duncesplayed

@duncesplayed@lemmy.one

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duncesplayed,

To be honest I’m more concerned by language-humor. Like not even saying what kind of humour, just any type of humour at all. Jokes are for adults only!

duncesplayed,

Some extra info about Sierra’s game engines…

AGI was indeed first used in KQ1, though earlier Sierra adventure games (even going back to Mystery House in 1980) used something extremely similar. AGI was just formalizing what they’d done before and setting it as a common platform for all future games.

In those days, it was, of course, not possible to write an entire adventure game in machine code because there wasn’t even memory to hold more than a handful of screens. The use of bytecode was as much a compression scheme as anything else. So AGI was just a bytecode interpreter. Vector graphics primitives (e.g., draw line, flood fill) could be written in just a few bytes, much better than machine code.

Ken Williams made a splash with early Sierra games because he had an extremely simple insight that most others at the time didn’t seem to have: for graphics operations, allow points to be on even-numbered x coordinates only. Most platforms had a horizontal resolution of 320, too much for 1 byte. Ken Williams had his early game engines divide every x coordinate by 2 so that it could fit into a single bit (essentially getting only 160 horizontal pixels). A silly trick, but it got big memory savings, and allowed him to pack more graphics into RAM than many other people could at the time.

After AGI (KQ3 was the last King’s Quest to use AGI), Sierra switched over to their new game engine/bytecode interpreter: SCI. SCI was rolled out in two stages, though.

SCI0 (e.g., KQ4) was 16 colours and still revolved around the text parser. SCI1 (e.g., KQ5) was 256 colours and was point-and-click. (SCI2 and later were full multimedia)

For the game player, the major differences you’ll notice between AGI and SCI0 (both 16 colours, both text-based) are that SCI0 renders using dithering, gets full horizontal precision (x coordinates stored in 2 bytes), multiple fonts, support for real sound devices (MT32, Adlib). For the programmer, though, AGI and SCI0 were pretty radically different. SCI0 as a programming language was an object-oriented vaguely Scheme-inspired sort of language, and was actually pretty radically different from AGI.

duncesplayed,

Yeah during the reddit exodus, people were recommending to overwrite your comment with garbage before deleting it. This (probably) forces them to restore your comment from backup. But realistically they were always going to harvest the comments stored in backup anyway, so I don’t think it caused them any more work.

If anything, this probably just makes reddit’s/SO’s partnership more valuable because your comments are now exclusive to reddit’s/SO’s backend, and other companies can’t scrape it.

duncesplayed,

WWII sent a very clear message. You can annex Austria. You can invade Czechoslovakia. You can take over Lithunia. But you don’t fuck with Poland

Well, I mean, you can fuck with Poland a little bit. You just can’t take over, like, too much of Poland.

duncesplayed,

According to here, Vermont and Utah do not have any titled players. At least Oregon has a FM.

duncesplayed,

Why the quotes?

If you ever see quotation marks in a headline, it simply means they’re attributing the word/phrase to a particular source. In this case, they’re saying that the word “security” was used verbatim in the intranet document. Scare quotes are never used in journalism, so they’re not implying anything by putting the word in quotation marks. They’re simply saying that they’re not paraphrasing.

duncesplayed,

The article mentions they’ll continue making the eZ80. If you’re in the middle of making a PCB around the Z80, you’ll just have to change the pins, I guess.

duncesplayed,

Heads up for anyone (like me) who isn’t already familiar with SimpleX, unfortunately its name makes it impossible to search for unless you already know what it is. I was only able to track it down after a couple frustrating minutes after I added “linux” into the search on a lark.

Anyway it’s a chat protocol

Microsoft’s VASA-1 can deepfake a person with one photo and one audio track (arstechnica.com)

On Tuesday, Microsoft Research Asia unveiled VASA-1, an AI model that can create a synchronized animated video of a person talking or singing from a single photo and an existing audio track. In the future, it could power virtual avatars that render locally and don’t require video feeds—or allow anyone with similar tools to...

duncesplayed,

If you pump out enough research papers, maybe Microsoft won’t move you over to the Office team.

duncesplayed,

Reminds me a little of the old Jonathan Shapiro research OSes (Coyotos, EROS, CapROS), though toned down a little bit. The EROS family was about eliminating the filesystem entirely at the OS level since you can simulate files with capabilities anyway. Serenum seems to be toning that down a little and effectively having file- or directory-level capabilities, which I think is sensible if you’re going to have a capability-based OS, since they end up being a bit more user-visible as an OS.

He’s got the same problem every research OS has: zero software. He’s probably smart to ditch the idea of hardware entirely and just fix on one hardware platform.

I wish him luck selling his computer systems, but I doubt he’s going to do very well. What would a customer do with one of these? Edit files? And then…edit them again? I guess you can show off how inconvenient it is to edit things due to its security.

I just mean it’s a bit optimistic to try and fund this by selling it. I understand he doesn’t have a research grant, but it’s clearly just a research OS.

duncesplayed,

To be fair, it’s the newest rule change, so some older players may think it some new-fangled whipper snapper thing. We’ve only had about 150 years to get used to it.

duncesplayed,

You just don’t appreciate how prestigious it is to get a degree from Example U.

duncesplayed, (edited )

Sure! We can insure that for you! Oh we just noticed that our InsureLink service isn’t connecting to your car. So I’ll just need you to sign this waiver saying that you’re declining the InsureLink Safety discount. Just sign right here. It’s just saying that we cannot offer you all of our insurance services, just like if you get in an accident or something and we can’t remotely verify what you were doing at the time, we can’t help you. Great! And without the Safety discount your premiums will go up by only 372.50 a month.

duncesplayed,

I’m guessing childless adults are significantly less than that. Just thinking about my kids and all of their book readers, barking animal toys, light-up fairy wands, I have a bad feeling they may be bringing up that average.

Though the nice thing about kids’ electronics is they never get obsoleted. A light-up fairy wand is just as fun in 2074 as it is in 2024. So they just get cycled through the 2nd hand mommy communities until they break. It was $40 new, you buy it “mostly undamaged” for $20, hope your kid doesn’t scratch it too badly so you can sell it a couple years down the line for $10 or so.

The bad thing about kids’ electronics is it’s that for new stuff, it’s really impossible to tell how long it’s going to last. Could be 20 years, could be 20 minutes.

duncesplayed,

I feel like the answer is recycling deposits somehow. I’ve seen attempts at them here and there, but I guess we haven’t quite figured out the details yet. I guess electronics are a bit trickier to set up a deposit system for than pop cans. Even the places that do have electronics deposits, often you have to drive to a special recycling centre out past the airport that’s open 3 hours in the middle of the day, only for them to tell you that everything’s glued together so they can’t really separate out the parts they need and most of it will probably end up just going to the landfill anyway.

But theoretically, if we could get a serious deposit system that allowed for recycling to be profitable and gave manufacturers and incentive for making their stuff easier to take apart and recycling (and hence easier to repair), that would be pretty sweet.

duncesplayed,

I was saying Boo-urns.

duncesplayed,

The end game of chess is social alienation and alcoholism. The only winning move is not to play. Everything else is a blunder.

duncesplayed,

I play chess960, so I just keep aborting games until I get a board where f3 makes sense.

duncesplayed,

Let’s do the CBA.

Keep playing:

  • Gain playing-from-a-losing-position XP
  • Gain end-game XP
  • Gain playing-without-a-queen XP
  • Allow your opponent the satisfaction of a mate
  • Bestow honour onto the name of your family

Resign:

  • Save 1 minute of your time
  • Feel like a stupid pansy bitch

Tough choice.

duncesplayed,

It is, but it probably shouldn’t be any more. WebP has good support everywhere now and is slightly better than JPEG and PNG combined. (Better lossy compression than JPEG, plus transparency support, and better lossless compression than PNG). But even WebP is considered lame these days compared to the new crop.

E.g., JXL (JPEG XL) is much better WebP and is supported by everyone except Google (which is ironic since Google helped create it). Google seems to want AVIF to be the winner for the new image format, but not many others do.

Anyway, until the Google JXL AVIF hissy fit is dealt with, at least we’ve still got WebP. It’s not super great, but it’s at least better than JPEG and PNG. A lot of web developers are stuck in their old JPEG PNG mindset and are being slow to adapt, so JPEG is still hanging around.

duncesplayed,

Here’s another reason you should never resign: endgames are crazy hard, and not resigning is the only chance you’ll ever get to practice them.

duncesplayed,

aborting everytime you are black

duncesplayed,

I feel like this should be required reading for a lot of Linux users. That article is a couple years old now, but I think is even more true now than it was when it was written. Having a middleman (package maintainer) between the user and the software developer is a tremendous benefit. Maintainers enforce quality, and if you bypass them, you’re going to end up with Linux as the Google Play Store (doubly so if you try and fool yourself into thinking it won’t happen because “Linux is different”)

duncesplayed,

The eval bar of the last 30 moves when I’m playing someone the same level as me

duncesplayed,

Linux is the only platform to get native WebGL, too!

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