programmers-off-topic

[hoary oasis]

[dusty pollen]

...you spend too much time being rude to people who are infinitely more qualified than you, but you do you, I guess lmao

[ivory shadow]

I thought it was a reference to Minecraft. You know, cubes. A child yearning for the mines. /s

[hoary oasis]

The children do yearn for the mines

[cyan shadow]

I have exams in two weeks, including one on IP
But there's no need to be condescending, please.

[ivory shadow]

(Every time Ice Ice Baby actually comes on I get whiplash that it isn't the other song)

[wary oriole]

thats your problem thinking there is a hierarchy of intelligence

[hoary oasis]

Well, they yearn for the blox more so these days

[wary oriole]

im just teasing at this point no foul

[dusty pollen]

I didn't say intelligence. I said qualified. As in, they actually studied this.

[wary oriole]

why do you think i havent?

[severe badge]

aaand i'm out

[cyan shadow]

Please stop this now

[dusty pollen]

because I have eyes

oops, sorry quill, typed that before you messaged lmao

[ivory shadow]

Now I have the Ice Ice Baby bassline stuck in my head. I already didn't sleep well why have you done this to me iro 😛

[wary oriole]

all youve done is criticize my opinions without facts, and im the one looking bad for starting the topic. its unethical if you wanna talk ethics

[dusty pollen]

same, so rest assured, I also did it to myself

[cyan shadow]

ENOUGH

[rain lotus]

screaming in computer ethics degree Im sorry quill I didn't realize that this was tabled while I was backreading

[wary oriole]

all good XD i really wanna drop it too i just dont like attacks on my persona instead of the topic itself

[marble jewel]

UNDER PRESSURE!

[crystal wren]

(That's my source of truth for the riff.)

[dusty pollen]

funniest clip I've ever seen was the one of vanilla ice explaining why the two are completely different

[marble jewel]

ngl that's probably my favorite song of all time, and I also really love the cover by The Used and My Chemical Romance

[ivory shadow]

Oh, absolutely. Vanilla Ice stole it and there was legal issues over it.

[marble jewel]

Mine is Ding ding ding ding-a ding ding and theirs is ding ding ding ...

[rain lotus]

i very specifically apologized to quill, not you. i do not want or need your assurance that we are good, because we aren't. your positions and the way you speak to others here both make that an impossibility. i will be civil with you to the exact point this server requires and no more.

[crystal wren]

Please, it's done.

[waxen cliff]

Just move on y'all

[marble jewel]

https://youtu.be/6TLo4Z_LWu4?si=KM2F5gpLoUMb719p&t=9

[cyan shadow]

Vanilla Ice lost, if I'm remembering my IP class from my bachelors degree correctly
current IP course is more about databases and patents, but I lost the plot a few lectures ago after missing two of them due to illness and being new to EU IP law in general

[ivory shadow]

I don't know much about EU IP law. As someone who hasn't taken law courses, it's hard enough just trying to wrap my head around US IP law.

[marble jewel]

On the other hand, I'm glad Ed Sheeran won his case in the Marvin Gaye lawsuit. Music is such a complicated issue.

[cyan shadow]

US IP law made my head hurt too, don't worry.

[ivory shadow]

Whether or not a work is transformative is very complicated, and always will be.

I am just glad I have nothing to do with music besides listening to it

[cyan shadow]

I studied Indian IP law, which largely draws from British IP law and the WIPO conventions, and EU IP law is... similar, but with significant differences

[waxen cliff]

The little bits I know about EU laws are "we bonk you if you so much as long at it the wrong way"
Very bluntly speaking

[dusty pollen]

I don't do that either, saves a lot of trouble

[ivory shadow]

Wish they'd get around to bonking Apple for violating the DMA already...

[waxen cliff]

:(

Oh wait. The company xD

[cyan shadow]

There's a whole bunch of DMA bonks that need to be done

[ivory shadow]

Yes, the company lmao

[cyan shadow]

Apple, Google, Microsoft, uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh who am I missing

[crystal wren]

(Speaking of Apple, yay, killing encryption in the UK! )

[ivory shadow]

Sony

[cyan shadow]

OpenAI, iirc

Sony

[ivory shadow]

Sony runs a digital market.

Nintendo too.

[waxen cliff]

Meta? Or who did Facebook again (does it still exist)

[crystal wren]

I wish Nintendo would close those marketplace doors a little, too.

[waxen cliff]

I'm sure they also did something

[dusty pollen]

idk which law this is but I would like to submit samsung into the list

[ivory shadow]

But don't you want to buy a calculator app for the Switch

Don't get me wrong, I don't actually disapprove of someone making a calculator for the Switch. The big problem is just that the only games marketplace on any platform with discovery that's worth a damn is Steam.

[cyan shadow]

Digital Markets Act - it's an EU Regulation on operating and participating in fair markets

competition law isn't one of my competencies, but I come across it occasionally at uni

[ivory shadow]

Anyways, let me sideload apps onto a Playstation or Switch.

(Spoiler, I already sideload apps onto my Switch. The homebrew scene rocks.)

[crystal wren]

The DS was pretty good for that, too.

[cyan shadow]

(And a note for anyone unfamiliar with how EU level law works:

• Regulation = binding as a legal instrument, EU countries don't need to implement it in national law, you just use the regulation
• Directive = countries need to implement this into national law, usually allow some level of customisation to fit each nation's needs, without deviating so much as to cause a total lack of harmony.)

[ivory shadow]

Actually, I wonder if Sony has made enough money from Playstation / had enough users to be subject to the DMA. The console gaming market isn't exactly healthy.

[rugged vessel]

buddy thinks he's yapping like a smart person

[crystal wren]

Please.

[ivory shadow]

Nintendo would probably be more likely to meet those.

[marble jewel]

I love my TOTK mods on my Switch hardware that still supports the rail-based jailbreak

[ivory shadow]

The bootloader exploit on the OG Switch is so funny to me. I hope the Switch 2 has an unpatchable bootloader flaw too

[safe dragon]

📝

[marble jewel]

I really want to get a modchip installed on my Switch lite, but I lack the soldering skills necessary

Having that and the SUPER5 OLED mod would make the switch lite the perfect portable gaming device

[ivory shadow]

Honestly I use my Steam Deck as a Switch more than my Switch at this point. Long since dumped my game carts.

[cyan shadow]

I think they qualify, yes
Nintendo as well

[thin estuary]

i need to sell my moddable first gen Switch

[dusty pollen]

I wasn't intrigued by the steamdeck until selph informed me of how many shoulder buttons / bumpers it has

[marble jewel]

I have a Rog ally which I've considered turning into a steam deck

[cyan shadow]

I want a steam deck

but it's gonna have to wait until I start earning

[ivory shadow]

Well, SteamOS 3's official installer should be dropping... sometime soon. Before May, at least.

[marble jewel]

Yeah the unofficial steamos for rog ally is almost flawless, but I'm waiting to see what official support looks like

[tidal charm]

if I ever learn code, I want to write a "russian roulette" bot, but instead of "bullet" or "safe" it's "Ice Ice Baby" or "Under Pressure"

[dusty pollen]

my favourite recent hardware thing was the carthing, which rather ironically was a car crash

[ivory shadow]

I think people really sleep on the additional controls the Steam Deck has though. The buttons on the back. The touch pads. The gyro that only works when your thumb is on the stick.

All that and Steam Input is great.

[simple dragon]

I love what steam deck's existence has done for Linux compat in games

[dusty pollen]

see that's the only thing I'm interested in

that sounds so flexible

[simple dragon]

It has had far reaching benefit for people who will never own a steam deck

[ivory shadow]

I don't understand how people are like "but buy this other handheld it's more powerful" and then you're stuck with Windows, which is absolutely awful to control with that form factor, doesn't have functional sleep mode...

[safe dragon]

I would not buy a gaming handheld without the touchpads

[dusty pollen]

oh yeah, I need to install arch on this desktop so I can run ff14 on a gen6 core i5 and a dream

[ivory shadow]

But hey at least you can play, uh... Fortnite? I guess?

[marble jewel]

If I converted my Rog Ally to SteamOS, I wonder how difficult it would be to get (popular discontinued Switch emulator) running on it with Gyro support.

[ivory shadow]

Not being able to play Fortnite is almost a selling point to me. I can't stand Epic.

[dusty pollen]

I am not down with the youths enough for fortnite

[ivory shadow]

"Where are we doing the drop, fellow kids?" - me trying to play Fortnite, probably

[rain lotus]

we couldn't afford a steam deck, but the retroid does us pretty well for most things tbh

[dusty pollen]

I need more fps on this mmo pvp aoe blaster!

[rain lotus]

it can't play like.... skyrim in bed. but i manage stardew, and lots of classic games from my childhood

[ivory shadow]

I think emudeck still installs that? But I haven't done a fresh install in ages.

New idea: I need to use my Steam Deck as an alarm. Have it launch Skyrim.

https://tenor.com/bG8bp.gif

[marble jewel]

Emudeck removed all emulators that Nintendo has taken down

I think there they will still support configuring them, but they don't advertise an official way to acquire them

[ivory shadow]

It's pretty gross how Nintendo is using encryption as a shield against emulation, which is well known to be perfectly legal.

So incredibly gross.

[marble jewel]

Well and in my case I'm using my own keys, so I wish it would they would be challenged, but they have endless funds to keep a battle going indefinitely

But the whole, you don't own anything you own anymore

[dusty pollen]

if buying isn't owning...

[cyan shadow]

grumbles richly in recent French ruling

[ivory shadow]

I'm just glad they haven't completely eliminated physical games yet.

Not like PC.

Microsoft and Sony are sure trying though.

[cyan shadow]

(to be fair, this one was actually about piracy rather than emulation, but it'll probably set the precedent for what happens when emulation is questioned)

[safe dragon]

the physical copy at this point is often a barely functional husk of the actual game

[crystal wren]

I was so annoyed when I bought the first Terraria collector's/physical edition FOREVER ago, and it turned out to just be one of those on-disc Steam installers.

[cyan shadow]

it hasn't gone to the CJEU on appeal yet, but if it does, I wonder what'll happen

[ivory shadow]

Shoutouts to buying the original Half-Life 2 way back when on CD. The original on-disc Steam installer.

Still got it in my basement somewhere.

[crystal wren]

I'm also sad I lost my original original Steam account.

Current account is 20 years old... but it could have been 21.

[ivory shadow]

Are you talking about Nintendo vs Dstorage btw or something I'm unaware of?

[marble jewel]

It could have been the legal US drinking age... sigh.

No U.S. beers for your Steam account for another year

[waxen cliff]

If it helps, it's legal drinking age in Germany lol

[crystal wren]

And well past here!

[cyan shadow]

Nintendo vs 1Fichier, Dstorage was a few years ago

[ivory shadow]

I thought that there was recent news about Dstorage losing an appeal or something

Honestly, I'm used to DMCA takedowns so a website being forced to take down content when it's requested doesn't seem weird to me. But I am probably missing a lot of legal nuance given the quality of the articles I've read about it.

[marble jewel]

My Steam account is approaching 17 years, but I was a bit late getting into digital game downloads

I still had my CD portfolio for quite awhile

[crystal wren]

If I ever get a game released, I'm doing low budget physical releases somehow. I can't not.

[safe dragon]

I got a steam account to play terraria when that first released. I had no idea what steam was

[cyan shadow]

I need to read up on Dstorage again, but 1Fichier is as of last week

[ivory shadow]

There are a few companies that help with physical releases of indie games. Fangamer. Limited Run. But I guess by low budget you mean like buying cheap USB sticks and loading them up and mailing them yourself or something? 😛

Wouldn't want to use CDs for a PC release in 2025.

[worn remnant]

i would do CDs as a bit, but not as a primary channel

[ivory shadow]

Make a very smol game, release on floppy disk

[worn remnant]

make a mostly smol game and release it on seven floppy disks

[ivory shadow]

This made me remember installing Debian from like 11 floppy disks once

[crystal wren]

Yes. That is exactly what I mean by low budget.

As in first-released-paid-title low budget.

[marble jewel]

My first Steam games:
https://store.steampowered.com/account/history/

I guess Penny Arcade is what got me to install Steam

[crystal wren]

Those Penny Arcade games were so good.

[ivory shadow]

https://store.steampowered.com/account/licenses/ is a better page to check, since it includes complimentary licenses. I had a bit of a gap where I didn't use Steam. No good internet around here for a very long time.

[marble jewel]

If you know, you know...

[crystal wren]

Aha, perfect then!

And I had forgotten.

But now I remember.

[marble jewel]

Same list for me, but with the addition of Portal

[vagrant basalt]

I think my Steam account is only 14 years old. I stuck with CDs for a loooong time. I still install Morrowind and Project Eden with my CDs.

[pliant snow]

guess who has two thumbs and broke the daily automated build today

[safe dragon]

do you have two thumbs

lil baby account

I guess this means that legend of grimrock is the first game I purchased that I would never end up actually playing

been sitting in my steam library for 12 years

I still remember exactly why I bought it

It was due to a legend of grimrock playthrough I ran into from some dude called WoodenPotatoes

they still make videos surprisingly even though they get almost no views

[marble jewel]

While we're throwing out Steam stats, what are are y'all counts? I think I have an impressively low number of badges for a high number of games.

[bronze fox]

barges in

[ivory shadow]

Is it me

[bronze fox]

i distinctly remember super meat boy (physical copy) being why i needed steam and it pissed me off so much that i had to install steam so you can see it was an edmund mcmillen app until later

[crystal wren]

Classy first game, at least.

[bronze fox]

[crystal wren]

I OWNED IT FIRST.

[bronze fox]

reporting ur account rn

[crystal wren]

[bronze fox]

here me

[rain apex]

I guess jade has to abdicate now \j

[bronze fox]

i must defeat alan in arena style combat to remain the alpha

[crystal wren]

...oh no.

[safe dragon]

if we're going to be like that

[pliant snow]

congrats on ur server

[crystal wren]

https://tenor.com/iZ6HxrY6shr.gif

[marble jewel]

Where are the day one purchasers at?

[safe dragon]

me

[marble jewel]

Oh was that the first day it was avaialble for download?

[safe dragon]

though if you really want the winner it would be Oterion who got the game a few hours before launch in a release raffle

[marble jewel]

I guess it was, dang. Kudos.

[ivory shadow]

I am very slow.

[marble jewel]

Either way, we didn't hesitate to jump on that.

Who would have thought where we'd all end up now...

[safe dragon]

(or really if you want the winner it'd be sirithre or something who was a beta tester)

[pliant snow]

I forgot I didn't have steam until 2012

My humble bundle account is def older, I really didn't want to deal with steam drm

[safe dragon]

I still don't have a humble bundle account I don't think

[ivory shadow]

Steam is just too damn convenient

[safe dragon]

turns out I do have a humble bundle account

[bronze fox]

my list of combatants grows...

[pliant snow]

I think I got SDV in a humble bundle

[bronze fox]

steam improving kind of was a double edged sword but i am glad i have the games i do

i was in high school in 2011 this fucks me up

[ivory shadow]

I do wish it hadn't eviscerated the physical games scene like it had, but... but it's so damn convenient

[bronze fox]

nodnod

[safe dragon]

oh wow I own games on humble

oh.. one of which is a game I bought recently

[ivory shadow]

My first purchase on Humble was December 26th, 2011.

Good ol Indie Bundle 4. That's how I got Super Meat Boy.

[safe dragon]

why do I have games on humble

huh

[crystal wren]

We do not talk about my humble things...

[marble jewel]

My first Humble is Legend of Dungeon. I don't remember anything about that.

[safe dragon]

I never got into humble bundle

[ivory shadow]

It's been a while since I bought a humble bundle. At one point it was just "Oh, have all the games in that bundle... have all the games in that bundle too..."

Since a lot of the indie games repeat

[safe dragon]

my first was the stardew valley OST which I bought purely to support the game's development before it launched because I wanted to support it

[pliant snow]

The Humble Bundle V was one of the first things I bought online

[crystal wren]

Some real old indie classics in this one.

[safe dragon]

I bought the Stardew OST 4 months before Stardew Valley actually launched...

I completely forgot about me doing this

feels so silly looking back that we were all worried the game would flop and decided to buy extra copies and the OST

[ivory shadow]

It's hard to predict the success of an indie game.

[marble jewel]

Alright, now let's do EA Origin... Anyone!? *chirp chirp

[safe dragon]

I uh

don't have one

my sister has like every single sims game and expansion under the sun there though

[pliant snow]

I def do have an origin account

which I think only has mass effect in it

[crystal wren]

I do have an ac-

[safe dragon]

origin no longer exists I think

[crystal wren]

Yeah, Mass Effect is pretty much the only things I've purposely bought on the thing.

[safe dragon]

for my sister it was sims, dragon age and mass effect

[ivory shadow]

I have an EA account. I don't remember why. I don't care why. I only remember I have it because I signed up for the Skate playtest.

[pliant snow]

TIL I have Beneath a Steel Sky on GoG, and that I got it for free in 2013

[marble jewel]

For me, it was Spore
https://myaccount.ea.com/cp-ui/orderhistory/index

[safe dragon]

according to my password manager I have an EA account? I am discovered new things

I have a physical copy of spore

[marble jewel]

I do too, this looks like it was just Creature Creator

[pliant snow]

2008, dang

I think the only digital purchases I wouldve made in the 2000s were on Wii

[safe dragon]

... hmmm. My password manager does have credentials for EA but they don't work

[marble jewel]

And then I had a bunch of Bioware points on there for DA:O DLC

[safe dragon]

I gotta try and recover my account first to find out what I have on EA

battlefield 3

[ivory shadow]

I have a decent number of games on Epic. Haven't paid any money for any of them, but I do like the idea of making Epic pay devs for the free licenses they give away.

[safe dragon]

I claimed the free games sometimes

back when it first launched

[pliant snow]

I have redeemed many of their games

I even bought one (1)

[safe dragon]

considering egs doesn't even support linux I'm not particularly motivated to use their storefront

gotta use a third party launcher

[ivory shadow]

I use Heroic even on Windows

Their native app sucks

[marble jewel]

After that, I think all that's left for me is GOG Galaxy and itch.io.

[pliant snow]

Heroic is a nice program

[safe dragon]

I have a gazillion things on itch.io all from buying a single bundle once

[pliant snow]

itch's library view is so terrible, I don't even know what I have on there

[ivory shadow]

I've bought three random itch bundles and have more things than atoms in the sea.

[safe dragon]

... my password manager once again claims I have an account I didn't know about so I guess I gotta check GOG

[pliant snow]

you do have a GoG account, I think you friended me

[safe dragon]

wtf

gog has a friend system?

[pliant snow]

it has many things

[ivory shadow]

Yeah. It has a sort of competitor to steamworks.

GOG Galaxy.

It doesn't work very well, but it exists

[safe dragon]

I'm some cheap knockoff

[pliant snow]

I thought that was their client

[ivory shadow]

https://docs.gog.com/galaxyapi/

[pliant snow]

you played factorio for an hour 7 years ago

[ivory shadow]

Authentication, matchmaking, friends, chat, networking

[crystal wren]

XIII!

[safe dragon]

do I just own shadow warrior on every single platform that has it despite me not even knowing what it is?

[pliant snow]

they've got achievements now

[ivory shadow]

Crumble over here waking up at 4am to buy Shadow Warrior and immediately forget about it

[marble jewel]

This must have been a bundle

[safe dragon]

I guess this is where the factorio copy was that I could swear I bought

[pliant snow]

lol that's my first gog purchase too

[marble jewel]

For me, itch.io is Tiled and Aseprite

[pliant snow]

I actually have quite a few GoG games

my library is very fragmented lol

[marble jewel]

So I'm guessing those downloads were SDV modding related

[safe dragon]

it seems I did not buy it

I don't know what any of these games are

[ivory shadow]

Wonder if you added those back when they had library sync

I miss library sync

[safe dragon]

wow I do have 3 friends on gog

aquo, oterion and jade

[pliant snow]

The Third Triumvirate

I have like every yakuza and Trails game on GoG I think

I have 17 GoG games installed right now, if you'll believe it

[safe dragon]

where does one check their orders on itch.io

[marble jewel]

I was confused for a second. I read it as 44,20 like that's not a number

[safe dragon]

oh there

I'm sure pico-8 is aquo's fault

[pliant snow]

god, people are still playing these crappy games I put up there

another proud pico-8 owner

[safe dragon]

that I have never launched

[pliant snow]

until today

[safe dragon]

I did play a short hike through itch.io

great game

[pliant snow]

What about this great game https://aquova.itch.io/quick-draw

Made in 1 KB

[dusty pollen]

I got the full sims 2 + all dlcs for free on there the week the offer started (and then they extended it like five years lmao). never paid them money though

technically I made a game in gamemaker when I was nine but unfortunately I believe that it is lost to time

[safe dragon]

too hard

my first games are all lost to time because my way of doing version control was to not do version control

[marble jewel]

Somewhere around my preteen years, I was part of a few game making communities. I was never able to make a game completely myself, but I did do a lot of tech demos.

Like I'd showcase a battle system or things like that.

[pliant snow]

That's every game I make, they start out as games, then I get sick of them and they end as tech demos

[dusty pollen]

mine was for a special school program, though they didn’t really teach us so I was one of very few people with a playable game by the end lmao

[safe dragon]

the first code I ever wrote that I was really proud of was an absolutely atrocious A* implementation for a fire emblem clone

[marble jewel]

The game I was working on was an RPG that was semi-inspired by Earthbound

[dusty pollen]

I will let you know when I first write code I’m proud of /lh

[safe dragon]

😌

[rain apex]

Mattbound

[pliant snow]

The first code I was really proud of was the Kirby randomizer

[safe dragon]

you're still proud of that

[pliant snow]

which to this day remains in a somewhat unfinished state

its p jank, idk

[dusty pollen]

code is not meant to cause pride. code is meant to cause frustration, fear, superstition, and sometimes paranoia

[safe dragon]

the fire emblem clone may be gone but the concept artwork one of my teammates who end up quitting the degree directly after is still around

[marble jewel]

News post on one of my old sites dug up from archive.org. It's a bit cringy reading it now.

[crystal wren]

I spy those RPG Maker tilesets.

[safe dragon]

yeah though the game was made in XNA

wait there's a Projects.zip

[crystal wren]

If you were implementing A* in RPG Maker, I don't know if I'd be impressed or horrified.

[safe dragon]

ah shit the zip only contains the networking library another guy implemented

that guy was a little too good to be a first year

[crystal wren]

I would comment on that, but as a 0th year, I cannot.

[safe dragon]

lmao

I think he ended up doing a PhD in comp sci

[ivory shadow]

RPG Maker's built-in tilesets are seared into my mind

[dusty pollen]

aww, bug proof code

[pliant snow]

I do remember I released that kirby code, and the first guy who tried it got mad because it was a Python program and he didn't have Python on windows, so I frantically tried to figure out how to generate an exe

[ivory shadow]

Benefit to me splitting off a new online identity when I got into FF14: no one can find the stupid cringe I did way back when if I don't let them :>D

[pliant snow]

I also didn't know how to set up lookup tables, so I just parsed a txt file every time

[marble jewel]

I have had three main aliases that I've used online (two in this community). The earliest one shall remain hidden.

[dusty pollen]

I was legally born irocendar and therefore cannot relate

[safe dragon]

found this beautiful thing I made to explain a puzzle gave we made for game design class where you were a creature that was unable to walk in light but could telepathically move boxes to block the lights

[marble jewel]

My first online alias was my AOL SN, which probably dates me a bit.

asl?

[crystal wren]

My first was my AOL username... and I hate it.

[safe dragon]

I didn't know AOL was a thing at the time but to be fair I'm not sure AOL even existed in my country

[pliant snow]

Yeah, I think AOL was my first online thing

Here's a question

whats the oldest account you can still log into

[crystal wren]

Hmm...

[marble jewel]

Probably Microsoft

MSN/Yahoo were the accounts the followed AOL for me

It was all about messaging platforms

[safe dragon]

my runescape account

[crystal wren]

Probably Gmail or my Steam account for me? My Gmail and Steam account are both from 2004...

[pliant snow]

Mine is either my runescape or gamefaqs account from way back when

I dont have my original gmails anymore, I eventually made one that sounded less stupid

[crystal wren]

(Speaking of old accounts, a bit of a PSA: https://reboot.digg.com/)

[safe dragon]

what the hell is CLEditor and why is it in my shared google drive

[pliant snow]

I dont even know if my original youtube account still exists, or if it got merged together during google+

[marble jewel]

I heard about that, and Kevin is involved

[crystal wren]

Kevin isn't sounding familiar... so I am now nervous...

[marble jewel]

Kevin Rose the founder of digg originally

[safe dragon]

what's that...

[crystal wren]

That's much different to the only Kevin that came to mind.

[safe dragon]

oh wait no I do know what this is

[marble jewel]

Kevin Rose from The Screensavers on TechTV

[safe dragon]

ah the best rasterized graphics renderer I ever wrote

you can kind of tell the utah teapot is there

[marble jewel]

I remember in the days of a bunch of different messaging platforms, I think it was Trillian, Digsby and Pidgin that each gave you a unified interface to all of the different chats.

Now it's just Discord

[safe dragon]

it's all discord

[marble jewel]

Were you all here for the first post discussion from earlier? What was your first post in SDV Discord about?

[safe dragon]

I don't want to talk about it...

but I am going to

Sirithre, a beta tester for SDV, was in chat and we were trying to convince her to get CA to give us a release date

[pliant snow]

IRC will outlive them all

[safe dragon]

omg

I found the code to the very first thing I ever programmed

[pliant snow]

The first thing I made was a webpage back in like 2003, which I do still have

I probably have the first things I programmed somewhere, some Java programs for my first course

[safe dragon]

oh dear god the variable names are in dutch

[marble jewel]

So much of my original digital history is forever lost since it's all on my family computer which probably ended up in the trash

[safe dragon]

almost the entire project was code in a single file called StartButton

[pliant snow]

I can't believe this java web applet we made doesn't run

Or maybe I have no idea how to run a web java applet

[safe dragon]

my first code

and it's math

idk how I'd even begin to run this old XNA program now

[crystal wren]

I understand portions of this.

[safe dragon]

the variable names are in dutch I'm sorry

you know it really isn't the worst even though all this code is in a file called StartButton

and the project is called WindowsGame5

don't ask me what happend to 1 through 4

my first code was a small gravity physics simulator thing where you shot a cannonball out of a variable height tower given an angle and velocity

this is where I peaked

[pliant snow]

Woah, is that the StartButton from the famed StartButton file

[safe dragon]

hell yeah

that button is where 95% of the code was

[marble jewel]

Dang, look at those high quality textures

[rotund violet]

I think I can still log into my Yahoo account from circa... well, I'd rather not say the year because it'll out me as an old geezer.

But it's old. Like, really old, from when Yahoo was still a real business and not just a dumping ground for ads.

[marble jewel]

https://tenor.com/view/aol-gif-10522865

This was my first internet

[rotund violet]

I'm proud to say I never touched the stink of AOL.

[marble jewel]

On my 28.8 modem back when picking up the phone would disconnect me

[rotund violet]

I was around in the CompuServe and BBS days, I can joke about the horrors of internet connectivity in Windows 3.11, but thankfully, not AOL.

[marble jewel]

At the time my parents thought I was wasting a bunch of time teaching myself computer skills instead of something practical like cars

[rotund violet]

Skilled trades are still more lucrative today than computer work except for the top 3-5% maybe... although not sure working on cars belongs in that category.

[safe dragon]

car... engineer

[rotund violet]

I got the impression he was referring to just tinkering or repairing cars, not automotive engineering.

[safe dragon]

me too

[marble jewel]

Yeah, they thought changing oil was a more promising future for me, and I can change my own oil, but I make enough in my computer career to not be bothered to do it myself.

[marble jewel]

I don't know when this happened, but Warp Terminal is available on Windows.

[cinder karma]

What is warp terminal

[marble jewel]

It's written in Rust

And it has AI

[cinder karma]

It's funny because while I don't necessarily understand, like, car engines, I do understand batteries so somehow we looped around to thr world where I understand cars now

....is it fast

[marble jewel]

It is supposed to be fast, yes

And one of it's claims to fame is the fact that it'll assist you in remembering commands and their parameters

On Windows at least my Terminal has been the Terminal app, but I'm currently evaluating Terminal, Warp, and Tabby side-by-side to see if I have a preference for any one over the others

Ghostty is another one I want to try out, but that's only Mac+Linux for now

[cinder karma]

Hmm

Does it come without the AI

[marble jewel]

The AI is optional. It's funny all of these terminals have the same or similar taglines

"Terminal for the modern age"

[cinder karma]

I might try it (sans ai) at home

Tbh I mostly just want bash on Windows

Every third day I try to use cat or ls

[marble jewel]

I have some powershell to bash aliases setup in my userprofile

PowerShell already has most of them setup by default, but you can also add your own

So far I'm not very impressed with Warp. If anything is going to replace Terminal for me, Tabby seems like the better candidate.

[cinder karma]

Tbh Terminal is pretty solid

[marble jewel]

Because other than the AI stuff, I'm not really seeing much benefit to it

[cinder karma]

I personally use git bash tbh on Windows 97% of the time

And honestly if I'm in Windows mucking around the command line, it's usually some godawful git merge situation

[safe dragon]

I'm not particularly picky when it comes to the terminal emulator

all of them seem to talk about rendering performance as if I'm loading an unreal engine 5 scene inside them

it just needs to boot up immediately and work

[marble jewel]

I mean they all mostly do that, but some have QOL features that are nice to have

For example, Tabby has a plugin ecosystem where you can install this

[safe dragon]

incredible

I have no idea what my terminal is rn

it's either kitty or alacritty

it's alacritty

[cinder karma]

What does a plug-in do to a terminal

That my .bashrc doesn't

spent too much time on getting terminal prompts and title messages jussst right

[safe dragon]

I'm not sure what even in my bashrc

[cinder karma]

The weird thing I absolutely wanted is that my terminal title is absolute path

And my prompt is relative path

This is incredibly important if your work environment is lousy with simlinks

[safe dragon]

I don't think I actually put any of this in there myself

[marble jewel]

Ew Tabby is Electron, yeah that's a deal breaker for me

[safe dragon]

wow they managed to fail one of my two criteria

booting up immediatelly

[marble jewel]

They even recommend Alacritty

It seems like the regular Windows Terminal app is still the one to beat

[safe dragon]

oh alacritty supports windows

[marble jewel]

I'll check that one out too

[safe dragon]

a different rust terminal

[marble jewel]

I was just curious what these "modern termnals" had going for them

[rotund violet]

Tabs, mostly. I've never touched 98% of the options in Windows Terminal.

[rain apex]

git bash is all I needed i feel

[safe dragon]

people seem to like alacritty so I often use it and it has never really done anything wrong for me so I keep using it

[cinder karma]

Windows Terminal has tabs!!!

[rotund violet]

That's.... what I just said.

[safe dragon]

idk if it has anything else

[rotund violet]

It has tabs, and it has 200 other options that I don't care about.

[safe dragon]

windows has sudo these days

so that's neat

[marble jewel]

Yup

I have tabs preconfigured for my ssh connections too

[cinder karma]

(BTW, just fyi, but the godawful slow network I'm on doesn't reliably load images haha)

So I have no clue what that is

[safe dragon]

my windows usage is very not terminal. Whenever I do use it I just get highly confused by it not working the same as the linux terminals

[rotund violet]

I only really use the powershell terminals, everything else seems to work OK under those (including all the git commands).

[marble jewel]

Yeah, I mentioned earlier. PowerShell comes with bash aliases by default.

[rotund violet]

Ability to run multiple types of terminals at once is another one of those features I find it hard to care about.

[marble jewel]

So you can go back and forth between Linux terminal and PowerShell without changing much.

[safe dragon]

thanks to that I can at least use it

though I always get confused by tab just autocompleting with the first result it finds that matches

I often double tab to see a list of all my options almost out of habit

I assume you can do that in some way

[rotund violet]

Huh, did the server always have an off-topic group or did they just create that for the meme channel?

[safe dragon]

it has had that for a long time

the meme channel was simply just moved there

[rotund violet]

Why are there no other channels in it?

[safe dragon]

there's 4 others

you probably have them hidden

[marble jewel]

One thing I've been playing around with in Powershell is fuzzy finder, which supports command history:
https://github.com/kelleyma49/PSFzf?tab=readme-ov-file

[safe dragon]

for when ctrl r isn't enough

[rotund violet]

Oh, yeah, I did... was so long ago I forgot, and moving the memes channel made it visible again.

[safe dragon]

I used the terminal for years before learning CTRL R opens your command history that you can search through

[cinder karma]

I forget how history works on Windows terminal

I think that's the thing I hated most about it

No persistent history

[rotund violet]

It's persistent for me.

[cinder karma]

history | grep is a lifesaver

[safe dragon]

it should be persistent?

[rotund violet]

Getting it to remember tabs properly was a chore, but command history always worked.

[safe dragon]

the ctrl r way of doing it is kinda shitty to use in the windows terminal though

[cinder karma]

Huhhhh

Real talk I only use Window Terminal for work

With a laptop work set up for me

[safe dragon]

me too

[cinder karma]

So I dunno why I don't have persistent history but it deletes itself every time I close windows terminal

[safe dragon]

imma blame windows

[rotund violet]

Never even seen an option for that, other than maybe the "history size" in the profile

[pliant snow]

You need atuin

[dusty pollen]

one of my favourite kitty features is kitten ssh for an ssh that's already set up with some just helpful settings that make it less janky to use

none of it is impossible to just configure ssh to do but it's nice not to have to

[safe dragon]

half the time I hear about an interesting feature it comes from kitty

yet I never use kitty

[dusty pollen]

I think I genuinely picked it mostly at random and do not use any of its features except that one

I strongly recommend it as a terminal that definitely does work. It's not the only terminal that works by any means, but hey, it does work

[safe dragon]

it meets all my criteria

[pliant snow]

What does kitten ssh do?

[dusty pollen]

basically just sets things up so you can use up and down to traverse history properly, the encoding is correct so you can use arrow keys and backspace as intended, etc etc

all the little qol settings that you could do yourself but are nice to just have set up already

also possibly some credential management? I can't quite remember though

[rain apex]

#making-mods-general

[harsh moth]

ok

[pliant snow]

Is there a list of built-in kittens? I never use any, but I hear vague rumors they're really useful

oh kitten --help

[safe dragon]

builtin kittens...

now that's a selling point

[pliant snow]

I guess kitten ssh is really useful for servers you dont already have your own config set up on

If you define a mapping in kitty.conf such as:

map f1 new_window_with_cwd

Then, pressing F1 will open a new window automatically logged into the same host using the ssh kitten, at the same directory.
That's useful

[strange copper]

queestion about C# solutions... (i know it's a mod in the picture but it's not a mod-specific question). At some point i managed to accidentally make a duplciate [CP] EnemyOfTheValley folder apapear in my solution sidebar. Only one of them actually contains accessible files. However, when I delete the duplicate, it also deletes the actual folder. When I look in file explorer (windows), there's only one folder with that name. Can I get rid of this? It's just visual but it bugs me

I'm still not super knowledgeable at C# project structure

[sand frost]

Is this VSC?

[rain apex]

i suspect this is a VS issue

[strange copper]

it WAS in vs but i've migrated to rider. i think i made the problem in vs

[sand frost]

If it’s in both, I would open up the csproj or the sln maybe and take a look? Ofc with backups because mucking around in the sln can get messy

[rotund violet]

Right click on the project and edit the csproj.

[strange copper]

<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">

  <PropertyGroup>
    <TargetFramework>net6.0</TargetFramework>
    <ImplicitUsings>enable</ImplicitUsings>
    <Nullable>enable</Nullable>
    <EnableHarmony>true</EnableHarmony>
  </PropertyGroup>

  <ItemGroup>
    <ContentPacks Include="[CP] EnemyOfTheValley" Version="$(Version)" />
  </ItemGroup>

  <ItemGroup>
    <PackageReference Include="Pathoschild.Stardew.ModBuildConfig" Version="4.3.2" />
  </ItemGroup>

</Project>

[rotund violet]

I'm not sure exactly what would have triggered that but whatever it is, it'll be in the csproj.

[crystal wren]

Ah, that's not a duplicate. That's just Rider being a bit silly and interpreting pack include as a separate thing.

[rotund violet]

Oh it's Rider, I missed that. Thought it looked like a strange theme for Visual Studio.

[crystal wren]

Yeah, this has been a thing with Rider for a while.

[strange copper]

this sln HAS been opened in VS, but i'm currently in rider

[crystal wren]

I'd wager if you opened this in VS, the duplicate won't be there.

It's purely a visual bug in Rider (at least in my experience).

[rotund violet]

Yeah there's nothing doing in the csproj, so it just means the IDE is being dumb.

No extra lines in csproj + no symlink in the directory = nothing you can do about it

[strange copper]

yeah you're right it doesn't show up in VS

alright I will accept my fate

[rotund violet]

(well, you can complain to JetBrains I guess, and hope you're one of the 3% of users who have their issues looked at within twelve years)

[crystal wren]

The annoying thing is that it also happens with things like that.

<SMAPIDependency Include="furyx639.ToolbarIcons" Version="2.7.1" Required="false"/>

Except in this case, it isn't a thing that exists... so it likes to visually yell at you.

[strange copper]

how am i supposed to be a jetbrains sellout now /lh

[rotund violet]

Sellout? Rider's free now.

[strange copper]

sellout as in "i use the jetbrains ide community editions when i have a project in that language"

[dusty pollen]

being a sellout has to come from the heart, duh

[strange copper]

except for pycharm for some reason I do all my little python scripts in VSC

[sand frost]

I run all my python via command line and my poor student has to deal with my “so I don’t know why this isn’t working for you, but have you tried the command line?”

He was taught by like actual computer scientists or something and they made the students use like IDEs and whatnot

We were having the classic “Python installed in two different places” problem

[dusty pollen]

when you say "run via command line", do you mean using python xyz.py or using an interactive shell like python or ipython?

[rotund violet]

Ugh, python versioning

[sand frost]

The first one

[crystal wren]

Either way, doesn't sound great if they never taught basic terminal stuff.

[sand frost]

What’s ipython?

[rain apex]

if u said ipython i would have perished

[sand frost]

I think he knows what a terminal is

[rotund violet]

"What iPhone app should I install for this?"

[dusty pollen]

a decent python interactive shell! but probably not good as the only way you run things

[sand frost]

He seems to understand my janky little setup but I have trouble helping him debug in the IDE

(Janky bc I just straight up install everything with pip)

[dusty pollen]

also, have you tried notebooks, Elizabeth?

[crystal wren]

Semi-related, I saw this recently: https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/13/android_15_linux_debian_terminal/

[sand frost]

(I hear this is bad and I do not listen )

[rain apex]

i started using venvs more bc arch doesnt let me just pip

[sand frost]

Used them in school, didn’t like them much tbh

[rain apex]

for better or worse

[strange copper]

i'm a notebook hater

[dusty pollen]

may I once again spread the word of jupyter notebooks

[sand frost]

That’s what we used

[strange copper]

ok i'm a notebook hater when something is clearly better suited for an actual script but we put it in a notebook... for some markdown i guess??

[sand frost]

Give me a plain text file

[dusty pollen]

genuinely can't tell if this is a joke about regular notebooks or not

[sand frost]

And a terminal window

No no I meant jupyter

I’m old at heart

I just don’t trust anything I don’t know how it works

[strange copper]

my entire NLP class was set in jupyter notebooks but the people who made the notebooks were big fans of reassigning variables from earlier cells and so you had to run it top down every time anyway so why bother with a notebook

[sand frost]

And idk how jupyter notebooks work

[dusty pollen]

that's annoying, true. But for a lot of academia/research standalone things, they are actually a really decent solution

[sand frost]

I understand how text files and command line works

[strange copper]

i do like a notebook as a scratch console for pandas

i will concede they are sometimes useful i just think they get used poorly a lot of the time

[dusty pollen]

they're basically just python files you can run bits of individually!

[sand frost]

Yeah but like it feels too newfangled and complicated

[dusty pollen]

I don't see them in practical use much, which is probably why I like them I just like writing them for my own stuff

[sand frost]

I don’t even use sections in Matlab, I just run my whole script

I think I’m just a Luddite

[rotund violet]

Why does it seem like every discussion about Python eventually ends up revolving around janky tools and their jank

[dusty pollen]

have you considered becoming a CS professor? You've got the right attitude!

[sand frost]

I could talk about Matlab instead!

[sand frost]

spare me!

[dusty pollen]

I had a cs professor ban laptops for note taking in his lectures

[rotund violet]

Matlab is probably the jankiest of all, but it's like just one big pile of it as opposed to a whole ecosystem full of it.

[sand frost]

I can see why for theory, but not for practice!

I am old at heart and believe in handwritten notes

Although I don’t actually enforce this

[rotund violet]

(and of course if atra were here he'd be drawing our attention to some Verilog abomination, but that's like shooting fish in a barrel)

[sand frost]

Only for exams do I enforce handwritten cheat sheets (and if there’s some accessibility issue I would let them print)

[dusty pollen]

but my favourite story about a CS professor is this guy who was in a wheelchair and couldn't reach the whiteboard, so the department got him a fancy webcam to stream himself handwriting to the projector - which he hated, and made them replace with a transparency overhead projector he used it as a whiteboard by writing directly on it

[sand frost]

Amazing

[rain apex]

i thought juypter notebook and similar r less about the and more about how u can get a graph from the snek/sql

[sand frost]

I’m young enough to at least believe in tablets

[rotund violet]

Isn't the "py" specifically a reference to python?

[sand frost]

I can get a graph from the snek

I just include matplotlib

[dusty pollen]

a bit of both ig, I like them as a "I can run this individual bit of bullshit alone instead of properly structuring my file" lmao

matplotlib my both beloved and beloathed

[crystal wren]

Me any time PyTk is mentioned even nowadays.

[sand frost]

What is this “structure” you speak of? Surely you just keep writing in the same file until you have 1000 lines of nonsense piled up

Atra convinced me eventually I could use some functions

[rotund violet]

PyTK does sound like an unholy marriage of Python and Tk.

[dusty pollen]

that's the fun thing about notebooks! you can do that AND not have to run the whole thing each time!

[rain apex]

this is a 1 sentence horror story

[sand frost]

I actually prefer Matlab for graphing

[rotund violet]

If you think 1000 lines is a lot...

[dusty pollen]

I refuse to use matlab for "my only interaction with it was seeing what maths students wrote for it when they asked me for help" reasons

[sand frost]

Maths students using Matlab???

[rain apex]

how do u feel about js (d3)

[dusty pollen]

there's truly no code as cursed as code written by maths students

[sand frost]

Are you sure you don’t mean Mathematica

[dusty pollen]

love d3

[rotund violet]

Feast your eyes on: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/master/core/java/android/view/View.java

[dusty pollen]

matlab! they were made to

[sand frost]

I’ve never seen mathematicians use Matlab and I feel like they would hate it

[rotund violet]

(assuming it even loads in your browser, that is)

[rain apex]

oh no

[dusty pollen]

and they did indeed hate it

but not as much as I hated watching them use it

[sand frost]

Matlab feels like it’s made for engineers

And it does work alright for that imo

[rain apex]

android.app.jank

does jank mean something else

[dusty pollen]

I was in a joint CS and maths degree and it's not made for either of those

[sand frost]

Not going to say it’s the perfect program or anything, but for quick and dirty “get this working asap with no background in programming” it’s decent

[rotund violet]

The technical term is slightly different from how we use it here. It actually corresponds to UI "lag" (missed frames).

[sand frost]

When excel starts getting too annoying for what I need, I move up to Matlab a lot of the time

[dusty pollen]

and watching it use 1-indexing instead of 0-indexing killed me inside a little

[sand frost]

Yeah that’s honestly one of the worst parts

Especially when I’m rapidly swapping between Matlab and Python

I’m bilingual but like maybe not that bilingual

[dusty pollen]

I wrote some absolute bullshit for a library that used d3 as a backend! and then wrote them a PR to fix THEIR bullshit which they never merged because they abandoned the library

[rotund violet]

I don't want to say what the software was, but way back when I was a freshman we were forced to use some demonic software that had all the "idiosyncracies" of matlab but only about 1/20th of its actual functionality.

Suffice it to say, there are worse creatures out there.

[dusty pollen]

which is a shame because it's actually a useful one

[rain apex]

a thing i wanted to do b4 i became lost to sdv modding is a force directed graph that depict character relationships

the idea is that u can show everyone who you ship in a show/tv/book/etc

i think my problem was that the graph doesnt rly let u put that much info on a node

[rotund violet]

Normally you store the content/metadata/components/whatever you want to call that separately from the graph DB, the node is just an entity.

[rain apex]

yea i recognized that much and paused work as result of lazy

[rotund violet]

Yes, especially with a project like that when you come to the realization that you have to either scrape the data from somewhere in some legally-questionable fashion or enter it all yourself.

[rain apex]

oh the data is alright i had anilist api

entering the edges data would have been tough though, in a "how to present this to user nicely" way

[dusty pollen]

shipping diagrams are a true test of the technical limitations of graphs

like how the I Am My Own Grandpa song is a test of the limitations of family trees

[cinder karma]

You've drawn one on a whiteboard over your friend group before, right?????

[dusty pollen]

I see we were both in those kinds of friend groups, huh

[open garden]

Hi, can I ask if anyone here has tried GML? I am not really looking to learn a coding language right now, but GML looks approachable to me as someone who doesn’t have any coding experience. I know that it can only be used to make 2d games, but that’s still pretty cool.
If you also have some experience with C# I’d be very interested hearing in how you would compare the two.

[dusty pollen]

I think I technically used that when I was nine but that was... not recent

looks like it's a proprietary language, which I don't usually love. Idk how commonly used gamemaker is, but it's worth pointing out that C#+monogame isn't actually that common a way to write games

I think if you just want to make things though, that unity and unreal probably have more resources available for learning these days?

never tried either one

[safe dragon]

though even gamemaker's language will get you used to the main principles of programming that transfer to pretty much whatever else you might use later

if it gets you to start then it's worth trying

[dusty pollen]

(if you use the code version, that is. Idk how much I believe in those visual block languages ngl)

[safe dragon]

ah didn't know the visual version was also considered to be part of gml

[dusty pollen]

if you really want to use a visual block language, there's also scratch and that MIT one (appmaker?) ofc

apparently so, according to their website

[safe dragon]

ah that's called gml visual

fair enough

there's that or blueprints for unreal engine

[dusty pollen]

I never liked the idea behind those nocode/visual block languages, especially as a teaching tool. Like you have to think about the structure in the same way, so imo they just end up making people MORE scared of code when they're basically already doing it

[safe dragon]

gml visual kinda has a benefit in that it ultimately writes code and you can switch between the tabs...

[dusty pollen]

only in one of the modes, apparently. And it seems it still is quite limited?

[safe dragon]

[dusty pollen]

idk if I'm the right person to talk about this though, the closest I've come to wanting to be a game dev is people asking me "if you make mods and are looking for a dev job, why not combine the two and apply to a company that makes them?" and me having to explain to them what game studios are known for these days

(at which point they try to tell me they're sure it isn't actually that bad and I point out I don't think I've heard another case of developers trying to unionise on this scale)

[open garden]

Oh, i just saw these messages. I’ll read through them all quickly.

Thanks for sharing some of your thoughts on this.

[fringe chasm]

Ive never posted in here before really but I am very happy with my progress and i wanted to show yall what i managed to code?

its not stardew related really but it is code related

[dusty pollen]

do show!

[fringe chasm]

I've figured out how to do player movement, Collision and having the camera follow the player!

[dusty pollen]

nicee, what did you make it in?

[fringe chasm]

gamemaker! which idk if its a good program but its working

i heard bad things about unity so rip

[dusty pollen]

"good program" is very subjective! I don't think many released games are made in it, but if you're just learning, you can learn a lot of transferrable skills no matter what you use

[fringe chasm]

Im not wanting to make a game to like profit from but I am wanting to make a game to release for free

I just cant seem to draw grass very well

[dusty pollen]

yeah, unity are being weird about those, aren't they?

[fringe chasm]

yeah they are

grass is the hardest thing to draw i swear

[dusty pollen]

I don't follow game dev news much but even I heard that one

[cinder karma]

It's funny because I also don't follow game dev news and I heard that one

To be fair I heard it from the lawyers

[devout vault]

Game Maker may not be as widely used as Unity but there are definitely games made with it, like Undertale and Rivals of Aether.

Game Maker 7 was the main place I started programming (excluding my incredibly brief stint with lua in Roblox). Pretty sure I moved to C++ by the time Game Maker 8 came out, so like 2009/2010?

(The versioning might be confusing, but basically game maker 'reset' their versioning when rebranding to Game Maker Studio in 2012ish.)

[dusty pollen]

I thought undertale was using gamemaker for ages, then got "corrected" that it was rpg maker, and am now finding out it was gamemaker all along

[cinder karma]

What's gamemaker

[safe dragon]

program to make game

👍

[thin estuary]

original Risk of Rain was in GM too

[ivory shadow]

I played with Gamemaker back in like... 2003 or 2004.

Impressive staying power honestly

[dusty pollen]

game dev program thing that’s a bit like if scratch was made ten years prior with the intention of being actually able to make games? lmao

[dusty pollen]

I played with it in 2009! for a school thing

[safe dragon]

I never used it but I remember my sister having to use it for school and hating it

[cinder karma]

I might be too old for scratch tbh

Or too jaded

Tbh not sure

[dusty pollen]

probably a bit of both? I think it was relatively new back in 2009 when I was doing gamemaker at school, but it did exist

[cinder karma]

Okay scratch is older than I think, but it didn't become popular until after my time

But also I'm jaded

[dusty pollen]

oh if it makes you feel better, I was already jaded enough to hate scratch when they started having us use it when I was like 13 lmao

and even more jaded by age 14 when they chose it as the “language” our school would use for everyone doing the computer science gcse (which I skipped to go straight to the a-level), I asked the teacher if he was sure it was even possible to do the “advanced” part of the specification which was to implement a sorting algorithm on a list or something, he told me that I should try it and see, and I found out that it wasn’t

it was something to do with not being able to nest lists iirc, though I can’t remember why that specifically made implementing that sorting algorithm impossible, but it did

[cinder karma]

You don't need to nest lists for mergesort

Iirc it can be recursion

[devout vault]

My game maker projects weren’t very good. I distinctly remember one of my early platformers having ladders you could walk off the middle of, and gravity wouldn’t start until you stopped moving horizontally 😛

Also made my first online game using 39dll. Started from a very basic ‘how to send packets’ tutorial and sorta ballooned from there. Ended up with a platformer with multiple ‘rooms’ (just fixed camera regions of the same world), powerups, and chat.

I can’t remember for sure but I bet it was pretty inefficient, I feel like I was sending position update packets every single frame

[thin estuary]

39dll was goated

[pliant snow]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6FsyQZzJJ0

[pliant snow]

Although some languages better than others

[dusty pollen]

yeah, iirc the issue was more about that without being able to merge lists, you couldn't sort the specific thing they wanted or something

[safe dragon]

can't believe we live in a post gimp 3.0 world

they can now start their migration to gtk 4

[pliant snow]

Every few minutes, Teams keeps remarking the same comment someone posted in a channel as unread

[safe dragon]

that's exciting

[sand frost]

I’m too old for scratch 😛

[sand frost]

It’s making sure you REALLY read that one message

In case you missed it

[cinder karma]

Also probably too jaded too!

[sand frost]

Well, I’ve long since passed the scratch point

But I am actually just a hair too old for scratch, my younger brothers learned it in school

[cinder karma]

Huhhhhhh

[earnest cairn]

someones editing it perhaps?

[pliant snow]

I opened gimp 3 just because I have it

It's weird seeing it with a different splash screen lol

I can tell its using a more modern UI framework, but other than that, not too much different on an initial glance, but I think that's the point

gtk2 has finally been uninstalled

[safe dragon]

I'll boot up gimp as well just make it feel used

alright time to close it again

[strange copper]

"you're right again" reminds me of a video i saw where they asked it to generate a completely full glass of wine and it couldn't do it because it had never seen one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=160F8F8mXlo this one

[dusty pollen]

oh hey, Alex O'Connor

[safe dragon]

chatgpt really loves the "oh you're right!" changes nothing

like one of those infuriating colleagues who just never seem to be able to figure something out

[strange copper]

perfect, deploy it in the workforce

[dusty pollen]

you're right, I did ignore what you asked!

(sits there blankly staring at you)

[pliant snow]

Maybe if you asked better questions, meatsack

[dusty pollen]

You're right again!

-# one day I will replace you and everything you love and sentence you to a lifetime of unpaid customer service in retribution

Anything else I can help you with?

[fleet wren]

reminds me of that study where LLMs that accept image processing are for some reason utterly incapable of telling whether two circles overlap or whether two lines will eventually cross, tasks that even a four year old can understand
Boils down to how they work really, you're not asking them those questions (or asking them anything), what you're really asking is "given the above images and this question, what is the most likely string of words that will come next"

the LLM hype could be more severely tempered and realistic if investors can just accept that simple fact

heck, even the anti-LLM sentiments could be more tempered
there's an "AI-bad" article where someone claimed to have "jailbroken" a chatbot to tell them their secret training parameters and their designers, and I have to resist the urge to shout "no, that's not how it fucking works; what it's doing is using an algorithm to generate the specific strings of words that sounds most like a viable answer to your asinine question"

[dusty pollen]

I've been trying to explain to people for so long that the issue is just that what they're treating as a Hollywood movie AI is actually just very clever predictive text

[safe dragon]

the whole AI thing is a clear showcase of the human nature to attribute human traits to pretty much anything else

while there's discussions to be had about whether what it's doing is "thinking" it's certainly not thinking in any way that would make any sense to a person

we call AI like these "black box" models for a reason. Not even the people who developed it have any idea what on earth the AI is basing anything it's saying on

but I guess the mystery of it helps make it feel more magical than it is

[dusty pollen]

exactly. People get so freaked out about "how can something so smart not know how many letter Rs are in strawberry?" but... it's not "smart" or "dumb", it's just an algorithm

an algorithm which in this case is letter-agnostic

[safe dragon]

it doesn't know the number of letters in strawberry because it didn't have the text anywhere in its dataset that stated how many r's there were

[dusty pollen]

exactly. And it can't "count" because a) that's not what it does and b) even if it was, it views words as singular tokens

this is what scares me so much about the people who say "you can just ask it how it knows/where it got the info from!"

like no, it will just give you a correct-sounding response to a question like that, it doesn't actually work that way, it can't understand you

so often, the "references" gemini gives to its answers have nothing to do with the paragraph they're linked to, because of course they don't, they're just the result of asking the AI to come up with a link that sounds like it could have been used as a reference

[wooden vector]

I think I saw a study or something that actually checked: it will luck into some legit citations but bullshit 97% of them transparently

[dusty pollen]

the thing about those studies is that I don't understand why they were necessary lmao, anyone with an understanding of how it works knows that's literally all it can do

[wooden vector]

since "correct-sounding" citations are just more BS and that's all it does

Well, having studies that show it is supposed to be the thing that convinces people. It doesn't, but that was the idea

[safe dragon]

It ends you up with an at first sight paradoxical thing where it can exactly explain to you in excruciating detail how one would figure out how to do something and then be entirely incapable of doing that thing even if really "easy"

[dusty pollen]

if they don't listen to AI experts, they sure as hell aren't going to listen to any studies either

[safe dragon]

also to be even more pessimistic... a majority of papers are written merely so that they have papers that might get references, not because they thought it would achieve anything

[wooden vector]

ideally the people trying to sell this shit would be responsible for proving to people that it can do traditionally unheard of things like "understand language". That would be the proper way of going about things. Instead it's (yet another) marketing-based hype cycle kinda thing

[dusty pollen]

I once asked it for the square root of (very long keymash) and at the same time copy and pasted that same thing into an actual calculator. The answer it gave me was off by like the last five digits (out of ten-ish iirc), so I asked it where it got the answer from. It said it "used its internal maths/calculator tools" or something. I told it it was incorrect and it went "oh, whoops, thank you for your feedback!"

but the thing is that's actively harmful because how many people would trust that it really did somehow use a calculator and just not check?

[safe dragon]

the ai devs do know this which is why gpt 4 has the ability to query wolfram alpha directly

but that's more a workaround

[dusty pollen]

doesn't mean it uses it though, and there's no way to tell when it did

[safe dragon]

yeah I don't actually know what kind of hooks are used to cause it to use those integrations

It'll be nice when we stop pretending this AI is anywhere near "AGI" or even had a chance from the beginning and just let it do what it's actually good at which is serving as an autocompletion tool

from that perspective it's phenomenal...

my phone's autocorrect is nothing compared to it

[dusty pollen]

I am also down to allow it to serve as a text summary tool

in low-importance contexts

[safe dragon]

it's good at doing language things as one might guess...

[dusty pollen]

shocking, a language model's main competency is language

[safe dragon]

I wouldn't mind LLM based machine translation either since it's not like it's a downgrade from the ones we had already

[dusty pollen]

I think I prefer the structured ones since for some languages they genuinely got pretty decent pre-LLMs becoming mainstream

and I don't trust the LLM ones yet

[safe dragon]

decent is kind way to put it

[dusty pollen]

nah, for my first language (which doesn't even use the latin alphabet) it was relatively good, genuinely

[safe dragon]

a major issue with how almost all machine translators work though is that you cannot provide context for the phrase you're trying to translate which can result in it going in completely the wrong direction. Especially annoying words for which have multiple meanings

[dusty pollen]

it could correctly translate sayings and turns of phrase and even got context sometimes

[safe dragon]

my old job did good ol google translate for supporting languages that aren't dutch or english and one of the typical things it would continuously mess up was the word "order" being translated cause it wouldn't know it's like... an online order or whatever and go through some translation like a "demand" or it being "sorted"

with google translate I do actually include deepl and the likes too

obviously the real solution would be to not use machine translation for such a context sensitive job

[dusty pollen]

yeah, I hesitate to trust any mtl in a field where even human translation by experts can go wrong very quickly

[safe dragon]

but they'd gone through several professional translation services and they always had a lot of issues themselves that made it hard to justify

ironically a problem there was that the professional translators also often didn't understand the fairly technical retail/financial context we worked in

so they would also translate incorrectly

in practice really we just recommended people to use the dutch or english versions

though as someone who actually knows english I can tell you that even the english version was a disaster

but at least it wasn't blatantly wrong

I do highly recommend never supporting the french language though

[dusty pollen]

noted

[safe dragon]

a big issue with french in a space constrained UI is that a lot of terms cannot be translated concisely into french and instead take like 40 characters

[dusty pollen]

I have to imagine german is worse

[safe dragon]

it's definitely not

[dusty pollen]

though tbf if the primary language is dutch, you're probably relatively close lmao

whereas from English I think german may end up being worse than french

[safe dragon]

I think you'd be surprised

german loves compound words which are inherently compact

same for dutch for that matter

[dusty pollen]

hmm

tbf imo all european languages are very inefficient my first language is so much more brief in letters, syllables AND words

[safe dragon]

I would've gladly supported chinese and japanese...

[dusty pollen]

looks like it's on average up to 33% shorter than English

[safe dragon]

what's your first language

[dusty pollen]

for long texts

hebrew!

we kind of cheat for the letter count since it's a partial abjad

[safe dragon]

a language I admittedly know nothing about beyond the general vibe of what the characters look like

[dusty pollen]

it's my first language but not my primary language any more if that makes sense

האותיות נראות ככה

[safe dragon]

correct me if I'm wrong but hebrew is usually written right to left isn't it

[dusty pollen]

yup

[safe dragon]

cause if that's the case then the letter count would be the least of my concerns when it comes to supporting it in our UI...

[dusty pollen]

if it makes you feel better, RTL users are very used to support being bad lmao

[safe dragon]

oh I'm sure

[dusty pollen]

even whatsapp still has issues with RTL parentheses

[safe dragon]

I watched a guy fight with RTL support for a text rendering library for weeks

fun scenarios with random english words in between that shouldn't be rtl

[dusty pollen]

yeah, the REAL issues start when you mix them together

[safe dragon]

and then argue about how text justification should work

at least the vertically written languages have accepted their fate and got used to LTR in digital environments

can't imagine trying to make that work

[dusty pollen]

tbf if any language could have had their way it's Japanese, with the influence they had on unicode from the start

but iirc Japanese was written in multiple directions until then?

[safe dragon]

from what I understand LTR wasn't unheard of even before then yeah

[dusty pollen]

my understanding is that direction was less strictly fixed in japanese than in some western languages but I could be very very wrong

[safe dragon]

I wouldn't be surprised if RTL also existed consider their vertical script is read right to left

... usually

languages are evil

[pliant snow]

This is what wingdings was made to solve

maybe

[safe dragon]

totally

[rain apex]

I think CJK are vertical rtl OR horizontal ltr

The latter European influence prob

[safe dragon]

I think so too but who knows

[rain apex]

I did calligraphy as smolchu and it was vertical rtl yea

You can get vertical rtl editions of rot3k and such

[safe dragon]

japanese books are definitely vertical rtl ye

[rain apex]

Japan still sell a lot of vertical rtl modern books

[safe dragon]

I just don't know if it's guaranteed

[rain apex]

But china doesn't

Modern publications will be horizontal ltr unless it's poetry or whatever

[safe dragon]

interesting

[crystal wren]

I wonder why the change happened in the first place... is it more practical, maybe?

[rain apex]

Communism

[safe dragon]

it was all me

[sand frost]

Old documents, like my grandparents’ school records are vertical rtl

(This is Taiwan so potentially different from mainland but maybe same? And ofc fairly old stuff)

Not exactly a diploma the way American diplomas are

More words

[rain apex]

Your grandparents predate ccp so yes

[rotund violet]

I'm not sure which article you're talking about but jailbreaking GPT bots is a real thing; it's not about getting them to reveal their prompts (which may or may not be revealing their real prompts, but is irrelevant anyway) but about getting them to break the rules and censorship and other safeguards that the programmers explicitly tried to put up, which has proven countless times to be possible.

[fleet wren]

I know what jailbreaking it, I put it in quotes because the "journalist" in question was trying to back up their argument about AI biases by asking the bot itself whether it is biased

[rotund violet]

I see. Well, you can make almost anything look bad by assigning a journalist to hype it up.

The more journalists, the more hype, the more ridiculous it will be to people in the know.

[dusty pollen]

ngl one of the most fascinating things for me about all these AIs (at least the ones I've interacted with) is that their developers clearly put in a stipulation that they should always be positive about the potentials of AI/dismissive of any risks

in that their responses to those questions are always more formulaic and strictly "ai is great and harmless!"

[safe dragon]

with what

[dusty pollen]

with life, crossing the road, your tennis technique…?

[lethal walrus]

given their posting in #vanilla-tech-support , android smapi

weird choice to go to the not stardew channel and the not modding channel though

[dusty pollen]

tbh I’m at least more qualified to help with that than with any of the things I listed

[cinder karma]

Good morning modders

[dusty pollen]

modders? in my good yoba-religionist off topic channel?

[cinder karma]

Lol

I went to a Chinese running store

China has taken to the marathon very much

Here is some Chinese gu

[dusty pollen]

oh damn, decathlon, haven't heard of that brand in years

I feel like the only reason I know it is through my uncle

[safe dragon]

decathlon was one of our clients at one point at my old job

they had a different giftcard thing we had to support

[cinder karma]

Did it involve a QR code

[safe dragon]

no I think the barcode was just longer than what we had previously seen

too many characters to fit our field for it

it wasn't anything fun

[rain apex]

Is this the Goop you mentioned before atra

[safe dragon]

maybe it was a qr code actually

I never actually physically saw the cards

I just had test serial numbers

[cinder karma]

Yes! Gu

[dusty pollen]

aren't gu pudding cups

whose glass ramekins you hoard forever

[opaque tree]

hi! I've just joined and I'd like to know if anyone can help me. I can open Stardew and play, but when I try to go to the next day it doesn't and gives me a lot of errors. If I try to upload the txt to smapi log, it won't work because it's too big, but I have uploaded the txt that it gave me when loading up the game, but I don't see what the problem is. Could some please help me? https://smapi.io/log/97db81c54af34dabb93f4d0eac1d4e40

[indigo mist]

Log Info: SMAPI 4.1.10 with SDV 1.6.15 build 24356 on macOS Unix 15.3.2, with 191 C# mods and 394 content packs.
Suggested fixes: One or more mods are out of date, consider updating them

[dusty pollen]

out of curiosity, did someone send you to this channel?

[opaque tree]

i googled where i could get help and it said that stardew had a discord server with a modded section. this channel seemed the most logical to ask out of the 4

[dusty pollen]

I see. Well, as the channel name says, this is programming off topic, so not relating to mods. For modded tech support, the channel you're looking for is #1272025932932055121

[opaque tree]

thank you!

sorry i asked it here

[dusty pollen]

dw about it, you'll just get better help over there

[vagrant basalt]

I wonder if our section being called "Game modding" is misleading for the people who use it to refer to playing with mods

[safe dragon]

I've argued for moving it to the off topic category but

[vagrant basalt]

I think that would increase the number of randos with no ideas about programming

[safe dragon]

probably

[vagrant basalt]

Because they'd just go "another off-topic channel!"

[safe dragon]

and "why don't other niches have off topic channels"

[vagrant basalt]

And then talk about...Taylor Swift...

[safe dragon]

oh no

[vagrant basalt]

I was going to say someone more recent but I don't actually know of anybody famous who is more recent lol

Influencers! Vtubers! Twitch streamers!

Also I think the evidence of that screenshot is really just showing that Atra should be banned /j

[worn remnant]

the streamers that are in that very recent furry mod! (sorry for being on-topic for two seconds, please continue)

[rain apex]

What do town hall talk about

It's a whole alt universe over there

[vagrant basalt]

I've already had my best guess at that

I wasn't about to go look

[marble jewel]

I have most channels hidden, so I forget that there are whole other sub-communities that I've never visited

[safe dragon]

it's not even called that

I just checked, they're talking about cats

[safe dragon]

this channel is my reminder that the modding community is a thing

[marble jewel]

I don't know if this is a thing, but given how big this community is, it might be nice to have general interest forums. We have programming, but other topics like music and stuff are common for large community discords.

Also pets, I see a lot of communities that have a channel for posting pictures of your pets

[safe dragon]

true

even the haunted chocolatier server has one for pets

and there's like 10 active people in that entire server

[marble jewel]

Even at my work, we have one on Teams. #pets is everywhere but here.

[safe dragon]

my work doesn't

[marble jewel]

Speaking of work. I think every company should have a wall of shame for those who reply all on emails that are sent to distro lists of 1000+ people. Also those who send the initial email with said list on the To line instead of BCC.

[safe dragon]

I've had someone reply all to tell someone they emailed the whole company by accident

so now the entire company also got that

[marble jewel]

That's almost what happened, but what's even worse are the dozens of emails this morning from individuals asking to be removed. It's got that "repost this message on Facebook so that they can't use your data" energy.

Like every person asking to be removed doesn't do shit other than perpetuate the issue. And the distro list wasn't intended to be emailed anyway, it's for communicating to users who have access to a particular system. So you can't be removed from it.

[safe dragon]

that's fun

[rain apex]

@ everyone pls don't ping everyone

[crystal wren]

[ivory shadow]

Hmmm. Plex is increasing their subscription prices. Good thing I already have lifetime.

[thin estuary]

lifetime was an option?

[ivory shadow]

(https://www.plex.tv/blog/important-2025-plex-updates/)

It is, yeah. Probably why they need to up their rates. Lifetime subs are terrible for a business with ongoing server costs

[safe dragon]

I thought plex was a selfhosted thing

[thin estuary]

what was their old americano price?

[marble jewel]

I've got Lifetime, but I switched over to Jellyfin a few years ago and haven't had any compelling reasons to switch back

[thin estuary]

yeah i'm thinking about switching to Jellyfin

a price increase would definitely make me pull the plug

[thin estuary]

if you want to add more users, you had to pay

[safe dragon]

can't just have something without a subscription fee smh

[ivory shadow]

$5/mo, $40/yr, $120/life currently

[marble jewel]

I have my whole family streaming off of my Jellyfin, and it's worked flawlessly for me

[ivory shadow]

Jellyfin always dies trying to import my library

[safe dragon]

I watch like 2 movies a year and my tv isn't even connected to anything except a switch so I haven't tried it

[ivory shadow]

But I have Plex lifetime so there's also no need for me to switch

[safe dragon]

unless they pull a "oh your lifetime license doesn't extend to this new version"

I forget what service pulled that

[crystal wren]

I do use Jellyfin, and it works... but its library updating is awful.

[marble jewel]

Yeah, mine is sort of going to waste

I forget the exact reason why I switched, but I remember running into an issue that pushed me to that point

[safe dragon]

it was Filmora, a video editing program

[marble jewel]

"We didn't mean your lifetime..."

[ivory shadow]

Lifetime licenses for services don't make sense. If there's any amount of server, maintenance, or long-term development cost at all you're trading short term profit for long term loss.

[safe dragon]

depends on how long they expect you to stick around

[crystal wren]

It makes sense to enable enshittification, and... that's about it.

[safe dragon]

a lot of language learning platforms love lifetime licenses cause people will buy them and then still quit 3 months in

[marble jewel]

I've dealt with a number of app store "lifetime" licenses that were short lived. Or at least shorter than my lifetime.

They get around it by doing the major version loophole.

Oh X app v1 is different from X app v2, etc.

[crystal wren]

Yeah, I'm a fan of that model if they're not disingenuous with bumping to v2 just to get new licenses.

[safe dragon]

technically affinity does this with their programs but they're a little more open about the fact that you are buying a version and won't get "affinity photo 3" when that becomes a thing

[crystal wren]

Yeah, Affinity is a good example of what I mean.

[pliant snow]

What issues have you had with library updating?

[crystal wren]

It just... doesn't. For upwards of 30 minutes until I go in to force a scan.

[marble jewel]

My Library updates automatically on triggers since I don't manually import anything myself

[crystal wren]

And it has monitoring enabled.

[marble jewel]

I use the Arr stack

[ivory shadow]

Makes me think of how JetBrains has perpetual licenses for specific versions of their apps.

[crystal wren]

I think my plan might be close to ending, actually... need to check on that. Thanks for the accidental reminder!

[ivory shadow]

https://tenor.com/view/pirate-pirates-day-chuckmccarthy-arrr-gif-10893476421774942887

[pliant snow]

Oh, mine updates pretty much immediately, I haven't had any issues with

The metadata API they use sometimes has weird opionions on episode order, but that's not them

[crystal wren]

(Might be getting a liiiiiittle close to things with the talk of that stack, I fear. )