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andywoodon How fateful?

10 years from now I live in a farming community, most of you have cel phones in your heads and live in panopticon minority-report smart cities pre-policed by AI, many of your relatives live in a bed, and every last one of us believes in God.

And now to scramble the pw to this account as well. That's it for me. No more socks left.

andywoodon How fateful?

True words.

andywoodon AI-powered communication coach

Imagine being so [insert your own term] that a robot is qualified to teach you to communicate better with humans.

andywoodon AI-powered communication coach

For me that moment is every time I read anything new about AI. Luddite life!

andywoodon Feds seized $311M in Bitcoin, then hacker stole it back

Here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33088681

andywoodon How fateful?

Exactly. If your entire right hemisphere is permanently shut down from making computers the core of your identity, these are exactly the same thing.

andywoodon On my resignation as regulator of the Dutch intelligence and security services

I think you mean that the only thing that's changed is that information that was tightly controlled by governments via a small but powerful set of mainstream media channels to advance the notion of an open society that played by a tight set of rules and respect for civil rights has been augmented by a small and even more powerful set of big mainstream internet companies.

Give yourselves a round of applause, Silicon Valley et al.

andywoodon On my resignation as regulator of the Dutch intelligence and security services

You think? Just read all the ones in black:

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_Orwell

But as so many even here keep repeating so idiotically, "We live in a society. We live in a society. We live in a society..." Gotta keep trading that liberty for more safety. Gotta keep 'em safe.

Anyone see the new messages you get on Twitter when its AI pre-judges your tweet to be Intellectual Spam?

Good job Twitter employees, if you're reading. Keep up the great work. Keep us safe from code points arranged in wrong orders.

andywoodon Ask HN: Best and Worst API Documentations?

I'm not as fond of the redesign that took place sometime in the last decade or so, but I remember the old (circa 2000) Win32 docs as good examples of great documentation.

For the worst ever in all of human history, I submit the official Unreal Engine docs. They never finished them, and they ain't gonna. If it didn't come with full source I'd never get anything done because I'm not about to sit through 100 hours of YouTube videos to find the details I need.

A lot of software relies on user-created documentation these days. And it's not even a decent wiki anymore. It's more likely to be YouTube and a Discord. Damn kids.

andywoodon Queen Elizabeth II has died

IMO this is a normal way to feel about it. I'm american and while I'm not shedding tears, I do feel the significance. I'd have immense respect for her even if it were only for fulfilling one large role, honorably and consistently, for an entire human lifespan. How many politicians have? And I think she had a hard, hard job. Imagine having to live up to the expectations of a great Queen of England for that long without a meltdown or scandal.

It's quite a different context, however I felt sort of similar about John McCain, mostly for what he endured as a POW, and what he nevertheless went on to accomplish in politics.

andywoodon Kiwi Farms has been removed from the Internet Archive

Kiwi Farms has a thread on Taylor Lorenz from WaPo, because of certain erratic behavior. Taylor got her own dirt removed from the internet archive. Taylor has been helping Clara go after Kiwi Farms.

Taylor's uncle is Roger MacDonald, founder of TV News archive:

https://archive.org/details/roger-macdonald-tv-archive

https://dicktracyonline.substack.com/p/who-is-taylor-lorenz

And of course you've already begun downvoting.

andywoodon Kiwi Farms has been removed from the Internet Archive

Another fun fact:

Taylor's uncle is Roger Macdonald, apparently a fairly prominent operator within the internet archive:

https://archive.org/details/roger-macdonald-tv-archive

https://dicktracyonline.substack.com/p/who-is-taylor-lorenz

andywoodon Blocking Kiwifarms

Tell it to somebody who's already subscribed to that whole delusional ideology. Such as every other user in this thread.

andywoodon Blocking Kiwifarms

Still really unclear what law is being broken in that case. Unless you're proposing new speech-curtailing legislation. They're Intenet-famous. They're of interest to forever-onlines. This one in particular is of interest to women and parents who've so far resisted brainwashing.

andywoodon Blocking Kiwifarms

I don't want that to be a quasi-unilateral judgement.

Also, one question. Suppose we do change the laws, and Kiwi Farms continues to operate within those new laws. Will that be enough, do you think? Because the US would have to outlaw dead naming and misgendering for it to be enough for the activists.

andywoodon Blocking Kiwifarms

I have the same information, unless CF pays someone to lurk the Farms more than I do. Unlikely. This is a pretext plain and simple. Prince is full of it. There was one fedpost and it was taken down. It happens. There's no machine learning algo scanning new comments to see if they sound like plausible threats.

andywoodon Blocking Kiwifarms

Lifetime of depression and multiple suicide attempts as well. If I ever do it, it'll be because I suffered my whole life, not because of the most recent thing that happened the week before.

andywoodon Blocking Kiwifarms

He's been taken to court around 7 times. It's almost as if he didn't break the law, and people just think he must of because it be so nasty!

andywoodon Blocking Kiwifarms

Of course not. It wasn't an actual threat, though it sounded like one. The mods handled it as soon as they became aware.

andywoodon Blocking Kiwifarms

> what kiwifarms has been doing to "free speech"

What? Testing it? To make sure we can actually exercise it in practice? Because "be careful how you use it or you might ruin it for everyone" wasn't ever how the 1st amendment was meant to work. Like, what would be the point. Let's let the 1st amendment say you have to check in with anyone sensitive and if they don't like it, you can't say it, because "we live in a society" Let's have a new Mandatory Courtesy and Respect amendment.

I am so utterly ashamed of the tech industry at this point. I'm glad I retired and don't have to pretend to your faces.

"The Internet interpretes censorship as damage and routes around it." Oh how naive and libertarian us techies were in the reactionary nineteen hundred and nineties.

andywoodon Blocking Kiwifarms

"the threat"

Ever think the feds have half a brain among them, and know there's no threat?

I know how gullible people are in these culture-warish times, but I still hope you've lost credibility with some significant fraction of us. Maybe those of us old enough to remember when the average techy was libertarian and opposed censorship. The Farms is right back up, by the way. But at least now you can wash your hands of it. Don't think Twitter will stop coming at you though. You need to understand those people want to punish and teach.

andywoodon Ask HN: How do you prefer to spend your weekends?

I prefer not to distinguish weekends from weekdays. So every day is a mix of work, hobbies, and play.

andywoodon Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?

I can't remember how the flyouts worked. They might have shared a window, or they might not have been HTML windows (but I think they were). What I know for sure is that the one main dropdown was IE.

andywoodon Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?

Here's a late version of Encarta.

https://goo.gl/6uX4Qu

Do you see that plain-looking dropdown menu with the rounded orange highlights? That is Internet Explorer. Just this one menu. It's an in-process instance of Trident, IEs old HTML rendering engine. So that little window is the equivalent of somthing like chromium embedded. I don't know why that menu is an instance of IE's HTML renderer. Someone wanted to style it with CSS, I think. So they embedded IE. That flyout to the right is probably another Trident window. In order to meet accessibility requirements, I had to grab the running instance of the root IE COM interface, and route keyboard events into it. With raw C++ COM. There were other hooks going in the opposite direction so the menu / browser window could tell the app about clicks.

andywoodon Into the Breach’s interface was a nightmare to make and the key to its greatness

I made a game that has this design principle. The UI is all point-click and a few icons. But it presents things like: what you can do to the object in front of you, with the item in your hand. What you can do with items you have on hand. What you could do if you had an item that you know about. Hints about what you could do if you knew something you don't know yet. This is all distilled to a single icon with decorations, but computing it all correctly is quite involved.

andywoodon DOSBox x86 system emulator

Oh my god. It's astounding what becomes possible as we move further into this era when most digital activity gets archived for future mashups and other archaeology.

Here, I released this in 1996:

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Aspetra_1996

I knew people still played it, but I had no idea it had a freaking URL now!

andywoodon Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

The existence of a BigCo is stable, but a job there isn't always. Between up-or-out, re-orgs, RIFs, defrags - you just might find yourself effectively reapplying for your own job on a yearly basis.

andywoodon Ask HN: Are there any IDEs or editors that support editable views of code/text?

Aha! I had not thought to look for such a hook. Are they common? This is very close to what I'm looking for, thank you. Then, to toggle, I guess I would automate closing and reopening the file.

Edit: Oops. Now I'm thinking this would probably break all code analysis features. It would be nice if there was a notion of a 'view' that is very superficial and doesn't impact the code analysis.

andywoodon Ask HN: Who Is Selling? (Apps, Sideprojects, Sites – February 2018)

https://gaiaeternal.itch.io/domino-playground

I personally guarantee that this is the highest-quality PC game about making binary logic circuits with dominos in existence.

andywoodon Show HN: Domino Playground – A puzzle game about making domino logic circuits

Hello HN. About three months ago I was thinking about how I would like to get some dominos, in order to try making some basic binary arithmetic circuits. That's when it hit me: why buy physical dominos when I could make a 3D sim, where I can iterate, save state, and stand all the dominos back up instantly?

The result is Domino Playground. There is a free demo on the page that includes a tutorial chapter, and a chapter on basic logic gates. My main goals for this project are: 1) Make an intro to learning about binary logic, which is accessible to newbies and students. 2) Make a fun puzzle game. and 3) Make a user-friendly environment for creating arbitrary domino rallies. I am especially interested in feedback on whether you think the game accomplishes goal #1!