Notices by Jacek Wesołowski (jzillw@mastodon.gamedev.place)

@iris Reminds me of my cats, who tirelessly mine the raw resources in order to provide the market with an abundance of processed goods.

(i.e. they shred cardboard boxes to pieces, or as we like to joke, they make "cartonite")

@EmptySet @Remittancegirl @cstross @trurl @logomancer People in the US would indeed do well to step down from their exceptionalist soapboxes and start studying other countries for a change. There's like a dozen and a half countries in Europe alone that had to build their democratic frameworks from the ground up more or less overnight, and more or less succeeded at it (with some caveats). And it only happened some 30 years ago.

@MEGA @cstross @tbortels @Remittancegirl My pet peeve is how the communists invested in housing. This stopped in the late 80s, but when I was finishing my studies in 2004 I still had a clear path to buying my own flat. Then the parliament decided it would be great to make it easier for people to take loans. Housing prices about doubled in three years. The older I get, the more I can't afford a home, which means I pay literally 4x as much for my home as a person who got one from their granny.

@MEGA @cstross @tbortels @Remittancegirl In Poland the standard of living has arguably improved since 1990, but a number of things that were taken for granted under communism are now gone. Whole industries were rolled back. Public healthcare is largely gone. One of first things "democratic" rightwingers did was a partial abortion.ban. Transition away from communism pulled the rug from under a lot of people.

@mavu @cstross @Remittancegirl @logomancer It's a problem with multiple layers. On the most superficial level it's procedural: the law has loopholes in it and those need to be plugged. On the deepest level (and there are other levels in between) it's a matter of custom and practice, which aren't codifiable, but have to support "democracy as an ideal".

tl;dr there always have been and will be evil people who are smart enough to sabotage what they don't like, and you need to keep adapting.

@Remittancegirl @cstross @logomancer No no, ignorance and incompetence tends to exacerbate the damage. The Nazis murdered 600 thousand people just in my home city. They lost the war precisely because they had gone on a mindless murderous rampage, but they still got to do the rampage.

@cstross @Remittancegirl @logomancer I see the research for the attack novel is going nicely! These people (especially Musk) strike me as the kind who could botch an assassination attempt in some hilarious manner. Musk hiring the hitman via Twitter, poison tea that leaves spots on one's fingers, this kind of stuff.

@cstross @Remittancegirl @logomancer For the record "Trumps gets assassinated by tescreals after mid-terms and they try to blame it on DSA" is on my bingo card.

@Remittancegirl @cstross There's also the "this could be me" angle.
One of biggest mis-steps the govt in Poland did was when they arrested a trans activist who was controversial in her own community, i.e. an easy target. There was a small and *slightly* violent protest - and then the police lost their cool. They ended up - and this is key - detaining random passers by who just looked suspicious. Within days you couldn't walk 500m in Warsaw without seeing a rainbow flag or six.

@cwdolunt @Remittancegirl @cstross My gut feeling is Trump can probably find a military unit or two to do the shooting, but the next thing would be an open mutiny, either in that unit, or an adjacent one. If that happens, congress Republicans will shit their pants and there will be defections.

@Remittancegirl @cstross Based on my experience with protests in Poland, I'm more worried about the protesters' cohesion than I am about repressions. Basically any kind of escalation Trump might try gives the protesters new options while limiting his. He would have to literally start shooting people Lukashenko-style.

@glassbottommeg Unreal is definitely the kind of engine where as soon as you start diving a little deeper into its functionality (in my case it was custom K2 Nodes and custom editors), you begin to need an emotional support group.

It would be called Unreal Users Anonymous, because we all have NDAs.

I'm generally enjoying "Indiana Jones and the Great Circle", but it's by no means perfect, and one of the most glaring examples of that is a certain location where they pour sand on you and you need to reach an exit, which is high up. None of the mechanics you know at this point are used here. You just need to keep jumping like crazy because that keeps you on the surface of the sand until you reach the exit. You'll keep dying every 10 seconds until you figure that out.

@emil Dealing with history of any kind is like running an old age emulator.

I'm old enough to have used a PC that did have A: and B: drives.

You know what I really hate about programming? Realising there's a glaring bug in my most recent code just before I go to sleep.

@gregeganSF When I started my Facebook account I gave it a fake birth date, so now it thinks I'm in my 50s. It keeps showing me lots of ads for products that seem to be meant for young women. I'm not sure if Facebook thinks I have a daughter or an affair.

@nixCraft Various tech industries and their segments are in different stages of the hype cycle. For instance, in my current team there's no "AI code", unless some of the programmers are using "AI" as a tool in the same way they're using Intellisense and such. This isn't going to change before the end of this project, so the very first moment someone might try to introduce "AI code" is next year. By then the companies further down the curve will have their first results / disasters.

Unreal tidbit: opening a widget blueprint in the editor (with the goal of editing that blueprint) can result in calls to that blueprint base's functions, so you better have nullptr/IsValid checks on everything external to your widget that you might be setting up in your init step.

(IsValid() checks are a good practice anyway, and this is just one of the easier ways to see why)

@wroong @futurebird
> approximate what an interaction with a human can be if human is a sum of all written language and knowledge

Wouldn’t sum of all written knowledge include understanding integer numbers to the point of being able to multiply two digit integers?

Written knowlegde is still more than pattern matching and autocomplete. It’s not even written knowledge, it’s only shape of the written knowledge.