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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • One could make a community named “Anon Posting” or something, lock it so only a mod can post, and then make the sole mod a bot that would post anything it got via DM (probably after automoding, rate limiting, etc) to said community.

    I do think it’s a good idea for the bot to keep a log in case it gets abused for sufficiently evil purposes. One could add some extra functionality to the bot that would give identifying information about the poster to instance admins on demand (via DM), but I think instance admins would have pretty easy access to all DMs made to the bot, along with identifying information anyway. (Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong on that.)

    Also, the bot could totally delete its logs and with them the identities of all posters after a while. Maybe a month?

    And, of course, this wouldn’t be ironclad anonymity. But it would keep identities secret from anyone but the bot maintainer and instance admins.

    Yeah, sounds like a pretty cool concept. Not volunteering to write such a bot (at least any time soon) or anything, but I support it.


  • Roughly in order of how much I enjoy them from most to least. (Not that the later ones are bad. Just that they’re more low-key.)

    Mindustry is amazing, but as I mentioned above, really really addictive. (The commercial game it’s most often compared to is Factorio.)

    Then there’s Shattered Pixel Dungeon. Amazing dungeon crawler.

    Endless Sky is a great space mercantile sim.

    Luanti is a Minecraft clone.

    Unciv is a turn-based civilization development game.

    And if you’re wanting to do emulation, there’s Lemuroid. Also, EasyRPG, an engine for playing RPG Maker games like Yume Nikki. Oh, FreeDoom is a great implementation of Doom for Android.

    Those are the ones that’ll keep your attention for a good long time. There are tons of much simpler games that are still fun like Frozen Bubble and Hyper Rogue. And plenty of games that I haven’t really gotten into very much but that people really seem to like Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.

    Man. There are a lot now that I’m listing them out. Lol.


  • Jesus. People get big mad about this stuff.

    The problem isn’t mobile games, and it’s not console games, and it’s not PC games. It’s the profit motive and corporations and enshittification. And there’s plenty of that going on in games for mobile, console, and PC. (And, for that matter, TTRPGs. And it’s not like the 300 different collectors editions of Monopoly released every year aren’t enshittification at play.)

    Addictive gotcha mechanics are shitty when they’re tied to microtransactions. Even when not tied to microtransactions, I think they can still be shitty depending on the specific circumstances, and it’s definitely wise to responsibly manage your (and/or your children’s) engagement to not cause other problems in your(/their) life. But is addictiveness in a video game inherently a bad thing? I don’t think so. All games cause dopamine squirts whether it’s Pong or a slot machine. That’s kinda the point of games. There are plenty of Open Source games out there that cause big addictive dopamine squirts. (Mindustry, anyone?) And such games aren’t made to milk whales. They’re made because someone wanted to create and play such a game.

    Don’t be talking too much smack about shovelware! Low-quality games create their own vibes. Some are accidental masterpieces. Both of my favorite two YouTube gaming content creators do a lot of their content on really low-quality games. This series got me to buy Radiation Island and I had a great time playing it. And here is a great video on all the shitty official games based on the movie Avatar.

    “Gaming is as much about socializing as playing” is an awesome outlook to have on gaming! Addictiveness in games can be… concerning. But sometimes particular games are the key by which your kid can be involved in peer group. I’m not saying that automatically trumps any downsides and you should let your kid spend $∞ on Fortnight skins or whatever. But I think probably in most cases a balancing act is superior to a hard “yes” or “no”.

    I should probably specify that I’m admittedly an old fart who doesn’t know shit about mobile gaming. (The only mobile games I play are Open Source ones on F-Droid.) And the only modern console I have is a Switch, and I don’t have any plans to get one soon. I’ve played a lot of Breath of the Wild, though. And a fair amount of Tears of the Kingdom.

    Some final thoughts:

    • Open Source gaming is awesome.
    • The way they’re doing anti-cheat on PC is fucked-up.
    • But so is the way they lock down consoles and phones.
    • Hack your games. Hack your consoles. (If you don’t hack it, you don’t own it.) Get your kids interested in hacking stuff.
    • …responsibly, of course.
    • Play games with your kids! (And not just the ones you want to play.)



  • Yeah, I think “a slice of bread” is a lot more common than “a bread slice”. Not to say I haven’t ever heard “a bread slice” used. I’m sure I have at least a few times. It would be pretty rare, however.

    Though, I’m not sure “a pizza slice” is all that much more common. Maybe there are regions where it’s very common? Or maybe it’s more common in certain contexts? Like maybe sell-by-the-slice pizza places might tend to refer to “a pizza slice” rather than “a slice of pizza” when talking with coworkers? (That said, I’d imagine they’d just shorten it further to “a slice” since the “pizza” part would tend to be obvious in that case.)

    Also, @eager_eagle@lemmy.world mentioned “water bottle”. I think if I hear “a water bottle” rather than “a bottle of water”, I’m probably going to assume it may or may not be an empty bottle intended for water rather than a bottle filled with water as “a bottle of water” would imply.

    Way off the topic of programming, but linguistics is fascinating too!


  • The Go programming language documentation makes a big deal about how it “reads from left to right.” Like, if you were describing the program in English, the elements of the Go program go in the same order as they would in English.

    I say this as someone who likes Go as a language and writes more of it than any other language: I honestly don’t entirely follow. One example they give is how you specify a type that’s a “slice” (think “list” or “array” or whatever from other languages) of some other type. For instance a “slice of strings” would be written []string. The [] on the left means it’s a slice type. And string on the right specifies what it’s a slice of.

    But does it really make less sense to say “a string slice”?

    In Go, the type always comes after the variable name. A declaration might look like:

    var a string
    

    Similarly in function declarations:

    func bob(a string, b int, c float64) []string { ... }
    

    Anyway, I guess all that to say I don’t mind the Go style, but I don’t fully understand the point of it being the way it is, and wouldn’t mind if it was the other way around either.

    Edit: Oh, I might add that my brain will never use the term “a slice of bytes” for []byte. That will forever be “a byte slice” to me. I simply have no choice in the matter. Somehow my brain is much more ok with “a slice of strings”, though.





  • No, finite doesn’t necessarily mean it has a border. The surface of the earth has finite area, but one can theoretically travel along the surface of the earth forver in any one direction without ever hitting any border. (You’d of course eventually return to where you started, but not hit a border.) The universe may well be the same way. A “hypersphere” if you will. That is, maybe theoretically if you traveled in “a straight line” forever, you’d eventually find yourself where you started rather than ever hitting an edge or boundary or border.


  • First off, it’s not certain that space is infinite, but I’d say it’s probable.

    But even if it’s infinite, infinity has some unusual properties that make this make sense. For this, I’m going to borrow from Hilbert’s paradox of the Grand Hotel.

    Imagine a hotel with an infinite number of rooms numbered 0, 1, 2, 3… with no end. The room numbers (and rooms) just keep going on forever. And imagine that hotel has no vacancy. That is, an infinite number of guests are already staying there and there are no hotel rooms that are vacant. But then, someone shows up and asks the hotel clerk for a room. The clerk, being a clever fellow, has all the current patrons change rooms to the room numbered one higher than the one they were previously in. (The person in room 0 moves to room 1. The person in room 1 moves to room 2. etc.) That operation is one that can go on forever. (It couldn’t go on forever in a hotel with a finite number of rooms, but in an infinite hotel, an infinite number of patrons can move to the next room up and not a single one of the infinite number of patrons will be unable to do so for lack of a room numbered one greater than their previous room.) Then, the clerk books room 0 for the new arrival. But also notice that the number of patrons before the new arrival is the same as the total number of patrons including the new arrival.

    Said another way, ∞+1=∞. (Not only that, but ∞+∞=∞. Thinking about the previous thought experiment, if an infinite number of people arrived to a fully occupied infinite hotel, the clerk could have all the existing patrons move to the room that was double their previous room number and then book all of the infinite number of new arrivals in all the odd-numbered rooms.)

    Final thoughts:

    • I don’t know where you got “the cause of [space expanding?] is apparently dark matter being created.” Maybe I’m just uninformed, but I haven’t heard of that. (There’s the idea of “dark energy” that IIRC is related to space expanding, but I’m not sure I’ve heard dark matter used as an explanation of that.)
    • Some of your question kindof implies that “space” is expanding “into” some… meta-space or something. Like you’re envisioning our space existing inside another space. And part of your question is about how the “meta-spacetime” can expand infinitely to accommodate our space. I don’t think that’s certain. It’s entirely possible that’s not really an accurate way to view what might be “outside” our space. (I’m not sure “outside our space” is really a meaningful concept.)

  • I never would have thought to print them at an angle like that, but thinking it through, I bet relative to other obvious-ish options, it a) improved part strength (particularly along the axes where you most need strength), b) saved a bit of material, c) improved bed adhesion. Smart move in general. I’ll have to keep that approach in mind for my own prints.


  • The way I’ve embedded magnets in prints in the past was to:

    • Design a magnet-shaped (plus like 0.2mm of clearance) cavity into the print, but leave it completely “closed off” to where it’s “inside” the print.
    • But only “closed off” by like 2 or 3 layers (I was printing at 0.2mm layer height for this particular print).
    • Use “pause at layer” functionality in my slicer (I used Cura at the time) to pause just before the first layer that would “close off” that cavity.
    • Start the print and when it pauses, drop the magnet into the cavity.

    Yes, I was a bit nervous about the magnet potentially jumping up and sticking to some ferromagnetic metal that’s part of the print head, but that didn’t happen in my case. YMMV, I guess.

    I guess theoretically it could also be the case that the heat from printing could weaken the magnet, but again, that wasn’t an issue in my case.

    Just to elaborate on what my project was, I had a freely-spinning part that I wanted to be able to fix in place or unfix. I fashioned a “stop” that when engaged would fix the freely-spinning part in place. The way it works is that the stop can move freely up and down. Putting it in the “down” position fixes the freely-spinning part in place and gravity keeps it engaged. But to disengage it, you slide it straight up. At the top of the “track” in which it slides is where I put the magnet. I used the same technique as described above to embed a little stack of about four staples into the stop itself. So, by sliding the stop to the top of the track, the magnet attracts the staples, keeping the stop disengaged until you pull it back down again to where gravity will keep it engaged until you move it back up.




  • I’m not sure why you’re getting downvotes exactly.

    A basic tutorial on web development like Sleepless One suggested is definitely a good place to start, just to get a basic overview of what you’re getting into. I personally learn best by doing rather than by learning. What I mean by that is if I sit down to try to learn… say… the C programming language, I’m probably not going to learn much from it, let alone retain it. But if I decide I want to write a game in C and start writing the game even from what little I know about C, I’ll learn as I go. Not to say for me there’s no benefit in a “learn C” tutorial, but if you’re anything like me, I’d recommend switching to doing the specific website you have in mind as early as possible rather than trying to “learn web development” before switching to the project that is ultimately your end goal.

    Beyond that, you’ll want to avoid falling into a trap of doing what feels to you like it’ll work rather than what’s “best practices” for “the industry.” So the other thing I think will benefit you searching-wise is to look for information about not just how to make it (technically) work but also how to do the thing you want to do “right.”

    At least that’s my recommendation.

    Beyond that, are there any existing websites that closely approximate what you have in mind for an end goal for your project? If so, could you share one? I think it might help us with more specific recommendations.


  • it still contains animal products

    It does? Assuming the replicator doesn’t get the matter it’s composing replicated “meat” from disassembled animals, what is it that makes replicated “meat” not dietarily vegan? Taste? Nutritional profile? Chemical indistinguishability?

    Is real world Impossible meat dietarily vegan? Could Impossible meat be made not dietarily vegan without actually using animal products in its manufacture? Maybe with nutrient fortification of some sort or a more sophisticated chemical process that produces proteins more chemically similar to meat proteins? Shaping the vegitable-derived matter into little muscle cell shapes? Adding gristle and fat?

    What about converting pure plant material into a whole living cow indistinguishable from a naturally bread/born cow, and then slaughtering, butchering, and griding it into ground “meat”?

    I dunno. I’m no vegan and I’m not sure if you are. Maybe among vegans, it’s an accepted consensus that Impossible is not dietarily vegan (though maybe morally vegan? Not sure.)

    I and a friend of mine were talking about the “paleo diet” at one point. The subject turned to paleo substitutes for dishes that were decidedly not paleo. Paleo breads, pastas, candy, etc. And he expressed a distaste for the entire idea of eating foods that approximate very not-paleo dishes, calling them “faileo”. Heh. I suppose one could say such foods are paleo in one sense and not the other. (Though if one were to discuss “moral paleo-ness” and “dietary paleo-ness”, I’m not sure which one they’d qualify as and which one not.) Maybe Impossible is similarly morally vegan but not dietarily vegan.