pseudonymcoward

Joined 10 years ago

Karma
97
Submissions
18
Member since
Sep 15
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Recent submissions

Comment · 11 months ago
As a society we find violence or harm against children to be extremely shocking and tragic. As a society we would do almost anything to prevent it.

Giving children the kinds of freedoms discussed in this article would lead to some harm coming to them. Accidents, violence, kidnap, etc.

Therefore, society won't give them those freedoms.

This tendency has been exagerated by mass media in the modern era. Every single case, every piece of anecdata, makes massive headlines and instills the fear into parents everywhere.

It's impossible for society to reverse course because that would mean acknowledging, implicitly or explicitly, that some level of harm for some children is justified by the developmental benefits to all children of increased freedom.

Comment · 1 year ago
Maybe I'm an idiot, but I was really struggling to understand how this worked from the website, which seems to have no photos or video of it actually operating.

I searched youtube and found a youtube short of it being used.

First you have to use another small machine to slice up a plastic bottle into a spool of roughly formed plastic spaghetti. Then you feed it through the nozzle on this machine to draw it into a properly formed filament.

Having to slice up every plastic bottle you want to run through it by hand seems like a cost to using it in any kind of bulk (I originally was trying to work out if it melted them down which would alleviate that).

Comment · 1 year ago
The author addresses this in the post.

"I'm not interested in temporary sheep like those that get driven over Southwark Bridge in September or shorn at the Lambeth Country Show in June."

Comment · 2 years ago
I think this is kind of a bad take. There have been plenty of "monster catching game"/"pokemon with the serial numbers filed off" games that have been somewhat successful, but no smash hits. "Cassette Beasts", "Nexomon" and "Temtem" spring to mind. From larger studios there has been stuff like "Monster Hunter Stories" and "World of Final Fantasy".

Palworld is really a "survival crafting" game and is closer to a game like "Conan Exiles" which has a similar gameplay mechanic of capturing slaves to put to work in your base.

What made Palworld stand out was the shock factor elements of "Pokemon with guns", "make pokemon work as slaves in a factory" and "grind up pokemon for meat", which streamers were able to convert into clickbait thumbnails and views.

Comment · 2 years ago
My biggest question is "why would I buy this and not Aseprite?". Aseprite is very well established in this space and this new tool doesn't seem like it has anythign unique to offer. Not that building a new tool isn't a good project, but when you're selling it you probably need some distinctive features, certainly if you want to win over existing users.
Comment · 3 years ago
I recently tried Literate Programming and I've found that it has some downsides not commonly discussed by its advocates. (It also has upsides which are valid, this post may come across as overly negative because I'm only covering negatives.)

* It messes with tooling. If you're lucky then your editor will be smart enough to syntax highlight inside code blocks, or can be taught to do so easily. It's unlikely that more advanced IDE-style features will work. Obviously tools could be adapted with custom plugins but literate programming isn't popular enough for these to already exist as far as I'm aware.

* It adds overhead to refactoring. Refactoring code now means editing and rewriting a book, doing a good job requires significantly more effort. If you have designed the program thoroughly ahead of time you can avoid this, but that's not generally the way most programmers work.

* The "includes" problem. Most language require you to include/import/require packages used in a file. These are usually all placed at the start. This means a lot of chapters will start with "here are all the includes we'll need" if you're using a linear format. More complex formats that rearrange the code to generate outputs can do a better job but it's still a little clunky.

Overall my conclusion was that literate programming works best if you write code like Donald Knuth: work solo, have a good idea of the entire design and a fixed scope which you can complete to declare both book and program "done forever". Unfortunately that doesn't cover most real world programming. I don't think it works well in the most common commercial/programming team style settings.

Comment · 3 years ago
I recognized the Reservoir Dogs example just from my brain.

To the site author, if you're going to list unknown images like this it would be nice if there was a way to give you feedback on them directly.

Comment · 3 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
That's only for the telemetry that happens during the install process (if I've read the link correctly). Seems quite reasonable as long as we accept them sending telemetry during install. ("A single telemetry entry is also sent by the .NET SDK installer when a successful installation happens")

For telemetry during actual use, you can set that flag any time, and a message is shown on first use to inform you about it.

So seems relatively reasonable to me.

Comment · 4 years ago
In Magic, cards come in one of 5 colours* - white, blue, black, red, and green. Each colour has specific mechanics associated with it as well as a general play style. Magic players often have a preference for specific colours as a result.

The colours are analogous to factions in strategy games, or to the different heroes in Hearthstone, but with more flexibility to mix colours in a single deck.

* or colourless, or multicoloured combinations

Comment · 4 years ago
It's not just you. There's a community on reddit called "mechanicalheadpens" centered around the overlapping interests in mechanical keyboards, audiophile headphones, and fountain pens. Hence "mechanicalheadpens".
Comment · 4 years ago
I believe that they would have written the manuscript, probably by hand but possibly aided by a typewriter, and then given it to a typographer (probably one with experience working on mathematical material) who would have typeset it, cutting any new symbols required.

I'm not a historian but this seems like the only plausible process given the technology around at the time.

Comment · 8 years ago
Interestingly named package given that it's clearly using quite a few non-ascii characters which will break non-unicode aware consoles. Also that the description, Node page, and github repo list different licences.
Comment · 8 years ago
Comment · 8 years ago
I think this may be exactly what I've been looking for. I've been wanting a "Better C" type of language, but all the existing candidates fall down on some point like - too complicated (Rust/D/C++), no manual memory management (Go), etc. I've even made some half baked attempts at writing my own language.

It seems that the design goals of this language are exactly what I'm after. Going to have to give it a try later.

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