Oof! I think I've lost a whole bunch of my old mini games. Down the line, turns out there was an incomplete copy of folders. That's the one that made it into all my current backups.
I do have an old broken laptop tho, I wonder if I can remove the SSD and access it, that one may have the files.
@Nifflas Any idea what kind of connector that drive would have? Usually you can find USB to various kinds of hard drive connector adapters, I've used those to rescue old data in the past.
@Nifflas (I had a hard drive that crashed that had a lot of old photos and weeks of code I hadn't uploaded on. I wrote it off as lost since I could not get it to spin up. One day long after I bought an USB adapter just to have one, and I thought I'll try connecting that old drive I hadn't been able to throw away, just to see.
It didn't spin up. It would start spinning up, click, and then stop...)
@Nifflas (I tried putting it in the fridge, which is sometimes supposed to help. Didn't spin up. Decided to try the ultimate last resort: Lift the drive up and drop it on the desk. Didn't spin up. Tried lifting it higher and dropping it.
IT SPUN UP. Copied as much data off as I could in a mad rush, recovered everything I actually cared about.)
@Nifflas My besst freezer story is that when I was at uni, we had a research program that was looking into how much energy you save by running processors at lower temperature (lower temperature means lower leakage current in transistors means less wasted power). To do this, were trying to run some small computer boards in a freezer.
@Nifflas This was running on an early Samsung Exynos chip. The chip had an internal temperature sensor, as is pretty usual these days, for protecting against overheating.
However, the Samsung drivers for this chip were pretty bad. They read the temperature in Celsius, and stored it in an unsigned 8-bit integer. So once the board got below 0 degrees, the OS would go "OH MY GOD! IT'S AT 255 DEGREES! IT IS ABOUT TO CATCH FIRE! TURN EVERYTHING WE CAN OFF!" and it would grind nearly to a halt.
@Nifflas Before I rewrote the driver for the sensor, we had to make sure to pre-heat the board outside the freezer by running a heavy load on it, and then put it in the freezer, because it generated enough heat to stay above 0, but only as long as it was running normally. Once it was clock throttling it did not generate enough heat to get back above freezing.
Wow. Just watched Freya's talk: Why can't you multiply vectors? I'll preface this by saying I'm a person who jumps at trying to explain the quirks of quaternions, but she explains the math in such a way that you can revel in a mystery and discover not just a bunch of ad hoc "that's weird" rules like I knew but a satisfying and irresistible conclusion: "It couldn't be any other way, could it?" Just a phenomenal math communicator. Follow her @acegikmo and watch the talk:
@sol_hsa@acegikmo@shanecelis You might have a hunch that doing this would be good, and you try it. Or you try things at random and see what works. Or you have a oracle cat that tells you what to pick. All of these are valid! In the end the choice is arbitrary, and you can judge by the consequences of the choice whether it was worth it.
Helping someone debug something, said they asked chatgpt about what a series of bit shift operations were doing. He thought it was actually evaluating the code, yno like it presents itself as doing. Instead its example was a) not the code he put in, with b) incorrect annotations, and c) even more incorrect sample outputs. Has been doing this all day and had just started considering maybe chatGPT was wrong.
I was like first of all never do that again, and explained how chatGPT wasnt doing anything like what he thought it was doing. We spent 2 minutes isolating that code, printing out the bit string after each operation, and he immediately understood what was going on.
I fucking hate these LLMs. Empowerment is learning how to figure things out, how to make tools for yourself and how to debug problems. These things are worse than disempowering, teaching people to be dependent on something that teaches them bullshit.
Edit: too many ppl reading this as "this person bad at programming" - not what I meant. Criticism is of deceptive presentation of LLMs.
Continuing into a second week of sporadic but gradually increasing use of my new Linux laptop and I am just continually shocked by how staggeringly bad the experience is at every level. The new indignity is that the version of Audacity I installed from the snap store cannot play audio. This is not as bad as it could be because oddly in this case I didn't install Audacity to play audio, I installed it to visually inspect audio waveforms, but this is still pretty bad.
@mcc The fact of it is, Apple remains the only company that actually takes user experience seriously, rather than treating hardware as a list of features.
@maddy I've only played it for a little while but I feel it does kind of carry on and maybe even make worse the tendency in modern 2D Marios where it just feels... arbitrary? Like there aren't strong and fast rules? Like you're just vibing more than actually playing?
I can't describe this very well. But it feels like there's a lot going on, but very little of it actually matters. And that causes it to fail to set into a proper game feel.
Sighs just wasted a couple hours on filing an Ubuntu bug, where I caught autoremove filing a package it shouldn't have removed, I asked about it on IRC, I was told it must have been user error, I reviewed the logs and was not able to find any user error, I filed a bug with the logs, it was closed on grounds it must have been user error, I asked if they would look at the logs and tell me what the user error was, they said no
@mcc@jk Running an app used by millions and millions of users really does make you aware of how there literally is a background level of crashes that just happen once, ever, for no reason.
I'm so miserable playing Baldur's Gate 3. Got like 25 hours in it and I hate everything and suffer every moment, but I keep playing because I paid AAA money and I don't want to it to be wasted, and I keep hoping any encounter will not be total bullshit, but every single new thing surprises me in how much it can suck.
@Nifflas@pettter It has one actual battle. All the checks and things are for completely random things. Talking, sure, but also, like, grabbing a tie from a spinning ceiling fan, or convincing a shipping container to open.
@Nifflas@pettter It is SO good, and it is such a complete experience where all the parts contribute to the whole.
Also, it is game that rewards failure as well as success. You should absolutely not savescum it, but just accept all your failures and see where they take you.
I wish I had a single unix command-line tool that presented a single command-line interface but can work with all the various compression formats I use (tgz, 7zip, zip, etc).
Currently zip, 7z, tar, zstd etc all use different tools with totally different interfaces. I find myself needing to consult one or another --help far more than I should. zstd just startled me greatly when I discovered that zstd -d by default writes the output file in the same directory as the input file rather than pwd
@mcc I have on and off been working on doing a proper C-and-Unix port of my archive library I wrote for The Unarchiver back in the day. I really should finish that...
I want to toot something but I don't know what. What a rough few days. Still trying to decide if I should proceed with my Unity project or not. I probably shouldn't unless they walk back on this AND restore Unity Plus.
Or, I take a break from making games/audio stuff and focus on getting the skills I'll need to be less dependent on a specific engine. I know I should learn more C++. I just... don't like C++. I like the idea of C++, but not the mess, inconsistencies, and header files.
@Nifflas@savovuksan I think a potential issue with using Rust for game dev is that in game dev you do want to be able to just throw some crap together and see if it works, and then worry about making it good later, because it's such an iterative and experimental process. But rust tends to favour making you think up front and design things properly, which is good for some things but not so much for experimentation.
@Nifflas@noisyowl If you want to make a dependency-free thing that you can embed in other engines, platforms and languages, then I think your ranking in terms of "how many different contexts can I reach" is:
The thread is now so long it is increasingly breaking Mastodon, so I am making a new thread, starting here.
To recap, here's the entirety of the year-one thread in the most impractical possible format: A YouTube playlist containing 246 songs and running for just over 47 hours:
