text_garden's recent activity
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Comment on How mods changed video games forever in ~games
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Comment on I want an RPG with reverse leveling in ~games
text_garden LinkI've been interested in RPGs where there's no skill progression at all. In Rogue, leveling is largely inconsequential. Your max health increases as you do, but you can do that by other means as...I've been interested in RPGs where there's no skill progression at all. In Rogue, leveling is largely inconsequential. Your max health increases as you do, but you can do that by other means as well (which are likely your primary means later in the game. There is only one other stat (strength), which isn't affected by levelling. Progression is instead externalized in the sense that you'll pick up and eventually identify items that you can use to make your life easier as you go down to harder dungeon levels. At the start of the game, you know nothing about the game's items. A potion for example will only be known by a randomized color assigned to it at the start of a run, and you'll only know what (possibly adverse) effects belong to a color if you use it or identify it by other means. Over the course of the game you'll identify potions, wands and scrolls in this way.
A later game inspired by it, Brogue, did away with levelling altogether. I think it's cool because the experience that gives you better options isn't just some abstract number that goes up, but what your player character actually experiences and as a direct consequence then knows how to use.
In a reverse progression game, maybe a similar mechanic could be used so as to give players more choices later in the game. As you lose strength and forget skills, you can invest your time to gain wisdom of the stuff in the world. Say, if you lose speed over time you can make up for it by studying the local geography so that you know how to traverse otherwise impassable obstacles. Or you study the flora and fauna and learn of a tree that will release a thick cloud of pollen if you kick it, allowing you to flee more easily from combat. Stuff like that which aren't just stat modifiers but new mechanics you have to use in clever ways.
Otherwise, by the end of the game when the player is at their peak of understanding the mechanics and would have the best opportunity to use them to their advantage, their agency is limited by the lack of choice. This seems like it could be frustrating to me.
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Comment on Richard Stallman on using the word "content" to describe works in ~humanities
text_garden Link ParentOh man... Yes, my bad. Nevertheless, GPLv2 is a GNU license using copyleft principles to ensure Free software. I don't disagree with this at all. I do however disagree that the difference between...All of the GPL licenses are OSI certified.
Oh man... Yes, my bad.
Nevertheless, GPLv2 is a GNU license using copyleft principles to ensure Free software.
The primary differentiating factor between the broader open source supporters and the free software movement is that the free software movement wants all software to be copyleft, wheras the broader open source movement mostly just wants it as cheap/free foundation for their proprietary software.
I don't disagree with this at all. I do however disagree that the difference between Open Source and Free software is exemplified by the difference between two versions of GPL, both designed to ensure Free software.
The more strictly user freedom-preserving GNU license would be Affero GPL v3. I don't take that to imply that less user freedom-preserving licenses like GPLv3 or GPLv2 aren't Free software licenses. They are different, more or less strict Free software licenses.
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Comment on Richard Stallman on using the word "content" to describe works in ~humanities
text_garden Link ParentNo, it's the difference between GPLv2 and GPLv3, both GNU license templates created by the Free Software Foundation, neither compatible with OSI's definition of Open Source.And that's the exact difference between open source and the free software movement.
No, it's the difference between GPLv2 and GPLv3, both GNU license templates created by the Free Software Foundation, neither compatible with OSI's definition of Open Source.
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Comment on Richard Stallman on using the word "content" to describe works in ~humanities
text_garden Link ParentOpen source licenses don't mandate that the source code of derived software is made available to users at all. It's only open until someone decides that their changes aren't. If your car...My car uses open source software extensively. I can get a look at it if I follow some Vogon-like procedure. But if I want to actually use this source to, you know, flash my car's firmware, I can go pound sand.
Open source licenses don't mandate that the source code of derived software is made available to users at all. It's only open until someone decides that their changes aren't. If your car manufacturer offers to give you source code it's probably because some parts of their systems use GPL licensed software.
I worked with proprietary embedded software and because the systems we designed incorporated Linux (which is licensed under GPLv2) with changes to add platform support code and drivers we honored the license by giving the source code of that to anyone requesting it. In the application code, however, we were strictly prohibited from using GPL code at all.
What you describe is called "tivoization". Earlier GNU licenses like GPLv2 don't address this problem at all, so Linux is often "tivoized": free software that you can retrieve the source code of but that you can't modify and use in place of the original program.
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Comment on What are the genuinely worst films of all time? in ~movies
text_garden LinkI've been eyeing this thread over a couple of days because I've seen some pretty awful films, but I'm hard pressed to remember the specifics of any of them. I think what places them in this...I've been eyeing this thread over a couple of days because I've seen some pretty awful films, but I'm hard pressed to remember the specifics of any of them. I think what places them in this category for me is that they're dull, trite and largely unremarkable. I can delight in the perfect storm of incompetence that results in a catastrophe like Birdemic while the stuff I regret watching is probably just mediocre.
I think what comes to mind first is awful sequels to sci-fi horror films. Something like Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem or Species IV.
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Comment on Ineos has opened a carbon dioxide storage site off the Danish coast, as momentum builds in Europe for the fledgling but expensive technology in ~enviro
text_garden LinkUnfortunately I can't access the article. I could access this alternative source:...Unfortunately I can't access the article. I could access this alternative source: https://cinea.ec.europa.eu/news-events/news/greensand-future-inaugurates-europes-first-commercial-offshore-co2-storage-facility-2026-09-18_en
Projects like this don't seem practically viable to me, at least as a solution to the problem they supposedly address. We release something like 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. and this would over eight years be able to store some tiny fraction of only one year's total emissions, assuming we'll capture that much CO₂ in the first place.
With that in mind, I start questioning the motives. This is from Ineos' press release:
Too often, the debate has been presented as a choice between industrial competitiveness and climate progress. Greensand shows that is a false choice.
It clearly does not. It'll be a false choice when we can sequester carbon dioxide at the same scale that we are blowing it into the atmosphere. So why are they saying this? What is Ineos anyway? Again, from their website:
A global petrochemicals manufacturer, INEOS operates 148 sites across 26 countries, generates $50 billion annually and employs over 23,000 people. Complementing our core business, INEOS is making an impact across a range of elite sports and becoming increasingly known in the automotive sector, with the launch of the Grenadier (our uncompromising 4x4). We make change happen.
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Comment on Richard Stallman on using the word "content" to describe works in ~humanities
text_garden Link ParentIMO they (let's not kid ourselves, though, this is probably all RMS' writings) have a variety of takes of...varying quality. Some completely inane stuff like the insistence that Linux is "merely a...Some of the entries on that page reek of condescension
IMO they (let's not kid ourselves, though, this is probably all RMS' writings) have a variety of takes of...varying quality. Some completely inane stuff like the insistence that Linux is "merely a component of the GNU operating system" despite many years of evidence that Linux is used (and successfully so) even without GNU software.
Still, I think there is the occasional nugget of wisdom. The take on "content" specifically resonates with me.
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Comment on Richard Stallman on using the word "content" to describe works in ~humanities
text_garden Link ParentRegardless of the causal relationship between the ubiquitous use of the word "content" and the trend will now describe, I think "commodity whose purpose is to fill a box and make money"...- Exemplary
Regardless of the causal relationship between the ubiquitous use of the word "content" and the trend will now describe, I think "commodity whose purpose is to fill a box and make money" unfortunately increasingly reflects our actual attitudes towards creative works, and the deliberate use of the word in that sense is still common because a work's status as an interchangeable commodity that serves to fill a box is important to some of the biggest companies in the world. More important than the status of being a work itself, as is becoming more apparent now that these companies are increasingly using non-works to serve as content for their platforms.
I can't speak for everyone else, but there has definitely also been a change in how I approach viewing, reading and listening to creative works in the past 20 years that I also see in friends and family. 20 years ago, someone might have said that about the 20 years before, but I think we would have described the same trend: a work is increasingly expected to be one item of many that fills our free time throughout any given day. I've not only grown less appreciative, but less discerning in what I view, read and listen to. It's become less of a mindful activity and more of a passive default to kill time. This speaks to the success of "content providers", television networks and platform operators which view "content" exacly as Richard Stallman describes.
When multiple meanings the use of a word is the potential source of equivocation I think we should be wary of using it or accepting its use without further definition. We use language as a proxy for concepts in our reasoning, a fact that has been exploited over and over again throughout history in order to manipulate. If we use language that doesn't conflate two very different views on the important qualities of works, maybe we will be more mindful of the difference.
For similar reasons I am wary of when people talk about "freedom", "democracy" and "extremism". Like "content", these aren't merely words whose definition have changed over time, but words which mean different things to different people in different contexts. They are frequent sources of both deliberate and accidental equivocation.
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Richard Stallman on using the word "content" to describe works
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
text_garden LinkPioneer just released version 20260907, so I've been getting back into that. It's a free space sim in the style of Frontier: Elite II where you fly about in a realistically scaled galaxy between...Pioneer just released version 20260907, so I've been getting back into that. It's a free space sim in the style of Frontier: Elite II where you fly about in a realistically scaled galaxy between realistically scaled solar systems doing odd jobs, trading, smuggling, surveying, bounty hunting, piracy, reconnaissance or just sightseeing for fun.
I've become somewhat successful in this run by getting a planetary scanner early so that I could perform high paying survey missions near Sol. Eventually I had enough money to start moving precious metals between different cities on Earth, earning enough from this to buy a ship with some more freight space after which I started smuggling robots, nerve gas and battle weapons between systems with varying laws on those.
I once bought live animals to trade on the black market (many systems ban animal trade), but when I arrived I only had animal meat in my cargo hold. Apparently animals breathe and I had neglected to install life support systems back there.
There is both time compression and wormhole jumping to deal with the scale of everything. The ships are very fast and accelerate like crazy, but some interplanetary journeys would still take weeks without time compression. Still, most time will probably be spent in uneventful transit
I really appreciate games that don't shy away from this kind of realism. It might seem tedious, but the scale really sells the idea that you're in space. Outside the Elite series, most games with space flight I've played really scale everything down and making them feel more like toy models as a result. Sure, a billion planetary systems and limited development resources naturally ends up as what game designers call "10,000 bowls of oatmeal" where the results of procedural generation are too similar to make them all meaningfully different, but I think that's fine with me when that's just realistic.
Other than that I played a little Shenzhen I/O and finally came up with a somewhat satisfying solution to the laser tag mission. The game makes you solve small engineering problems using a combination of circuit design and assembly programming for an imaginary family of very limited microcontrollers. Usually with Zachtronics games I play and enjoy them a lot up to a point when it starts feeling more like a job where planning and design would take more time than I'm willing to invest, and this game has been no different. But I know it's the perfect game for someone else.
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Comment on putt.day — a daily hole of mini golf in ~games
text_garden Link ParentIt's probably easier to make a game that's fun for a few minutes at a time than it is to make one that you can spend hours with before getting bored. That the limited scopes of these games...I mean if you are one person/tiny team, why has this become the attractive first option?
It's probably easier to make a game that's fun for a few minutes at a time than it is to make one that you can spend hours with before getting bored. That the limited scopes of these games probably make them an easier target for an LLM to cobble together something moderately entertaining probably helps a lot.
I kind of like the format. I play Hoplite on my cell phone and have been for many years. The game can endlessly generate random levels, but if you know someone else playing, doing the daily challenge (where the random generator is seeded with the current date so everyone plays through the same levels) can be a nice low-effort social gaming event that creates some opportunities for small talk. Currently doing the same thing with Wordle and Hexcells Infinite.
This game, though. I don't know, it doesn't seem fun. Today's course was very annoying anyway.
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Comment on Software for humans in ~tech
text_garden Link ParentThat "when" assumes a particular answer to a very big "if". I'm seeing no indication yet that LLMs will ever be used to solve bugs faster than they are used to produce them. The economic...When that happens, that's when the transition is done.
That "when" assumes a particular answer to a very big "if". I'm seeing no indication yet that LLMs will ever be used to solve bugs faster than they are used to produce them. The economic incentives are pointing elsewhere: access to models that can thoroughly audit and produce high quality threat analyses that identify critical vulnerabilities is much more expensive than access to models that can produce poor to mediocre code which ostensibly implements solutions to business domain problems but has an error rate similar to that of a junior developer.
There are a few differences between the LLM and the junior developer that further exacerbate the problem. The junior (without an LLM) is limited in their productive capacity by their lack of skill, knowledge and wisdom. They will produce code at a lower rate than the experienced developer, because they will have to stop to learn things more often, ask more questions or will simply avoid problems that seem challenging. The burden imposed on more skilled team members in reviewing and auditing the low-quality code is consequently limited. The LLM knows no such limits and will spit out massive changes without ever gaining knowledge. I think people working in engineering organizations that are being pushy about LLMs can corroborate my experience that this eventually results in lower quality reviews.
I worked in an organization where management "addressed" the problem by reminding developers that their code is their responsibility, whether they wrote or generated. That sounds nice in theory, but is ultimately simply not true. The resulting problems won't magically be directed at the person who created them, but at the team that maintains the software.
You should consider that what works for Linus Torvalds might not work for every other software project. Linux has generally high standards of inclusion because it deals with the production and maintenance of software responsibly and uncompromisingly as a high-stakes engineering problem. Being as widely deployed as Linux is also attracts a lot of attention from security researchers and skilled developers, funded by organizations with legitimate interests in its quality. I am however using (and I'm being used in) a lot more software produced by organizations with much lower standards, driven by the market to "get shit done", "move fast and break things" or whatever other slogans they use to justify being quick to market at the cost of quality of engineering. This use of these systems is often not voluntary.
Meanwhile, with the advent of LLMs, the difference in cost between producing such low quality systems and producing high quality systems has increased. I think it will increase further as investors become impatient waiting for the chatbot vendors to realize the potential they see in them as profitable businesses. If any charlatan with no knowledge of engineering can use an LLM to quickly generate volumes' worth of low-quality software alone and something with the rigor of Linux still demands the attention of hundreds of engineers on the LKML, the production of software will be much more in the hands of incompetent charlatans than people like the Linux maintainers.
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Comment on Software for humans in ~tech
text_garden Link ParentIt's not so much a matter of opinion on what LLMs can and can't do as an observation of an ongoing phenomenon. Yes, plagiarism is to be expected everywhere, not just of Free software. What does...I agree that LLMs can be used to launder free software.
It's not so much a matter of opinion on what LLMs can and can't do as an observation of an ongoing phenomenon.
You can use an LLM to recreate currently closed source programs.
Yes, plagiarism is to be expected everywhere, not just of Free software.
I see them as being part of the transition from our legacy world.
What does this even mean? What is a "legacy world" and what are we transitioning into? Will the world you think we're transitioning into not have a legacy? I try to think clearly about this issue, but terminology like this isn't making things easier. It seems to me like a creative alternative to waving your hands instead of presenting an argument.
Knowing the problems on environnement and being able to fix them is completely different. The only thing that seemed to work so far was during the pandemic lockdowns. Most people don't want to go through that again. We're already locked into bad outcomes and predictions are happening faster than expected. Vicious cycles are going to get worse and worse. I don't expect anything to get better the way things are going.
With that perspective in mind, the hope in LLMs magically solving the problem for us makes even less sense.
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Comment on Software for humans in ~tech
text_garden Link ParentIt is the current system that affords authors the right to license their work under whatever terms they please. There is no Free software, with its strict licensing requirements, without a legal...In terms of stolen work, since I've started learning about Linux and free software, I've always felt like the current system was broken. https://web.mit.edu/m-i-t/forums/copyright/index_transcript.html The culture change that AIs bring seem to me to be something that will be positive.
It is the current system that affords authors the right to license their work under whatever terms they please. There is no Free software, with its strict licensing requirements, without a legal system that protects these rights.
You'll be less pleased to know that one frequent use of LLMs is to perform so-called copyright laundering of Free software. Modules, libraries or whole applications are fed into the LLM which rewrites them ever so slightly so as to rid the software of signs of the original authorship and, at least ostensibly, the licensing requirements imposed by the original author. The idea is that by doing this you can more easily create proprietary software based on Free software.
The negative effects of LLM use on the maintenance of Free and Open Source software are well known. For every useful contribution to a popular project there are a hundred patches and PRs by useless charlatans who practically function as transparent proxies for the LLMs they use by uncritically reproducing their hallucinations, neither understanding the problem they may or may not be solving which may or may not exist nor understanding the solution they submit. This has made many F/OSS project maintainers more restrictive in what kinds of contributions they'll accept or entertain at all, potentially throwing some babies out with that dirty, smelly ocean of bathwater.
For the environment impact, I guess I got magical thinking, but I feel like it's the only way to speed up research to save the earth.
We know what the problem is and we know what we are doing to cause that problem. The reluctance to solve the problem accordingly is a political phenomenon.
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Comment on Apple announces iPhone Duo, its first foldable iPhone in ~tech
text_garden Link ParentI checked the local store just to see what the upper end of that price range is. They have one for 43 990 SEK, about €3900. Seems absolutely absurd to me. What are some good phone options nowadays...I checked the local store just to see what the upper end of that price range is. They have one for 43 990 SEK, about €3900. Seems absolutely absurd to me.
What are some good phone options nowadays in the €200-300 range if I don't want a giant screen?
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Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp
text_garden LinkI started using a couple of OpenBSD security features in my Gopher server. The server is an application that serves a single request received on stdin, writing the response to stdout before...I started using a couple of OpenBSD security features in my Gopher server. The server is an application that serves a single request received on stdin, writing the response to stdout before exiting. The data being served lives in a single directory tree. In OpenBSD I manage this using
inetdwhich can fire off commands upon socket connection, passing the socket I/O as standard I/O to the commands.In OpenBSD, processes can restrict themselves to subsets of the kernel API calling pledge. From the point of calling pledge, the restriction is enforced by the kernel; attempt to use a restricted syscall and your process will die. Access can only ever be narrowed, so a process can't unrestrict itself. I restrict my server process to using only standard I/O and filesystem access with
pledge("stdio rpath")before I do anything else. Anything the attacker can achieve in userspace after the pledge call will be restricted to those APIs.The second feature is unveil, which can restrict a process to certain files or subdirectories. The first call will hide the entire filesystem from the process, except the given path (and anything within it, if it's a directory). Subsequent calls may add more paths. Calling
unveilwith NULL, NULL will prevent further unveiling of the filesystem (but so will pledging not to use it), so even if an attacker achieves rce in userspace they can't unveil more of the filesystem. I inserted a call to this before calling pledge, unveiling just the gopher root.I think these features are great examples of "worse is better". Something like SELinux is definitely the better approach in that it's more fine grained, provides more thorough protection and doesn't rely on the userspace playing along in the first place. pledge/unveil are more limited but mitigate ROP well enough for an operating system maintained the way OpenBSD is. I think this pays off in the worse-is-better sense because you can understand and apply pledge and unveil in less than 10 minutes.
My setup still has some more glaring weaknesses. For one, there's no per-client rate limiting (inetd only supports global rate limiting per service) and there are no timeouts. I should be able to use timeout for timeouts and the kernel's packet filter to stop accepting connections from high request rate clients. I would like to avoid any such functionality in the server process to keep it simple.
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Comment on Stop Killing The Internet: No digital ID and no age verification in ~tech
text_garden Link ParentNot 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.
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Comment on Stop Killing The Internet: No digital ID and no age verification in ~tech
text_garden Link ParentI 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.
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Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp
text_garden Link ParentThanks! 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.
I couldn't bring myself to watch something like this for 17 minutes. I just don't see the appeal of this style of editing and direction at all. A constant stream of them going through a whole cartoon sound effect library and non sequiturs over 3-second clips. And that audible page flipping transition... It's like it's made to entice toddlers, which seems weird given a toddler would have no interest in the subject.
Not to be too much of a debbie downer I will add something interesting about the history of mods. In the European cracking scene of the home computer era it was common to add "trainers" to games. A lot of prestige was attached to being the first to release a cracked version of a game, which was nailed down to an art form by a few groups that had suppliers in the industry, so competition in that area was fierce. I think trainers were essentially one way to differentiate your crack from those that were quicker but didn't have trainers.
Trainers were basically hacks of the games, adding optional changes that you could pick in a menu before the actual game launched. Some changes are obvious cheats, like unlimited lives, invincibility or whatever. More interestingly, some trainers added fixes that basically rebalanced the games or significantly changed it in some way that wasn't just an obvious cheat. Clearly made by people who knew what about the mechanics annoyed them.
Several companies sold hardware intended to make it easier to mod games. There was a tool called Action Replay which eventually existed in some form or another for several computer and video game systems. The Commodore 64 version allowed you to freeze the game, inspect and modify the memory (including the code) and then resume the game with those changes. Marketed as a cheating device, this turned out to be a very useful tool for crackers as well as modders. The Commodore 64 version even included assemblers and disassemblers.
The console versions are interesting to me, because by definition you can't modify the content of a ROM cartridge. On the Sega Megadrive, the Action Replay instead sits between the cartridge and the cartridge slot and intercepts the memory accesses on the bus. That way it can present a different value to the CPU than the cartridge ROM would in some places and just forward the data from the cartridge in others. You could create a rather short list of such interception points in order to cheat. There were also rudimentary mods made this way. I recall there was one for Sonic 2 that simply swapped a palette entry, turning Sonic green and black.
There are course earlier examples of modding. Before the era of commercial computer games especially, when games weren't so strongly considered as proprietary, and hacking on a game you had access to was just par for the course for the people that did.