whitequark

whitequark , vor 2 Tagen an Random Englisch

DID YOU KNOW: Every time Microsoft calls a function DoSomethingEx, it's because it was girlfriends with, and broke up with, the DoSomething function.

whitequark OP , vor 2 Tagen

DID YOU KNOW: Every single Windows API function is gay.

whitequark OP , vor 2 Tagen

@foone w-why

fasterthanlime , vor 3 Tagen an Random Englisch

Good, uhhh.. good morning

whitequark , vor 3 Tagen

@fasterthanlime KITTY EARS

whitequark , vor 4 Tagen an Random Englisch

despite having never shot a gun i will get very annoyed at imprecise use of gun-related terminology on the internet, because i find these engineered mechanisms fascinating and an interesting object of study

engineered objects consist of parts each of which serve a purpose! they're not just things with an aestheti[gets shot]

whitequark OP , vor 4 Tagen

i feel the same way about programming languages

whitequark OP , vor 4 Tagen

but also have you ever looked into how absurdly difficult it is to make a reliable automatic feeding and extraction mechanism? like when i was a child i didn't care for guns much but i was wondering how you'd design such a thing

many years later i have a much more detailed understanding of how one works, but i still wonder how you'd design such a thing

especially with like, no high speed cameras, no CAM/CAE, nothing but your mind and a sheet of paper

a beautiful form of applied mathematics

whitequark OP , vor 4 Tagen

and a lot of trial and error

i wonder if i can read, like, winchester's lab notebook or something, to understand the thought process behind the design

whitequark OP , vor 4 Tagen

@4censord I think some of the better airsoft options could be satisfying in the same way

foone , vor 6 Tagen an Random Englisch

I mean, they make a good argument.

Source: https://www.tumblr.com/ejacutastic/752960889515294720/

whitequark , vor 6 Tagen

@foone the username really ties it together

foone , vor 10 Tagen an Random Englisch

Idea: a USB-controlled gun, but the USB protocol implementation is the most cursed part.
Any ideas? I have a better one, but I'll start with that it's a USB printer class. Every time you tell it to print a page, it fires

whitequark , vor 10 Tagen

@foone web camera (the cursed part is that someone would actually deploy this)

fasterthanlime , vor 13 Tagen an Random Englisch

One thing that is cool about LLM‘s right now is how there’s actual competition, the likes of which I haven’t seen in other fields lately.

I’ve been enjoying GPT-4o, now Claude Sonnet 3.5 is out and I can just switch to it with one line of config. Until next time.

whitequark , vor 13 Tagen

@fasterthanlime "mostly actively harmful" is closer to reality than "completely useless" or "going to replace us all"

whitequark , vor 13 Tagen

@fasterthanlime can you post the code as well?

foone , vor 14 Tagen an Random Englisch

Someone really needs to develop a lightweight VM container that we can stuff software in. Like, you know how you can buy DOS games on steam, and it just gives you dosbox preconfigured to play the game?

That, but for all software on all OSes

whitequark , vor 14 Tagen

@foone i'm not sure how useful this is outside of software as art

ime the biggest use case for "i want to run ancient software" is when you have ancient hardware, and virtualization famously does not work very well for that

18+ whitequark , vor 16 Tagen an Random Englisch

tired: barcode tattoo carefully aligned horizontally on your neck
inspired: laser scarred asset tag on whichever patch of skin was sufficiently large in the marking machine's field of view first

18+ whitequark OP , vor 16 Tagen

@azzie a datamatrix code in particular can survive up to ~30% loss, and doesn't even require the dots to be square. they can be circles, this is done fairly frequently on equipment where it's annoying to do squares, like if you're making tiny dents with a needle

18+ whitequark OP , vor 16 Tagen

@azzie like

18+ whitequark OP , vor 16 Tagen

@azzie all it needs is Contrast

it absolutely does not care if it's ink, dents, dots, squares, as long as your camera picks it up it will decode