ttmrichter

@ttmrichter@lemmy.ml

Personal pronouns: 同志 / 同志 / 同志的

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ttmrichter,

I don't get it. What's it supposed to do beyond making me repeat letters? Do you have something that actually explains the intent somewhere?

ttmrichter,

That's what it does.

What is the intent? WHY does it do this?

I'm baffled as to what the entire point of this is.

ttmrichter,

Time to break out the block cannon. Ain't no way that I let anything Zuck touches touch my stuff.

osma, (edited ) to fediverse
@osma@mas.to avatar

Why has not embraced ? It doesn't seem like at all a stretch to have the private/followers-only/everyone model map to strava.social fedi visibility.

For that matter, why aren't or jumping on the opportunity? Seems like easy way to promote both fitness and their own apps.

Edit: 🧵

@fediverse

ttmrichter,

This. This right here. For anybody to embrace anything they have to perceive and advantage to them to do so. If you can't persuade them of such an advantage they won't do it.

ttmrichter,

The name is a really weird one. Sounds more like a spreadsheet than a social media application.

ch0ccyra1n, to random
@ch0ccyra1n@emeraldsocial.org avatar

@fediverse What type of social media do you feel is lacking most in the fediverse?

To elaborate, there are a lot of different types of social media already on the fediverse such as microblogs, regular blogs, image sharing, link sharing and video sharing.

Personally, I'd love to see a gaming-focused social media platform on the fediverse.

ttmrichter, (edited )

String concatenation with + is evil. Well-designed languages (Lua, for example, among many others—I'm not calling PHP well-designed!) doesn't do this.

Why?

Because +, in every other context is commutative, but suddenly, in the case of concatenation, it is not. This is an unnecessary cognitive burden for no material gain.

Concatenation can be accomplished by juxtaposition (e.g. SNOBOL4, Rexx, much of the C family tree), by .. (Lua), by . (Perl, PHP), by || (PL/I, Rexx again), by & (Ada, some BASIC dialects), etc. without this added cognitive burden of overloading + for no good reason.

ttmrichter, (edited )

A whole lot of misdesigns are only a "small amount of brain power" to use. As your language accumulates these, however, the load builds up.

This also has the extra problem that overloading in general brings with it. What is the result of 3 + "string"? What is the result of "string" + 3? You have to have rules for this. These rules have to be learned. They have to be kept in mind. There is room for error. And of course the way different languages react to them will vary strongly.

For example in Rexx, Python, and Ruby these are errors (and with the latter two the error changes depending on which order). In Awk and Perl the result is 3 in both cases.

Format strings are better than + as concatenation, to be fair, but are still not very good compared to separate concatenation operators. It's hard to make them type-safe. They separate the value from its location in the string.

Using actual concatenation operators has the advantage of format strings, but add the possibility for type safety. For example in Ada:

...
    Put_Line("Distance: " & Distance_Value'Image & "km");
...

See here, & will only concatenate string types. If you want to print something that's not a string, you have to convert it to a string. This means you can't accidentally mix types. Further, it's immediately obvious where a given value will show up in the output. Compare and contrast with the C equivalent:

...
    printf("Distance: %skmn", distance_value);
...

Not only is location of the value obfuscated—trivial to spot here, but in a complicated string it's very difficult to spot at times. And it's easy, too, to have the format code not match the value. As this example illustrates. Again, easy to spot in trivial code like this, but horrifically hard in real-world code, especially if the variable type changes.

ttmrichter,

Chrome too.

ttmrichter,

No.

ActivityPub is a protocol. It has no agency.

People can save the Internet. Perhaps with ActivityPub, perhaps with something else.

ttmrichter,

And here we see the seeds of IRC'sthe Fediverse's irrelevancy being planted and lovingly tended.

What you just said could have easily been put into the mouths of any number of IRC advocates 20 years ago. Where is IRC now? Remind me.

ttmrichter,

Because it's sometimes a ludicrous demand?

Common pattern I see in Mastodon's ... more strident, shall we call them? ... advocates:

Poster: I just took a picture of a . Note the red and yellow flash of plumage, in contrast to the more usual green and red. I caught this little darling hopping along the charcoal grey slate walkway I've got running through my garden, right next to the you can see at the right side of the frame.

Strident Twit: WHY YOU NO PUT ALT TEXT!?

Or, worse:

Strident Twit Bot: WHY YOU NO PUT ALT TEXT FOR OUR BLIND USERS!?

So what, precisely (providing details), would you put into alt text that's not already in the post? Would you just copy and paste the alt text? When I ask the strident twits this, I generally get vague homilies and blocks.

What are the best ship-to-ship combat rules in a sci-fi game?

I've played my share of sci-fi RPGs, such as Traveller and Starfinder, but as many things as they do well, the space combat rules have never really captured the feel of a Star Wars-style starfighter dogfight or even a Star Trek-style naval battle. What is your favorite sci-fi RPG for shipt-to-ship combat?

ttmrichter,

Best for what purpose?

There's no universal "best" because different people want different things from their spaceship combat games. Myself I like quick resolution and simple record-keeping so I always kit-bashed something with the old Starfire wargame to warp it to the RPG setting. If you're not into kit-bashing, though, that's not going to be "best" for you.

For spaceship combat that was tense as a suspension bridge truss, the one that was made for Traveller:2300/2300AD was really, really good, but it was very much glued with cyanoacrylate to the setting.

The original Book 5 for Traveller had a ship combat system that was very much about capital ship combat in large fleets (and could barely scale down to smaller conflicts like individual ships). It was "perfect" for that kind of thing, but again was glued to the setting (albeit more with some contact cement rather than superglue).

The Jovian Chronicles (game, not Mekton Zeta supplement) space combat system was rather nifty and came with a nifty spaceship design system (albeit one that had a "dreaded" cube root in the construction rules that made people panic). And while it was made for a setting, it was much easier to kit-bash for other settings.

For more generic games, if you want the scope and glory of space opera, the game, well, Space Opera is hard to beat. It's an old design, so filled to the brim with odd, crunchy, ornate bits, but it was a whole lot of fun when I played it. Just ... be ready to fill out a lot of papers and roll a lot of dice many, many times.

ttmrichter,

It's not Twitter that Mastodon has to seize the moment from. It's all the other commercial offerings that will inevitably pop up in its place as Twitter crashes and burns.

ttmrichter,

Esperanto is not a particularly easily learnable language to most of the world. It's a very parochial language made by someone whose exposure to language was all European and very strongly focused on specifically East European languages both phonetically and grammatically. English, to take a horrifically terrible language at random, is not much harder to learn for, say, a Chinese speaker than Esperanto would be, but it would be a million times more useful given the rather pathetically small number of Esperanto speakers out there.

If you're going to use a constructed IAL (as opposed to de facto lingua francas like have been historically the case), make one that isn't filled with idiotic things like declension by case, by gender, by number, by tense, by ... Or you're going to have most people in the world ignoring it. Like you already have for Esperanto.

ttmrichter,

Here’s a little tip for you: If you use “CCP” you’re basically identifying yourself as an ignoramus whose opinions on the topic can be safely ignored. After all if you can’t get the name of an institution correct, what are the odds that you got things that require genuine knowledge and nuance right?

ttmrichter,

So the current press climate of blaming China for everything up to and including sunspots isn't negative enough?

THE RUNEQUEST STARTER SET: A REVIEW (andrewloganmontgomery.blogspot.com)

"If only there were a single, streamlined product we could point new players to, a concise entry point that explained the rules, introduced the setting, and made it all effortless to learn and play. Something that showcased what makes this fantasy RPG unique. Oh wait, now there is... If you have ever been even mildly curious...

ttmrichter,

Another new edition of Runequest? What is this, version 7? Or is it 8 now? What is it that makes Runequest so cursed in its publication history? 😲

Do you think Technology makes us more lonely...?

This is a philosophical question, which means there is no right or wrong answer in a traditional term, but keep trolling to yourself. If you have no own opinion or respect before such question, please do not answer, thanks. I am not looking for low-quality answers such as … no … yes …...

ttmrichter,

Show me now a picture of people walking around public spaces reading papers.

It's crypto! It's blockchain! It's decentralized! It's PaNQuaKE! (panquake.com)

Does anyone know what this thing is? Some kind of decentralized, open source, anti-establishment, etc platform aiming to be an alternative to twitter, but we plebs aren’t allowed to see or participate in the development process or even see any source repositories yet....

ttmrichter,

“Banned from Twitter” is usually code for “right-wing extremist” IME. I mean look at Gab or Parler and see what’s mostly in there.

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