mindbleach

@mindbleach@sh.itjust.works

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mindbleach,

I got a finger-wag e-mail for pirating the ISO over my college network.

mindbleach,

To everyone scoffing: welcome to sizecoding! Yes, they really fit the textures and models and music in that limit. No, we don’t care what the browser or hardware does for free. If you want tighter technical limits, contests go as low as you can imagine.

Here’s a 256-byte raymarching demo for MS-DOS.

Here’s an MS-DOS clone of Descent, in 4 KB.

Images are procedurally generated. It doesn’t mean random; it means rules were followed. Music is generally MIDI-ish, with a synthesizer also built into the code. Instrument samples can also be procedurally generated, and effects like echo and stretching are commonplace. Models in this game are… well you can see why they don’t take much space. But other projects get smooth and detailed objects using tesselation (remember that from 2007?), constructive solid geometry (cube with cylinder cut out), or signed distance fields (you are on your own).

The most useful tool is cheating your ass off. This game does not have doors. Everything’s rectilinear. But it’s based on levels you already recognize, so your brain hand-waves the missing parts and focuses on what looks like you expect. Contrast it with that Descent demo, which is dead-on. Seriously, that thing is from 1997, and they even nailed the sparkles in the healing chamber. If a bare Pentium with VGA isn’t bare-metal enough for you, I’ll try to find something tiny and mindblowing on ZX Spectrum, which had to be coerced into doing any damn thing.

mindbleach,

More generally - stop expecting every program to have an alternative. Sometimes there’s just the one thing that does what you want.

I lost functionality when I moved from Ubuntu to Windows 7 circa 2010, and I lost functionality when I moved from Windows 7 to Mint circa 2020.

mindbleach,

A steady supply of people who ask too many questions.

mindbleach,

Vaguely resembles a famous Amiga demo. Lemme see if I can… yeah, here it is:

Eon, by The Black Lotus.

That’s on an A500. Basically a Sega Genesis with more memory.

Love him or loathe him, James Corden is back in the UK. So will the sniping now stop? (www.theguardian.com)

James Corden is back in the UK and characteristically busy. Last year, the 45-year-old left his job as Los Angeles-based chat show host of The Late Late Show on CBS. A Christmas special is planned for Gavin & Stacey, the acclaimed BBC sitcom he created with co-star Ruth Jones. There’s talk of reviving One Man, Two Guvnors, the...

mindbleach,

Point of order, this is the community for comedy.

mindbleach,

He’s a decent writer and straight man who keeps trying to be a goofy comedic lead.

The core problem is that being nice is an act, for him. He’d honestly hold a better reputation if he had leaned into being a dick. But no: he’s on the same vector as Elon Musk, desperately wanting people to love him, while caring vanishingly little for anyone beneath him.

Black leaders call out Trump's criminal justice contradictions as he rails against guilty verdict (apnews.com)

As Donald Trump lambasted the guilty verdict of his hush money trial this week, he stood inside a Manhattan courthouse that was the site of one of the most notorious examples of injustice in recent New York history. And he had a part in that....

mindbleach,

Conservatives don’t even know what hypocrisy is. They don’t understand the concept.

When your worldview is all about loyalty to The Hierarchy,™ you don’t mean you care about justice, you just say that when it suits your team. When it doesn’t - you say something else. Why would you say something that hurts your team? Who cares what you said yesterday? Yesterday isn’t real. Nothing is real. There’s only what the ingroup says, and what the outgroup says, and if you have to ask who’s right, you must be betraying the ingroup.

mindbleach,

… and that push has been obvious since before GPT-4 blew up, thanks to Google themselves. AlphaGo was quickly surpassed by AlphaGo Zero, which was surpassed by AlphaZero, which was surpassed by MuZero. Each one was an order of magnitude smaller than the last. Each one did more, sooner, despite less input.

A big part of this AI boom has been randos tooling around on a single consumer GPU. Outside of that, I understand there’s ways to rent compute time remotely, down to mundane individual budgets.

Meanwhile: big iron tells people to put glue on their pizza, based on exactly one reddit comment. Money is not a cure-all we’d like alternatives to. Money just amplifies whatever approach they’ve fixated on. It’s a depth-first search, opposite the breadth-first clusterfuck of everyone else doing their own thing.

I would bet good money on locality becoming a huge focus, once someone less depressed than me bothers to try it properly. Video especially doesn’t need every damn pixel shoved through the network in parallel. All these generators with hard limits on resolution or scene length could probably work with a fisheye view of one spot at a time. (They would have solved the six-finger problem much sooner, even if it took longer to ensure only two hands.) If that approach is not as good, conceptually - it’s a lot narrower, so you could train the bejeezus out of it. We would not need another decade to find out if I’m just plain wrong.

mindbleach,

They’re the only company doing VR hardware properly: standalone, inside-out, cheap.

This future sucks.

Shock Treatment (1981 720p) (www.youtube.com)

Shock Treatment is a 1981 American musical comedy film directed by Jim Sharman, and co-written by Sharman and Richard O’Brien. It is a follow-up to the 1975 film The Rocky Horror Picture Show. While not an outright sequel, the film does feature characters from the previous film, most portrayed by different actors, as well as...

mindbleach,

I am a fucking mutant who watched Rocky Horror with zero awareness of the whole theatrical circus and still enjoyed it immensely.

I own this movie on DVD.

It’s so-so.

mindbleach,

TPM is not about giving you control over your computer.

mindbleach,

Personal favorite: a helicopter from the USS America landed on the USS John F Kennedy. They weren’t lost. They were delivering a sack full of greased pigs, which promptly ran all across the flight deck.

The three pigs were painted #1, #2, and #4.

mindbleach, (edited )

Blame ClearChannel. Nickelback emerged near the peak of one company fucking up commercial radio throughout the US. This new band played inoffensive pop-alternative-country melange, seeming broadly acceptable to everyone without exciting much of anyone. Their image was squeaky-clean while their conventionally attractive frontman looked vaguely rugged. All very saleable, but aggressively generic.

So: take an audience at peak rude irony. (This is the era of Celebrity Deathmatch, “Mike Tyson ate my balls,” and Game.com ads calling their customers morons.) Subject them to the same middling singles over and over. Ask how they feel about this merely okay experience taking up air time that could easily be Destiny’s Child, Third Eye Blind, or Shania Twain. Try not to act surprised when they smirk and say they hope the entire band dies.

People hate Nickelback because it’s fun to hate Nickelback. It is easy and rewarding to hate Nickelback. Everyone knew about them, but nobody was a diehard fan. You could perform ingroup bonding with nearly anyone by saying “Fuck Nickelback, right?” You could privately grumble about hearing “How You Remind Me” for the dozenth time this week, without any baggage like Creed’s religion-bait popularity or various artists’ public feuds. Hating Nickelback is uncomplicated. To this day, I have no goddamn idea what Chad Kroeger is like, or what he’s into, or what he’s done. But I still knew his name without checking.

And nobody’s replaced them. Rampant piracy deepened people’s musical tastes by letting them choose what to listen to, instead of the constant deluge of lowest-common-denominator payola. Streaming later made it polite and acceptable to pay artists nothing. Meanwhile, internet forums and thousand-channel cable packages allowed culture to splinter. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a Taylor Swift song. I don’t care, and I don’t have to. Having any reputation become memetic like this is obscenely unlikely now. To have that reputation be… mediocre? Unthinkable.

mindbleach,

That was then co-opted by, yes

C’mon, Keys To Ascension chased some trends, but it wasn’t-- oh I see.

Blink-182 was similarly emblematic but had none of the backlash. Some dorks found a properly talented drummer and turned pop-punk into juvenile dick jokes. This was a huge step down from its previous focus on erudite sociopolitical dick jokes.

Jonas Čeika has a video essay on Adorno’s critique of television… via the Emoji Movie. Adorno argues that any system worth hand-waving as “the system” cannot comprehend anything besides reinforcement of that system. Even direct populist rebellion simply gets treated as another valid path to a predefined outcome within that system. And that works. These power structures are effective and resilient. That’s how they became a problem.

mindbleach,

Fuck this attitude.

I am so goddamn tired of hearing ‘he’ll be a martyr!’ as if he’s not already screaming and crying about persecution. We’ve tried not having consequences - we know it doesn’t work. Maybe let’s hold him accountable, just once?

mindbleach,

Frankfurter in libation.

mindbleach,

Consoles are dying.

Yeah, the PS5 is doing alright, sales-wise. But even its fanboys say ‘it has no games.’ What they mean is: almost every game is on every relevant platform. Multi-platform development won. Even hardware has to reflect this: Sony and MS had three lockstep releases of nearly-identical AMD laptops. Nintendo’s latest money-printing handheld is literally an Nvidia Android tablet.

Everything is a computer now. Some of them are needlessly locked-down.

This market where every game has to be certified and pressed three separate times in different-colored boxes will not last. It is an absurdity. Sony finally recognizes this, after Microsoft starting doing weird shit with the Xbox brand. Because really - the Xbox whatever-it’s-called selling half as many units as the PS5 is still a metric shitload of units. Microsoft still has recurring revenue from millions of customers and the apparently-standard one-third gross cut from retail sales. The Xbox is not hurting.

Microsoft is acting weird because the Xbox was always an effort to PC-ify the console market. They aimed for something 360-ish, whiffed, and released a literal Pentium 3 PC. Then they did the 360, as a generic compiler target, and it got all the good ports. It also gave indie developers something novel: money. Once the Xbone launched, the PS3 had recovered, but only by helping PC devs deal with their wonky vector processor. And the Kinect fucked them. But it was already too late: the PS4 was just a PC. The PS4 Pro and PS5 couldn’t even tempt gamers to “wait and see” or jump ship for instant gratification, because MS launched similar machines at the same damn time.

Helldivers 2 finally showed Sony how much money they could make, being just a PC publisher. They desperately do not want to be just a PC publisher. Their overreaction is a desperate effort to protect their platform - because being a platform is all they have. They didn’t design whiz-bang hardware that allows amazeballs games like nothing else. They don’t have Nintendo’s damnable first-party appeal. They need their releases other platforms to coerce people into entering the Sony ecosystem.

Meanwhile: Microsoft is teasing Halo on Playstation because it makes no difference to them. Microsoft doesn’t give a shit if all the money in a game sale goes to Sony and Valve, so long as the game’s running on Windows. They want a market driven by developers, developers, developers, because they know they can dominate it.

mindbleach,

“Democratic.”

Also, fuck.

mindbleach,

Stop spending so much money, you dumb bastards.

It has never been easier to make a game. You just cannot imagine anything besides the biggest, most bestest game evarrr. You keep hiring more people - that makes it take longer.

Small teams have the requirement and the ability to look at a proposed feature and go “nope, can’t.” And then the game ships without that and nobody fucking cares. It’s not half-implemented and unpolished, and it didn’t take seven months of tweaking, and the audience does not notice its absence because the game was built around not having it.

Big teams suffer scope creep, plan ages to do everything, then need even more time to gouge out whichever big ideas completely flopped. Meanwhile the market has moved on. Even the parts that work reflect trends from when developed began. Congratulations! You’ve spent one hundred million dollars and seven entire years to make a bloated product that is deeply okay and now needs to sell eight zillion copies to break even. Just in time for a ravenous money-robot like Embracer to fire you all. They made a bad call in a completely unrelated industry, but sacrificing your perfectly successful company will make them money somehow. Maybe they’ll pump that into one of the hot new independent studios that ships more than once per decade.

mindbleach,

Just write “we are the bad guys” across your own foreheads.

mindbleach, (edited )

All’a’y’all scoffing ‘you don’t make friends by stabbing a Nazi!’ can fuck right off.

Yeah yeah yeah, they’ll scream persecution and say it proves them right, but they say that about everything. That’s what they’re already doing! I have negative remaining patience for the idea that consequences for bastards are somehow the worst thing, because they’ll be a maaartyr. You know how many motherfuckers just die? A depressing number of black Americans got murdered by cops, in broad daylight, before a handful of names became locus of organized protest.

If these narrative-addicted bigots want to lionize someone who got killed for being a goddamn Nazi, they are spoiled for choice.

mindbleach,

Come on. The man wouldn’t have this career if he wasn’t such a huge westaboo. All his political messaging is built on a deep knowledge of that popular culture, and he’s not exactly subtle about it.

mindbleach,

Sounds like the blacklist is done with Good Old-Fashioned AI, which is to say, it’s humans guessing every possibility ahead-of-time. Which obviously never works.

They should be feeding the LLM’s responses back into the LLM and asking, “does this look like it’s explaining how to make drugs?”

mindbleach,

Evidently. There’s a userscript called Eza’s Image Glutton that redirects.

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