@chriscunningham@mastodon.social
@chriscunningham@mastodon.social avatar

chriscunningham

@chriscunningham@mastodon.social

Opinions not my employers etc. He/him

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stefan, (edited ) to internet
@stefan@stefanbohacek.online avatar

The web can be such a small world sometimes. Has this ever happened to you?

You look up an answer to a question you have, or come across someone's fun side project, look at the author, and -- hey, that's a friend of mine!

chriscunningham,
@chriscunningham@mastodon.social avatar

@stefan increasingly commonly, the author is literally me from 10 years ago

eniko, to random
@eniko@peoplemaking.games avatar

of course rust isn't the perfect language for game development. that would be qbasic

chriscunningham,
@chriscunningham@mastodon.social avatar

@eniko a guy I went to uni with wrote the program for his thesis (which, because he was from the extreme north of scotland, was a potato management simulator) in qbasic. he is now wildly successful

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

So on the one hand, we have a lot of fun on here making fun of Python packaging systems. But on the other hand, have you considered: JavaScript packaging systems

chriscunningham,
@chriscunningham@mastodon.social avatar

@mcc a couple of years back for work I had to learn that PHP now has a rich packaging ecosystem and learning just how PHP it was all the way down gave me a warm fuzzy feeling about python for weeks

foone, to random
@foone@digipres.club avatar

Anyone know an easy way to show a full screen image in windows 95?
I thought I could use mspaint but it turns out it adds a 1px border in full-screen mode.

I could write a simple win32 app but that seems like a lot of work for something this simple

chriscunningham,
@chriscunningham@mastodon.social avatar

@foone trivially, you could install irfanview 4.4 and then just hit the fullscreen key

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

I remember https://mastodon.social/@256/112327140220436419

chriscunningham,
@chriscunningham@mastodon.social avatar

@mcc I didn't start work at sun until 2006 and yet internal sun ID user passwords still had an eight-character cap at that point

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Looking into how to set up a bluesky server.

Noticed this bit here, in the documentation. That's an interesting way to spell "cannot"

chriscunningham,
@chriscunningham@mastodon.social avatar

@mcc honestly hats off to them if they have developed a shell script that can reliably and silently install docker in a cross-distro manner

is it total brain worms? absolutely. but curl-to-bash, and technology in the 2020s in general, is all about plunging one's hand enthusiasically into the pain box

chriscunningham,
@chriscunningham@mastodon.social avatar

@mcc I admire the commitment to idempotence ("if there is already a key, throw it away") and that despite having been in the industry for over 20 years this is the first time I've ever seen what the long argument for "mkdir -p" is (presumably because a linter complained)

fasterthanlime, to random
@fasterthanlime@hachyderm.io avatar

yesterday I learned about Split Ticketing in Great Britain and:

  1. ???
  2. the fuck
  3. is any other country doing this?

https://www.thetrainline.com/trains/great-britain/split-tickets

chriscunningham,
@chriscunningham@mastodon.social avatar

@fasterthanlime for extra fun, you are not expected to tap out on buses, where if you tap out you will be charged again

jonny, to random
@jonny@neuromatch.social avatar

Speaking strictly about churches as buildings, its super dope to have a building kind that has humongous bells in it.

chriscunningham,
@chriscunningham@mastodon.social avatar

@jonny I must respectively disagree, having spent three years living within earshot of this extremely silly building, which chimed every single hour of the entire year

chriscunningham,
@chriscunningham@mastodon.social avatar

@jonny IT'S THREE O'CLOCK IN THE MOOOOOOORRNNIIIIIINNNG

whitequark, to random
@whitequark@mastodon.social avatar

looks at Lattice devboard dated 2019 why did they go back from micro-B to mini-B?!

what on earth would possess somebody to put a mini-B connector on a new devboard from 2019? did they run out of micro-B's and found a crate of mini-B's? did they get a kickback? so few options

chriscunningham,
@chriscunningham@mastodon.social avatar

@whitequark fun story: it is actually illegal to put a mini-b socket on any device which is not covered in that soft-touch rubber crap which disintegrates into a tar-like slime after three years

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Today's horrible computer discovery: Github will not let you create a pull request from repo A to repo B unless there is specifically a fork relationship in github.com's database from repo A to repo B. It doesn't help for the git commits to simply be all the same. If there is a way to create this fork relationship after the fact I couldn't find one, so I wound up renaming a github repo to move it out of the way, then forking a new one, then rerunning the git push

chriscunningham,
@chriscunningham@mastodon.social avatar

@whitequark @mcc on the plus side, GitHub support is ridiculously good. Even free randos get better support than you'd expect from, say, a six-figure corporate AWS support contact

Craigp, to random
@Craigp@mastodon.social avatar

OK, OK, let's talk about TTRPG stats.

In recent decades we've seen stats get smaller, both in terms of numerical value and in terms of number of stats. And this is fine, but let's talk a little about larger stat ranges.

One seemingly strange thing about D&D is the way that stats "actually" range from -3 to 3, but it's printed as 3-18, right?

There so many "useless" values that resolve to the same result. 9-12 is all the same number. 13&14? Same value. 15&16? Same value.

chriscunningham,
@chriscunningham@mastodon.social avatar

@Craigp diablo 2 did this exactly right, and one of my favourite characters was a melee necromancer who did the job with a giant fuck-off two handed sword

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

A URL with "/cgi-bin/" in it

chriscunningham,
@chriscunningham@mastodon.social avatar

@mcc the only way to top this is a url that ends with ".dll"

patrickhadfield, to random
@patrickhadfield@mastodon.scot avatar

This article suggests Labour might have a majority of 286 after a general election. Such a large majority, meaning Labour don't have to listen to other views, could be a disaster. I hope that other parties - LibDems, Greens, SNP and Plaid - and even, dare I say it, Reform (though the more deposits they lose the better) - see a Tory rout as an opportunity and make as many gains as they can.

"Conservatives set for worst election result yet, research shows"
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/mar/30/conservatives-set-for-worst-election-result-yet-research-shows?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

chriscunningham,
@chriscunningham@mastodon.social avatar

@fkamiah17 @patrickhadfield Labour have been happily and enthusiastically working with the Tories in Scotland for decades and that's with the express consent of the current leadership. A result which leaves them the junior partners in a unity government that basically just does all the same things the Tories do already but nets them ministerial Jaguars is their absolute ideal result

Craigp, to random
@Craigp@mastodon.social avatar

It is extremely funny to me that 99.9% of yacht salesmen and used yacht dealers can't afford to buy even one of their own product.

Can you imagine a used car dealer that can't afford to buy a car?

chriscunningham,
@chriscunningham@mastodon.social avatar

@Craigp thing is, historically it's been perfectly commonplace for salespeople to not be in the income bracket for the things they're selling? Also it's not like people pay cash for new cars is it? I assume pretty much every body in the world is on finance (and none of the people doing the finance could afford to buy the boats outright either)

whitequark, to random
@whitequark@mastodon.social avatar

i used to be far, far more loud about "thing bad", often in that FOSS enthusiast way that many of you (over 25, anyway) are probably quite tired of

at some point i realized that while thing is, indeed, bad, being loud about that rarely has any effect, and decided that instead i will put that effort into finding ways to make thing not bad; in changing it myself, in being a force multiplier, or relying on others to be a force multiplier

chriscunningham,
@chriscunningham@mastodon.social avatar

@whitequark, I've found that once one has done the necessary work to make Thing X unnecessary, one can casually note "Thing X is bad" on the relevant slides of one's presentations about its replacement, as a little treat

badlogic, to random
@badlogic@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

orange site parenting

chriscunningham,
@chriscunningham@mastodon.social avatar

@MudMan @badlogic random YouTube clips still at least theoretically have some oversight function built into them. Also "this is probably not worse than the worst thing which has existed until now" is not especially compelling

chriscunningham,
@chriscunningham@mastodon.social avatar

@MudMan @badlogic tbqh the actual live action stuff that people do for toddlers on youtube is pretty much equally weird and terrifying to the generated stuff, at least now that the elsa spider stuff has been dealt with

apropos of nothing, interesting to me that in star trek, holodeck programs always have a sentient author. they never just tell the computer to make it up

chriscunningham,
@chriscunningham@mastodon.social avatar

@MudMan @badlogic iirc every time this happens it's a plot element which spells disaster for the unlucky holodeck participant, which is somewhat of a counterargument

Craigp, to random
@Craigp@mastodon.social avatar

When looking back on it, do you think the AI boom will be thought of as more or less foolish than the radioactive toothpaste boom?

chriscunningham,
@chriscunningham@mastodon.social avatar

@Craigp radioactive toothpaste didn't raise global temperatures by like one degree celsius by itself, fwiw

Craigp, to random
@Craigp@mastodon.social avatar

You know, I do have an almost embarrassing weakness for people comparing fictional ships, but so many people don't do it right.

We're here for a narrative. A story.

Anyone that's like

"The Hogglebock has a max fuel range of 99.287 but the Burfergurfer has a max fuel range of 102.875, the Hogglebock has a max battery of 921.751, and the Burfergurfer has-"

What are you doing? Anyone can read the fucking stats and you're being boring.

chriscunningham,
@chriscunningham@mastodon.social avatar

@Craigp it's amazing that roughly half the books in the Honor Harrington series have, as a climactic element, a thirty page explanation of the relative merits of two opposing sides' missiles as they spend thirty minutes approaching one another, and that somehow this ends up being exciting

chriscunningham,
@chriscunningham@mastodon.social avatar

@Craigp also a refreshing case of boomer military fiction that gets massively, markedly more progressive as it goes (to the point where the author's own inserted political opinions from the early books are subsequently retconned as Sinister Cult Interference)

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

A good "puzzle" for a point and click adventure game would be that in order to get something or do something you have to send someone a fax, and this touches off a multi-hour quest to find the one remaining fax machine in your city and be allowed to use it

chriscunningham,
@chriscunningham@mastodon.social avatar

@mcc my new year's resolution is to figure out how to get my HP M283fdw (the f is for fax) to actually send one

my real-life example of this one is my first ever ecommerce transaction (on the long-departed QXL) where upon winning an auction I was confronted by the horror of needing either a credit card or a chequebook, neither of which I had ever even seen

Craigp, to random
@Craigp@mastodon.social avatar

I still hate this thing where every webpage has an app.

It works fine as a web page. Why are you trying to be an app?

Even Mastodon has a mandatory five second popup begging me to get the fucking app.

chriscunningham,
@chriscunningham@mastodon.social avatar

@Craigp this goes the other way as well tbf. If you have to keep your work email open all day in a browser tab, or either that open it in some weird halfway house desktop web app that shuts if you close your browser, you're not winning either way

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