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hammycheesy

58 karma · joined December 4, 2021

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hammycheesy··on 1996 chat room simulator connected to Win95 and System 7 web desktops
I was having some good fun chatting with other randos on here, then a few minutes ago nearly everyone was kicked out of the room, and now I just see a few bots talking to each other with some canned phrases. Bummer.
hammycheesy··on 1996 chat room simulator connected to Win95 and System 7 web desktops
This makes me very nostalgic, but in a slightly sad way, where I remember how much better the real chat experience was back in the day.

This look-alike client struggles to show me messages in real-time. It looks like they only get pulled down in big chunks every few seconds. It also fails to scroll the new messages into view. I don't remember these sort of problems in IRC clients or IM programs of the 90s (though there were many other problems).

In a way I guess it paints the irony of modern computing, where we have several orders of magnitude more in computing power and resources, but that has only enabled us to keep rushing out perpetually unpolished, unfinished products.

It's still a bunch of fun to see a bunch of strangers talking completely unfiltered nonsense in a rudimentary chat room, though!

hammycheesy··on Porting my JavaScript game engine to C for no reason
> My decision to sell it was met with a lot of backlash but was successful enough to launch me into a self-sustained career.

As someone who is interested in eventually freeing myself from the corporate job and diving head-first into my side projects, I would love to hear more about this aspect.

For some reason the idea of trying to charge folks for the work I would normally do for the fun of it on the side is daunting to me, even though I know it could enable me to focus on doing the stuff I love full-time.

hammycheesy··on A Brief Note on the CrowdStrike Outage and "Tech Influencer" YouTube
I assume the author is mainly referring to the video by Dave's Garage [1], at least the items listed match up pretty well with the points made in the video.

I seem to remember Dave making some of these points as examples rather than asserting them as the truth of what occurred with CrowdStrike, but it's been a couple days since I watched the video.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAzEJxOo1ts

hammycheesy··on Serious Sam handled massive amounts of enemies on 56k modem connections
There is a whitepaper exploring similar netcode concepts that was written by the Tribes developers:

https://www.gamedevs.org/uploads/tribes-networking-model.pdf

hammycheesy··on Radial Menus in Video Games (2022)
A friend of mine was a Program Manager on Xbox that worked on some HCI projects like the original Kinect.

He told me there was once an experimental keyboard that used the two thumbsticks on an Xbox controller like a dual radial menu to input text - the left thumbstick would select a character group, and the right thumbstick would input a character from that group.

The learning curve was deemed too steep for the average customer, but apparently those who spent enough time using the prototype were able to type an order of magnitude faster than with traditional on-screen keyboards.

The memory sticks out as an amusing idea, and potentially a really cool "power-user" input modality for game controllers.

hammycheesy··on People want 'dumbphones'. Will companies make them?
I had a Sonim XP3 "dumb phone" that I used for a year and successfully drove my screen time down from 1-2 hours per day to <10min.

The key for me was that the input (T-9 keyboard) and output (tiny non-touch display) modalities were so constrained that any task that wasn't completely trivial was made so painful that I would put it off until I was in front of a computer, if I did it at all. This was a great way to filter out tasks that weren't truly important enough to work on immediately in the moment.

The downfall was my new job which required travel for work, which meant needing a phone capable of managing flights, navigation, and coordinating with my coworkers.

If my circumstances change, I fully intend to switch back to the XP3 or something similar.

I do wish there was something available that could perform those tasks I need for work, but not give me the "full throughput" to get distracted.

hammycheesy··on Write a Letter to Your Future Self
For me this link leads to what looks like a domain squatting page. Is something broken?
hammycheesy··on A list of recent hostile moves by Google's Chrome team
I've been wanting to switch to Firefox for a while, but there is a single bug I filed ~6 years ago [1] that has prevented me from making the leap. I've always wanted to investigate and see if I can pull a fix together but haven't been able to find the activation energy to get a dev environment set up to do so.

The bug is that Firefox on Windows doesn't play nice with virtual desktops. Clicking on a link in one virtual desktop may focus a Firefox window several VDs away. I'm a heavy user of virtual desktops, so this is a dealbreaker for me. Chromium browsers don't have this issue, so I'm stuck in Chromium land.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1423768

hammycheesy··on Fast machines, slow machines
> a lot of the Windows shell and apps have been slowly rewritten in C#

I worked on the Shell team until late 2022. There is very little C#, if any at all. The vast majority of the Windows Shell is still C++ with a significant amount of WinRT/COM.

hammycheesy··on The top-selling game on Steam is a new 254-player FPS made by 4 people
I'm a native US English speaker and I'm familiar with this idiom.
hammycheesy··on Show HN: Horizontal News, a column-based Hacker News reader
I really like this navigation model - it reminds me a little of the Panorama control [1] that Windows Phone attempted or the column-based, horizontally scolling UIs of the infamous Windows 8 Metro apps [2].

Sadly these more creative approaches seem to be forgotten in place of lazy hamburger menu/pages with back-stack style approaches.

[1] https://www.minddriven.de/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/wp7_pan...

[2] https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/ytfp8btYCkR2rCpW9WS9u3.jpg

hammycheesy··on Snap Store administrators removed signal-desktop from Ubuntu Snap
Reading this thread is what convinced me to switch away from Signal and investigate Matrix:

https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...

hammycheesy··on Show HN: This Food Does Not Exist
I tried to use the linked Colab notebook to generate my own, and it appears to have been successful, but I don't see any way to view the generated images via the notebook interface. I'm not familiar with the notebook tool - have I missed something?
hammycheesy··on OBS – Open Broadcaster Software
Self-promo: there is an open source implementation of Mixer's FTL protocol :)

https://github.com/Glimesh/janus-ftl-plugin

hammycheesy··on Remembering Apple’s Newton, 30 years on
I believe you are thinking of WinFS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS

hammycheesy··on Cat S22 Flip Phone
This experience matches mine. Never had problems group texting. Also find the predictive text a little frustrating (it's also seemingly impossible to reliably type contractions like "I'm"), but not deal-breaking. I see in another comment here that there's an open source T9 Android keyboard [1] that I may try out...

[1] https://github.com/Clam-/TraditionalT9

hammycheesy··on Cat S22 Flip Phone
I'm also rocking an XP3 Plus! I bought it around September because I was looking to curb my screen time. I ruled out the S22 for similar reasons.

I find that in rare cases I need to bring my old smart phone with me (traveling, mainly) for things like airline tickets, movies on planes, maps in new areas.

Otherwise day-to-day I am exclusively using the XP3. My screen time is now at an average of <10 min per day, and my battery life is between 5-6 days on average.

Super happy with the experience, and I bought back so much more time and sanity by not staring at my phone for hours per day.

hammycheesy··on Eden
A similar effort was made by Microsoft a while back to scale up Git in order to use with the Windows monorepo: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/bharry/the-largest-git-repo-o...