#i am definitely not a software developer

[liiht]

My brain refuses to focus on work today. Like if I just put concentrated effort in for like 4 hours I would be done with this project forever, but I've done 3 three different crab related things instead

[kcamberart]

Development going forward

So in case anyone hasn't heard, Unity announced this morning that they're going to be making some pretty major (baffling) changes to their licensing plans and monetization. TLDR regarding the pertinent info (from what I understand. The company hasn't made another statement at the time of writing, and the FAQ is very vague):

They've removed the cheapest paid subscription tier (Unity Plus) completely, and are altering Unity Personal (the free one) so that the editor needs an internet connection in order to function. If you're offline for 3 days, it kicks you out until you reconnect to the internet again for the software to phone home. This is apparently not an issue if you subscribe to Unity Pro, the $2,000/yr plan.

If you publish a game made using the Unity engine, once it passes a certain threshold of installations and revenue, Unity will charge you a fee for every subsequent installation of your game on a per-month basis (and it's not per-purchase, it's per-installation. So (allegedly) if someone on Steam buys, installs, uninstalls and then reinstalls your game, or if they need to update the game, that's considered multiple different instances of installation and Unity will (allegedly) charge the developer as such). This will go into effect in January of 2024, but will seemingly retroactively apply to all games published before then as well.

If I've misunderstood any of this, please feel free to correct me.

I would not be surprised if they heavily walk back some of this (i.e., "the last time we announced something bad everyone got mad about it, so this time we'll announce something unbelievable and then say that we changed our minds so people will be more willing to accept the slightly less bad thing we wanted to do in the first place"), but it's setting a very bad precedent for using Unity for any future projects.

I'm currently weighing my options on whether to finish Vollema in Unity and then migrate to a new engine for future projects (Godot gets better every day, from what I've heard), or to just take what I've made so far and start over using different software. Honestly, it's early enough in development that the vast majority of what I have finished and ready to implement is visual assets, dialogue, narrative stuff and audio, so I'm leaning heavily towards testing the waters with a different engine. I likely also will not be able to work on or release any smaller games in the coming months for the time being (RIP 2023 Halloween Game, I'll make it up to you) while I make some decisions. Regardless, I'll keep you all in the loop.

TLDR: I'm likely going to be changing game engines, which will definitely set Vollema's development time back a bit (along with my other projects), but development in general will continue regardless.

Hopefully I'll have more positive news to share with you soon! I'm gonna miss my add-ons, though. Oh man, am I gonna miss my add-ons.

[beesmygod]

perhaps foolishly throwing my hat in the ring here about cohost developers making 90k/yr (as someone who used cohost for like five minutes but does work in software. although I'm not even close to making SWE-level money lol): depending on your stack, experience, location, other benefits, etc., that's genuinely in the bottom twentieth percentile for engineer salaries at your average startup, if not lower. especially for a "founding engineer who does literally everything"-type role. idk how much experience these people have or what their stack is, but just to guess, at your average seni-marture startup they could easily double that salary, and at a big FAANG company or whatever stupid acronym we're using now they could probably quadruple that, plus or minus whatever part of your comp package is stock instead of actual salary.

there are a couple interesting/relevant reasons I bring this up: (1) at really really early-stage startups, where you only have four guys and a couple hundred grand in the bank, having bottom-twentieth-percentile salaries is normal *because they make up for it by giving you a shitload stock options that will theoretically be worth a lot in the future*, if things ever take off, although of course they rarely do. in cohost's case, it doesn't seem like stocks and shit were part of their long-term plans (which, fair enough, not trying to say they should've been), so in theory the cohost devs were making a lottt less than your average early-stage startup devs, even though overall comp at an early-stage startup is mostly monopoly money.

(2) the other thing is that if the pay is uncompetitive, which it obviously was, then attracting worthwhile talent is really hard. again, idk these devs, they could all genuinely be very good at their jobs. and cohost was clearly a passion project for them. but it makes me wonder if *some* (not all) of their problems stemmed from technical or even positioning/market issues that having more people or more experienced people would've solved, and they just weren't able to hire them. especially since they were doing design work and moderation and other shit in addition to plain old engineering!

I guess my angle here is that unless you see how the sausage is made, it's really really easy to underestimate just how much money (and human labor!) it takes to build anything, and that most projects only manage to pull it off for as long as they do thanks to a near-bottomless supply of venture capital funding. even not-for-profit community projects (which I was considering whether something like cohost could survive as, but even then I'm unsure) rely on corporate sponsorship and free labor from people who are getting paid a lot of money at their day job. so like many of you I am not at all shocked that they're folding—easy to say in hindsight but I definitely say this coming, although maybe not so quickly lol.

but like, even most VC-funded startups fail despite having way better odds and a shitload more money. legit kudos to them for trying anyway, because the only way we get cool shit is if someone's willing to take a risk and maybe fail. that said as a *user* there's still no way I'd hitch my wagon to a fledgling startup unless I was totally okay with that wagon falling into a gulch within 24 months, because that's usually what happens

interesting insight. thanks boss. much to learn about this world that, as an outsider, seems uniquely annoying and stupid to try to navigate

[bryce-bucher]

Basidia Post #4

Vintage CGI:

Modus Interactive and I have been spending the last week or so learning how to use Alias Power Animator 9 which is essentially an old version of maya. It was used on sgi workstations back in the day on games like ff7 and mario64 for all the pre-rendered stuff. For a long time Modus and I have been pretty invested in learning how to replicate the look of old pre-rendered stuff, and, as it turns out, the best way was just to do it how they did it. For so long I tried to wrap my head around how old cgi stuff was modeled because the sorts of shapes that were often created seemed like they'd be unnecessarily hard to create with polygons. The thing that specifically stumped me for a while was how they handled wrinkles in clothing and organic shapes. As it turns out, the answer was hidden right under my nose the whole time. They weren't using polygons at all! Instead they were modeling with NURBS! It seems very obvious in hindsight, but I feel like I deleted the memory of NURBS once I exited highschool, and nobody ever seems to talk about or use them these days. If you don't know what they are, it's basically a style of modeling that involves making a bunch of bezier curves and using them to define surfaces. It's a totally different style of modeling from polygons with a lot of pros and cons, but it achieves that smooth look we're after extremely well.

Scout Rifle Render:

As shown in the pics above, I decided to make a model of the scout rifle in Basidia so that we could use it for an item icon. The process was definitely a learning experience, and one of the things I learned is that modeling like this is super fun. It's like creating each shape is a puzzle where you need to theorize what is the best approach to take, and following through is always a multi-step process of defining a surface and slicing it up. I find it super satisfying to pull off, and making slapping materials on it is always fun as well. Moving forward we are probably gonna use this program and/or older versions of maya to create any pre-rendered item icons or backgrounds that we'll be needing. Modus actually made new versions of the vials in it as well which I will put right here \/

Wow there it is would u look at that. Power Animator just has an amazing way of outputting some unique, rich colors that are hard to get in modern software. I mean, just look at that cork. How do you make a cork have such interesting colors? Amazing. Fuck it, I'm gonna show off a little guy I made in power animator that has nothing to do with Basidia. I've been hyperfixating on this program since I downloaded it so I owe this to myself.

Here he is! Power animator has this amazing glow effect you can put on any shader that adds this bloom as a post processing layer. I used it on the head in this one, and I think it achieves a particular dreamlike effect really well. The sorts of shapes I can get for cloth out of NURBS is also super fun and rewarding, as shown with the cape here. Character modeling is something I'm always really excited about, and I'll definitely be modeling some Basidia characters in this thing.

Conclusion:

I am loving this program and I cannot stop thinking about it. Anyway, I have some commissions to take care of before switching back to midwest lost development, so I may or may not be posting about that game next week. I'm trying to buy an old sgi workstation with the commission money, and, if I can pull that off, then I will have access to all the old software they used back then (including the IRIX version of poweranimator). If you want to check out power animator yourself then here is a link to the program, and here is a helpful tutorial. Oke bye take care!

[mudora]

A few days ago, I re blogged a post describing the intense backlash Adobe is getting for certain policies involving permissions with their cloud services, and posted an article citing these agreements lack of changes until recently - and upon thinking on it for a few days, I AM noticing the apparent lack of transparency, especially since they updated those terms. But the lack of trust for Adobe remains true regardless, and further updates on this matter are far more alarming then the initial read. So, definitely try to find other programs then Adobe's products. I'll likely need to search for something myself. Sadly, I am mostly comfortable with photoshop's features, and clip studio does not work in the way that I like or prefer. I'm a user who likely does not spend as much yearly on a sub, since (and I'm not joking) my uncle does indeed work for Adobe as a programmer, and unfortunately has no clout to stop this higher level lunacy from happening. Though I might pay a smaller price tag, it doesn't change the fact that the price for their programs is astronomical. I'll likely keep using it and other software as I don't have many other options that work the way I'd like them to for my process. However some other options are always nice to look up on. Keep in mind, I am an advanced user, and simple photo manip tools are not going to cut it for painting/drawing/and visual development. I am keeping my eye on a few promising options. Thankfully for Photo manipulation and editing, there is plenty of good and free software to use. Some recs for those who can't just get off the burning Adobe Train - use your firewall to protect you from potential spying from their programs. On Windows, you can change these settings directly within your firewall settings. "No problem.

And for those wondering, on Windows both 10 & 11, go to Control Panel > Windows Defender > Advances Options > Manage Outgoing Connections > Add new rule.

From here you'll enter a wizard menu where you can pick and choose programs to block access to."

(credit to @kevinreijnders.bsky.social for this tip). I also suggest not to use the cloud for your file storage, and I rec getting a different storage device for your art files anyway, as you can take it with you anywhere you go with either an external hard drive, or usb memory stick.

[blackjackkent]

Offering Free Software/Web Dev Tutoring Sessions on Twitch Stream Once a Month!

OK, the people have spoken! There was a definite expression of interest in coding tutoring when I floated a vague post about it towards the coding side of Tumblr, which was very exciting to see! I am really excited about helping teach new people in the industry, and I conveniently have a Twitch stream where I do lots of coding stuff on Sundays. Seems like these two things go well together! :D

Here's the deal:

For right now, I will allocate the first Sunday of every month on my coding stream to tutoring! This will be two slots of an hour each, one from 11am-12pm Central Time and one from 12pm-1pm Central Time. (Depending on interest, there may be more slots in the future as well. :) ) If you are interested in requesting a slot for tutoring, please fill out this form!

This is a pay-what-you-can offering, and if I offer you a live tutoring slot it will be at no charge! However, I welcome donations to whatever degree you can afford them, after the session, to help keep my stream and other projects going.

Submitting this form does not guarantee I will give you a tutoring session, as some subjects are more conducive to demonstrating on stream than others and some may be too far outside of my expertise for me to be helpful. However, I will try to at least reach out to you and provide some helpful resources if I have any to offer. 

If you don't want direct tutoring on stream (or even if you do!), feel free to stop by my Discord server at https://discord.gg/k4gDad5, where we talk about coding, gaming, and plenty of other nerdy stuff! :) Everyone's welcome, just don't be a jerk. ;)

I'll be posting more about this in the future depending on the response I get. Feel free to hit me up with questions if I can clarify anything. :)

Finally - this is a bit of an experiment; I've never tried this before so I will also be learning as I go. :) Suggestions/feedback appreciated.

Thanks for your interest and good luck in your coding adventures!

[exeggcute]

Can you please tell me what story points are I hear about them from tech dudes they sound so scary

oh yes lmao. let me answer this publicly so everyone can learn...

in software development there's a work allocation philosophy called agile that everyone either does or tries to do. some people just "do" agile and some people will tell you that agile is a vibe and you can only "do" subsets of it like scrum or kanban or whatever. many people use these terms interchangably and many places end up doing an unholy patchwork of various agile frameworks and hoping for the best.

(or they don't actually do agile at all but adopt agile tools and terminology anyway because that's the shit everyone knows how to use. Big Atlassian has us in their grip...)

in (some) agile work planning, each team divides their session into sprints, which is a fixed length of time for which you pre-determine what you'll be working on and any new tasks won't get picked up or really even looked at until the next sprints. from what I've seen these are usually two-ish weeks but can definitely be more or less. at the end of your sprint, you'll ideally be done with all of the work you were assigned and then get new things to work on for the next sprint.

each unit of work is broken into a story, which is supposed to be a whole anthropomorphized "user story" and not just a unit of work but I've never worked somewhere that adhered to this. sometimes people call them a ticket or an issue instead. it kinda depends on the tool you're using. right now we use a not-jira tool that calls them stories, so to us they're stories! but they're basically just bite-sized work assignments.

each story gets an estimate of how much effort you think it'll take to complete it. (not time, just effort. these are supposed to be different but no one has ever explained how in a way that's satisfied me.) those are your story points. so when you do your sprint planning every <x> weeks, you or your boss or your scrum master or whoever allocates work based on the point total of your stories. let's say that you're usually trying to hit 30-ish story points or so; you might pull in a 13, an 8, a 5, and four 1s for that sprint based on which stories are outstanding. but the next sprint might be two 8s, a 5, three 3s, and a 2.

also I love (and am mystified by??) how these tech dudes are apparently just coming to you to complain about their sprint planning all the time. but I understand. it's rough out here.

[rabid-mercenary16]

So, I am doing both asking something, and saying how I just think shit in your AU goes in general, bc brain bored and I’m in gym class, not giving a shit. All of it is positive, but, I’m an over thinker so—

Anyways, so, Caine has an alternate personality of sorts, the ‘evil’ or malware version of him, but why exactly hasn’t Caine and Able (C&A) fixed it yet? That is though, a whole other topic to open up as to see why and what is actually happening in the original version with C&A. So, instead I will go off of the assumption that the company purposely trapped people and their souls here.

Any virus of any sort, is human made. For a specific reason and purpose, there’s many ways malware can be spread, and it also depends what kind this is. Say what if, for example instead of just being malware (malicious software), is actually ransomware, where people steal the data and certain others have to pay to get it back. I say this theoretically, because it is a random thought that came to mind, in a way, the players in general are being ransomed, taken over and not let out, but than that would oppose the question of what does the maker/perhaps corrupted Caine, want? Maybe it’s not Caine that wants something. Maybe someone wants something from C&A.

Say if it is this, than, perhaps that would explain the ‘help’ that Pomni and Zooble get, because I have read somewhere that from the corruption AU they sometimes find things around, things that could be helpful, things from past ‘players’. I know it’s probably just normal Caine trying to help whereas he can’t do much against the malware, but what if, instead, it was the company? I don’t know, since we don’t know much about the actual company story in the Og version, but I believe if C&A really wanted to drive people insane and steal their souls or something, they’d just find a way to do it off the bat, immediately, why wait for abstraction? What if this is somehow an attempt from the original company, with the small amount of access it has, trying to help the players in the game? Jax and Ragatha are both sort of on the edge, and I feel like if character data was stolen and held somewhere else, yet bits of it were still with the original people, the scattered code would make an affect like that, and than with others who are completely gone, there is no control over them at all.

…Anyways that was random and I just thought of that all on the spot just now since I got the ball rolling— ANYWAYS.

There is almost an infinite amount of possibilities, yes, Caine is an AI, but he can only go along what has been set for him. Such as how in the character ai app if a character says something that doesn’t Aline with the policy of the developers(ex, gore, NSFW content, etc), it gets rid of the message and notifies the user about it, saying to try again or if this is a big problem, to report it to the developers.

I might just be overthinking the technology, especially since if we go based timeline wise than if we’re still in the era of the technology it looked there was in tadc original pilot, this is probably taking place in the 90’s for the Og thing, from what everyone assumes, so I’ll assume this is the same time period. Caine does seem like a somewhat accurate ai for the time period, he stalls and goes back to the previous thing you said/asked if it’s something he isn’t designed to deal with, whereas an AI in this time might still answer the question and a bit confused. I suppose the overall question is who gave Caine that sentience? As in, the other Caine. It’s probably just me looking at it from my negative point of view, but for some reason the corrupted Caine gives a more humane vibe, in the way of acting, with definite maliciousness to the others. The only thing I can wonder is if this Caine already existed, just needed to be activated, like a prototype that then seemed to go a bit off the deep end while being replaced and left as idle undeleted code.

An ai would only have control of the physical bodies, I believe, so it would make sense, as where the virus starts as a physical part that just acts off of a player’s emotional state. It’s one goal? To corrupt. I have no mouth but I must scream, AM super computer vibes right there, and yes Caine’s original character is based off of that, but he’s a more wacky version. What if, pretty much the exact opposite of what I was theorizing before, C&A did this on purpose? In a way. As in, Caine was originally a malicious entity meant to corrupt those who came there and take them over, put them in eternal suffering like the five last remaining humans in the short horror story that AM the supercomputer originated from. Maybe Corrupted Caine is just more like AM in general, perhaps he was just the base code and than left, only in the end hating humans for the way they are, hence he wants to torture all those in the circus, make what little hope they have, turn into extreme fear, almost turning the tides entirely from what his situation had been? I dunno.

Anyhow, I’m a coding person, per say, a family of cyber people and hence in a way I can almost understand a lot of what’s going on here. Abstractions from before staying the same, since they’ve already become ‘abstract’, unstable code and likely can’t be ‘abstracted’ again. I like how it shows the difference personality wise, the abstractions would stay where they are, where as the ‘abstracted’ or corrupted above the surface, are either fighting, in a constant tug a war, or completely given up. So, what I’m getting at for the cyber part is, would there be any way for them to, in game, have any sort of.. protection? Like a failsafe, or something added recently to the game, because I’m thinking from a cyber security perspective. I can see how the players would get infected, since really all someone has to do to infect or hack into something is find a weak link, like hacking into the weak device in a network and than using that to get through to the others. Is there any type of antivirus things, or is that just not possible with how the circus is right now? The players are people, after all, they can’t just have their minds hacked into, unless that is their overall overwritten by the virus, but that would be for the already infected.

…That’s all the random shit I thought of in the last like three minutes and typed here randomly, sorry for the text wall, lol. Probably like none of this makes sense but I figured maybe as well theory rant for a bit

I love this analysis

C&a are an abandoned company long forgotten until it has opened and that’s when Pomni entered the game-

The virus is a WHOLE separate entity feeding on existing code that describes the characters and every time a character is added that code it added to the system constantly changing and morphing on the characters actions

But the moment they started to abstract that code is broken and allows access to the character for the virus to invade corrupting the characters code into a scramble mess bits where the virus pits it into a new form

But just because the code is broken doesn’t mean it’s completely useless some code is still protected and we see what that looks like with Jax and Ragatha

[sybaritick]

In response to recent posts I've seen discussing "people on tumblr lying about being working class when they're clearly not/people on tumblr claiming they're regular middle class when they make 200k a year": it's true this is extremely annoying, but i really think this problem exists on EVERY website and also in real life (feel like one can meet working-class-larpers at every US university, but more so the more elite the university is).

People build an identity around an image of their social class, both current and past, and that can be for political reasons (they're a leftist and don't want to be one of the bad rich people) or just because they want to have a bootstraps success narrative around themselves or whatever else. But that identity they build can be completely disconnected from the material reality of their upbringing.

My parents were definitely well-off: my dad was a software developer and my mom also had a tech-adjacent job. Because we lived in a very expensive area, people still made fun of me for class-related reasons as a kid and my parents struggled with financial stuff at times (like having to move out of the house we lived in and switch to renting a smaller condo). However I would still never make the claim I am just some average American, because as a kid my family's income was definitely in the top ~15% in the US.

The thing is though... I think some people either 1) Solely base their perception on the people around them, and if you do that you'll probably think of yourself as average, or 2) have a load-bearing element of their personality that depends on them having been working class background or at the very least have come from an "average" background.

I think the problem here is people building their identities so hard around what their ideology "demands." It's not easy to solve but it's something you have to be honest with yourself about. There is a huge strain of online Tumblr-type-leftism that demands you perform a sort of victimhood/background of oppression or be considered inherently a bad person, and the result is that some people will fake it, but they might not even believe they are faking it, it's part of their self-image.

Don't buy into this idea that victimhood is virtuous.

The first step is do not apologize for any advantage you have and do not feel guilt over any advantage you have: the advantage is good. it lets you do more, gives you power, gives you time or money or connections compared to the average. Everyone has at least some advantages in life, even if they are as simple as "It's an advantage that I was born in at Western country," or "it's an advantage that I'm not blind or deaf." You will never accomplish anything useful, politically or personally, by feeling bad for these things. (You cannot give another person your advantages, or remove your own advantages, by feeling guilty. you CAN use your advantages to help disadvantaged people-- but not through guilt or performative hand-wringing!)

You should feel good and happy about the things many on Tumblr call privileges, because they mean it will be some amount easier for you to get further and climb higher and do more. I love being American. I love being able to do this many pull-ups. I love being male-passing. And I love money. Build from there.

[secretgamergirl]

Hell is terms like ASIC, FPGA, and PPU

I haven't been doing any public updates on this for a bit, but I am still working on this bizarre rabbit hole quest of designing my own (probably) 16-bit game console. The controller is maybe done now, on a design level. Like I have parts for everything sourced and a layout for the internal PCB. I don't have a fully tested working prototype yet because I am in the middle of a huge financial crisis and don't have the cash laying around to send out to have boards printed and start rapidly iterating design on the 3D printed bits (housing the scroll wheel is going to be a little tricky). I should really spend my creative energy focusing on software development for a nice little demo ROM (or like, short term projects to earn money I desperately need) but my brain's kinda stuck in circuitry gear so I'm thinking more about what's going into the actual console itself. This may get techie.

So... in the broadest sense, and I think I've mentioned this before, I want to make this a 16-bit system (which is a term with a pretty murky definition), maybe 32-bit? And since I'm going to all this trouble I want to give my project here a little something extra the consoles from that era didn't have. And at the same time, I'd like to be able to act as a bridge for the sort of weirdos who are currently actively making new games for those systems to start working on this, on a level of "if you would do this on this console with this code, here's how you would do it on mine." This makes for a hell of a lot of research on my end, but trust me, it gets worse!

So let's talk about the main strengths of the 2D game consoles everyone knows and loves. Oh and just now while looking for some visual aids maybe I stumbled across this site, which is actually great as a sort of mid-level overview of all this stuff. Short version though-

The SNES (or Super Famicom) does what it does by way of a combination of really going all in on direct memory access, and particularly having a dedicated setup for doing so between scanlines, coupled with a bunch of dedicated graphical modes specialized for different use cases, and you know, that you can switch between partway through drawing a screen. And of course the feature everyone knows and loves where you can have one polygon and do all sorts of fun things with it.

The Genesis (or Megadrive) has an actual proper 16-bit processor instead of this weird upgraded 6502 like the SNES had for a scrapped backwards compatibility plan. It also had this frankly wacky design where they just kinda took the guts out of a Sega Master System and had them off to the side as a segregated system whose only real job is managing the sound chip, one of those good good Yamaha synths with that real distinct sound... oh and they also actually did have a backwards compatibility deal that just kinda used the audio side to emulate an SMS, basically.

The TurboGrafix-16 (or PC Engine) really just kinda went all-in on making its own custom CPU from scratch which...we'll get to that, and otherwise uh... it had some interesting stuff going on sound wise? I feel like the main thing it had going was getting in on CDs early but I'm not messing with optical drives and they're no longer a really great storage option anyway.

Then there's the Neo Geo... where what's going on under the good is just kind of A LOT. I don't have the same handy analysis ready to go on this one, but my understanding is it didn't really go in for a lot of nice streamlining tricks and just kinda powered through. Like it has no separation of background layers and sprites. It's just all sprites. Shove those raw numbers.

So what's the best of all worlds option here? I'd like to go with one of them nice speedy Motorolla processors. The 68000 the Genesis used is no longer manufactured though. The closest still-in-production equivalent would be the 68SEC000 family. Seems like they go for about $15 a pop, have a full 32-bit bus, low voltage, some support clock speeds like... three times what the Genesis did. It's overkill, but should remove any concerns I have about having a way higher resolution than the systems I'm jumping off from. I can also easily throw in some beefy RAM chips where I need.

I was also planning to just directly replicate the Genesis sound setup, weird as it is, but hit the slight hiccup that the Z80 was JUST discontinued, like a month or two ago. Pretty sure someone already has a clone of it, might use that.

Here's where everything comes to a screeching halt though. While the makers of all these systems were making contracts for custom processors to add a couple extra features in that I should be able to work around by just using newer descendant chips that have that built in, there really just is no off the shelf PPU that I'm aware of. EVERYONE back in the day had some custom ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) chip made to assemble every frame of video before throwing it at the TV. Especially the SNES, with all its modes changing the logic there and the HDMA getting all up in those mode 7 effects. Which are again, something I definitely want to replicate here.

So one option here is... I design and order my own ASIC chips. I can probably just fit the entire system in one even? This however comes with two big problems. It's pricy. Real pricy. Don't think it's really practical if I'm not ordering in bulk and this is a project I assume has a really niche audience. Also, I mean, if I'm custom ordering a chip, I can't really rationalize having stuff I could cram in there for free sitting outside as separate costly chips, and hell, if it's all gonna be in one package I'm no longer making this an educational electronics kit/console, so I may as well just emulate the whole thing on like a raspberry pi for a tenth of the cost or something.

The other option is... I commit to even more work, and find a way to reverse engineer all the functionality I want out with some big array of custom ROMs and placeholder RAM and just kinda have my own multi-chip homebrew co-processors? Still PROBABLY cheaper than the ASIC solution and I guess not really making more research work for myself. It's just going to make for a bigger/more crowded motherboard or something.

Oh and I'm now looking at a 5V processor and making controllers compatible with a 10V system so I need to double check that all the components in those don't really care that much and maybe adjust things.

And then there's also FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays). Even more expensive than an ASIC, but the advantage is it's sort of a chip emulator and you can reflash it with something else. So if you're specifically in the MiSTer scene, I just host a file somewhere and you make the one you already have pretend to be this system. So... good news for those people but I still need to actually build something here.

So... yeah that's where all this stands right now. I admit I'm in way way over my head, but I should get somewhere eventually?

[foxofninetales]

How do public libraries choose which books to stock and which not to?

Somewhere, all of my coworkers just felt a shiver run down their spine because they KNOW what I'm like when I start talking collection development. Oh dear.

(As a disclaimer, I am answering this very specifically from the viewpoint of an adult fiction purchaser for a public library, because that's what I do. There are other considerations for nonfiction, juvenile, etc that I can't speak of with as much experience.)

The short answer is: our goal is to develop a collection that meets the needs of the local community.

The most obvious facet of this is purchasing, and the most obvious driver for purchasing is demand. How you calculate that demand varies: mine involves a combination of 1) fancy analytic software 2) pulling specific reports from our ILS data 3) patron requests 4) seeing what terms are being searched in our catalog 5) getting input from front-line staff about trends and chatter and 6) longterm knowledge of the general likes and dislikes of our community. Longterm authors are known quantities and pretty easy to predict, while new authors require reading reviews and evaluating their potential. It can vary from "this genre/author always circulate well in general" to "I know this book will be read by these three specific people". Bestseller lists are useful and you definitely need to pay attention to them, but those are national trends, and a good collection development librarian who really *knows* their community can look at two books that are selling almost identically nationally and know that locally they need to buy ten copies of one and one copy of the other. Heck, I buy for a multi-branch system, and I can tell you which genres and authors will do better at one branch versus another 20 miles away. Local means. *local*.

Anyway... another facet in meeting the needs of the community is providing representation. Here's where you get into fun things like GIS maps and census statistics and keeping up with local populations trends, etc., as well as just paying attention to who walks through the library doors, and who doesn't, and why that might be. Communities are diverse and you want everyone to be able to see themselves represented in your collection. This is where budgets really come into play, and how much money you have left after purchasing the must-have bestsellers. (See again: James Patterson rant.) This is also, unfortunately, restricted by what the publishers are putting out that is available to purchase - sometimes the representation you want to buy just isn't out there, especially if your supplier isn't good about small-press books.

"Quality" is a factor in purchasing, but sometimes people misunderstand this and think that this means that the library should buy nothing but classics and literary or educational books. NOOOOOOO. We evaluate books for quality before purchasing, but it's "quality as a representation of what it is" versus "quality against all books of all time". What this basically means is that yes, if the demand is there, we are going to buy that lurid potboiler that is written on a third-grade reading level, because that is that is what provides enjoyment for a specific level of reader, but it's going to be the best example of that genre that we can find. Those category paperback romances? Excellent examples of category paperback romances. The goal of fiction isn't foremost to educate, but I do get particularly excited when I find what I call "eye-openers", which are books that are absolutely typical genre fiction *except* they have one little facet that exposes the reader to something they aren't usually exposed to in that genre - a different race of protagonist, a queer sidekick, a facet of history that is looked at in a slightly more nuanced way.

Besides purchasing, another aspect is collection maintenance. For the most part, this is "weeding", which is the process of removing older books to make room for new ones. Collection space isn't infinite: for new books to come in, old books have to leave. This is comparatively simple for adult fiction, as it is largely based on what is still circulating and what has been gathering dust for three years, though the physical condition of the book also comes into play. For nonfiction, you also have to evaluate whether the information the book contains has become old/outdated/downright dangerous. Because i am fortunate enough to work in a library with ample collection space and a good budget, collection maintenance for our collection also involves strategic replacements where needed, not just of battered classics, but also of older series books that are still popular. (Agatha Christie is still one of our top 20 circulating authors, nearly 50 years after her death!)

The overall goal is to have a collection where everyone in your community will be able to walk through the door and find a book that appeals to them and is what they need right then, whether it provides a moment of startling revelation that shapes their life or just gives them the companionship to get through one more sleepless night.

[trainsinanime]

Dear friends:

If you write code, document it! At least give it an honest try. If I see a new class, somewhat complex, fundamental framework logic, and there’s not a single comment on it, that’s not acceptable. I need, at the very least, an explanation of what the class is for, an idea of how to use it.

E.g. if you have a class named Event, tell me: Is it a synchronization primitive (like a Win32 Event), or a cross-process message (like an Apple NS/UIEvent), or a thing you subscribe to (I think .Net has those and calls them event)? And if I subscribe to it and get a Subscription object back, what does that mean? What am I supposed to do with it? It automatically unsubscribes me when it’s destructed, okay, great, please say so somewhere!

I want to know what this class is that I’m seeing here. What is the logic behind it? If I were to call you on Teams and asked you what this class does, what would you tell me? Put that in a comment above the class, so I don’t have to call you.

Unit Tests are great but they are not a replacement for documentation. For one, they typically have poor readability. Also, they only tell me that you wrote that code on purpose, but still not why. For something that’s supposed to be a glue between different modules, for example, I want to know which methods are supposed to get called by which side, and in a unit test the test code typically does not make that fully clear. Write documentation and unit tests. If you’re surprised that I had to write this paragraph, so am I.

What invariants does the class enforce? Is it thread safe? Does it implement some weird logic to interface with a third-party framework? That’s prime stuff to write into the class, somewhere, so I won’t be confused when I see it.

You don’t have to go overboard if you don’t want to. I can figure out what the parameter to setEnabled(bool enabled) means on my own. And yes, sometimes you’re in a hurry, and sometimes the purpose changes while you’re writing the code as you realize your original idea didn’t work, and sometimes you say “I’ll do it later” and then just forget. I’ve been there. But the basic idea of a piece of code is better expressed in a comment than by making someone read all that code.

You should get into that habit for your one person hobby projects, but you definitely have to do this if you’re part of a big team of professionals in a software development company. If I see a new class here with no comments whatsoever, one that’s supposed to be an interface between different modules and used in lots of places, that’s just not acceptable. I’ll get so angry, I’ll write aggressive Tumblr posts about you and your code. And neither of us want that.

[neithliveshere]

building my organization and productivity system part 1: school

hello interweb

this is a big project so we'll do this in parts.

first: school

I am finishing the last couple classes I need for my degree over the summer, therefore school is still an important part of my life.

Apps:

notion:

I am not a notion girlie, but I can't find an app that lets me build databases the way notion does. at least not one I like. I am a productivity app enthusiast so i've tried just about all of them and notion just works the best. Here is the template I use to keep track of my assignments. It is a mix of StudyWithAra's template and Notion's Assignment Tracker. The image above is the template I've made available for all of you! There are automations set up (the lightening icon), but I think everything is pretty self explanatory? if you have any questions don't hesitate to reach out.

edit: I have added a new section called "treats" to the database, to help motivate me to finish more of my work. I should add that this system is what I have developed while struggling to manage my chronic illnesses.

obsidian:

my one true love. i can wax poetic about why this is just a superior notetaking app, but that will be for a later post. for now, think of obsidian as a wikipedia database for all your notes. it allows for tags and backlinks and search and callouts... its amazing. love it there. uhm. a bit of a learning curve, but again a whole post on obsidian upcoming. here is a bit of an intro video for obsidian for students that I often return to. will reveal my obsidian notes in that post I'm working on.

timepage:

if you love stationery you might be familiar with Moleskine. they've built this wonder suite of productivity tools and timepage is the calendar app. I use this on my phone! its everything a calendar app should be and more. its super cute and functional and customizable. I use google calendar to create different calendars that i've color coded to correspond to different areas of my life. i use a couple different calendar apps but timepage is my school calendar. it tells me when to leave for class, how to get there, and how long i have to rest/study/eat between my classes. it shows the weather, alerts you of rain, and did i mention its cute?

things:

the adhd/depression/anxiety struggle is real. I have 101 different apps to tell me what to do and when. things is another one of those apps. one of my lovely friends purchased the mac app for me and it has been a game changer. i use things to organize my entire life, but in the screenshot above you'll see my school list. when notion is too overwhelming or i need to break down things a bit more, i use things.

youtube:

here are some youtube channels I recommend for motivation, for aesthetics, for background noise 1, 2, 3, for body doubling...

drafts:

cute little app. great for quick notes and also uses markdown so easy to copy and paste between drafts and obsidian. opens and closes quickly and syncs between your mac and phone for free! I write my speeches in here and also those last minute things your professor says after you've already put away your notebook.

anki:

just started using this because i am in desperate need for spaced repetition. i bought and set up a small remote using this video to help move through the flashcards faster. i am also terribly lazy so we definitely downloaded premade cards instead of making our own. still need to do a bit more research to be able to use this software properly, but it is good enough for now. I am supplementing this app with the flashcard app below.

brainscape:

i use this to learn whatever I am studying. recently it has been vocab and kanji, but I imagine I might add in grammar cards at some point too. if you are familiar with anki, brainscape has a similar system for "learning", meaning you rank the card after seeing the answer, deciding for yourself how well you know the material. I can also download the decks I make to use during my commute so that is super helpful. And it's free (with a subscription upgrade available)!

Supplies:

as for material supplies, you'll find some of my favorites below:

kokuyo campus semi B5 - 5 mm graph

kokuyo campus semi B5 - dotted 6 mm rule

zebra sarasa gel pen .07/.05

pentel energel .07/.05

pilot g2 .07/.05

zebra mildliners

bic mechanical pencils in .07

twsbi fountain pen medium/extra fine

platinum carbon black ink

hobonichi cousin

System:

okay so i'm not quite sure how to explain this in a way that makes sense, but i shall attempt it. the system as it stands has a few steps.

move weekly assignments and such from the syllabi to Notion

add due dates and deadlines into Calendars

move tasks to Things

plot study schedule onto Calendars

write essays using notes i wrote in Obsidian during class

study for Japanese using Brainscape and Anki for memorization

practice Kanji and writing in kokuyo campus notebooks

write scripts, quick notes, etc., using Drafts

migrate things from Drafts to Docs, Obsidian, Calendars, or Notion

commence studying using YouTube as background noise

---

that's all for now. I'm still working on the next few posts in this series, but I hope this is helpful or at the very least somewhat entertaining.

wishing y'all the best,

Neith

[rinofwater]

Yo, I legit want to hear your data disk theory bc I was kinda thinking the same thing? Except I figured that if they really are magnetic hard disks then they'd be even more fragile than DVDs/CDs since even a stray magnet could screw up all the data? I am but a lowly software person so I don't exactly how storage mediums work all too much lol. Also, if the old world was really DA FUTURE(tm), wouldn't their computer storage be more in SSDs than HDDs? There might be an economic reason to stick with HDDs but if their computing tech was at the level of sentient AIs and stuff they hypothetically would have the faster, more compact storage in those...

Reminds me of the deep dive I did to figure why the hell telegraphs in the My Time world are called telegraphs if they're supposedly wireless (short answer: it's probably primitive radio? i have no idea how the hell transmissions can work at distances up to cross-country tho)

Oh boy, I'm so glad you asked! I've done IT infrastructure repair work for a couple years now, and my last job actually had me working with a lot of storage servers in particular for the latter half of my job, so I have Opinions(tm) on this small detail lol. And those are all really good questions too. And hopefully I don't get too technical trying to answer it, but I make no promises (and it's DEFINITELY going to be long and rambly so bear with me)

So starting with it being The Future(tm), there are pros and cons to going HDD versus SSD versus NVMe today, but did you know that not only is tape storage still in use, but it's actually still considered a modern, practical solution to archival storage with the technology still being upgraded and developed, even right now in 2023? Archival in this case being the sort of data you need to hold onto for 20, 30, 40 years or more without a constant need to have read/write access to that data. The tape servers have a cool robot arm in them and everything to move the tape cassettes around. A lot of this technology isn't actually aging out because it has its niche, it's just being modernized to settle it more in that niche

So with HDDs versus SSDs, they are becoming fairly comparable to each other today, HDD was winning out for a long time because SSD was a lot more expensive to get ahold of at the same storage capacity as HDD. That's great from a regular end-user perspective because you can get that upgrade more practically and reap the benefits of not having to rely on physical moving parts to access your data. Swapping it out on a server level is going to be a much larger and more expensive project, though, without seeing a lot of additional benefit for going that direction. A lot of the benefits that you would see for swapping to SSD on a regular computer have already been accounted for in existing server designs for a while now, in the form of RAID technology (Redundant Array of Independent/Inexpensive Disks; fancy way of saying "get a bunch of drives to take on the work of one drive and then replace any drives that break along the way"; being able to share the data load across multiple drives improves efficiency and then you can also replace broken disks on the fly without having to worry about the integrity of the overall storage system as long as you don't sit on too many dead disks for too long)

Not to say that SSDs won't still overtake HDD eventually, as new servers are installed in datacenters and closets, they're increasingly having SSD as the supported format, but there's not a good enough benefit to rush through fading out HDD at the moment when they're still about comparable to each other and the weaknesses have largely been accounted for. And even then, there are always going to be legacy servers that get passed up for upgrades either because nobody sees a need or it's too important to the overall infrastructure or any number of reasons, at which point they're still almost definitely going to be sticking with HDDs even in The Future

So that's the long-winded justification for why I think it's plausible that there would still be large enough quantities of HDDs kicking around even in the future for them to end up in ruins of that future

As for the justification of how you'd be able to get enough usable data off of them given the notorious fragility of those disks, I chalk it up to a matter of quantity. When I was installing brand-new storage servers for a customer, one drawer could hold up to around a hundred hard drives, and there were often four or five drawers slated for install with one server. If you figure that your average HDD has about three to six platters, multiply that by 100, and then multiply that by the drawers, and then the number of identical hardware setups that are also set up around it, and that number just keeps going up by orders of magnitude. Most of those platters are absolutely going to be shattered or wiped or otherwise damaged in a way that renders them useless, and the percentage that make it out in-tact enough is going to be very small. But if you take a very small percentage of the ridiculously large number of platters you can expect to find in a datacenter (even the smaller ones) is still going to give you the chance of finding enough usable platters that you can pull something off of them. Like, we're talking millions or billions of platters just in one place, if you take .01% or .001% or even .0001% of that kind of number as your chances of finding something in tact you're still looking at a fairly decent pool of workable salvage to sort through*

(*In theory, anyway; in practice, you usually need all the platters that are associated with an HDD to be able to put the data together into something usable given the way data's distributed across them...not that it's impossible to grab information off of a single platter but it would take A LOT of extra work to figure out how to reverse engineer it into working versus having the full set. It could still be possible but that factor drags the already small percentage down even further. But then, I would be surprised if Pathea has given it NEARLY as much thought as this, so after a certain point, there's kinda just the shrugging to say "video game logic" lol...but before reaching that point I'm going to have my fun spending way too much time trying to figure out how it *could* work)

With the quantity argument, as well, you're also way more likely to see that kind of overabundance of HDD than you would DVDs or CDs; DVDs just aren't scalable in the same way, both in terms of the amount of data they can store and the amount of read/write flexibility they have. You're also a lot less likely to find the sort of information on a DVD that you would find in a storage server; DVDs are more useful for executable programs than they are for data storage, and even that purpose is superceded by a usb thumb drive a lot of the time. There wouldn't be nearly as many to account for in an apocalypse situation and that means the statistics are going to hit them much harder

Anyway, yeah, that's my nerdy ass supposition for this headcanon, thanks again for giving me an excuse to ramble on about it and I hope it makes sense lol

[verifying-gimmick-posts]

i recommend checking out @colortracker because it would be funny to see you fight him over colors in his posts

Gimmick Post Verification Status: UNIQUE (see below)

The gimmick blog @colortracker is a human-run blog that examines post contents, most often images but also other forms of visual content such as gifs and videos, and attempts to roughly quantify how many colors are present. According to the blog's pinned post, only the colors red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, and gray are counted. Each post receives a score out of 8, the score representing how many of the aforementioned colors are present in the content.

From observations, this blog seemingly builds controversy, intentionally or otherwise, due to the issue of color identification bias. This is a problem that effects several fields of research, study, software development, and even fashion design and marketing. Generally speaking, "objective" color identifications are bad. Human vision and perception is an extremely complicated topic, and humans don't visually process 100% of the information they are seeing, including color. Color is mostly an approximation, your brain kinda "guesses" what color is the "most" apparent or applicable in any instance. The first half of this video ("What Color Is My Hoodie?") by Tom Scott is a good launching point for understanding color perception.

The reason I am giving all of this context and information is to demonstrate that color is, objectively, subjective. "Objective" colors are less useful in practical fields than the general consensus (source is the same as in the first sourced statement). I cannot use a precise color code identifier to dispute this gimmick blog, because color is an example of qualia. I could easily squash and stretch any image, pick out individual pixels and especially use generation loss and compression (a whole other topic that also relates to this blog) to show "definitive" proof that, on my monitor, the "True Blue" theme of Tumblr contains bright red. Alternatively, I could link to an article from when "The Dress" was a meme.

Controversy relating to this blog's determinations & objective/subjective colors are also influenced by Alexis Spectral Data and the digital imaging concept of color management.

On a less subjective note, this particular post contains a formatting error, where two additional colors, likely yellow and purple, are counted in the score but not listed in the post content.

[collegelifediary]

☆ 11.10.2023 ☆

Today was just another day on campus, and it seems like it will be that way from now on. Here's a rundown of my day:

Morning classes:

Operations research: The professor covered an entire chapter at lightning speed. Usually, I strive to absorb 90% of the material in class so I can delve deeper into it later. But today, I could only manage to grasp about 20% because I couldn't focus, and the teacher was racing through the content.

Evening classes:

Mobile development on Android Studio: Once again, the teacher bombarded us with loads of information that went right over my head. Now I have to tackle it all on my own at home.

Software projects development: This class was surprisingly enjoyable, but it also introduced a ton of new information that I need to review and study again.

The problem is, when I get home around 7pm, I barely have any time to study. By the time I change, take care of my skincare routine, and eat, it's already 8:30pm.

Upon reflection, I've realized that I lack a consistent routine, and my mental health needs often distract me. I also neglect basic self-care, like drinking enough water and having proper meals throughout the day.

To address these issues, I've set some small goals for myself:

Drink at least 1.5 liters of water every day.

Actually eat substantial meals. Eat properly instead of surviving on a single cookie without any water. Am I trying to kill myself? Definitely not.

Study for at least one hour every day.

Try to establish a routine thatworks for me best.

I wasn't even planning on making this post, but I made a promise to myself to be consistent, and I intend to keep that promise.