• 9 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 4th, 2023

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  • venv nonsense

    I mean, the fact that it isn’t more end-user invisible to me is annoying, and I wish that it could also include a version of Python, but I think that venv is pretty reasonable. It handles non-systemwide library versioning in what I’d call a reasonably straightforward way. Once you know how to do it, works the same way for each Python program.

    Honestly, if there were just a frontend on venv that set up any missing environment and activated the venv, I’d be fine with it.

    And I don’t do much Python development, so this isn’t from a “Python awesome” standpoint.


  • Well, someone’s gotta pay for all the bandwidth somehow.

    considers

    Honestly, maybe that’d be a way for instances to provide some kind of “premium” service. Like, provide larger upload limits for people who donate. I assume that the instance admins don’t have any ideological objections to larger images, just don’t want to personally pay out-of-pocket for huge bandwidth and storage bills.

    goes looking

    I believe that this is the backend used by Lemmy, pict-rs:

    https://github.com/distruss/pictrs

    https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/from_scratch.html

    Lemmy supports image hosting using pict-rs. We need to install a couple of dependencies for this.

    It looks like it only has one global size setting, so probably can’t do that today.

    Could also host one’s images on an off-site image hosting thing, but then you don’t benefit from integration with the uploading UI. I guess another option would be for Lemmy to provide some sort of integration with an off-site image-hosting service, so that a user could optionally use all the Lemmy features seamlessly, but just have your client or browser make use of your off-site account.


  • Also, I tried to upload pictures but kept getting an error.

    If lemm.ee supports image uploads – which they don’t have to – they may have size restrictions; my understanding is that the size restriction can be customized on a per-instance basis.

    EDIT: They say in their sidebar:

    https://lemm.ee/

    • Image uploads are enabled 4 weeks after account creation
    • Image upload limit is 500kb per image

    Your account was created in 2023, so it’s not the 4 week limit, but you’re probably exceeding their (relatively low, as Lemmy instances go) image size limit.

    Be kind of interesting to expose that data and let lemmy.fediverse.observer display limits per-instance.

    EDIT2: I think that the largest image I’ve uploaded on lemmy.today is this high-resolution scan, which is 8 MB.


  • I would call Hades and pretty much anything people call an “action roguelike” a roguelite, but I have a hard time calling something not a roguelike for using graphics, even being pretty strict about the definition. Like, there are a number of originally-ASCII roguelikes that have tilesets. Those don’t functionally change the game in any way than other than directly dropping the tiles in. Does that mean that Nethack-family games or Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup aren’t roguelikes?

    My red lines are:

    • Gotta be turn-based. Maybe I’d accept a purely forced-turn version of a turn-based roguelike, like Mangband.

    • At least some element of procedurally-generated maps and loot that alters how one needs to play the game from run to run. I’d definitely call many games that still have many handcrafted maps – Tales of Mag’eyal 2 or Caves of Qud, say – roguelikes.

    • At least the option for permadeath, and that that be the primary mode of play. Some Caves of Qud was originally permadeath-only, but added a mode that avoids it.

    • Grid-based. Hex grid is fine, like Hoplite.

    Those are Berlin Interpretation elements. In addition:

    • Top-down view (or functionally-equivalent, like equivalent, like isometric). I wouldn’t call a first-person grid-based game – and there were a lot of 1980s and 1990s RPGs that used that structure – a roguelike.

    • Only direct control of one character at a time. I wouldn’t rule out Nethack for indirectly-controlled pets or Caves of Qud for letting one switch which character the player’s “mind” is controlling.

    I don’t think that I’d make it a hard requirement, but all good roguelikes that I’ve played involve a lot of analysis and trying to find synergies among character abilities or item or monster or map characteristics, often in nonobvious ways. That’s a big part of the game.





  • I’m assuming that they’re Bluetooth, as if they were wired, the problem couldn’t really come up.

    If they’re still paired to a device, crank the volume up and try playing something loud enough that you can hear it.

    For Bluetooth devices that are powered on and responding to queries for nearby Bluetooth devices, you can also try asking a device that can pair with Bluetooth devices and show signal strength, like a laptop, to query for nearby devices, can kind of use to “home in” on the device.


  • I don’t think that the problem is 2FA itself so much as poor UX on existing systems.

    Let’s say that I have a little USB keychain dongle in my pocket with an “approve” button and a tiny screen. When I sign in, at the time that I plug my password in, I plug the dongle in. It shows the information for whom I am approving authentication. I push the “approve” button.

    It’s got a trusted display (unlike a smartcard, so that a point-of-sale system can’t claim that I’m approving something other than what I am).

    It can store multiple keys, and I basically use it for any credentials that I don’t mind carrying with myself.

    I then keep another, “higher security” dongle at home with more-sensitive keys.

    Does that add some overhead relative to just entering my password? Yeah. But is it a big deal? No. And it makes it a lot harder for someone to swipe credentials.

    I agree that using phone-linked SMS 2FA authentication is problematic (for a number of reasons, not just because it locks you to a phone, but because there are also privacy implications there).


  • Some context:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Goddard

    Goddard eschewed publicity, because he did not have time to reply to criticism of his work, and his imaginative ideas about space travel were shared only with private groups he trusted. He did, though, publish and talk about the rocket principle and sounding rockets, since these subjects were not too “far out.” In a letter to the Smithsonian, dated March 1920, he discussed: photographing the Moon and planets from rocket-powered fly-by probes, sending messages to distant civilizations on inscribed metal plates, the use of solar energy in space, and the idea of high-velocity ion propulsion. In that same letter, Goddard clearly describes the concept of the ablative heat shield, suggesting the landing apparatus be covered with “layers of a very infusible hard substance with layers of a poor heat conductor between” designed to erode in the same way as the surface of a meteor.[47]

    Publicity and Criticism

    The publication of Goddard’s document gained him national attention from U.S. newspapers, most of it negative. Although Goddard’s discussion of targeting the moon was only a small part of the work as a whole (eight lines on the next to last page of 69 pages), and was intended as an illustration of the possibilities rather than a declaration of intent, the papers sensationalized his ideas to the point of misrepresentation and ridicule. Even the Smithsonian had to abstain from publicity because of the amount of ridiculous correspondence received from the general public.[21]: 113  David Lasser, who co-founded the American Rocket Society (ARS), wrote in 1931 that Goddard was subjected in the press to the “most violent attacks.”[50]

    On January 12, 1920, a front-page story in The New York Times, “Believes Rocket Can Reach Moon”, reported a Smithsonian press release about a “multiple-charge, high-efficiency rocket.” The chief application envisaged was “the possibility of sending recording apparatus to moderate and extreme altitudes within the Earth’s atmosphere”, the advantage over balloon-carried instruments being ease of recovery, since “the new rocket apparatus would go straight up and come straight down.” But it also mentioned a proposal “to [send] to the dark part of the new moon a sufficiently large amount of the most brilliant flash powder which, in being ignited on impact, would be plainly visible in a powerful telescope. This would be the only way of proving that the rocket had really left the attraction of the earth, as the apparatus would never come back, once it had escaped that attraction.”[51]

    On January 13, 1920, the day after its front-page story about Goddard’s rocket, an unsigned New York Times editorial, in a section entitled “Topics of the Times”, scoffed at the proposal. The article, which bore the title “A Severe Strain on Credulity”,[52] began with apparent approval, but soon went on to cast serious doubt:

    As a method of sending a missile to the higher, and even highest, part of the earth’s atmospheric envelope, Professor Goddard’s multiple-charge rocket is a practicable, and therefore promising device. Such a rocket, too, might carry self-recording instruments, to be released at the limit of its flight, and conceivable parachutes would bring them safely to the ground. It is not obvious, however, that the instruments would return to the point of departure; indeed, it is obvious that they would not, for parachutes drift exactly as balloons do.[53]

    The article pressed further on Goddard’s proposal to launch rockets beyond the atmosphere:

    [A]fter the rocket quits our air and really starts on its longer journey, its flight would be neither accelerated nor maintained by the explosion of the charges it then might have left. To claim that it would be is to deny a fundamental law of dynamics, and only Dr. Einstein and his chosen dozen, so few and fit, are licensed to do that. … Of course, [Goddard] only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.[54]

    Thrust is however possible in a vacuum.[55]

    Aftermath

    A week after the New York Times editorial, Goddard released a signed statement to the Associated Press, attempting to restore reason to what had become a sensational story:

    Too much attention has been concentrated on the proposed flash pow[d]er experiment, and too little on the exploration of the atmosphere. … Whatever interesting possibilities there may be of the method that has been proposed, other than the purpose for which it was intended, no one of them could be undertaken without first exploring the atmosphere.[56]

    In 1924, Goddard published an article, “How my speed rocket can propel itself in vacuum”, in Popular Science, in which he explained the physics and gave details of the vacuum experiments he had performed to prove the theory.[57] But, no matter how he tried to explain his results, he was not understood by the majority. After one of Goddard’s experiments in 1929, a local Worcester newspaper carried the mocking headline “Moon rocket misses target by 238,799 1⁄2 miles.”[58]

    Though the unimaginative public chuckled at the “moon man,” his groundbreaking paper was read seriously by many rocketeers in America, Europe, and Russia who were stirred to build their own rockets. This work was his most important contribution to the quest to “aim for the stars.”[59]: 50

    “A Correction”

    Forty-nine years after its editorial mocking Goddard, on July 17, 1969—the day after the launch of Apollo 11—The New York Times published a short item under the headline “A Correction”. The three-paragraph statement summarized its 1920 editorial and concluded:

    Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th Century and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.[60]



  • If a nuclear missile is launched at the United States the President has just 6 minutes to come to terms with that and decide to launch a counter attack or not.

    US nuclear deterrence in 2024 doesn’t rely on launch-on-warning, but on the expectation that no hostile power has the ability to locate and destroy the US ballistic missile submarine fleet prior to them performing their counterlaunches.

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

    In nuclear strategy, a retaliatory strike or second-strike capability is a country’s assured ability to respond to a nuclear attack with powerful nuclear retaliation against the attacker. To have such an ability (and to convince an opponent of its viability) is considered vital in nuclear deterrence, as otherwise the other side might attempt to try to win a nuclear war in one massive first strike against its opponent’s own nuclear forces.

    Submarine-launched ballistic missiles are the traditional, but very expensive, method of providing a second strike capability, though they need to be supported by a reliable method of identifying who the attacker is.

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

    Launch on warning (LOW), or fire on warning, is a strategy of nuclear weapon retaliation where a retaliatory strike is launched upon warning of enemy nuclear attack and while its missiles are still in the air, before detonation occurs.

    In 1997, a US official stated that the US had the technical capability for launch on warning but did not intend to use a launch on warning posture and that the position had not changed in the 1997 presidential decision directive on nuclear weapon doctrine.

    This non-reliance on launch-on-warning is also true of the French and British nuclear deterrents – the British don’t even maintain a nuclear arsenal other than on subs, so they haven’t even bothered with maintaining the option to do so, and the French only use tactical ALCMs in addition to the strategic sub-launched weapons; those weapons probably would be poorly-suited for such a role.

    The Brits rather famously have the “letter of last resort”.

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

    The letters of last resort are four identically worded handwritten letters from the prime minister of the United Kingdom to the commanding officers of the four British ballistic missile submarines and stored on board of each. They contain orders on what action to take if an enemy nuclear strike has both destroyed the British government and has also killed or otherwise incapacitated both the prime minister and their designated “second person” of responsibility, typically a high-ranking member of the Cabinet such as the deputy prime minister or the first secretary of state. If the orders are carried out, the action taken could be the last official act of His Majesty’s Government.

    If the letters are not used during the term of the prime minister who wrote them, they are destroyed unopened after that person leaves office, so that their content remains unknown to anyone except the issuer.

    Process

    A new prime minister writes a set of letters immediately after taking office and being told by the Chief of the Defence Staff “precisely what damage a Trident missile could cause”. The documents are then delivered to the submarines in sealed envelopes, and the previous prime minister’s letters are destroyed without being opened.

    In the event of the deaths of both the prime minister and the designated alternative decision-maker as a result of a nuclear strike, the commander(s) of any nuclear submarine(s) on patrol at the time would use a series of checks to ascertain whether the letters of last resort must be opened.

    According to Peter Hennessy’s book The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War, the process by which a Vanguard-class submarine commander would determine if the British government continues to function includes, amongst other checks, establishing whether BBC Radio 4 continues broadcasting.

    In 1983, the procedure for Polaris submarines was to open the envelopes if there was an evident nuclear attack, or if all UK naval broadcasts had ceased for four hours.

    Options

    While the contents of these letters are secret, according to the December 2008 BBC Radio 4 documentary The Human Button, there were four known options given to the prime minister to include in the letters. The prime minister might instruct the submarine commander to:

    • retaliate with nuclear weapons;

    • not retaliate;

    • use their own judgement; or,

    • place the submarine under an allied country’s command, if possible. The documentary mentions Australia and the United States.

    The Guardian reported in 2016 that the options are said to include: “Put yourself under the command of the United States, if it is still there”, “Go to Australia”, “Retaliate”, or “Use your own judgement”. The actual option chosen remains known only to the writer of the letter.


  • for some reason

    It’s called price discrimination.

    If there are multiple groups of potential purchasers who have different levels of willingness to pay, if you can identify some characteristic of people willing to pay more, then you can create a version of the product that targets that characteristic and thus the group.

    Price discrimination (“differential pricing”,[1][2] “equity pricing”, “preferential pricing”,[3] “dual pricing”,[4] “tiered pricing”,[5] and “surveillance pricing”[6]) is a microeconomic pricing strategy where identical or largely similar goods or services are sold at different prices by the same provider to different buyers based on which market segment they are perceived to be part of.[7][8][2] Price discrimination is distinguished from product differentiation by the difference in production cost for the differently priced products involved in the latter strategy.[2] Price discrimination essentially relies on the variation in customers’ willingness to pay[8][2][4] and in the elasticity of their demand. For price discrimination to succeed, a seller must have market power, such as a dominant market share, product uniqueness, sole pricing power, etc.[9]

    • “Product versioning”[8][16] or simply “versioning” (or “second-degree” price differentiation) — offering a product line[13] by creating slightly differentiated products for the purpose of price differentiation,[8][16] i.e. a vertical product line.[17] Another name given to versioning is “menu pricing”.[14][18]

    In this case, you’re going to have something like a group of “value customers” who care a lot about how much they need to spend on the game. And then you’re going to have “premium customers” who aren’t too fussed about what they pay, but want the very fanciest experience.

    If you had just one version, sold the game at the “value customer” price, then you’d lose out on what the “premium customer” would pay. If you sold it at the “premium customer” price, then you’d have a bunch of “value customers” for whom the game would no longer be a worthwhile purchase, who wouldn’t buy the game, and you’d lose the sales to them. But by selling it at multiple prices, you can optimize for both groups.

    EDIT: l’d also add, on the technical rather than economic side, that I’ve messed around with having a custom HRTF model myself, as Linux (and maybe elsewhere, dunno) games that use OpenAL let you specify a custom HRTF model in the config file. My own impression was that any impact on audio experience was pretty minimal. Might be different if someone had really weirdly-shaped ears or something, dunno.







  • The feature list of the language is so long at this point that it is pretty much impossible for anyone new to learn C++ and grok the design decisions anymore.

    Even if it is possible, it’s a high bar. The height of that bar matters in bringing new people in.

    I have seen decades of would-be “C++ killers” come and go. I think that in the end, it is C++ that kills C++. The language has just become unusably large. And that’s one thing that cannot be fixed by extending the language.