#Software

[digitalismmm]

Ribs

[prokopetz]

Ironically, the whole "ask me again in two weeks" thing is actually more transparent than what a lot of major software vendors used to do, which is ostensibly allow you to opt out permanently, but every major update would "accidentally lose" your privacy settings and change all of your opt-outs back to opt-ins without telling you.

[atmosphericradar]

"We automated our nanny state, that way you can keep your privacy! 🤗"

NO! The way to preserve our privacy is to stay the fuck out of our private lives, our houses, and our basic choices!

people are clowning on this guy on reddit but uhhh let's pause for a minute and ask...so what happens if someone has a skin condition? what if part of their face has been burned? what if they're missing their eyes? and so what if they just have a fuckton of tattoos? recognition algorithms are aligned with the most ""average"" / ""normal"" features which means any deviation gets denied access to shit we didnt need age verification for 1 year ago. i dont care if it's a choice versus not, dont care if it's accessing porn or wikipedia, this needs to stop

[vgprintads]

'SafeDisc - "Friday"'

[MISC] [USA] [MAGAZINE] [1999]

"During the final push to ship, we repeatedly attempted to make Macrovision's SafeDisc product work with [Gabriel Knight 3]. SafeDisc has a set of special (and we felt completely unnecessary) antihacking measures that got in the way of the game's execution. It heavily affected performance, dropping the frame rate to a third of its original speed and adding strange intermittent freezes of several seconds while the camera was moving. After getting nowhere with Macrovision's engineering department, we decided to ditch Safe-Disc and roll our own (which took less than a day to do). This entire process wasted several weeks of our time and frustrated us all the more because, apart from this one remaining task, we were ready to ship the game. Lesson learned: If you are required to use copy protection, don't put it off until the last month, especially if it's SafeDisc. We weren't the first game to have severe problems working with SafeDisc and probably won't be the last, so if you're using this product be sure to do your homework and try it out well in advance of your ship date." ~Scott Bilas, Senior Engineer for Sierra Studios (Game Developer, June 2000 (#55))

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Source: Game Developer, June 1999 (#43) || RetroMags; TheRedEye, MigJmz

[ralfmaximus]

Unexplained Phenomena, Software Programming

[hardyfellow]

twitch - tiktok - github

[a-v-q]

WinRAR on the 3DS! 📂📄📚

[eikotheblue]

How do you *accidentally* make a programming language?

Oh, it's easy! You make a randomizer for a game, because you're doing any% development, you set up the seed file format such that each line of the file defines an event listener for a value change of an uberstate (which is an entry of the game's built-in serialization system for arbitrary data that should persiste when saved).

You do this because it's a fast hack that lets you trigger pickup grants on item finds, since each item find always will correspond with an uberstate change. This works great! You smile happily and move on.

There's a small but dedicated subgroup of users who like using your randomizer as a canvas! They make what are called "plandomizer seeds" ("plandos" for short), which are seed files that have been hand-written specifically to give anyone playing them a specific curated set of experiences, instead of something random. These have a long history in your community, in part because you threw them a few bones when developing your last randomizer, and they are eager to see what they can do in this brave new world.

A thing they pick up on quickly is that there are uberstates for lots more things than just item finds! They can make it so that you find double jump when you break a specific wall, or even when you go into an area for the first time and the big splash text plays. Everyone agrees that this is neat.

It is in large part for the plando authors' sake that you allow multiple line entries for the same uberstate that specify different actions - you have the actions run in order. This was a feature that was hacked into the last randomizer you built later, so you're glad to be supporting it at a lower level. They love it! It lets them put multiple items at individual locations. You smile and move on.

Over time, you add more action types besides just item grants! Printing out messages to your players is a great one for plando authors, and is again a feature you had last time. At some point you add a bunch for interacting with player health and energy, because it'd be easy. An action that teleports the player to a specific place. An action that equips a skill to the player's active skill bar. An action that removes a skill or ability.

Then, you get the brilliant idea that it'd be great if actions could modify uberstates directly. Uberstates control lots of things! What if breaking door 1 caused door 2 to break, so you didn't have to open both up at once? What if breaking door 2 caused door 1 to respawn, and vice versa, so you could only go through 1 at a time? Wouldn't that be wonderful? You test this change in some simple cases, and deploy it without expecting people to do too much with it.

Your plando authors quickly realize that when actions modify uberstates, the changes they make can trigger other actions, as long as there are lines in their files that listen for those. This excites them, and seems basically fine to you, though you do as an afterthought add an optional parameter to your uberstate modification action that can be used to suppress the uberstate change detector, since some cases don't actually want that behavior.

(At some point during all of this, the plando authors start hunting through the base game and cataloging unused uberstates, to be used as arbitrary variables for their nefarious purposes. You weren't expecting that! Rather than making them hunt down and use a bunch of random uberstates for data storage, you sigh and add a bunch of explicitly-unused ones for them to play with instead.)

Then, your most arcane plando magician posts a guide on how to use the existing systems to set up control flow. It leverages the fact that setting an uberstate to a value it already has does not trigger the event listener for that uberstate, so execution can branch based on whether or not a state has been set to a specific value or not!

Filled with a confused mixture of pride and fear, you decide that maybe you should provide some kind of native control flow structure that isn't that? And because you're doing a lot of this development underslept and a bit past your personal Balmer peak, the first idea that you have and implement is conditional stops, which are actions that halt processing of a multiple-action-chain if an uberstate is [less than, equal to, greater than] a given value.

The next day, you realize that your seed specification format now can, while executing an action chain, read from memory, write to memory, branch based on what it finds in memory, and loop. It can simulate a turing machine, using the uberstates as tape. You set out to create a format by which your seed generator could talk to your client mod, and have ended up with a turing complete programming language. You laugh, and laugh, and laugh.

[engravedlives]

misc coding stamps graphics

[digitalismmm]

How to hide wires in your workplace

[n64retro]

[oldwindowsicons]

Mozilla Firefox 3.5 (2009)

[animentality]

[jemwolf]

Hey hey!! If anyone here is interested in getting into animation or is looking for software, Moho is doing a pay what you want deal through Humble Bundle right now!

Minimum of $25USD, you get the software and some brushpacks and stuff. The software is usually around $400, so. Now is a great time to pick it up even if you just wanna test it out.

My animation professor was really excited about this software and I'm super excited to try out the tools they've been showing off like smart bones. Definitely look up their YouTube where they show it off and pick it up if it appeals to ya!

This bundle is going till July 24th 2025, looks like

[prokopetz]

I vaguely remember you saying something about writing a code to switch up you profile pic and I'm wondering, did you do something with your username? 'cause humm... I think Tumblr is stealing people's names and giving them to you, at least temporarily...

Tumblr is a highly functional website.