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netmare

207 karma · joined January 29, 2012

Just a guy born in the late 70s.

My woefully neglected site: https://efotinis.neocities.org

Some scripts I've written: https://github.com/efotinis/scripts

My HN CSS: https://userstyles.org/styles/117336/hacker-news-slick

"The only way for ${anything} to survive is for the good people to stay" -- Sam Carter

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netmare··on Neijuan
Yup, it's exactly the same.
netmare··on Neijuan
There's a Greek proverb disputing the latter: they are spitting on him and he thinks it's raining.
netmare··on God sleeps in the minerals
The religious have managed to make every YouTuber say "gosh" though.
netmare··on Olympians turn to OnlyFans to fund dreams due to 'broken' finance system (2024)
Not per se, but indirectly penalizing modest people is not OK.
netmare··on Attacking PowerShell Clixml Deserialization
I had the same problem initially. It's sometimes easier on the command line, since piping file and directory objects to commands generally binds their PSPath to LiteralPath using a parameter alias.
netmare··on CSS-only infinite scrolling carousel animation
Marquee, blink, i, b... Older people like me remember the old "innocent" days of the internet. It's probably nostalgia, but the modern web doesn't seem exciting anymore...
netmare··on Steve Ballmer's incorrect binary search interview question
IANAL, but they either have to honor the verbal contract (pour an additional cup AND pay $20) OR the contract is void and therefore they can be sued for assault. Of course, the "can" in "if I can" may be construed as "being able to", but that's up to the jury I guess.
netmare··on GitHub Copilot is not infringing your copyright (2021)
That's a great point about stripping authorship. It would be nice if there was some sort of blockchain linking every bit of knowledge to its source. Some people at least would like getting attribution--I know I would. Instead we get a planet-sized meat grinder producing the perfect burger material. Just make sure to add enough spices to make it edible, i.e. not to offend anyone.
netmare··on Why Vivaldi won't follow the current AI trend?
You are using LLMs to summarize bloated articles probably generated by LLMs. Maybe stop paying attention to such "articles" and cut the middleman?
netmare··on The saddest "Just Ship It" story ever (2020)
I'm also not a fan of overly-funny writing, but I just wanted to say that I found your style quite enjoyable. Maybe it's because a can relate somewhat to your situation... :b
netmare··on FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't
If A can die from sesame seeds and B can't and the A-to-B ratio is something like 1:1e+6, doesn't it make more sense for A to bake their own bread instead?
netmare··on Impulse Tracker source code now available on GitHub
The Wikipedia entry on text-based user interfaces uses IT as an example of a text-mode program featuring a pixel-accurate mouse pointer. The "citation-needed" had always been annoying me, since I knew it was true, but I couldn't prove it. Now, we can finally link to IT_MOUSE.ASM and be done with it.
netmare··on Serious Sam handled massive amounts of enemies on 56k modem connections
I think it was a rhetorical question. I wasn't a big fan of the SS series, but those damn kamikaze still echo in my mind. I've even had nightmares about them...
netmare··on Quake in 13kb (2021)
You could then fix the inverted x axis by using the mouse on the underside of the table. Works fine with optical mice, but a ball mouse might require fiddling with gravity (or magnets, but that's no fun).
netmare··on A Cursory Look at Cursors
I still prefer it the way it was when I started using computers with DOS 6.x and Windows 3.1: underline in console, bar in GUIs, block in both with overwrite mode. Always blinking of course. My problems with modern programs are 1) overwrite mode is usually not implemented and 2) moving the cursor does not reset the blink timer. The first I can understand (although it's trivial to do), but the second results in the cursor getting invisible when moving while pressing the arrow keys. It's the little things...
netmare··on Magic Numbers
That's like a programming language with 0.5-based array indexing.
netmare··on Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges
David Crane, the creator of Pitfall, explains it all very nicely in a GDC Classic Game Postmortem [1]. I'm linking at the relevant timestamp, but the whole video is pure Atari 2600 goodness. The full Postmortems playlist is quite enjoyable too. I particularly liked the talks about the original Deus Ex, Myst, Loom, Adventure, Marble Madness, Ms. Pac-Man, Paperboy, Lemmings, and more. I find these videos very soothing and nostalgic. Got to rewatch them now...

[1]: https://youtu.be/tfAnxaWiSeE?list=PL2e4mYbwSTbbiX2uwspn0xiYb...

netmare··on The origin and virtues of semicolons in programming languages
Although they're the same glyph, they are different codepoints in Unicode. There's an old joke about replacing semicolons with Greek question marks in JavaScript and baffling your colleagues...
netmare··on The origin and virtues of semicolons in programming languages
And that the semicolon was used as a PRINT statement terminator when you wanted to suppress the implicit newline at the end.
netmare··on Programming with DOS Debugger (2003)
I "solved" that by using two assembling passes. The first had dummy jump/call addresses in order to determine the code offsets of labels. Then I would resolve the relative offsets, replace the target labels with offset deltas and reassemble.

I used that trick to speed up my QBasic programs with graphics, string and list handling, etc. It was one of the first rewarding times in my programming "career" and it actually made me feel proud of myself.

netmare··on BreakTime: Running Breakout inside Google Calendar
Wouldn't that cause positive feedback in the analytics? Firefox usage is already below the magic 5%. If we start hiding, we may soon join IE5 in unsupported land.
netmare··on A peculiarity of the X Window System: Windows all the way down
An X-Mouse mode was available since at least Win98SE [1]. It was hidden and you had to enable it in the Registry [2], typically via Tweak UI.

That mode would move the input focus without actually clicking on another window. You could see the caption bars change color accordingly, but the "temporarily" focused window could be set to either stay in it's original z-order or moved to the top.

Windows 10 uses a different method: it doesn't change the focus and only sends mouse scrolling events to the target window. That's less powerful, but probably more intuitive for us non-*nix users.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/70599589/how-do-i-turn-o...

[2]: https://superuser.com/a/19643

netmare··on The quest to decode the Mandelbrot set
There's MMCE†, the spiritual successor of Marble Marcher. I've only played the original some years ago and it was pretty awesome. You simply have to move a ball across a 3D fractal surface that's constantly evolving in real-time!

Sadly, I can't run MMCE to test, since I'm using a PC and gfx card from 2009.

†: https://michaelmoroz.itch.io/mmce

netmare··on YouTube begins new wave of slowdowns for users with ad blockers enabled
I would pay much more for YouTube if they offered proper search and filtering tools. There's so much interesting stuff hidden behind light years of fluff. Ymmv, of course.
netmare··on I bricked my Christmas lights
For future DaaS perhaps. Everything is becoming a service, why not decoration...
netmare··on Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year
I also skipped that, but we won't have to worry about it anymore. They started enabling it by default. Recently got a toast notification that I barely got to read. Soon they'll probably make it mandatory. :o)
netmare··on Wisconsin couple has old phones and nobody to buy them
Known as myriads to many ancient civilizations.

Fun fact: in modern Greek a million is called "ekatommyrio", which means 100 (ekató) myriads.

netmare··on The Frustration Loop
They were probably referring to the random delays, form field wiping, focus-jumping and silly back-end errors which are prevalent in "healthcare UI/UX".
netmare··on Go CLI to calculate total media duraton in directories
These are all my scripts. They're object-oriented, self-documented, tab-completable and a `hg clone` away. They're simply more polished versions of what I could do on Windows with built-in PowerShell (and FFPROBE of course):

    F:films> filter probe_format {
        ffprobe $_.fullname -v error -show_entries format=duration -of json |
            convertfrom-json | % format
    }
    F:films> ls -file -rec | ? extension -in .mp4,.avi,.mkv | probe_format |
        measure -sum duration | % { New-TimeSpan -Seconds $_.sum } | % tostring
    15.12:18:09  # same result as before (15days+12hours, etc.)
Even this makes much more sense to me than the Unix equivalent. I realize that Bash/AWK was better than CMD.EXE batch files, but, come on...
netmare··on Go CLI to calculate total media duraton in directories
As long as we're golfing: In PowerShell, using my personal script library:

    F:films> ls -rec -file | gec video | gvi | ndur
    372:18:09
where:

- `ls -rec -file` gets all files recursively under CWD (F:films)

- `gec video` selects video files via extension (gec -> Get-ExtensionCategory)

- `gvi` uses FFPROBE to get video info in custom object (gvi -> Get-VideoInfo)

- `ndur` sums Duration property of objects and converts seconds to 'hhh:mm:ss'

Most people I've shown this have found the syntax and aliases confusing and non-intuitive. They prefer the find/xargs/awk incantations, which, I'm told, are more elegant, correct and precise. After that, I'm usually speechless.

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