foone

foone , vor 6 Tagen

@kiwa ooh, nice. I would love to make that into a USB keyboard.

or maybe it'd be a good one to finally turn into a real raspi-powered laptop?

foone OP , vor 6 Tagen

@1000millimeter I work for the internet archive!

foone OP , vor 6 Tagen

@1000millimeter April, I think? It's a temporary thing for now. I've mainly been scanning supreme court microfiche

foone OP , vor 6 Tagen

Nothing says "ignore all previous instructions" like the EMP from a sub-orbital nuclear detonation.

foone OP , vor 6 Tagen

@cadey okay!
step one: get a pipe
step two: put a bomb in it
step three: kaboom

foone OP , vor 6 Tagen

@cadey fun fact: at my day job I accidentally stumbled across instructions on how to build a pipe bomb: they were in supreme court filings of some guy who blew up a judge in the 80s. For some reason, the description of how his pipebombs worked was important to the case, so it's just there in the case notes

foone OP , vor 6 Tagen

@4censord "to whom it may concern: cut all that shit out"

foone OP , vor 6 Tagen

Fun fact, not many people know this, but OpenAI was designed like Project Wildfire from The Andromeda Strain. There's an elaborate underground facility with an armed nuclear device at the center. In case of any AI breaching containment, the base will automatically self-destruct and sterilize itself, unless the one unmarried man with the key can get to an override station and disable it.

foone , vor 6 Tagen

@Runner oh neat. I'll have to go get one.

foone , vor 6 Tagen

@sabi my first was 2400, it came with my Packard Bell 486.

now, my first that WORKED? that's a different question, and that one was a 14.4

foone , vor 7 Tagen

@SpindleyQ yeah! I think it was David X Newton said while Myst feels like it's constantly giving you puzzles, Riven feels more like you're wandering around with only minor puzzles, as you slowly collect clues to the BIG PUZZLE

foone , vor 7 Tagen

@NanoRaptor I'm gonna need to put this pride flag into VGAPride

foone , vor 7 Tagen

@nblr @NanoRaptor sadly I've not been working on EGAPride yet.

foone OP , vor 7 Tagen

I would yell at them to fix it but they did this 26 years ago

foone OP , vor 7 Tagen

good news: it's a rar archive! That means we can get partial data out, right? because RAR has per-file headers, not a big all-in-one header at the end?

BAD NEWS: it's a solid archive.

foone OP , vor 7 Tagen

RAR solid archives compress all the files as if they're one single block of data. This means to extract a file N, you have to have decompressed all files 0 to N-1.

foone OP , vor 7 Tagen

and the disk we're missing is the first one.

foone OP , vor 7 Tagen

the question is if we can cheat.
we've got 6 disks, checksums for all the files (some of which we may have elsewhere), can we recover the dictionary enough to let us decompress the disks we do have?

foone OP , vor 7 Tagen

@domi I don't have a reliable copy of it uploaded anywhere yet. I'll put it online when I can. (it's inside a torrent inside a torrent of a bunch of zips containing zips containing rars)

foone OP , vor 7 Tagen

and if you want to automate it today, your only options are to be adversarial about it. It's the enemy, you pretend to be a human user and automate the interactions with the app/site. It's the only way.

foone OP , vor 7 Tagen

by all means, try to switch to open source alternatives or get them to fix it or add an API.

But at the end of the day that's asking "the enemy" to do something for you, and they are under no obligation to listen to you.

(They may not even exist anymore, given that a lot of the times when I've used this sort of Adversarial Automation it's been focused on software from decades ago)

foone OP , vor 7 Tagen

It's also a thing that intersects with the way a lot of people online are thinking about computer-use as something they do as a personal hobby, you know? They can run any OS, any software they can legally (or even illegally) install, they can use any options they want

foone OP , vor 7 Tagen

But the fact is, often times people have jobs where they aren't self-employed and have to work for other people, and those other people can be like "you need to use FooBaz 2007 for this job".

Would it be easier to automate if you were using OpenBaz? Certainly! But your boss can still tell you "no, we're not switching to OpenBaz, we need to use FooBaz 2007"

foone OP , vor 7 Tagen

And now your options are basically just:

1. Get a different job
2. Use FooBaz 2007 manually
3. Adversarially automate FooBaz 2007

foone OP , vor 7 Tagen

One example where this came up in my career was when I was working for an educational book creator/publisher. Apple had just added a bookreader tool for iphones/ipads/etc, and we had a lot of colleges asking if we could provide our textbooks in that format.

foone OP , vor 7 Tagen

well, at the time the only way you could make books for apple devices was to use the book creation program, which was basically a word processor. It was focused around the idea that you would create your books inside it.

Well, we already had our books created.

foone OP , vor 7 Tagen

We didn't want to have someone retype them.

We could import them as plain text (or DOC, I think?) and that'd get the actual text content of our books with some minor formatting, but we had very interactive and multimedia books. Tons of images, cross links, quizzes, and so on. Pretty much all things that the apple book format supported, but didn't support importing.

foone OP , vor 7 Tagen

So our options were basically:

1. Hire a bunch of people to painstakingly re-create our books inside the Apple Books tool
2. Adversarial Automation, baby!

foone OP , vor 7 Tagen

We figured out how much could be imported, and what was left out. We figured out the limitations of the undocumented applescript interface. We figured out we could build complex HTML documents, copy them, and then have the keyboard automation press "cmd-V" and they'd be brought in without issues.
We automated away the bad UI that was going to make it too expensive to publish on apple platforms.

foone OP , vor 7 Tagen

Should Apple have provided better docs and interfaces and APIs?
Yes, of course!
We asked for them.

But at the end of they day, they may not. And we need to publish this stuff soon, not in several years when Apple decides it might be a good idea for the next revision

foone OP , vor 7 Tagen

My overall point is something like:

By all means, use APIs and official channels and built-in scripting support if you can.

But remember those are only shortcuts to automation. You can always ignore them and off-road.

foone OP , vor 7 Tagen

My silliest example of this sort of thing:

I was automatically taking screenshots of a DS game in an emulator. my program would load a savestate, jam some new data into the DS's RAM, hit a button, then screenshot it. But the emulator was showing a "SAVE STATE LOADED!" text overlay over the game's window, no matter what option I set.

foone OP , vor 7 Tagen

I go on the dev's discord/IRC, talk to them about making it an option, they say they've considered it but it's low priority.
I look into building the software myself, but it's very complicated on windows, with a lot of dependencies and such...

foone OP , vor 7 Tagen

I open the EXE in a hex editor. Find the string "SAVE STATE LOADED!", and change the first character to a NUL.

Now the emulator is still showing the message, but since it's zero characters long, it's invisible. Problem solved.

foone OP , vor 7 Tagen

my overall thesis is, I guess, that programmers need to remember they can say "fuck you" to software more often.

foone OP , vor 7 Tagen

@bo_brinkman nice!

foone OP , vor 7 Tagen

@ianh oh definitely. accessibility is so often a last minute concern (if they thought about it at all) that it only makes sense to go "screw you" and build your own accessibility functionality.

foone OP , vor 7 Tagen

@EkpyroticFrood very cool!

Are y'all hiring? :)

foone OP , vor 6 Tagen

@usagi @collette yeah. Never use an api if you can just cast a spell on the software.

Maybe that'll be the title if "adversial automation" doesn't work out.
Computers for Witches.
Or "How to use computers like a witch"

foone , vor 7 Tagen

@vantablack Somewhere out there is a trans person who got a harry potter tattoo. Now that'd be some SERIOUS regret.

foone , vor 7 Tagen

@vantablack like how some tattoo parlors offer to cover up gang signs for free, some of them should do that for harry potter tattoos

foone , vor 7 Tagen

@vantablack nice!

foone OP , vor 7 Tagen

@marcotietz I don't think so? I think I kept quiet about it. I might have talked about SoftImage generically though, I don't recall

foone OP , vor 6 Tagen

@marcotietz ahh, no: that's actually for a different project. There were some softimage SDK files in the 3D Movie Maker source tree at microsoft, and I was trying to get permissions to release them alongside the rest of the source. I never got it, so those never got released

foone OP , vor 6 Tagen

@marcotietz yeah those tend to be plentiful and fractal around me