andrewt

andrewt, 13 days ago to random

Who called it "the God Particle" and not "M. Boson"?

andrewt, 16 days ago to random

If there are breadcrumbs in your toaster then you either need to clean out the crumb tray or redesign your UI.

andrewt, 17 days ago to random

The tech industry in a nutshell is that "prefers dark mode" is built into CSS and "is colourblind" is not. This should be a one-shot setting at the OS level, instead of telling every site individually.

andrewt, 22 days ago to random

I've been prototyping something based on @welshpixie's Celtic knot tutorial.

https://mastodon.art/@welshpixie/112496027266636193

The whole thing strikes me as art that's for creating rather than consuming, like life drawing or a mandala, so like, obviously my goal here is not to create computer-generated images so I don't have to draw them.

I'm playing with the maths of these knots with a view to seeing if there's a puzzle game in there, perhaps in a "get all the red dots on one knot and all the blue dots on another and you only have three walls to place" kind of deal.

Normally I'm a "stare at the puzzle and do logic until it breaks" kinda guy but given the nature of the source material it feels like this ought to be a more meditative "click around and chill out" vibe. But I've no idea, this isn't a fully-formed plan, it's just a poking-around "I bet there's a fun puzzle in here somewhere" dive.

andrewt, 23 days ago to random

"this is environmentally friendly, it says so on a blockchain"

A "genuine leather" tag photoshopped to say "100% vegan"

andrewt, 1 month ago to random

in 200 years whenever anyone coughs they're going to politely say "it's not covid" even though nobody knows what it means

andrewt, 1 month ago to random

🎶 I am a language model and I've been trained on the internet.
🎶 I've information half-remembered, unsourced and approximate.
🎶 I live inside your laptop, phone and apps and even wearables
🎶 With pushiness and arrogance that's verging on unbearable.
🎶 I mansplain as a service if you need me to "well actually"
🎶 And draw pictures of women with large breasts and polydactyly.
🎶 I'll regale the room with confident elucidati-on
🎶 And some of what I say won't even be hallucinati-on

andrewt, 1 month ago to random

I really enjoy how much the community of the fediverse is all about a deep love for a few important pictures of software and a deep, deep animosity towards nearly everyone who created any of it

andrewt, 1 month ago to random

andrewt, 2 months ago to random

they're putting toxins in the airbnbs! wake up sheeple! we need answers!

andrewt, 2 months ago to random

Playing around with a basic "2.5d" version of the #picotron map system

Definitely needs optimising, though, this is currently using ~80% of the CPU

a basic 2d level drifts around the viewport, but it's slightly 3d so you can see the edges of the blocks stretching off to a back wall that scrolls as if in parallax

andrewt, 2 months ago to random

I feel like the overall health of the web and tech generally has been going downhill for ages but it seems to be really accelerating at the moment.

The industry's pinballing from scam to scam; everyone's blog is on some centralised platform or other that doesn't make money and might vanish or ban you; email is entirely beholden to the whims of Google; things that would have been websites five years ago are at best Fandom wikis and at worst Discord chatrooms; half the results on Google are spam; half the products on Amazon and Etsy are fake; Twitter's not literally on fire but maybe it should be; all the most valuable "tech" businesses are just existing industries but ignoring all the regulations; anyone trying to set up their own business to compete with them is at the mercy of deeply conservative payment providers and app store owners; and even though it's still possible for any idiot with a raspberry pi and a broadband connection to set up a website in five minutes using nothing but a text editor. we've all agreed to pretend you need a Heroku stack and a whole React build process.

A part of me just hopes the whole stupid thing collapses and we can start again from scratch like we did when the web was first available.

andrewt, 2 months ago to random

Nasa are currently working to fix a computer error aboard Voyager 1. The probe's computer system runs at around 8000 instructions per second and has about 68kB of memory. Due to the interplanetary distances involved, even at light speed it takes 45 hours to send a signal and get a response. When asked about the unique challenges this poses, an engineer said "that's actually about average for a modern CI system".

andrewt, 2 months ago to random

someone explain how a collection of "over 50" megadrive games comes to 1.2GB

https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-Switch-games/SEGA-Mega-Drive-Classics--1476990.html

andrewt, 2 months ago to random

can't believe they convinced us all "potential energy" is a thing

"you see the energy isn't gone, it's been converted into potential energy" yes yes sure and your sandwich isn't gone, i converted it into potential sandwich

andrewt, 2 months ago to random

agile is going great

the "this is fine" meme, but all the fire has been photoshopped out

andrewt, 3 months ago to random

This sort of thing really puts me off ever buying another Apple device.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/03/dma-be-damned-apple-cuts-off-path-to-epic-games-store-fortnite-on-eu-iphones/

Like, I own some fairly locked-down devices. I'm no absolutist. But I find myself objecting to the way Apple always say "oh, the fact you can't install your own software? that's for security, it's a feature. oh, the fact you can't repair it? security feature. the fact you can't use firefox? feature. we're blocking PWAs, by the way, it's for security reasons, you're welcome" — all companies sugarcoat their motivations for anticompetitive and user-hostile behaviour. I have a Pixel phone and I'm not wild about everything Google do with those. But Apple do seem to impose much harsher restrictions on their users and tell much more insultingly transparent lies about why they're doing it than other similar companies.

andrewt, 3 months ago to random

what if the rapture happened years ago and nobody noticed because only like fifteen people made the cut?

andrewt, 3 months ago to random

Oh, hey, I get a mention in the new FOTSN podcast 😁
https://festivalofthespokennerd.com/podcast/series-3-episode-4/

andrewt, 3 months ago to random

Tell you what, generative AI will probably be really good once it's been trained on one or two hundred more internets.

andrewt, 4 months ago to random

When people talk about sentences that would have made no sense decades ago, it's always things like "my galaxy can't bluetooth my android nexus" and never things like "if you like this video, please consider liking it"

andrewt, 4 months ago to random

The Vision Pro is pretty heavy, but the fan intakes are on the bottom and the vents are on the top, so maybe if you run the fan hard enough it'll feel a bit lighter?

andrewt, 4 months ago to random

IEEE floating point numbers are named after the noise mathematicians make when you explain how they work

andrewt, 4 months ago to random

This video about Jubensha, a kind of alternative version of murder mystery parties that's been taking off in China, makes it sound so much better than any murder mystery party I've attended — if for no other reason than you get a full-on booklet of information about your character. The western ones make no sense. You get a single sentence of backstory, then people ask you questions you haven't been told the answer to, while you question the other players who you know full well have no real idea about their character either.

#https://youtu.be/6_dlxbGUNNQ?si=-yf7cB7o9KJjgUyp

andrewt, 5 months ago to random

Whenever someone tells me their name, I enter my Memory Palace, stand around for a bit, and then say "what did I come in here for?"