#computery things

[jeidai]

My swipe and word suggestion algorithm need to go get lost in an active volcano. My S9 was never this bad. S5 was pretty decent.

[galaxygermdraws]

Me and @vixen-thicket returning to our BMC roots by making an entire Hermitcraft AU in which several Hermits are hologram AIs! Please talk to me about their designs I want to infodump. The left versions are their hologram form colors, the right is their colors in simulated worlds (which are common here)

[jeidai]

#pov: you are 11 years old and about to royally fuck up a computer you don't yet know how to fix (@kaneofnod)

[clown-eating-pig]

Omg no way!! It’s Jon The Magnus Archives!!!!

[oriandcate]

I refuse to believe Etho is not our universe's version of Dragon from the Worm series.

[ungodlyangel2506]

honestly getting good grades in maths is huge machinekin euphoria for me,, like im calculating well ? like machine calculations ? all those numbers ? such a robot moment

[jeidai]

The museum has expanded!

original url http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Galaxy/9051/

last modified 2007-11-08 14:50:36

[dykeredhood]

The way I will stand up straight and click my heels together before I ask siri or the google to shut off the lights

And the fact I’ll say please to the (essentially what is a) robot

[kieraelieson]

I’ve told y’all about the bead system my family uses, right?

Quick rundown in case: If you do tasks or chores or anything generally worky and/or unpleasant around the house, you award yourself a number of beads. They’re pretty glass beads~ Then each bead has an exchange value of $0.50 for buying fun enjoyable things for yourself.

This way we can purchase silly little treats without feeling like we’re ’wasting money’, and also gives us more incentive to keep our house clean and maintained.

Now I’m saving up for the Biggest Prize Yet. A new laptop. My old one can’t physically keep up, and I cannot justify using money from our general account for something like this just for me.

It’ll take me a good few months to save up. I usually get somewhere between 10-30 beads in a week. I have 100 already set aside. (They’re set aside as digital representations, so I don’t squirrel away our collective bead stash xD)

This is the laptop I’m looking into getting. I’m hoping it’ll go on a nice sale. Maybe around Black Friday?

It’s not my favorite option that exists out there, but it‘a one that looks pretty good within a doable price range. And I figure if it can handle video games, it can handle the video editing/audio processing I sometimes do. And then maybe I could play some newer games too ^-^

It’s ~$700 new, but I’m intending to wait till a sale, coupon, or refurbished one pops up at $600 or less, and then buy.

[jeidai]

Hey I had Cardcaptor Sakura and Sailor Moon backgrounds on my Windows 98. Until my brother switched to his backgrounds, anyway. Constantly duking it out with him. And I had Kero greeting me when Windows started, "Konyanyachiwa!!!" and Quatre Raberba Winner declaring, "To outer space, every one of us!" on shut down. Ahahaha!

But anyway I chuckle at the Start menus and raise you a Program Manager:

From toastytech.com. (This is the closest to my setup. I think we had six different groups/sections. I didn't even understand what a wallpaper was back then.) I also used MS-DOS to load games from 5.25" floppies, but that's not a fun screenshot and I can't remember the commands to get to Windows or MS-DOS, so do I really get credit there?

[superbellsubways]

art. blocking

[duckapus]

33 and 34's Admin is Download, a relatively new Admin that the council felt held promise. Most of the main group isn't really convinced, considering they know just how intense dealing with the SMG universes can be. It says a lot about how they see someone's chances when Cursor says something about the situation and is only scolded for being rude about it instead of bitch-slapped across the room for talking out of her ass.

Though, nobody's as worried about Download possibly crashing and burning as Download herself. She's well aware that she was thrust into this extremely important position way too soon, and that her new coworkers are apprehensive at best about dealing with her. It doesn't help that she's a very talkative person, to the point that she's often been called annoying in the past, and all the nervous energy is manifesting as a flood of nonstop chatter that would get on even the most stoic Program's nerves.

Still, she's not going to let all that stop her. She's bound and determined to complete this assignment to its fullest and give her Guardians the best shot she possibly can. And despite everything, she does it! Everything in her SMG Mod package is fully tested ready to go right on time, despite everyone's expectations (including her own), and once all the preparations are made she launches the program.

That's about when her console starts electrocuting her.

Next thing she knows, she's waking up in the infirmary with Vitality and Lag standing over her, and a terrible pain in her chest and throat. Turns out there's good news and bad news.

The good news is, while the merging of Sally's universe and the Diamind universe shouldn't have happened in the first place, they've integrated almost seamlessly, and they know from the Arles that the split Avatar setup, while slightly unstable, is sustainable long-term, even if one of the Avatars happens to go rogue. And the SMGs are both perfectly fine and their programming is fully functional. 33 did admittedly land near Cole instead of in the Internet Graveyard like she was supposed to (34 ended up near Sally. Thought it would be neat if they each landed near the Avatar that the other one is a recolor of), but again, her programing is fully functional so she'll definitely go there at some point. They don't have another SMG3 on their hands, thank god.

The bad news is about Download herself. The power surge that was created by the merge ended up grounding into her, causing her to take the full brunt of it all at once and severely damaging her code. If she were a character-level program that much electricity would've killed her outright. As it is, Vitality did what she could to repair the worst of the damage, but nearly everything to do with audio output is straight-up gone.

The pain she's feeling will eventually subside, barring any wireframe scars that may develop, but she'll never speak again.

[dragonbleps]

wtf is a "rendering brush". btw

[jeidai]

I feel like these are not aerodynamic enough for a good ride

[mwydyn]

One thing I found a bit annoying is people can really shit on online geology degrees

And I understand! It's not ideal! It's normally a hands-on course and field trips are an important element of it and yeah my online course does do field trips but they're not mandatory and can be quite difficult to get to. They're spread all across the country in quite remote places so if you're relying on public transport it can be very expensive and take more hours to get to than the actual trip lasts

But when people are shitting on these courses they aren't acknowledging that you could follow up with a in-person masters

or go into a more computer side of it like GIS or environmental data science

and these benefit from an earth science degree!

so just like

You still actually have some pretty good options but there's this assumption that if you're doing geology it's because you want to handle the rocks and work with rocks and be on site all day even though those jobs are actually quite shit in the beginning because you can work 12 hour days in random places

so it's just people got oh no this is stupid you should never do this but I'm going to ignore all the things this could actually help you with

[iwillstabyou]

TMAGP 31 - A Computer Nerd’s Breakdown Of The Error Logs

It’s round 3, bitches! (tumblr crashed twice when I was writing this so I’ve had to start again multiple times. I do in fact see the irony, considering the subject matter)

I was listening to TMAGP 31 and as a computer nerd, oh my god those error messages just HIT DIFFERENT. There are so many subtle details hiding in those lines that a typical non-computery person would probably miss, so I feel it is my duty to explain them and their possible implications. So that’s why I’ve decided to fully break down each part of the error report, complete with what they could potentially suggest — think of this as “the TMAGP theorist’s guide to deciphering Chester’s yapping”

So without further ado, let’s get this party started…

(NOTE: lines from the transcript are in red, ‘translations’ are in purple, jmj specific stuff is is green, explanations are in black)

Starting off with Category: fatal programmer error, notice it says programmer, not program. There is nothing wrong with the code - the user has truly fucked up. Uh oh, Colin has made a big mistake…

Also, clever double meaning here with the word fatal. Obviously we know it was fatal to Colin (RIP king 🥲), but error logs also typically have a criticality level describing if immediate action needs to be taken. There are 6 commonly used levels, with the most critical being, yep you guessed it, ‘fatal’ - this means that whatever Colin was doing was a critical threat to the system. In other words, Colin had figured out the problem and was dangerously close to fixing it so Freddie just went “oh shit, we need to deal with this guy quickly or we are in serious trouble.”

Then we’ve got the next line, attempted host compromise (the Errno611 isn’t significant - error codes vary from system to system). When it comes to network terminology, a host is basically just any device on the network, so in full this line basically means “somebody’s tried to damage part of the network.” Importantly, “host” seems to suggest that the computers aren’t the source of this evil but merely a vessel for it. Freddie is just the mouthpiece for these supernatural forces - a bit like a non-sentient (as far as we know…) avatar. Whatever these forces are, they didn’t come from within/they weren’t created by Freddie.

(NOTE: I will come back to jmj=null in a bit)

The program traceback, Traceback <module> by extension BECHER, is rather interesting. A network extension is a way of providing network access to remote users (think along the lines of a VPN) by creating a personal direct ‘route’ to the network. Therefore if it’s the subject of an error report, it means there’s been an issue with data transmission along that path. So this bit means “there’s a problem with this specific network route that’s allocated to Colin.” However, the darker implication here is that Colin is an extension of Freddie. Although he wasn’t initially a part of all of this, he’s become tangled in the web (no pun intended) to the point that he and Freddie are inseparably intertwined. The OIAR employees may be able to quit their jobs, but they’ll still be a part of Freddie…

There isn’t much to say about Host=self.host in this context. It’s just convention when it comes to object oriented programming. Not important here.

Extension BECHER compromised isn’t just saying “there’s an issue here.” It’s saying “there’s an issue here that is a serious threat to network operation.” In other words, Freddie’s going “uh oh. Colin needs to be dealt with.”

The next bit is pretty self explanatory. I really don’t think I need to explain what <hardware damage_crowbar> means for you guys to understand. This bit made me laugh so hard. One thing that’s interesting though is that it gave it a DPHW, so Freddie processed this like it was an incident… Perhaps this fully confirms that the ‘thing’ controlling Freddie is of the same origin as the cases - it’s not something else entirely?

And now onto Administrator privilege revoked. This was the moment when I fully realised “oh no. Colin is fucked,” because any control that Colin may have had over the situation is now gone for good. Freddie’s basically just said “fuck you Colin. You’re not in charge anymore. I am.”

As you can probably guess, Unexpected data isolated/resolved just means that the crowbar’s been dealt with and the program can run as usual. Similarly, the Colin threat is fixed now he’s not an administrator i.e. he can no longer control the system. However, it then gets weird with Independent operation permissions revoked… It’s not saying Colin can’t use the network independently, it’s saying that Colin can’t be used independently of the network. Remember what I was saying earlier about Colin being a part of Freddie? Yeah, well now he purely is a part of Freddie. They’re turning our boy into data!

NOTE: I know in the audio it said everything was discarded but I’m going by the transcript. Idk why they’re different

You know it’s a bad sign when you hear Re config: self.host - Freddie’s evolving. The network is literally reconfiguring itself to now include Colin. And then Freddie goes through each of his alchemical elements one by one and fucking deletes them! How rude. You go and eat this man only to spit everything out!? I guess he’s feeling generous though, because he decides to keep the sulphur, which in alchemy, refers to the soul… If this isn’t just a coincidence, then that means Colin’s actual soul has been uploaded to Freddie. That could be really cool. And messed up. But mostly cool.

Starting with the final line, everyone knows what New administrator permissions assigned means, but we don’t know yet who they’ve been assigned to. Maybe it’s Gwen? Maybe it’s a new character? Maybe there is no system administrator anymore? It’s a mystery.

Now that’s out the way, let’s get on to the real juicy stuff…

The top few lines are pretty simple - it’s Freddie’s way of saying “Colin was a problem. We ate him. Now he’s not a problem anymore.” The next line, however, is a reminder that none of this is simple” - .jmj error not resolved. There it is again. The infamous jmj error. What does it mean? Jon? Martin? Jonah? Is that you???? Nobody knows. One thing we do know though is that jmj=null (from the start of the error log). Now when it comes to interpreting values, null is weird. It’s not zero, it’s not empty, it’s sort of nothing but it’s not nothing. It’s just null. It means no value, but it doesn’t mean that the variable doesn’t have a value (if that makes any sense to you guys???). Ooh I think I know how to explain it?? Imagine you’re Jonathan Sims, head archivist of the Magnus Institute and you’re digitising some archived ID photos when you find one without a name. The recorded name in the database would be null - you can’t put anything in particular, but that doesn’t mean the person in the photo doesn’t have a name. I guess null means unknown or missing here. So basically, what jmj=null means is that the jmj is unknown and that is a problem because it can’t get ignored/it is important. So what it’s basically saying is that jmj is a mystery not only to us, but also to Freddie.

Take a look at Data integration cycle ongoing <0.02%> - Data integration is the process of combining data from multiple sources into a single source of truth. There are 4 stages: data ingestion, cleaning, transformation, and unification. Thanks to the whole Colin ordeal, I’m sure you are all quite familiar with these stages by now (and that, students, is what we call a case study!). The peculiar thing here though is that we’ve just witnessed most of the data integration cycle - surely it should be higher than 0.02%? Yes, that’s correct. It should be far higher than that. It makes no sense. UNLESS this isn’t about Colin. Most of Colin’s data has probably already integrated. This is something else entirely - something so much bigger and foreign than these computers were designed for (the only comparison I can think of is trying to run the sims 4 with all expansion packs on a 15 year old laptop. It really shouldn’t work, and it probably won’t, but it’s gonna try regardless). This seems to follow on nicely from the jmj=null comments above, because Freddie is clearly struggling to integrate something (hence System function margins down to 82%), and when you try to read data that hasn’t been fully integrated with the system, you end up with a lot of missing & unknown values. Sound familiar? Yep, that’s right - until more data is synchronised, many values will be null, like our good friend jmj. Why is it taking so long to integrate jmj? We don’t know. Perhaps its origins are so supernatural and otherworldly that it’s simply not tangible enough for Freddie to process it? That’s what I think at the moment, at least.

So yeah, that’s my line by line analysis done! Hope you found that helpful/interesting. This podcast is so well written I’m actually going insane! Jonny and Alex, you are the guys of all time! As I’ve already said, feel free to expand on any of this - I’d love to hear your theories

Signed, your friendly neighbourhood computer nerd who is very autistic about TMAGP :)