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madmoose

472 karma · joined January 12, 2010

Poking at games to see what makes them tick.

https://mastodon.social/@madmoose

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madmoose··on ‘Whisper list’ contains 40 politicians never to accept a drink from, MP claims
It might not be ”the solution” but it seems like this is the best solution these particular women have been able to come up with in the situation they’re in.

I certainly won’t shame these women for talking to each other about what men to avoid.

madmoose··on ‘Whisper list’ contains 40 politicians never to accept a drink from, MP claims
A man bragged on tape about sexually assaulting women and was elected president of the USA.

His lawyer was filmed trying to take of his pants on a bed in a hotel room with a woman he believed was an underage girl and nothing happened.

madmoose··on ‘Whisper list’ contains 40 politicians never to accept a drink from, MP claims
> I'm putting your name on that list, now deal with it

I do not get the impression that any women would trust you with access to any such list, or would rely on you for such information.

Mainly because you seem extremely worried about ending up on such a list, and do not appear in any way to be concerned about the women trying to protect themselves.

madmoose··on ‘Whisper list’ contains 40 politicians never to accept a drink from, MP claims
> It's all fun and games

No, it's rape and sexual abuse.

madmoose··on <i>: The Idiomatic Text element
Ironically, in the list of examples of how to use <i> under Usage Notes, they actually use <em> instead.
madmoose··on Do we need a “Rust Standard”?
> With GCC adding Rust support there is no longer one "official" compiler.

No, there's will still only be one official compiler – the one written and provided by The Rust Project.

> If Rust wants to supplant C in embedded, a specification is required.

You're getting your history backwards.

C did not become successful because of its specification, it got a specification because it was successful.

Similarly, if Rust becomes successful enough, it will probably get a specification. But the popularity will drive the work on a specification, not the other way around.

madmoose··on Mastodon.technology Shutdown
When the Musk takeover was first announced it was practically impossible to register on many of the most popular Mastodon instances.

An actual takeover will almost certainly be a virtual DDoS on Mastodon.

madmoose··on Weird Al had 100 gigs of RAM
Wait till you see Frank's 2000" TV!
madmoose··on Blocking Kiwifarms
You could have seen the evidence if you had started caring when they were harassing trans people.

> Sure they doxed people but I can think off the top of my head half a dozen other places that do that quite regularly, couple that are dedicated to it.

So you know where crimes are currently being committed? Have you reported them to the authorities?

madmoose··on Telegram is asking German users when to share information with law enforcement
> Signal Desktop does not support transferring message history to or from any device.

> Migration Assistant and Time Machine for macOS are not supported.

madmoose··on Complete Introduction to Particles in Japanese
> just keep practicing and it should fall into place eventually.

You just have to train your skull-housed neural network with lots of examples.

madmoose··on The Elusive Origin of Zero
I like to imagine the situation of a tax collector in ancient Mesopotamia, going around and asking the farmers how many animals they have.

If the farmer has 5 cows, they have a number of cows that you can put in a form on a clay tablet.

If the farmer has no goats, they don't have "a number of goats", they have no goats to count. Writing a number on the tax form doesn't make sense.

If numbers are only used to count actual things in the real world, zero is a very odd concept.

We realized later that having "a number" to represent "none" simplifies many things and rids us having to deal with special cases. And if we teach it to children early enough it isn't too confusing.

madmoose··on New Ghostscript PDF interpreter
Strangely this appears to be a new implementation not based on MuPDF, so Artifex now has two implementations of a PDF interpreter.

I wonder what made them decide to reimplement it instead of reusing their existing code.

madmoose··on World's oldest tree still growing near the Norwegian-Swedish border
Apparently it's from German around 1780, for the time during the summer when the cucumbers ripen, everyone is on vacation, and business is slow. That's what the Danish wikipedia entry says, at least.

https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agurketid#Ophav

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silly_season#Other_names

madmoose··on Pronunciation Guide for Unix
He is indeed called Anders And but the only name I know in Danish for & is "og-tegn" (and-sign).

We don't call it ampersand because that comes from the English "and per se and".

madmoose··on Return to Monkey Island trailer [video]
As Ron has said, Monkey Island 1 and 2 weren't made in a pixel art style.

They were just the best art they could do at the time.

madmoose··on Odyssey Game System (2021)
We had a lot of fun with Monkeyshines.
madmoose··on x86 Is an Octal Machine (1995)
I implemented an 8086 emulator using the 1981 "iAPX 86, 88 USER'S MANUAL". It specifies the opcodes in bit patterns, so add is specified as "0 0 0 0 0 0 d w | mod reg r/m", where d is direction (mem to reg or reg to mem) and w is width (byte or word). Since this kind of pattern is used across many instructions it makes the code fairly easy to comprehend (to me at least).

Extracting the alu function from bits 4-6 means that you can group together the implementation of add, or, adc, sbb, and, sub, xor, to and from memory, for bytes and words into one function.

The code's not as fast as the "one code block per instruction" approach of something like DosBOX but at least it doesn't cause me dread to look at.

madmoose··on Apple contributes to OBS to support screen capture using ScreenCaptureKit
The Apple developer's commit builds upon another pull request which contains the build system work by OBS developers, the build system changes are not part of Apple's commit.
madmoose··on Apple contributes to OBS to support screen capture using ScreenCaptureKit
It's in the commit message: https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/5875/commits/5...
madmoose··on Prince of Persia open-source port based on the DOS version disassembly
Disassembled code from a C or C++ compiler is generally better structured than hand written assembly.

I reverse engineered major parts of Westwood’s Blade Runner for ScummVM. It was compiled with the Borland C++ compiler in 1997 and a lot of it was relatively easy to decompile. The most difficult parts were video decoding and character rendering. The video decoder was older Westwood code, clearly hand optimized, and the character renderer was also very optimized.

Currently I’m working on Cryo’s Dune which is all hand-written assembly code. The code jumps all over the place, parameters are passed in arbitrary registers and have to be traced over several calls. I’ve seen a function that, instead of using ret to return, jumped to the ret-instruction of a different function.

Code generated by an older compiler that doesn’t do too much optimization is vastly preferable.

madmoose··on Image file formats that didn’t make it
PPM P6 is also what I use all the time - I usually have to convert from paletted format to RGB first.

A PPM paletted format would save me a lot of space.

The built-in support for PPM in Preview on Mac OS X makes it extremely useful.

madmoose··on Google said it had successfully ‘slowed down’ European privacy rules
By providing useful products or services?
madmoose··on ScummVM 2.5 “Twenty years ago today”
Sgt. Pepper might have inspired Ron Gilbert to use it in Maniac Mansion, but we took it from Maniac Mansion for the 20th anniversary :)

I googled the phrase to make sure we quoted Maniac Mansion correctly and that’s when I realized it was probably a Beatles reference originally.

madmoose··on ScummVM 2.5 “Twenty years ago today”
It is a reference to both the 20th anniversary of ScummVM and the opening text in Maniac Mansion, the first SCUMM game.
madmoose··on Apple Watch production delayed as engineers wrestle with quality issues
Apple does fly a lot of their products out of China so it doesn't take a month.
madmoose··on When zero cost abstractions aren't zero cost
C++ also has std::popcount since C++20. It should probably have had that from the beginning.
madmoose··on Apple says photos in iCloud will be checked by child abuse detection system
> <img width=0 height=0> would do the job.

No, that's not how the Apple's system works.

madmoose··on Apple says photos in iCloud will be checked by child abuse detection system
> Apple isn't trustworthy.

Why not? They've told you in detail what they're going to do.

madmoose··on Apple says photos in iCloud will be checked by child abuse detection system
What you're talking about here has nothing to do with what Apple is implementing.
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