@tqwhite@mastodon.social avatar

tqwhite

@tqwhite@mastodon.social

Old computer programmer with penchant for cocktails, technology and left wing politics. I read a lot. I have a lot of opinions.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

tqwhite, to random
@tqwhite@mastodon.social avatar

Nice essay by @jeffjarvis about the state of journalism today.

https://buzzmachine.com/2024/04/26/the-times-is-broken/

atomicpoet, to random
@atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org avatar

Ascendant isn’t the most beautiful game in the world. It has a sense of vision, though.

The developer clearly wanted to offer something unique, and I think they largely accomplished that.

This is a rogue-like beat ‘em up platforming RPG. Even saying that is a mouth full. You got lots of melee and ranged attacks, and if you beat up an enemy long enough, you can turn the enemy into a ranged weapon.

Though you can skip the tutorial, I don’ t recommend this. You’re going to have to learn all the different strategies for coming out victorious in a stage.

The best part about Ascendant, though, is that it’s completely free on GOG.com. No DRM. You can own it forever. And as I like to say, you can’t argue with free.

https://www.gog.com/en/game/ascendant

Ascendant screenshot (RTX 3080 Ti)
Ascendant screenshot (RTX 3080 Ti)
Ascendant screenshot (RTX 3080 Ti)

tqwhite,
@tqwhite@mastodon.social avatar

@atomicpoet No judgement if you can't afford it but I always argue with free. Computer programmers need food, too. I never take the free version if a paid one is available. the market pressure that software should be cheap or free is bad. I want to give for what I get.

tqwhite,
@tqwhite@mastodon.social avatar

@atomicpoet I offer no criticism of your decision but, as a software developer I will tell you that free is always the result of market coercion. Nobody ever gives their work away if they could get paid.

lauren, to random
@lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org avatar

Back in the day, it was popular to use line printers to print out large (multiple sheets taped together) ASCII images to hang on walls and such. Some of these were very popular with us guys (keep in mind this was a heavily male-centric CS-era, even worse than now) and were NSFW -- but still ended up hanging in various places where they really shouldn't have been.

At the ARPANET site #1 lab at UCLA, we wanted some "Star Wars" posters. At the time, the only place I knew of with a potentially usable video digitizer (black and white, very low resolution by today's standards of course) was at the original Stanford AI Lab (SAIL / SU-AI).

So. A nationwide TV Star Wars special was coming up. This was my chance. I arranged with the gentleman who had the digitizer at SAIL to have it tuned to the appropriate local channel in Stanford at the correct time.

Then, from my bedroom here in L.A., over the ARPANET via my account on the SAIL / SU-AI system that controlled the digitizer, I grabbed various key images as I watched the same program locally.

Then, after the program was done, I FTP'd (file transferred) those files down to UCLA, where I had a UNIX program to create those ASCII posters.

Mission accomplished, thanks to the Defense Department's ARPANET!

Though this was fun stuff, a LOT was being learned about distributed systems and resources through these kinds of amusements.

tqwhite,
@tqwhite@mastodon.social avatar

@lauren I think you and I might be the same person.

I worked at a printing company and wrote a system to convert images to print on a Versatec thermal printer. Later, on a brand new invention, ink jet!!, 72 dpi. As far as we knew back then, it was the first continuous tone image printing.

At home, I used my dot matrix to make posters of continuous strips taped together in my picture window. Six, eight pages wide by four or five strips. People thought it was amazing.

tqwhite,
@tqwhite@mastodon.social avatar

@lauren We both recall that. The paper was too fragile and the drive didn't pull evenly all the time. But my management was thrilled. It was a printing company and being able to see a page in primitive WYSIWIG without using very expensive film was huge.

lauren, to random
@lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org avatar

Long ago in DEC PDP-11/70 days there were disk drives the size of washing machines to provide 80 or 100MB or so of storage. These all had removable disk packs, some had clear glass covers over the disks.

I used to like staring into the top of those while the disks were spinning so rapidly. I occasionally had the uncomfortable thought of what would happen if one of those disks broke loose at that speed. I also was haunted by the concept that one day I'd be removing one of those disks with the work of dozens of people on it and it would break loose from the cover (much like a big cake cover) and shatter on the floor.

Bizarrely, I now get much the same morbid thrill from staring through the top glass cover of my direct drive washing machine, which in spin cycle spins VERY fast and so looks very much like those old disk drives in action.

tqwhite,
@tqwhite@mastodon.social avatar

@lauren

We used Control Data Corp disks. 300MB. Size of a small washing machine. $35k in 1980 dollars.

I used a PDP 11/45 with 128k words of core memory.

On fun day, I wrote the OS (RSX11/M) onto paper tape. It booted up and was very fun to see it 'seeking' on the tape.

One day we got a 600MB disk. It was like a miracle.

Good old days.

coffeepine, to random
@coffeepine@beige.party avatar

It's so tragically obvious that is nothing but of another ilk. Underlying is the same greed for money, land and power that signifies .

In the end, when all is said and done this is what it is. Fascism donning its favourite costume of and religious zealotry.

Pointing that out is NOT antisemitism. Get it into your bloody heads.

tqwhite,
@tqwhite@mastodon.social avatar

@coffeepine

Not sure I agree that it's not antisemitism but it sure is the dumbest thing I've heard in forever. Apparently you fail to understand both zionism and fascism.

tqwhite,
@tqwhite@mastodon.social avatar

@Radical_EgoCom @coffeepine Jewish people were kicked out of Judea and abused in the diaspora. I believe that Jews have a right to have a place to live and exert their culture. It is my view that opposing the very idea that Jews should have a home is to say that they are not deserving of the privilege most other cultures can simply assume. I think that the claim that Jews should accept the role of subordinates in other peoples countries is antisemitic.

tqwhite,
@tqwhite@mastodon.social avatar

@Bron1954 @Radical_EgoCom @coffeepine

OK, then.

For me, it is obvious that the Jewish people is an ethnic group. I live in a world where anti-semitism is hostility toward Jewish people.

You live in a topsy turvy where the Jews are not an ethnic group and anti-semitism is hatred of Palestinians.

I have to say, I did not expect you to wander so far through into bizarro world.

I stand by my explanation and, on rereading now, think it is right.

tqwhite,
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@Bron1954 @Radical_EgoCom @coffeepine When it was founded, it was explicitly inclusive of the Arab sort of people that lived there. The schism was a consequence of Arab hostility to which Israel responded. You are incorrect. It became a separatist state after Arabs attacked in forty eight. It’s not because it was a Jewish state unless you consider Jew hatred to be Israel’s fault.

tqwhite,
@tqwhite@mastodon.social avatar

@Radical_EgoCom @Bron1954 @coffeepine The region was under British control. There was never a Palestinian state. Before they coalesced against Israel there was no cohesive Palestinian ethnicity. They were a variety of tribal identities.

tqwhite,
@tqwhite@mastodon.social avatar

@Radical_EgoCom @Bron1954 @coffeepine A government was legally created by the international community. The indigenous Palestinians did not like it and, with the Jew hating local Arab community, attempted to destroy the country. It did not work. I am no fan of Netanyahu but I do not agree with the characterization of genocide.

tqwhite,
@tqwhite@mastodon.social avatar

@Radical_EgoCom @Bron1954 @coffeepine they did not have a government. They had been living under British rule for a long time. It was absolutely not imperialism. Also, where would you have put the Jews?

tqwhite,
@tqwhite@mastodon.social avatar

@Radical_EgoCom @Bron1954 @coffeepine You are knowledgeable. Thank you. These are things I know about. The dedication to the homeland was decisive. Also valid in my view.

tqwhite,
@tqwhite@mastodon.social avatar

@Radical_EgoCom @Bron1954 @coffeepine I agree. Since that's not what happened, you win.

tqwhite,
@tqwhite@mastodon.social avatar

@Radical_EgoCom @Bron1954 @coffeepine Except for the part where it is not true, you completely right. Before Israel, there was Britain. Before them, there were nomadic groups and villages, including Jewish ones for decades.

tqwhite,
@tqwhite@mastodon.social avatar

@Radical_EgoCom @Bron1954 @coffeepine While you seem like a nice, smart person, your judgement of validity isn't really important. It was ratified by the international community as a legal country. It is a fact, just as is racist old America. Jews have as good a right to the place as the Palestinians (I would argue better) and when they tried to include them, the Palestinians tried to overthrow Israel.

I am very angry about many things Israel but arguing about its right to exist is pointless.

tqwhite, to random
@tqwhite@mastodon.social avatar

"But these changes in moral history and technology can hardly be expected to comfort Jewish students in the here and now. What began as intelligent protest has become, in its uncompromising fury and its ceaselessness, a form of abuse."

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/opinion/columbia-protests-israel.html

jeffjarvis, to random
@jeffjarvis@mastodon.social avatar

Galloway glibness: "People are opting out of America..,Young people aren't having sex.They're not meeting, they're not mating. The pool of emotionally and economically viable men shrinks every day, which lessens household formation...Our kids are more axious, more depressed, more obese, more addicted...We are producing too many of the most dangerous person in the world & that is a young, broke & lonely young man....I would like to see in the senior year of college [a course in] mating dynamics."

tqwhite,
@tqwhite@mastodon.social avatar

@jeffjarvis "Mating dynamics" Hilarious.

nixCraft, to linux
@nixCraft@mastodon.social avatar

What's the one or command-line tool you absolutely can't live without?

tqwhite,
@tqwhite@mastodon.social avatar

@nixCraft

ls, tail, grep... ssh, pipe

jeffjarvis, to random
@jeffjarvis@mastodon.social avatar

Johnson is not worthy to clean Churchill's bathtub. Nonetheless, this is a good way to publicly challenge him:
Johnson’s Chamberlain-or-Churchill moment https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/04/18/johnsons-chamberlain-or-churchill-moment/

tqwhite,
@tqwhite@mastodon.social avatar

@jeffjarvis Easy to believe he'd be doing a Saltburn Trump tainted bath water sip.

dangillmor, to random
@dangillmor@mastodon.social avatar

Blog post: Once again, NY Times amplifies right-wing trolling, omits vital context. It's journalistic malpractice, and it's the norm in Times political coverage.

https://dangillmor.com/2024/04/17/again-ny-times-amplifies-right-wing-trolling-omits-vital-context/

tqwhite,
@tqwhite@mastodon.social avatar

@dangillmor Makes me want to do murder. Their sycophantic willingness to reinforce the rightward shift of the overton window is terrible.

jeffjarvis, to random
@jeffjarvis@mastodon.social avatar

No, public schools are not liberal. They're schools. The WaPo's bothsidesism shifts its axis to legitimize extremists' premise. The proper perspective: Far-right extremists reject education:
They quit liberal public schools. Now they teach kids to be anti-‘woke.’ https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/04/15/they-quit-liberal-public-schools-now-they-teach-kids-be-anti-woke/

tqwhite,
@tqwhite@mastodon.social avatar

@jeffjarvis (Contrary to Kristen, I appreciate people bringing up interesting topics, even from annoying publications.)

To the point, the old phrase, "Reality has a liberal bias" comes to mind.

"Anti-woke" is a euphemism for 'racist, sexist, anti-social'.

nixCraft, to random
@nixCraft@mastodon.social avatar

Japan Declares AI Training Data Fair Game and ‘Will Not Enforce Copyright’ https://petapixel.com/2023/06/05/japan-declares-ai-training-data-fair-game-and-will-not-enforce-copyright/

OpenAI, with help from Microsoft, announced an office in Japan. I see no connection between the two events. This battle to prevent the misuse of your work to train AI is already lost.

tqwhite,
@tqwhite@mastodon.social avatar

@nixCraft I will be switching to Japanese AI's asap. I am 100% against restricting your AI's ability to learn things. Copy right be damned. If you don't want people and AI's to learn from your stuff, keep it offline.

tqwhite, to random
@tqwhite@mastodon.social avatar

How do I get to 71 and never notice this.

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