a1studmuffin

Never say never! I worked on the original Dead Space (2008). There’s a minigame in chapter 4 where you have to defend the ship’s hull from incoming asteroids by shooting them with a cannon. On completion of the challenge, there’s some explanation as to why the cannon’s auto-targetting system is back online and you can leave the minigame and the cannon automatically continues shooting asteroids as you wander off. While I was rummaging around the code for this, I stumbled across a quadratic formula implementation. On closer inspection I discovered that some smart cookie had actually implemented the cannon’s auto-targetting system for real! It actually tracked each asteroid’s velocity and speed and aimed ahead of the target to hit it with its slow-moving projectiles. I just assumed the whole thing would be playing a canned animation faking the cannon shooting at the asteroids. My hat goes off to the programmer that decided to solve that problem - it’s one of the very few times I’ve ever seen the quadratic formula used in gamedev!

I’d love to see a Linux distro attempt to implement a migration wizard for Windows users. Do all the heavy lifting for them, including walking them through what personal data and accounts they want to migrate across, creating a bootable USB installer, then running said installer and copying across their data for them. Maybe even detect and install any apps they’re using, or suggest FOSS alternatives. In practice I imagine this would be a nightmare to try and implement effectively, but it’d be pretty cool to see.

The “complicated” Fediverse signup process is actually the perfect filter. If someone isn’t willing to learn such a trivial process to gain access to an open decentralized discussion platform, then they really only have themselves to blame when they keep ending up in enshittified algorithmically-manipulated echo chambers.

It would be great to see a Fediverse GitHub alternative. Obviously we have plenty of self-hosted software forges around, but I’m not aware of any decentralized network solution. Allow people to host repositories on an instance, but be able to search, discuss and contribute to repositories across the entire network. That way you’d get the benefits of a large programmer community without needing to centralize to a single company or organization. Maybe this already exists and I’m unaware.

The official Python tutorial is very well written and is suitable for total beginners:

https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/

God, even if they didn’t have QA test it, they should have had continuous integration running to test all new channel updates against all versions of their program, considering the update will affect all of them. What an epic process failure.

… until you finally track down who wrote this mess, and it was you 5 years ago.

The older I get, the more I question the value of public companies vs the damage they do. As soon as you’ve got shareholders at large to please, you’re incentivized to keep your share price going up above all else, especially in the short term. Global stock markets seemed like a great idea at the time, but I feel they’re doing more damage than good at this end of capitalism.

Is it? I skimmed the GitHub source code and couldn’t see anything involving encryption, but it’s totally possible I missed something. Perhaps just accessing the database from python is enough to decrypt it.

Wow, it’s pretty wild they didn’t even attempt to encrypt or protect this data, even if it is local to your machine. What a treasure trove for malware to sift through.

A new deal is being forged with 4chan instead.

And imagine being the guy who’s got to clean out the train car afterwards of all the tiny pieces. Nightmare fuel.

Especially considering it scales by adjusting accuracy! That makes it very adaptable so it could be used everywhere from microcontrollers through to Google data servers.

I did some more research after your comment and it does indeed sound like it’s not for the feint of heart.

Spam seems to be one of the biggest challenges, both incoming and outgoing. For incoming, it’s a constant arms race with spammers to circumvent spam filtering techniques. But at least that’s something you have control over, you can just turn off your spam filtering and ensure you receive all important email. The real problem is ending up in other people’s spam filters, which you have very little control over once you’ve decided on your mail server domain/certificate.

The crux of the issue seems to be that SMTP is ancient insecure tech designed for an innocent era when email was for universities only. We desperately need a more secure open source email protocol designed for the modern era, but capitalism isn’t having it - instead we’ve got corporations wrestling for control of the next big thing with proprietary protocols… Discord, Slack etc. And big tech companies that continue using SMTP (Gmail, Outlook etc.) simply treat any servers outside their sphere with a high level of suspicion.

Has anyone tried self-hosting on a NAS or similar? I’d be interested to hear the practicalities of it, I imagine it’s not exactly set or forget, and the realities of the enshittified internet present some obstacles, like ending up in spam filters etc.

Would love to see the same tests with an adblocker installed.

I’ll level with you… I’ve never used Matrix either. 🤣 But all the cool kids around these parts recommend it, and I fundamentally agree with the cause of the project and saw they had the WeChat bridge, so thought I’d mention it.

Ah, that’s interesting and makes sense. So I guess your best option (if you must use WeChat) is to use the international version of the app with as many permissions disabled as possible.

Or maybe look at the Matrix WeChat bridge? https://matrix.org/ecosystem/bridges/wechat/

The US has absolutely atrocious employment laws, so yes they can: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment

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