metroholografix

Joined 10 years ago

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229

Member since

Dec 29

"LIFELESS NEON SPELLED out METRO HOLOGRAFIX in dusty capitals of glass tubing. They stood in a clearing, dense tangles of junk rising on either side to walls lined with shelves of crumbling paperbacks. The junk looked like something that had grown there, a fungus of twisted metal and plastic. He could pick out individual objects, but then they seemed to blur back into the mass: the guts of a television so old it was studded with the glass stumps of vacuum tubes, a crumpled dish antenna, a brown fiber canister stuffed with corroded lengths of alloy tubing. An enormous pile of old magazines had cascaded into the open area, flesh of lost summers staring blindly up as he followed her back through a narrow canyon of impacted scrap."

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Recent submissions

Comment · 3 months ago

There are some great remixes to Kenny Chow's legendary intro to the amazing "One Must Fall 2097" that manage to retain and enhance the tracker feel:

- Original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ixf_NfKjXkA

- Chow's own remix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvlVaQl7kEk

- SIDNIFY: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3Jf4i4jG4U

The original Deus Ex also had some great tracker music.

Comment · 3 months ago

There's no need to pay for questionable courses. Here's an excellent free alternative that covers all the basics:

https://haqr.eu/tinyrenderer/

Comment · 4 months ago

Current SOTA models work great with Emacs Lisp and Common Lisp. Giving access to the REPL enables them to do an amazing job but they still work well with Unix input/output static code processing paradigm.

Comment · 5 months ago

Official chess competitions are taking place under stringent monitoring conditions and even then, with professional reputations on the line, there have been multiple high profile cheating incidents.

Amateur online chess on the other hand is besieged by cheaters that use engines, even in casual non-ranked games where there's absolutely nothing to gain besides a pat on the ego. This has drastically changed how the game is played today with lot of players gravitating towards speed chess (bullet and blitz) to compensate. That will thin the herd of cheaters but one still runs into engines on a weekly basis.

This is also the tip of the iceberg, with the true scale of the problem being orders of magnitude worse, as someone dedicated enough can use an engine to cheat in a way that's essentially undetectable.

Comment · 8 months ago

6$ / TB / month is a fool's bargain even for something as low as 10 TB. One can buy a used LTO-6 drive for a few hundred bucks and build tape libraries that span hundreds of TBs.

There's no Cloud-based backup service that's competive with tape.

Comment · 9 months ago

The vast majority of MUDs don't even implement the full TELNET protocol, just a small subset. In typical MUD fashion, fundamental TELNET parts like option negotiation were either hacked together -badly- or altogether ignored.

For the longest time in the 90s TELNET AYT would crash tons of custom implementations.

Comment · 10 months ago

This doesn't apply here, a wealth tax is levied against assets not income.

Comment · 10 months ago

If you want Scheme, go use Scheme because these are not arguments for Common Lisp. There is tons of value in the CL specification being this big and I'm happy I can still run code I wrote more than 25 years ago (or third party code written more than 50 years ago) without any issues.

Generally, contemporary folks that propose improvements to the CL spec tend to be misinformed / misguided and/or lacking experience to realize why their proposed improvements are bad ideas.

Comment · 1 year ago

Great story! I also read Neuromancer for the first time in Greek translation (Αίολος), around 1995, knowing nothing about the book otherwise. It was a blind buy in a bookstore solely because I liked the cover and the short synopsis on the back. It was a book that changed my life. I remember being drenched in sweat when I finished it, and I immediately re-read it without a break. I was already at age 14 hopelessly hooked on computers, but Neuromancer completely rewired how I thought about technology (it was the first book I came across that put forth a non-anthropocentric point of view, with Technology being presented as both an addictive drug and a force in itself, bringing about its own teleology).

That book was the main impetus for me connecting to the Internet, installing Linux and getting involved with the European hacking underground of the mid to late 90s. I also periodically re-read it (now in English): the prose still seems razor-sharp and the divergent feelings are still being evoked. Plus, it's an insanely hyperstitional book: one gets the feeling that Gibson (whose non-Sprawl work pales in comparison and who has never again reached these heights) didn't just write a heist-story filled with countercultural sensibilities but channeled something greater, something that has been intricately involved with how the world we experience has evolved.

Looking back on those days, I now wish I'd read it in English for the first time. The Greek translation is not bad but it feels kind of archaic and doesn't do justice to the brilliance of Gibson's dystopian vision.

Comment · 1 year ago

A lot of the power of Forth comes from its metaprogramming capabilities and having the compiler available at runtime, all wrapped in a tiny footprint. Similarly to Lisp, it empowers one to explore a problem domain without getting in the way. These concepts are alien to C which is downright hostile to exploratory programming.

If you really want to understand the genius of Forth and its creator, I suggest reading everything that Chuck Moore put down in writing starting with "Programming a problem-oriented language".

A lot of us today, being bogged down in the sort of tedium-inducing programming that pays the bills, tend to forget that programming languages are (or should be!) primarily about expressing ideas. Forth is still one of the best languages to do that in.