@gregly@retro.pizza
@gregly@retro.pizza avatar

gregly

@gregly@retro.pizza

Ruby dev. Previously embedded-dev. Former “gifted” child. Frustrated creator. 45. Married, heteroflexible, cis, he/him.

You have nothing to prove. Be unapologetically yourself, for one day you shall die.

#fedi22 #fish #dogs #music #gamemusic #gamedev #programming #ruby #videogames #tech #electronics #retrogaming #retrocomputing #startrek #doctorwho #scifi #adhd

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eniko, to random
@eniko@peoplemaking.games avatar

me, revisiting code i havent touched in potentially years: wow why is this call pattern so convoluted

me, reading the comments: oh okay thanks past me

gregly,
@gregly@retro.pizza avatar

@eniko This is exactly why I advocate for code cleanup and smart comments in our code… too often the answer to a question is “nobody knows, the person who implemented this left four years ago”

(Or “oh, ignore that code, it’s been dead for ages” after I’ve spent a day trying to get it working 🤦🏻‍♂️)

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

This is a pretty basic, "and what's the deal with airline food??" kinda observation, but

It's just been brought to my attention that a Chrome tab takes up a minimum of 24 to 28 MB of RAM*, even if it's looking at about:blank or an empty HTML page. There are good engineering reasons it might work this way but I am also thinking about how my first computer-shaped computer** had 4 MB of RAM and that was like, an OS plus sophisticated full apps. Later we upgraded to 8 MB RAM and that was a big deal

gregly,
@gregly@retro.pizza avatar

@swetland @whitequark @mcc Hercules?

gregly, to random
@gregly@retro.pizza avatar

There are times I wish we could just start over with computers and the internet. Just reset to about 1987 or so, and try again from there. Back then computers sucked, but they sucked in a hopeful, “things are getting better all the time” sort of way — whereas now they suck in a “financialize, monetize, advertise, AI lies, software spies” sort of way.

We have more power than ever, and yet we have less power than ever. And the first warning was when “My Computer” became “This PC” in Windows.

gregly,
@gregly@retro.pizza avatar

We thought it was trite at the time, Win95 using “My Computer”, “My Documents”, “My Pictures”, etc. It was too cutesy, us nerds said.

But look at it now. “This PC”, “Documents”, “Photos”. No possessive pronouns anywhere. Almost as if Microsoft wants us to forget anything has ever been “ours”. When did that happen? Vista? Win7? I forget.

It’s a stupid little thing… and yet it’s troubling.

gregly, to random
@gregly@retro.pizza avatar

Me at 25: “I’m gonna run Cat-5 cabling through the attics of my entire house, no problem”

Me at 45: “I’ve installed one ceiling fan and I’m gonna pass out now”

gregly, to stackoverflow
@gregly@retro.pizza avatar

LLMs looting the internet will lead to a significant increase in insularity, barriers to entry, suspicion, and siloing by its users.

Expect to see an increase in invite-only forums and communities which vet everyone who applies for access to make sure they aren’t a scraper in a human suit. An increase in experts refusing to help newbies, for fear of their help being copied, mulched, and resold by massive corporations. A decrease in the “social” part of the net.

ephemeromorph, to random
@ephemeromorph@topspicy.social avatar

Does anyone have a NAS enclosure/drives to recommend or warn against? I assume they're all much of a muchness but I thought I'd ask in case someone said 'Never get a Pigfuck brand, it shagged my cat and salted my crops'.

gregly,
@gregly@retro.pizza avatar

@guffo @nikki @ephemeromorph As someone who lost a huge portion of his digital life to a drive crash, I strongly recommend doing so. You may not get a warning that the drive is gonna fail; I sure didn’t.

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

"Growing concerns" that Ozempic will disrupt big tobacco, candy companies, and alcohol brands, according to Morgan Stanley

Are GLP-1 drugs the first real threat to the hyper-processed food and alcohol industries?

https://curingaddiction.substack.com/p/growing-concerns-that-ozempic-will

gregly,
@gregly@retro.pizza avatar

@genecowan @cstross No, actually, because these sorts of drugs literally make you stop wanting those things! Ozempic and the like don’t get rid of the consequences; they alter the way the reward pathways in the brain operate, changing behavior. It’s fascinating, amazing, and terrifying all at once.

gregly, to random
@gregly@retro.pizza avatar

OH MY GOD THE NEXT CONSOLE GENERATION IS GONNA HAVE A BUNCH OF LLM BULLSHIT IN THEM AREN’T THEY

whitequark, to random
@whitequark@mastodon.social avatar

did you know: i really like computers (an FPGA is a computer for the purposes of this statement)

gregly,
@gregly@retro.pizza avatar

@whitequark I’ve always meant to teach myself FPGA programming but never find the time/motivation to do so. (It didn’t help that dev kits were pretty expensive until relatively recently…)

thpoll, to mechanicalkeyboards
@thpoll@mastodon.social avatar

Created a shortcut overlay for @inkscape Very satisfying to see the icons on the keycaps 🥹

image/jpeg
image/jpeg
image/jpeg

gregly,
@gregly@retro.pizza avatar

@thpoll Gorgeous keyboard! I think the space keys would throw me off, though… my thumbs are too inaccurate not to have a giant spacebar-blob to hit 😆

gregly, to random
@gregly@retro.pizza avatar

Okay, techbros. Look.

I don’t want an AI assistant. I don’t want self-driving cars. I don’t want a Mars colony. I don’t want robots that create art, or help with coding, or deliver food, or determine the most efficient way to maximize destruction when bombing civili—I mean “legitimate military targets”.

I just want a robot that CLEANS MY FUCKING BATHROOM FOR ME

gregly, to random
@gregly@retro.pizza avatar

I got a new router to replace our aging one, which just can’t handle the amount of traffic we sometimes have these days… but god, I do not want to have to port my existing network setup over. 😫

gregly,
@gregly@retro.pizza avatar

I actually got two new routers, one wired and one wireless, with the goal of splitting the two into their own subnets, before realizing that I don’t know if the Xfinity modem/router will let me hook both up to it while it is in dumb “pass through” mode. I can always daisy-chain them, but that sorta defeats the point — at that point I may as well replace one of the routers with a dumb switch or wireless access point.

gregly,
@gregly@retro.pizza avatar

At least it isn’t like my setup is complex. The home net uses 10.10.10.x because it’s easy to remember, and I have a couple dozen fixed IPs assigned via DNS. If I use two routers I’ll probably have one be 10.10.10.x and the other 10.10.1.x or something. My IP routing knowledge is awfully rusty, though, so hopefully it’ll be easy to make sure the two subnets can talk to each other.

gregly,
@gregly@retro.pizza avatar

@peter yeah, that might be a problem though: the edge router is currently Xfinity’s own modem/router set to dumb passthrough mode, because I’d rather not have them spying on/controlling my home setup. So I’m not sure if I’ll have the ability to manually set default routes on their router. (Or, hell, use more than one of its four LAN ports for that matter.)

masukomi, to transgender
@masukomi@connectified.com avatar

Well water in our area is polluted by a Teflon company that didn't give a 💩 about humans, only 💰. So we get bottled water from WB Mason.

Our delivery driver is wicked friendly, & a joy to interact with, but when we met him I was in Boy Mode. Now, it's getting warm out, so I'm going to have to out myself (ugh).

Also, he always says "hey buddy!" when he greets me and I realized, I can't think of a female or neutral equivalent for that. 🤔

gregly,
@gregly@retro.pizza avatar

@masukomi “Hail and well-met, friend” 😆

gregly,
@gregly@retro.pizza avatar

@mii Look, if big corporations want to pay everyone six figures to generate sexy catgirl (or catboy) porn on company time, I’m not gonna stop them. /s

gedeonm, to random
@gedeonm@mastodon.social avatar

Reason 14,456 Mastodon is better than Twitter: Yesterday after Iran launched its massive missle and drone strike on Israel, Twitter was awash with FUD about how Biden had started WWIII.

I’m not kidding, the entire site was one conspiracy thread after another that world war 3 was about to start. Air traffic closed over Washington DC, Netanyahu had left Israel in the only jet allowed to fly there, accompanied by spurious screenshots of air traffic radar. It’s still happening NOW.

Utter trash.

gregly,
@gregly@retro.pizza avatar

@gedeonm I think part of this is that a lot of Christofascists really want it to happen. Sure, they say they’re furious at Biden for it, but they think these events will kick off the Second Coming and they’ll all go to heaven while everyone they hate is sent to hell, and they are so excited for that to occur.

gregly, to random
@gregly@retro.pizza avatar

We’ve come a long way from the old days of BIOS flashing, but my anxiety always shoots through the roof when the system is totally nonresponsive, with no feedback whatsoever, for minutes, as it does whatever the hell it is doing.

gregly, to random
@gregly@retro.pizza avatar

So I’m watching a video about horrible Switch games, and I’ve come to a conclusion:

Gatekeeping is Good Actually™️.

…

Okay, obviously I’m saying something outrageous to catch your attention. Gatekeeping — as in keeping people out of groups/fandoms/etc. — is awful. What I really mean is that minor barriers to entry are good, particularly for markets.

Look at the absolute flood of shit drowning every market, everywhere. You know why it’s all there? Because it is EASY. it is CHEAP and EASY.

gregly, to mentalhealth
@gregly@retro.pizza avatar

Okay. My Mastodon feed is, on the whole, way nicer than my old Twitter feed, but the ratio of horrifying/depressing news to interesting/happy news is still way too high.

I’m looking for suggestions for generally happy/upbeat stuff and people to follow, to try and balance things out a bit. Because I want to stay informed of the lousy stuff happening in the world, but I don’t want to be utterly deluged by it.

ichderfisch, to gaming
@ichderfisch@ruhr.social avatar

Reading this is nuts. Google changed its algorithm and websites are on the brink of death. This is what gatekeeping is doing.

Hate to see it, as Retro Dodo is one of my favorite websites. I read their articles almost every day. I got their book and backed/preordered the upcoming two which might never be released now.

If you are into Retrogaming or are interested in modern handhelds, consider bookmarking their website and supporting them.

https://retrododo.com/google-is-killing-retro-dodo/

gregly,
@gregly@retro.pizza avatar

@ichderfisch @eniko We used to joke about Yahoo vs Google. “There’s no way Yahoo will be able to maintain a curated tree of Internet sites when anybody can just search for stuff on Google,” we said, and at the time we were right.

But given today’s web, now I’m wondering if some sort of curated database of links, perhaps combined with a distributed “curator trust rank” system, is the way to go.

gregly, to random
@gregly@retro.pizza avatar

I had really hoped to save enough money for retirement before the entire tech industry went down in flames screaming, but [gestures vaguely at everything going on for the past few years]

foone, to random
@foone@digipres.club avatar

it's funny that multiple jobs have been like "nah you don't have enough experience for a java developer job, we'd only hire you for doing CI/devops"

when I've got a codebase here from when I worked for the government. it's all in java. I wrote 90% of this. it's 55,000 lines.

gregly,
@gregly@retro.pizza avatar

@dannotdaniel @foone I believe before that you must create an EmotionFactoryFactory, and initialize it with a SadnessInterface

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