Ephera

@Ephera@lemmy.ml

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Ephera,

I feel like people not knowing this Matpat person may also just be a case of the channel being called “The Game Theorists”.

I have seen videos of that channel suggested, but never clicked on any, because it looked like typical content mill stuff to me. If you don’t watch any videos, you’ll only ever read “The Game Theorists”…

Ephera,

I have a very unusual workflow. In addition to not stacking windows, I don’t minimize them either. Instead, I spread them out over many workspaces. Per workspace, I usually only have 1 or 2 windows, but I ‘group’ workspaces to keep semantically related windows together.
And I do that, by having all workspaces in a column and just placing windows in neighboring workspaces + leaving workspaces empty between the groupings. I also have a minimap for my workspaces in my panel, to just keep track of all of this.

I like this workflow a lot, because it maps semantics to location. It feels like a desk where you just place related documents next to each other and might place some documents more in the middle, others in a faraway corner.

This is in contrast to the traditional Windows workflow or the workflow that many tiling folks use, where the first workspace is for web browsing etc…
Those use groupings based on the kind of task you do in them (often effectively being tabs in an application), like web browsing. They don’t group by the topic, e.g. you might frantically research ants and use a separate browser window, separate text editor etc., all grouped up for ants.

Now, traditional use of workspaces does allow this grouping by topics, by just assigning each workspace a topic. But personally, I found that too static.
Like, yeah, I have some larger, completely distinct topics, but often I’ll just quickly research bees and that’s kind of ant-related, but doesn’t need to be fully mixed with that either. I’d rather just place it to the side of the ant stuff.

Ephera,

I don’t do that (again, too static for me), but I have larger meta-workspaces still, which group 20 workspaces each into very big, very distinct topics like “Orga” and “Work”.

Ephera,

One example that stuck with me is that he said some shit along the lines of 80% of Twitter’s microservices being superfluous and he’ll be shutting them off.

Yes, the dev teams just spent 4/5 of their time building shit no one asked for. It just annoys me so much, because anyone with basic reasoning should be able to work out that this cannot possibly be the case, but it’s easy to give it the benefit of the doubt.

Well, except that many, many Twitter outages followed.

Ephera,

It means the message was sent as an SMS rather than via Apple’s internet chat protocol. There’s also a whole thing that when you write with Android users, they always get green bubbles.

support.apple.com/en-us/105087

I guess, this could still mean that you’ve been blocked and it then tries to deliver via SMS, but I have no idea…

Ephera,

I can’t get it to decode, even after correcting the base64 padding. Firefox just shows the broken image icon. My image viewer throws out the glorious log message Image format is actually “png” not “png”, along with a bunch of checksum errors.

I guess, the checksum can’t be correct when it’s cut off, but none of my image viewing/editing software wants to look past that.

In a hex viewer, it looks like this:

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/53562043-87c9-451d-b097-fcc1d4222351.png

Compared to a normal PNG:

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/a9bf2593-3024-4e7d-a5f9-ce32e2ddf05f.png

I don’t know the PNG spec by heart, but I guess, it doesn’t look completely off the rails before it goes there…

Ephera,

The war may have been lost, but what else do you even say in response to this meme?

Ephera,

This summer, my car wasn’t worth repairing anymore and I decided to try living without one for a while.

And well, as it turns out…

me going on a stupid little daily walk for my stupid physical and mental health

…does actually work wonders. I just had to be forced to do it consistently.

Except I completely missed another factor:
Christmas Eve rolled around, my dad picked me up from the train station. It was just a ten minute drive home, but of course, some asshat had to tailgate us. My dad pretty much just routinely became angry.

Which I get. That shit used to stress me out, too.
But well, used to. I had not experienced that level of stress for multiple months. I felt like some monk, checking in on what the normal people were dealing with.

And man, I did not like what I saw…

Ephera,

I mean, I’ve also done that at times, but it just happens so often around here. You basically can’t drive more than a few minutes on a road without having someone tailgating you…

Ephera,

Well, at least only three who write things down. I don’t know what the others are doing…

Ephera,

Jeez, I expected an hour-long video, because y’know, GIMP is a complex piece of software…

Ephera,

For me, it was simply that “BASIC” was spelled in capital letters. That’s generally how you spell it when referring to the programming language…

Ephera,

I imagine, it doesn’t help that this seems to be some regional thing that it’s specifically 5 AM. Here in Germany, it seems to usually be 7 AM or so.

Ephera,

There used to be the genre of collect-'em-ups, where the thinly-veiled end goal was to just collect various items.
For example, to complete a level in Banjo-Kazooie, you had to collect 10 puzzle pieces and 100 musical notes, and you likely gathered lots more bonus collectibles along the way.

These were essentially just numbers going up. But we do all have that gatherer instinct in us, so if you can get past the meaninglessness, it’s just one of the easiest sources of endorphins.

And I feel like modern crafting systems evolved out of that. While you still can’t think too hard about it, they are providing meaning, in that you’re now collecting 100 wood planks, because you want to craft a house.

The unfortunate side effect is that they are now part of the soup which is pretty much mandatory to include in big budget games.
Indies are perfectly capable of fleshing out individual endorphin sources these days, so AAA games need to outdo them by having multiple. And the whole collect+craft loop is an endorphin source that can be added relatively easily to many game concepts, especially if you’re also buying into the mandatory open world.

So, I guess, the moral of the story is: AAA bad, indies good.

But like, for real. AAA won’t stop using the collect+craft loop, unless we have another massive technology jump where their big budget becomes useful again (like with 2D -> 3D, back in the days).
So, if you’re tired of it, you do want to look into smaller budget games or, I guess, some of the few remaining niche AAA titles…

Ephera,

Jeez, that blog post is so much better than that article.

Ephera,

Now we just need to someone to package it and upload it to NPM.

Ephera,

I’m absolutely on-board …in application code.

I do feel like it’s good, though, when libraries optimize. Ideally, they don’t have much else to do than one thing really well anyways.

And with how many libraries modern applications pull in, you do eventually notice whether you’re in the Python ecosystem, where most libraries don’t care, or in the Rust ecosystem, where many libraries definitely overdo it. Because well, they also kind of don’t overdo it, since as a user of the library, you don’t see any of it, except the culmulative performance benefits.

Ephera,

The == operator in JS will try to cast the things being compared and do all kinds of ‘smart’ assumptions about what equality means. This is why everyone uses === instead…

Ephera,

Sure, but you can get frameworks that generate that for you. I’ve written whole webpages in WASM without writing any JS.

You don’t get around reading JS documentation, though. Especially the DOM API is just documented as JS, and you basically hope that your framework makes it obvious enough how to write that in your non-JS language of choice.

Ephera,

There’s actually in theory all the pieces in place to use a different scripting language, because in the early days, there really were multiple. But yeah, the massive DOM API is only really standardized+implemented+documented for JS, so you don’t get around it in the end.

As the others said, though, WebAssembly is starting to become a thing and the JS boilerplate for calling the DOM API can be generated for you.

Ephera,

I used to think so, too, but on the one hand, the DOM API is absolutely massive. Going through the standardization, implementation and documentation process another time would take decades.

And on the other hand, a language-agnostic API in WebAssembly would mean specifying it WebAssembly itself. And well, it’s Assembly-like, so what’s currently a single line for calling a JS function would turn into tens of lines of low-level code.

Ultimately, you’d want code from some other high-level language to give you a summary of how you may need to call your language-specific wrapper. In practice, that’s likely even worse than translating it from JS, because the high-level call isn’t standardized.

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