• 0 Posts
  • 1.12K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 30th, 2023

help-circle

  • Try making a game. I think minesweeper might be a good one because it can be broken down into many different problems with different complexities. Like user input could start out as entering coordinates into specific cells to interact with a seperate grid, then you could switch to using an input grid where you enter a value into the cell you want, and then move on to clicking on cells like in the real minesweeper, including different behaviours for left, right, and both clicks.

    Pretty sure you could implement a full version of minesweeper in excel, though even if you can’t get all the way, there should be enough low hanging fruit you can reach to learn a lot from the process.

    Or if you’re feeling really ambitious, I think a realistic physics racing simulator is also possible, though I wouldn’t expect a lot on the graphics side of such a thing. Just lots of formulas that then get used to simulate a car accelerating, braking, and turning. But this one might also be great to get started with because you can start with a simple model and add complexity from there.


  • No, I’m saying the ones who say it’s evil to bring kids into this world are hypocrites if they themselves want to keep existing in this world but think a child couldn’t possibly want to exist in it.

    Like anti-natalist, not just child free. I don’t think anyone has a duty to have kids and think not wanting kids is a great reason to not have them. I even disagree with doctors who refuse to sterilize people who would rather remove that possibility than keep the risk (and think the doctors should be shielded from any consequences when a patient later regrets that decision). I’d also call it fair if you said some people have no business having kids.

    But there’s some people online who take that position to the next level and say that anyone having kids these days is wrong to do so.

    It’s pathetic, considering how existence itself was a struggle for the past 3 billion years, then gets easier over the last like 100k, and now there’s new challenges and anti-natalists want us to just give up because it is hard?

    And inconsistent because they don’t want to give up themselves, but want everyone else to not give future generations a chance.

    And I didn’t say they should kill themselves, but if they believe existence is so painful and hopeless that creating new life is wrong, why haven’t they? Though that “if they are serious about it” is the crux of my position: I believe they are being dramatic or overcompensating for those other assholes that insist having kids is our only purpose and that everyone should have them and gets in their business about not wanting kids themselves.

    I also believe that kids born during a collapse will probably have an easier time handling it (emotionally) than those of us who got used to life before a collapse. It’s just hard to say if that will apply to kids born soon or if it won’t be the case for some decades yet.


  • A variation of this that I realized fairly recently is that striving for excellence doesn’t mean the journey towards it is garbage. I can both feel pride in what I’ve done while also acknowledging where it could have been better with the intent to either circle back and do it better in the future (for like house projects) or avoid that mistake next time (for creations).

    Like I did a cross stitch of a wolf and it skewed a bit because it had a lot of half-stitching (without going into too much detail, a full cross stitch equalizes the forces the threads put on the canvas while a half-stitch puts an uneven force on it). So for my current one, I got hoops that I previously didn’t think I needed, which hold the canvas in place outside so the threads are less likely to put a high force where they are.

    And my next one will involve a better ordering strategy because my fairly random approach caused some areas of the canvas to bunch up more than others. Less noticeable than the wolf’s skew, but still a flaw I’d like to fix going forward but I’m not beating myself up about the current one.

    Assuming this is even relevant to the context you mean lol.









  • Investing in good blinds can help with this. If you picture strings and plastic or wooden panels that can get wrecked by kids or pets (or sometimes wreck the kids or pets), blind technology has come a long way since then.

    I got some dual layer ones where one layer is zebra stripe transparent/translucent and the other layer is blackout. Balanced such that I just need to lift or lower it and it stays put where I let it go. Helps with the heat, too.


  • Reminds me of the reddit threads where someone was doing a bit like song lyrics or quoting part of a joke from some media source and if anyone replied playing along but not completing the expected joke, they’d get downvoted, “whoosh” replies, and people upset that they didn’t catch the reference, even if their response was otherwise clever.

    Glad that shit doesn’t seem like it’s made it here. People will do bits referencing other stuff (hell, I just did one myself yesterday) but I haven’t seen people scolding others for not following along in the proper way here (of if they do, the scolder gets downvoted and piled on rather than the person accidentally or deliberately missing the reference). Even spelling/grammar nazis usually get downvoted (though it depends on tone).






  • The bronze age copper industry was very unforgiving. You deliver reduced purity copper ingots once and suddenly there’s tablets all over the place telling everyone about it. Not that it affected sales; demand for copper was always high. But every single customer makes a comment about the purity.

    I curse them all to be wiped out by mysterious alien invaders from across the sea!


  • Yeah, that’s the frustrating part, it could be either way. Could be based on a heuristic analysis that recognized a pattern associated with malware (that may be based on the malicious parts of the code or maybe some big data algorithm associated otherwise innocent code with the malicious software and flags anything with similar code), maybe it’s just some string match (ie a bad attempt but maybe in good faith), or maybe they are using the malicious code removal tool to also targer code that the user wants but MS considers malicious to their desire to make money.

    Iirc, it’ll say what it matches it to but from what I remember, the actual details remain vague. Like it seems to be at a “report information that sounds useful to managers” level rather than a “report useful technical information for engineers who want to understand what’s happening at a low level”. So you get malware name but nothing about what that malware does or how this current flag associated it with that.


  • It used to be a source of annoyance. So many programs relied on undocumented behavior that MS couldn’t go back and change decisions they made that turned out to be bad ones without potentially breaking things for some programs, even if that decision should have been entirely transparent to end users. So there was a bunch of technical debt being carried in the OS itself, at least until they started adding compatibility layers that allowed the quirks to be moved to there and the OS itself to progress.

    But then they started with the enshittification that made those technical debt days look so innocent in comparison. It was a time when MS cared about the quality of its products.