notbeuller

I’d been doing some retro-mac’ing the past couple days, and one thing I noticed is how impossibly “tight” the mouse cursor movement always seems to the physical input. It’s probably just a few dozen instructions from taking the interrupt to scaling and placing the cursor for the next vbl task, but it’s like sticking a 10 point landing.

Cursors on sun workstations (not just because of their optical grips mousepad) or windows boxes always felt like “oh there’s an abstraction between the physical hardware and the pointer, that’s just the way it is” - and nobody cared to make it better.

I saw a video of some sort of motocross meet (not familiar with it) and apparently the visors become completely covered with mud, so riders start the race with several clear plastic strips on the visor and they tear one layer off off as needed. (A comment was made that motocross meets are littered with the debris). Probably wouldn’t need to be so dramatic here.

As an alternative - would a headset lite version without the AR work better here? Display needed information on a nearby tablet or large tv while the user wears a headband only.

Todd Rundgren wrote (or produced) an Mac app in 1990 called “Flowfazer” that was intended for meditative visuals. I remember lots of “is this what computers are supposed to be for” articles at the time.

I recalled that this made the rounds a while back - caused me to purchase the assets (again!) to play.

Diablo 1 for Web Browsers(https://github.com/d07RiV/diabloweb) 449 points|nsoonhui|10 months ago|109 comments

Remapping the non-locking caps lock to control is a no brainer - and if you train yourself to use control-[ to get ESC, then you don’t have to leave the home row. (us keyboard - not sure how that works out in other locales, but caps lock should be eliminated everywhere. Or at least require turning two simultaneous icbm style launch keys to engage.)

This comes up time to time, See discussion of Robin Sloan’s “Spring ‘83: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32233412>

And “Fraidycat”: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22545878>

I do think there’s a maximum size of any online community beyond which it loses its value.

If I'm using curl, I'm probably also using git, ssh and wget. I think an active threat would be more likely to try to blend in (a giveaway would probably to use a user agent that declared I was using a different OS because it was hardcoded into the payload.)

What I end up thinking about is that even though I'm back at the office full time (and I'm one of the weirdos that actually prefer it) I have doctors appointments, school teacher meetings and such that have all moved online. So convenient!, except there's no way I can realistically attend them privately, so a 5 minute meds appointment is now once again a 3 hour travel ordeal.

End-to-End encryption doesn't matter if your employer is scraping your device. I know this is all obvious, but it didn't need to be this way.

During covid when WFH, I received a legitimate looking SMS message with a link, so rather than clicking it, I curl --verbose'd it (and one subsequent redirect) before seeing it was an obvious phishing / troll. The next day, my VPN & SSO was disabled with instructions to contact corporate security. My use of curl had been detected and while they didn't accuse me of anything, they claimed that they wanted to make sure that I hadn't been hacked. I've never felt safe since then - I don't know how "deep" this spying goes. Yes it's their equipment, their network, etc. But I hate the way this makes me feel.

I really appreciate the single quote allowing for alignment:

case 0b0001'0000:

case 0b0101'1000:

(edit, fixed formatting, but I also wanted to agree with a lower down comment asking for 0b001_0000 instead; a better choice.)

I've enjoyed a few VRChat things of watching movies with a random group of mst3k like mindset - but I'm not social enough to have created any contacts, so it's hit or miss if you'll find one of those rooms with a compatible mindset.

The Meta Horizons stuff though - was creepy. There seemed to be people that must've been paid to be there to excite the newcomers, and once I sort of got away from that I ran into the "these are obviously children" problem. I can't help but think that there's a huge COPA fine at the end of that rainbow.

I ran into this one the other day[1] - similarly amusing iOS / macOS debugging (by the guy that wrote much of the modern objc runtime)

[1] http://www.sealiesoftware.com/blog/archive/2010/09/01/Dr_Gre...

I'd like to +1 the advocates of -x c++ here. There's just no reason not to. It's like building scaffolding around a building so you can retrofit it. It doesn't need to end up like a tower of c++, but the scaffolding lets you hoist things out of overly complex codebases a lot easier. The only immediate code changes encountered were adding explicit casts from malloc (and fixing actual bugs that had been hidden.) In one case recently, trivially converting some c structures to c++ and hiding internal representations let me delete thousands of lines of set(foo, xxx) calls because I could prove that there was no access to the computed result.

However, because I'm inherently chaotic neutral, I tend to use -x objective-c++, but that's a story for another day.

There was a folklore.org[1] article about user testing and the original Mac - the OK button was originally "Do it" - but one user was particularly frustrated because he misread it as "Dolt" and thought the computer was insulting him. (Likely this was someone with very little experience with a GUI.)

[1] https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

Randomized cutesy errors (or non errors) are even worse. I'm thinking of the Slack app here, where unhelpful errors are a constant frustration for me. I'm not your friend Slack. I click in the search bar and it says "Enter your search term. You have the window open anyway." Which is salt in the wounds of having to use this app on macOS where I only get one "window" for multiple workspaces. Hate hate hate this thing and it's faux personality.