems and random chance. Especially early on, the degree of freedom and level of narration of traditional RPGs was limited by relatively meager computer resources. Where you could ask a good game master to describe anything or make an unconventional but valid use of a skill in a traditional RPG, you were now limited to predefined interactions and overtly fixed, simple and terse narratives and descriptions, and simplified interactions with non-player characters.
If your character was a kind of wizard or conjurer, in a traditional RPG they could for example use magic to create an explosive blast, and use that to cause a cave-in to block off a corridor, extinguish torches, turn water into steam, intimidate a non-player character or whatever they could think of that the game master agreed was a realistic application of the skill, but in early computer RPGs the use of that kind of magic might instead have been limited to just being used as a direct attack against an enemy.
This improved as computers got more powerful and the techniques to design narratives and systems that more closely approached the flexibility and freedom of traditional RPGs were developed. Visual art and animation could do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to descriptions. Narratives and changes in the narratives could be supported by a lot of text, video and voice acting. Useful abstractions that allow a great deal of interaction between different objects and characters were developed.
Second, making everything a system allowed for an entirely different mode of play. Computers can roll millions of dice in a second and resolve the systems checks without player interaction, so RPGs played out in real time were now an option.
It turns out that simpler approaches to computer RPGs are interesting enough in their own right to survive to this day, and that maybe there's a sweet spot between interactivity and narrative that is appealing to a wider audience. So right now there are a lot of different concepts of what an RPG and especially computer RPG is and what it should aspire to be.
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Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp
text_garden LinkI finished the synthesizer portion of the software groovebox I described here. The hardest part was keeping the number of controls limited without sacrificing too much flexibility. The sound...I finished the synthesizer portion of the software groovebox I described here. The hardest part was keeping the number of controls limited without sacrificing too much flexibility.
The sound turned out quite TB303-like but with a very distinct quality because it's all faked using phase distortion synthesis. I made the "filter" slider continuously morph from a sawtooth to a square via a sine instead of using a switch to change waveforms. The "resonance" control just mixes in a sine wave at the guesstimated resonant frequency, which is synchronized with the oscillator that provides the body of the sound and also fades to zero over the duration of a single cycle. This is probably illustrated more clearly in figures 18 and 19 of Casio's patent. One notable "improvement" on the patent is that I introduce feedback modulation of the phase, like in Yamaha's FM synths. That becomes a really nasty fuzz/distortion effect in this design.
For now it sits in my music prototyping/hacks repo is a JACK application that accepts MIDI notes and pitch bend, with simple on-screen sliders for the timbre controls. I will use MIDI messages internally for sequencer control once I build that, so it should be plug-and-play. If anyone wants to give it a go and are comfortable with JACK, the source is available here. I'm using Zig, but I haven't updated that in a while so I only know it builds with version 0.14.0-dev.2605+136c5a916.
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Comment on Bear is now source-available in ~tech
text_garden Link ParentMaybe it's just phrasing, but this boggles me because open source is evidently highly compatible with a capitalist mindset. The proliferation of licenses like the one the author used initially has...I think what happened here is that the developer realised that the open source philosophy at its core is incompatible with the capitalist commercialism mindset.
Maybe it's just phrasing, but this boggles me because open source is evidently highly compatible with a capitalist mindset. The proliferation of licenses like the one the author used initially has created a massive commons that can be nearly freely capitalized on by anyone, also in ways that are antithetical to the philosophy you describe above. I can attest that most of the proprietary, closed source, commercial software I've worked on was built on substantial piles of BSD/MIT licensed libraries.
In my opinion, free software as defined by GNU has a better claim to represent your philosophy in that it meaningfully incentivizes mutually beneficial development and the production of software that users can modify freely, by requiring authors to provide the source code of the modified versions they distribute to others. Especially GPLv3 seems like a commercial dead end, because the people who make computer appliances like Internet Of Shit, set top boxes, NAS etc. really, really don't agree with you on whether you should have any power over your computers, a position to which the MIT license is very agreeable.
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Comment on What is a non-problematic word that you avoid using? in ~talk
text_garden Link"Content" in certain contexts where it's possible to be much more precise without being more verbose. Seems deliberately reductive and vague. I guess it makes sense from e.g. Google's perspective..."Content" in certain contexts where it's possible to be much more precise without being more verbose. Seems deliberately reductive and vague. I guess it makes sense from e.g. Google's perspective that someone is a "content creator" since they literally don't have the capacity to mind what exactly the "content" is, and since it isn't relevant to their business model, but I see more people adopting this term to describe their own professions.
"Resource" on a similar note. At a workplace I heard that we were getting "two more resources for the team". It sounds like it's euphemistic, but I really don't know why they needed a euphemism for what they actually meant: people, workers, developers, members, whatever.
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Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp
text_garden LinkI'm writing a software mono synthesizer. The idea is to eventually incorporate it and a drum synth in a self-contained software groovebox and hopefully run it on one of the really cheap Chinese...I'm writing a software mono synthesizer. The idea is to eventually incorporate it and a drum synth in a self-contained software groovebox and hopefully run it on one of the really cheap Chinese Linux Game Boys you can find on Ali Express. The synth is based on Casio's invention of phase distortion synthesis, but I try to put package it more like a Roland TB-303, with accents and portamento, and with few knobs and controls yet many sweet spots, but also with complete MIDI control.
An interesting, bite-sized problem so far was implementing voice prioritization. The key you pressed last always has the highest priority, but if you release that, the one you pressed before that should have priority and so on, and you can of course release the keys in any order.
I opted to use an array with one entry for each of the 128 possible MIDI note pitches. Each entry represents a doubly linked list node, pointing to the previous and next pitches, if any. So on one hand I can link them into a list where the tail is always the highest priority note, but when I unlink them when a note off is received, instead of iterating over the list, I can simply index the array by the pitch to retrieve the node. In that way, there is very little pointer chasing and no iteration over the list at all, and the nodes are all contained in a contiguous 768-byte array, so the common caveats about linked lists (locality, O(n) iteration) have been eliminated.
One open problem is designing mapping curves, in order to map the user controls to sometimes several internal values. I feel like a visual tool for designing curve functions where you can just drag points around would be helpful here, but I don't know of anything off-the-shelf, so if anyone has an idea I'm happy to hear it before my project becomes two projects. I have curves that work for now, anyway.
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Comment on Germany legal case alleging adblockers violate copyright in ~tech
text_garden Link ParentSoon enough, ignoring the ads will be an attack against free speech, and not buying the products they advertise will be theft.Soon enough, ignoring the ads will be an attack against free speech, and not buying the products they advertise will be theft.
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Comment on I spent months living with smart glasses. People talk to me differently now. in ~tech
text_garden Link ParentAnd a vast majority that hasn't meaningfully had a reason to take a stance at all because virtually no one uses smart glasses. Thus far, they're culturally irrelevant, which is why I don't agree...The point is, there is a small but vocal minority who hate smart glasses.
And a vast majority that hasn't meaningfully had a reason to take a stance at all because virtually no one uses smart glasses. Thus far, they're culturally irrelevant, which is why I don't agree with the New Coke analogy.
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
text_garden Link ParentI'll check it out! VoxeLibre has been working out nicely for us, I guess since neither of us have played much Minecraft since the early 2010s, but I've been wanting to try some more Luanti games.I'll check it out! VoxeLibre has been working out nicely for us, I guess since neither of us have played much Minecraft since the early 2010s, but I've been wanting to try some more Luanti games.
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
text_garden LinkI've been coming back to Daggerfall, with the Daggerfall Unity port and a bunch of mods. The sheer scale of it is still impressive, even more so with the increased draw distance and greater height...- I've been coming back to Daggerfall, with the Daggerfall Unity port and a bunch of mods. The sheer scale of it is still impressive, even more so with the increased draw distance and greater height variations of the port. I am using a mod that adds roads and fast-forward automatic travel along the roads as an alternative to the instant fast travel options of the original game, which also makes me appreciate the size of the world. Unfortunately, the quests, dungeons, settlements and NPCs are mostly very samey, but the freedom in how to approach things and even what your goals are puts later Elder Scrolls games to shame and hasn't meaningfully been attempted since.
- I beat the last remaining couple of levels of the Quick & Hard set for Elasto Mania. I spent hours yesterday and maybe an hour today just on level 17 which is the hardest by far IMO. It easily took hundreds of attempts, after which victory was as cathartic as video games can get.
- Exploring Caves of Qud in the roleplaying mode has been great lately. I played it in the roguelike mode before, but it turns out I enjoy it a lot more with checkpoints. The setting is awesome and it's one of a few games that can still immerse me in its world.
- I've set up a server for Luanti with VoxeLibre with VoxeLibre and have been playing it for hours with a friend of mine. It's a nice FOSS alternative to Minecraft. Luanti itself is just an engine, and there are quite a few different games for it that I haven't tried.
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Comment on Who’d be into a book club but for retro games? in ~games
text_garden Link ParentFor DOS games I recommend checking out https://www.dosgameclub.com/ One game per month with a subforum opening up for each game, followed by a roundtable podcast episode.For DOS games I recommend checking out https://www.dosgameclub.com/
One game per month with a subforum opening up for each game, followed by a roundtable podcast episode.
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Comment on Is there still an arcade gaming scene? in ~games
text_garden LinkThere's a small arcade in my home city with a rotation of early 80s to mid 90s cabinets and pinball machines. They're no longer coin op; instead you pay a flat entrance fee and use a button to...There's a small arcade in my home city with a rotation of early 80s to mid 90s cabinets and pinball machines. They're no longer coin op; instead you pay a flat entrance fee and use a button to "insert a coin". Otherwise they're authentic hardware. The owner collects as a hobby and I think it's mostly to fund that for now. He used to run a lunch restaurant combined with an arcade which didn't pan out financially I think.
I saw some arcades in Bangkok, but those were mostly dance machines and claw games I think. If there are no Metal Slugs, After Burners, Cave shooters, gun machines or movie tie-in pinball machines I'm not interested :)
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Comment on How is Linux these days? in ~comp
text_garden LinkI use Void Linux as my daily driver and I have a hard time imagining not using GNU/Linux personally. There are distributions that provide a more familiar desktop experience out of the box so you...I use Void Linux as my daily driver and I have a hard time imagining not using GNU/Linux personally. There are distributions that provide a more familiar desktop experience out of the box so you don't have to worry too much about documentation, but to me it seems the strength is rather the opposite: I can start from 0 and build something much more catered to my workflow from it. That requires digging into documentation, so certainly not for everyone, but very rewarding for a power user willing to invest some time and energy into long term ergonomics.
As a development environment it's again very configurable and flexible. It's what it is, at heart. It's largely based around a now strangely anachronistic model with virtual VT100-like terminals and pieces of software interacting via unstructured plain text streams and command line arguments, but it works well and somewhat transparently across multiple machines via secure shell connections. Best of all is that any sequence of commands could easily be turned into a script to automate some workflows. In theory you could have the same scriptable environment in the Windows CLI, and maybe even better in PowerShell which has a more modern take on structured input/output data, but the boon in Linux is the breadth of software built to be scriptable in this way.
One thing that has really grown on me in the past few years is audio. Linux has a basic built-in audio and MIDI subsystem, but there are multiple options for audio servers running on top of that. That's been a bit of a PITA historically, but since the release of Pipewire I have a nice, low latency setup which is compatible with all the other audio servers and really Just Works™ in my experience. Audio is routable, not only between applications and audio interfaces but between applications. Much like OS X, IIRC.
Gaming works surprisingly well. There can be a slight performance drop in my experience, depending on the game, though YMMV since I've seen reports of Proton outperforming DirectX on the same hardware. I play Windows games via Steam and Heroic which both automate Windows API emulation via Proton. I use some Windows-based VST plugins and getting that to work was a bit of a hassle, and still hit-or-miss in terms of whether it works at all for a given plugin.
I keep my Windows installation around mostly in order to test Windows builds of my game now, but if you're otherwise happy with Windows, you can use Windows subsystem for Linux. I think WSL 1 is an API emulator much like Wine/Proton and WSL2 is based on a VM.
Linux can be a bit of a hit or miss with laptops in my experience. I've always bought laptops which I know are well supported. Some have problems with NVidia hardware, and you have to use their proprietary drivers to get the most out of it, but it's never really been an issue for me in practice.
I suggest "diddler", for Dedicated Integer Data Dust Lavishing Entropic Robustness.