@eschaton@mastodon.social
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eschaton

@eschaton@mastodon.social

Work on tools for people to do work. Play with old computers in my spare time. Only ever speaking for myself.

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eschaton, to random
@eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

@siracusa @atpfm QuickDraw 3D was contemporaneous with the Game Sprockets APIs but it wasn’t actually a game API. It was a retained-mode scene graph API like SGI Inventor, NeXT 3DKit, or SceneKit. It sat atop a low level immediate-mode API like OpenGL called RAVE that supported hardware acceleration, and that was what games targeted.

We got MechWarrior 2 working really well on RAVE, which was sad because that version was only available as a pack-in with some 3D accelerators (but worked on all).

eschaton, (edited ) to random
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I often find myself wishing the far right’s paranoid delusions about Soviet-supported Communist infiltration of American academia (referred to as “the Frankfurt school” in those circles) were true.

If our economics departments and business schools actually dealt seriously with issues like labor theory of value and the purpose of economies instead of tautological Ayn Rand bullshit, they wouldn’t have failed humanity as utterly as they have.

eschaton, (edited )
@eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

One of the most basic questions in economics is, “What is an economy for?” The answer historically has been, “To most efficiently allocate goods and services.”

The wool that’s been pulled over everyone’s eyes is right there, in a single word: “Efficiently.” There is a common-sense definition that almost everyone uses when they refer to efficiency, but that’s not the way economists—or, at least, Western economists, the most massively dominant kind—use it.

eschaton,
@eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

The common-sense definition of “efficient allocation of goods and services” is the allocation that provides the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people, possibly even ensuring a baseline standard of living for all. Whenever anyone who isn’t a trained economist or fellow-traveler uses it, that’s what they mean. And that’s the trap that Western economists have laid.

eschaton, (edited )
@eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

The definition of “efficiency” used by Western economists sounds almost the same, at first blush: The allocation of goods and services that most matches the preferences of the members of the economy. That certainly sounds reasonable, right? Here’s the problem: There are humans alive today who prefer to get imperceptibly wealthier more than you or anyone you know or have ever known, combined, prefers to simply be alive.

eschaton,
@eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

One guess as to who actually pays for academic economics departments, and their fellow-travelers in business schools.

eschaton,
@eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

There's a reason that Ayn Rand-related scholarships are exclusively associated with economics and business and not philosophy: Her bullshit was immediately laughed out of academic philosophy, while it was embraced by economists and business schools.

eschaton,
@eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

@danjac Yes, he was one of her direct acolytes and lovers.

eschaton,
@eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

@danjac No, you see, it was all about values, and that’s why her husband couldn’t be with anyone he wanted to but she could.

eschaton,
@eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

@danjac This is also why it wasn’t at all contradictory that she received Social Security and Medicare under her government name but anyone else who did so was such an immoral leach on society as to be subhuman.

eschaton,
@eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

@danjac Oh, no, those didn’t go to Ayn Rand the author, those checks went to Alice O’Connor the natural person! Totally different!

eschaton, to random
@eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

@siracusa Sure, some people were calling it the "Jesus phone,” but if they really wanted to emphasize its popularity they'd have called it the "Beatles phone." ;)

schwa, to random
@schwa@mastodon.social avatar

deleted_by_author

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    eschaton,
    @eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

    @KevinHoctor @ij_baird @schwa @rickfillion Who would ever dream of playfully disrupting your… holiday in Cambodia?

    eschaton,
    @eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

    @KevinHoctor @ij_baird @schwa @rickfillion It’s tough, kid, but it’s life!

    cstross, to random
    @cstross@wandering.shop avatar

    Raspberry Pi is planning a London IPO, but its CEO expects “no change” in focus

    — Yeah, right.

    I am looking forward to my Raspberry Pi 7 which will arrive with Windows 11 pre-installed, cost a mere £25, and use the bottom 25% of the desktop for streaming ads (while snooping on my every keystroke). Because this is how enshittification proceeds …

    https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/raspberry-pi-is-preparing-for-an-ipo-in-london-for-likely-more-than-500m/

    eschaton,
    @eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

    @cstross They jumped the shark when they hired a fucking cop and then doubled down when it was pointed out that they hired a fucking cop.

    eschaton, to random
    @eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

    Modifying the look and feel of HTML form elements is something that never should have been supported.

    eschaton,
    @eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

    @sanguish Amen.

    cfi, to random
    @cfi@mastodon.social avatar

    One beautiful underrated pattern in Swift is writing your own ExpressibleBy* types. Give richer semantic meaning to Strings and Ints, use stronger types, enable more fluid callsites, document your weird constants

    eschaton,
    @eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

    @cfi This is good, but making every one of them ExpressibleByStringLiteral is bad in the same way as operator overloading and type inference: All of these make it impossible to look at code in isolation and understand its behavior.

    eschaton, to random
    @eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

    Is there anything like git-fossil so I don’t have to learn yet another DVCS and can just use git for read access to a Fossil repository?

    micahflee, to random

    35% of Americans believe Israel is committing genocide https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/24/americans-believe-israel-committing-genocide-poll

    eschaton,
    @eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

    @jamesmarshall @Dubikan @micahflee He did when he referenced Amalek.

    bynkii, to random
    @bynkii@mastodon.social avatar

    https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/111807101144724924

    Thing that no one in that group will give a squid’s shit about:

    Making it stupid easy to use in a default save configuration

    Making setting them up in a mesh config easy

    Making setting up a safe IoT network easy

    Ease of use is never a priority for the open source lot.

    eschaton,
    @eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

    @bynkii That’s why I’ve been going with MikroTik rather than OpenWRT as I replace my old AirPort hardware and do some more specialized networking tasks. Easy to use for default configurations but powerful enough to handle my weird retrocomputing needs. (I have a couple separate µTik hAP configured to act as physical-layer tunnels to a network shared among friends, so we can use non-IP protocols like PUP, Chaosnet, XNS, DECnet, Apollo, and AppleTalk with each other.)

    eschaton, to random
    @eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

    Because I was a band nerd and clarinet fingerings got hardwired into my hands in 5th & 6th grades, I have Yamaha WX-7 and WX-5 wind controllers as well as the Yamaha VL-70m woodwind simulating tone generator and MIDI adapter. I went to play the WX-7 tonight and the VL-70m doesn’t recognize it, which turns out to be a symptom of something familiar: Fucking 47µF SMT electrolytic capacitors in need of replacement!

    eschaton,
    @eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

    @pcbeard It’s not like a saxophone isn’t just a metal clarinet. ;)

    eschaton, to retrocomputing
    @eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

    So I had a realization: The QuickTime movie format would make a good format for archival and preservation of streaming tape data. https://eschatologist.net/blog/?p=409

    eschaton,
    @eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

    @dryak There are some additional layers of abstraction in QuickTime that aren’t present in many other media container formats like Ogg, as they’re “presentation formats” while QuickTime is an editing format. (For example, my understanding of Ogg is that it doesn’t have a track versus track media distinction.)

    eschaton,
    @eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

    @jaredj No, a lot of media container formats are output/rendering/presentation formats rather than general purpose formats that can be used for both editing and presentation, and a lot also bake in CODEC details instead of having the layered abstractions that QuickTime does. Additionally, there are no concerns about licensing, the QuickTime format has been documented openly from the start.

    eschaton,
    @eschaton@mastodon.social avatar

    @thias Exactly! And other metadata too, for tape labels and such.

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