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mindbleach

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mindbleach ,

I do not want to see his autocomplete for “how to root.”

mindbleach ,

It’s the trigger - like a weedwhacker. The actual firing mechanism is on the bottom of the handle. You use your little finger. Any small children or pre-warp civilizations just assume it’s designed to be convenient and fumble about uselessly. Nah: if Starfleet can’t make a dangerous tool smart enough to say no, they make using it a pain in the ass.

mindbleach ,

That’s how Stargate had a time-travel episode to 1969, and the worst writing decision was about getting rid of a footlocker.

mindbleach ,

The Goncharov is a segfault.

mindbleach ,

I typed in some Wario Land music on my Nokia’s 10-key pad. And then didn’t use it because it sounded like ass.

mindbleach ,

Tanks don’t exactly have spacious windows.

mindbleach ,

Oh sorry, in the US it’s classified as a light truck.

mindbleach ,

Only if you mean your mom.

mindbleach , (edited )

Async got popular when the choices for clientside code in the browser were “Javascript” or “go fuck yourself.” It’s an utterly miserable way to avoid idiotic naive while() stalling. But it was the only way.

mindbleach ,

My previous PSU had one extremely noisy fan. I wasn’t about to open a power supply… so I stuck a plastic tab on the outer grille, so that fan simply could not spin.

I used that computer for about ten years.

mindbleach ,

Bonsai STONITH.

mindbleach ,

Oh yeah, and it’s been used since forever. IIRC there are Commodore 64 components with the same power cord as a modern-ass PC PSU.

mindbleach ,

UK’s are hilariously over-engineered. Might as well have a puzzle mechanism on the back, to make sure you really meant to power that toaster.

Breakers in every socket are a neat idea, though. And power switches at the socket make a lot more sense than US homes where some wall switches control some sockets, somewhere. Good luck!

mindbleach ,

Y’know how Discord is an application that only does one website?

That.

It’d look like that.

Outside the web, even in this timeline, there’s been no shortage of internet-centric programs. Napster would still emerge, leading to Limewire and BitTorrent. Streaming services like Netflix would probably exist, but only if video-streaming applications like RealPlayer took off. There’s little reason Youtube could not have worked as a glorified file server. You’d show up and need to install some video client to do anything, but that’s not really different from how everyone had to install Flash.

Even leading into the dot-com boom - Prodigy, CompuServe, and early AOL were walled gardens. You could use services those programs provided, or, you could dial in and then run Quake. People were buying computers and getting modems to use instant messaging and e-mail as much as to browse webrings or use a search engine.

IRC would be huge. Comments here predicting no competition are severely overlooking that decentralized chat protocol, and how people to-this-day form weird little communities. Hell, they’re more centralized now, thanks to the aforementioned Discord.

And in this application-centric internet - games would be a lot cooler, a lot sooner. Flash was a forward-looking godsend for about three years, back when it was mostly Shockwave. Once games demanded 3D hardware and even iMacs had it, the explosion of webgames was still rigidly 2D. Ultimate Doom was a “look what your browser can do now!” demo in 2000, 2004, and 2008… using technology from late 1992. When some maniac ported Quake 2 to browsers, he had to use Java.

Without browsers, there’d be nothing weird about being asked to download an executable and run it. It could be as fancy and modern as the developers liked. Obviously it could also be a virus that makes you reinstall Windows 98 for the fifth time this year, but Flash was damn near as vulnerable as that, and you’d never catch that virus from a friggin’ banner ad inviting you to punch a monkey.

The wrong-est take in this thread is expecting open-source ultranerds to wither. Nah: we’d be the ones pushing the biggest formats, by coagulating similar services into one place. The Fediverse is trying to staple together a Reddit clone, a Tumblr clone, and a Twitter clone. You don’t think we’d meld all the Wiki apps together? Or unify whatever here’s-some-text services people host, the way instant messaging protocols were swallowed by Pidgin? We’d recreate the browser by accident. Not as a starry-eyed Hypercard clone or a jumped-up document viewer, but as a way to run code in a sandbox without having to explicitly install it. Java instead of Javascript. Jesus Christ how horrifying.

mindbleach ,

People would still have computers for office applications and games. Hardware would still get cheaper into the late 90s thanks to AMD nipping at Intel’s heels and assorted companies building IBM PC clones. Quake would still demonstrate netplay, and Unreal Tournament would still get a Mac port.

If nothing else, it’d come to computers via smartphones, which existed well before any of them had serious browsers. A global telecom network already existed. It was just voice-centric and mostly analog.

mindbleach ,

Yeah pretty much. Two major differences: not motivated by surveillance, and not pushed when you try using a normal website. There are no websites.

You’d also be running multiple services at once, the way people will leave a torrent client, IM client, and IRC client open. Or at least idle in the system tray. Not sure if the constant sound effects are more or less of a vortex antipattern than persistent notifications.

mindbleach ,

You are here.

mindbleach ,

The less-ridiculous version of this would be “metal storm” sequential cartridgeless rounds. Basically a tube that goes rifling, bullet, powder, bullet, powder, bullet, powder, bullet, powder, etc. Pull one trigger and get a very tight grouping for an absolute stream of lead. Skimp on rifling and it’s more of a death cone.

Of course the goal is probably closer to a one-gauge shotgun. You want a flying ball of death that says, fuck everything in this general direction. Ideally with the visual impact of the shotguns in Armored Core 6, because god damn, reach for the stars.

mindbleach ,

See also machinegun jetpack.

mindbleach ,

He was mildly autistic with a wooden thumb, and it was his favorite week of the year.

mindbleach ,

If you set them to single-fire (giant asterisk) or three-round burst, it’d be a fantastic way to perforate an area instead of a line. Maybe mix-and-match so each pull gets you a dense wavefront, then a thinner hail of bullets, and then a couple streams that stop working shortly after contact with the enemy.

At the very least, have a separately-triggered one in the middle, set to single-fire and filled with tracers. Walk it in to be about right… and “about right” will get the job done.

mindbleach ,

Backend developer for certain, owing to ponytail theory.

Shame the original wording is so 2005. And right-to-left, for some reason.

mindbleach ,

Men can have ponytails.

Men’s ponytails can look dumb.

mindbleach ,

Wolf-goat-cabbage problem. You gotta keep 'em separated.

mindbleach ,

“River crossing puzzle” is apparently the generic term.

And it’s at least thirteen centuries old.

And it maps to the vertex cover problem, so it’s NP-complete? Wow, okay. All around the world we’re doing computer science by accident.

mindbleach ,

Some code has bugs.

Some code has ghosts.

mindbleach ,

“Concave?”

mindbleach ,

I do some 8-bit coding and only last month realized logarithms allow dirt-cheap multiplication and division. I had never used them in a context where floating-point wasn’t readily available. Took a function I’d painstakingly optimized in 6502 assembly, requiring only two hundred cycles, and instantly replaced it with sixty cycles of sloppy C. More assembly got it down to about thirty-five… and more accurate than before. All from doing exp[ log[ n ] - log[ d ] ].

Still pull my hair out doing anything with tangents. I understand it conceptually. I know how it goddamn well ought to work. But it is somehow the fiddliest goddamn thing to handle, despite being basically friggin’ linear for the first forty-five degrees. Which is why my code also now cheats by doing a (dirt cheap!) division and pretending that’s an octant angle.

mindbleach ,

Oh, Lord Nikon.

mindbleach ,

“I do not recognize the bodies in the water.”

mindbleach ,

It’s simpler than that: fascists lie.

mindbleach ,

Yesterday I tried using an honest-to-god pointer pointer pointer, and I think the compiler refused on moral grounds.

mindbleach ,

The real solution is designing around the problem. Pretend everyone has an aimbot and make aim matter less.

Players want to pull the trigger the moment their crosshairs touch the enemy? The game could just… do that. It’s only an instant-win button if, for some reason, bullets are perfectly accurate when you just whipped your mouse around to land on a guy.

These games already add inaccuracy for movement. Why not for mouse movement? If you’re holding an angle and someone walks into it, yeah, you should definitely hit them; you correctly predicted what they’d do. If you’re smoothly tracking to align with someone, you should have great odds. If you did a 360 no-scope, get real. Why would that be any more accurate than leaping around wildly and hip-firing a submachinegun? A rifle bullet will be more accurate out the barrel, but you’ve expressed no precise control over where the barrel is pointed.

mindbleach ,

Positioning, prediction, economy, teamwork, movement? Basically - ask any hardcore FPS player what they do besides click on heads. (And then watch them twist in pretzels to insist that clicking on heads is the heart and soul of the game and there’d be nothing left if that was changed in any way.)

Wallhacks can stay forbidden. They’re detectable through gameplay. Especially when the server can straight-up lie to players about enemies just around a corner or off in the distance. Dummies can even be sent to the renderer, if they’re all masked by cheap occlusion queries. The client does not need to know until a player is nearly onscreen.

mindbleach ,

Britain: unitaskers.

France: unicycles.

mindbleach ,

Counterpoint.

mindbleach ,

Now see if “programming socks” do anything for you.

mindbleach ,

“Y’all can bury me loose.”

mindbleach ,

Oh great.

mindbleach ,

I wanna show this comment to someone in 2004 with no context.

mindbleach ,

It can always get worse.

mindbleach ,

If buying isn’t ownership then piracy isn’t theft.

mindbleach ,

Blah blah blah. Shove that copyright-maximalist take. You own things, god dammit. Even if you only own your copy of a book, it’s not somehow an ink-and-paper license to a copy, it is your copy. That’s what ownership means.

If you don’t know the difference between individual property and intellectual property, stop spitting at people who do.

mindbleach ,

Blunt rejection of scolding is not where the problem started.

mindbleach ,

‘No, see, he meant exactly what you thought he meant.’

Again: I know the difference between individual property and intellectual property. I am condemning the corporate word-games that would deny one of those exists, and the the tutting of people who take that for granted. I don’t need a fucking primer.

mindbleach ,

I’d probably still be using my CeBIT-branded IntelliMouse Explorer if it hadn’t been jostled by too many backpack rides. It was just plain good.

mindbleach ,

What The Commit provides a list of all-purpose messages to randomly select between. Would these be better?

mindbleach ,

No. Nintendo goes after fan games about Nintendo properties - on any platform. They don’t really give a shit about new games for their old platforms, in general.

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