Feneric

Thanks! I don't know of anything exactly like that, but there are plenty of hackathons and the like that are similar. It's not to hard to sit down with the docs and/or tutorials for systems like Godot, Inform 7, Ren'Py, etc. and put something basic together. Expect to throw away your initial one or two projects, but after that you should be good to go. I built Minima & Anteform using PICO-8, a virtual console. The RPG game system they use I had to build from scratch first. For me it was mostly a challenge to see if I could fit that much gameplay and story into the available footprint, but if you're starting out with one of the systems I mentioned it should be a lot easier. Also, don't get discouraged if you seem to be "almost done" for a long time. It often takes as long (or longer) for the last 10% and polish than it does for the initial 90%.

Definitely. I slake my thirst for game dev by creating games in between job contracts as well as on some weekends. I've written a few interactive fiction pieces, but my most downloaded titles are in the category of retro RPGs in the style of the old 8-bit Ultima games (as found on the C64/128, but playable on modern hardware). It's admittedly a niche. They are Minima https://feneric.itch.io/minima and Anteform https://feneric.itch.io/anteform and are both open source.

I think his point is that our society is putting too much value in entertainment sorts of goods like art, sports, literature, etc. and not enough in things like infrastructure maintenance, science, teaching, etc. He's not saying we don't need any entertainment, just that we don't need anywhere near as much.

Recall the Golgafrinchans. His argument is that our society is pushing more people out of the "thinkers" and "doers" category into the "useless" category, and that if they had our population breakdown they'd need to shove a lot of entertainment producers on Ark B.

There's some truth to it but also some falsehood. I think the reality is a bit nuanced.

I can understand the ruling, but it sounds like it also means it's now pretty trivial to bypass restrictions by getting a massive list of numbers to dial from a third party.

Nice. It reminds me a bit of GEOS Warp http://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/archive/geoswarp/

How well does it work with Linux? I didn't see anything about it on the site. It'd be neat to hook up to my laptop, but if Linux isn't supported at all there'd be no point.

This was a mammoth effort by 80+ authors and programmers organized by Ryan Veeder and Jenni Polodna to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the classic work of horror interactive fiction "Anchorhead" by Michael Gentry.

It was written in "Exquisite Corpse" style where each author was unaware of the details of other author's contributions, with Ryan and Jenni providing the interfaces between different rooms. It thus varies wildly in style, tone, and feel; individual rooms can be story-focused, puzzle-focused, or somewhere in between.

The whole is a gigantic work that is puzzle-dense and which will alternately delight, amuse, confound, and horrify. Do not expect to jump in and finish it in an afternoon; it's taken weeks for contributing authors just to find their individual rooms during pre-release testing and debugging.

Other languages can be compiled into WebAssembly, too, including Nim: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17314581

Disposable diapers are actually a burden on society in many places even beyond the obvious problem of essentially putting sewage in the trash; https://www.nearta.com/Papers/GovernmentDiapers.pdf

It's surprising that even with the energy it takes to generate a plasma strong enough and in enough quantity to achieve the desired effects, it can still result in an estimated 25% energy savings. It goes to show how much energy just deals with drag in the current system.

What's amazing to me is that even with broadcast TV, theoretically the medium that they have the most experience with, they still delivered an abysmal product that the author was kind in describing as "tolerable".

I guess this shouldn't be too surprising considering the fraction of our waking lives that we spend in work, driving to or from work, or lunching at work.

The stricter syntax allows JSON to be directly parsed outside of JavaScript in other languages like Python. This is a nice feature and one of the selling points of JSON.

The Nissan Altima Hybrid (2007-2011), the more efficient, better performing cousin of the regular Nissan Altima: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Altima#Hybrid

This is one I'd like to see come back.

You mean like ZEO? Yes, it's probably been around for a couple of decades now.

Not even a mention of ZODB. While it's true it's Python-only, it's certainly one of the most mature NoSQL databases around.

How did I miss that "Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu" was released?

If you've never played it, the standard "Pandemic" is an engaging, clever puzzle of a cooperative game with random elements.

There were systems that embraced both models. Remember the Amiga? When using it for work it'd run off of hard drive and would multitask between productivity apps. Some games though required the isolated boot model.

Personally I always found the isolated boot model to be kind of a pain (and even now I prefer VMs over native boots for running non-native software), but I can see why some like it.

One of these scared the heck out of me as a kid. I had just gone to bed and was staring up at the ceiling and a small ball of intense light with crackling tendrils around it flared in the middle of the room and was gone. I ran out and got my parents, and I was so obviously scared my Dad eventually climbed into the attic above my room and reported a burning smell in the air but couldn't find anything out of place.

Just a white screen for me too, Safari on a Mac.

The potential benefits of combining the properties of the two (circuits that are more robust even when damaged, etc.) are intriguing, but there aren't any mentions of the potential negatives that will also undoubtedly arise. Will such circuits also be more prone to crosstalk? Will they be sensitive to different lighting conditions?

I suspect that if VR / AR continues to take off, the need for good quality generated binaural sound will make it more and more attractive to put a greater percentage of sound processing onto the GPU.

Just wondering why you rolled your own gesture recognition system rather than using something off-the-shelf like the Leap Motion.

Also, your comments about the Python environment are maybe a little unfair... You have an unusual (and some might argue overly-complex) use case where you're combining it not just with the third-party OpenCV package and wrapper, but also Tornado and Node.js. It would have probably been easier going with either the Python approach or the JavaScript approach rather than combining them.

All in all, pretty neat though.

This looks like a great document to help one get started on the road to using Python for lots of STEM type tasks. Pandas fans: don't be put off by the lack of mention of it on the title page, as it is covered in there, too.

Glasses-free 3D has potential in a number of applications and it's surprising to me how little penetration it has in the market at large. Just as adding color to a display is a means of providing more information, adding depth to a display adds information. Just as we don't typically grade a movie or an application on how effectively its color has been used, once the novelty of 3D has worn off and it's become just another tool in the box we'll start to see what sort of impact it really has. Now we seem to be limited to the 3DS, expensive Ultra-D displays, and soon glasses-free cinemas. What about the 3D phones and tablets? (Yes, I know about add-ons like EyeFly3D, but they're still pretty niche at the moment.)

The sample run on the video frame-by-frame is pretty fun and worth watching.

There's also the expectation that ports have all been vetted for security issues and the like. That's the tradeoff that ordinary users see -- not as many packages have been ported, but they're safer. I don't always think that this is true, but trying to abide by it makes porting a bit more difficult.

Really cool, and this same approach looks like it'd work out-of-the-box with the C128 as a target, too.

If you pick a fringe package it just points way off center in empty space. It's not immediately clear what's happening. An extra dot for the center might be helpful.

As a society we really need to start reducing light pollution. It doesn't take much to shield the tops of streetlights and advertisements to at least make the majority of their light point downward.