Computers as tools for humans are so useful exactly because they can’t think and do tedious work like calculations or information storage and retrieval for humans in a deterministic way.
It took like nearly 90 years of digital computers to make them powerful enough to run a wasteful algorithm that pretends to think (but doesn’t) and to deliver bullshit non-deterministic results while using absurd amounts of computational and environmental resources.
Note: by that they mean they're going to use it as a way to fire everyone.
The intention of building AGI is not to improve the human condition, or to create a new, better kind of person. It's to create the ultimate slave, and leave all humanity to starve in poverty.
Cloud is popular because a lot of organizations don't even want to employ an IT department, let alone security specialists. It's the “cost center”/“profit center” brain worm that afflicts capitalists these days.
In the beginning, the computer was invented. It had many uses, and people saw that it was good, and much money was made.
Then, the Internet was invented. It, too, had many uses, and people saw that it was good, and much money was made.
Seeing this, the techbros concluded that people will see any new technology as good, and that much money will be made, and so they invented #cryptocurrency, and said that it had many uses and was good.
If I told you how much time I spent adjusting this so all the emulators + retroTerm fit right in borderless windows in the 800x600 box on the :commodore: monitor background you’d understand why I never get anything done 😅
This thing is actually my home server (Plex , Frigate, NAS etc but these MiniPCs have too much untapped power to just sit there doing nothing, so I hooked it up to the TV for some nerdy nostalgia in addition to a huge terminal.
I really wish there were good HTML/CSS layout engines for typesetting. Then there's no problem using exotic characters, arbitrary fonts, SVG images, you name it. Also, generating a web version of the document is trivial.
CSS has control flow? 🤨 I've been wrangling CSS for two decades, and not observed a control flow, unless you count later/more-specific declarations overriding earlier/less-specific ones.
Anyway, what else would I use for typesetting? The only other option I know of is TeX, and its problems seem even worse.
I did use DocBook+XSLT+XSLFO for typesetting a book once. I now consider that workflow to be a form of punishment.
I don't understand. Modern browsers render 20-year-old websites without a hitch, provided the resources are all available and don't do anything evil.
But yes, HTML/CSS typesetting engines should refuse to execute scripts or load remote resources. It's quite unfortunate that EPUB allows such things and merely “strongly encourage[s]” authors to avoid them. Goodness knows a lot of authors and publishers are much more concerned with short-term profit than long-term stability.
“A New York appeals court judge has rejected #Trump’s request to delay his April 15 hush money/interference criminal trial while he fights to move the case out of Manhattan.
The decision came Monday, a week before jury selection was set to start” #legal
People were expecting aliens? 🤨 Dude. It's the moon. It's a big, dumb ball of rock. No aliens anywhere to be found, and we did fly over there and check.
The thread is now so long it is increasingly breaking Mastodon, so I am making a new thread, starting here.
To recap, here's the entirety of the year-one thread in the most impractical possible format: A YouTube playlist containing 246 songs and running for just over 47 hours:
I would think that playing tracker music without hardware assistance (not everyone had a GUS) would impose more CPU load than decompressing MPEG.
But memory was still fairly expensive back then. Keeping an MPEG audio file (~3MB) in RAM would have used a significant fraction of the machine's total RAM (only 16MB). Most of Unreal's tracker songs are below 1MB.
That said, one of them, ENDEX.IT, is 3MB and plays for only 0:46. An MPEG version would have been significantly smaller!
I vaguely recall that MP3 decoding was royalty-free, and you only had to pay to encode. I'm not at all sure about that, though.
I could also be mistaken about the CPU load of MP3 decoding. Could've been too much.
And yeah, if that kind of compression couldn't be used for whatever reason, then you were pretty much stuck with either tracker music, MIDI, or CD-DA. Most games of that era used CD-DA, but Unreal and UT had a lot of music, probably too much to fit on a single disc.
The only other game I remember tracker music being in is Terminal Velocity. I gather a lot of Amiga games used it, since Amigas had hardware support for playing it, but I was on MS-DOS/Windows, where tracker music usually had to be played in software.
Some people had a GUS or AWE32/AWE64, and could play tracker music in hardware like on an Amiga, although the AWE32's 512kB of RAM meant that almost none of Unreal's tracks, and none of UT's, would have fit.
Didn't games at that time usually require the CD to be inserted for copy-protection reasons anyway? I know Quake 2 did, but I don't remember if UT did.
