In C# you can do:
someVar is > 10 and < 100 and not 6
and I think that's beautiful.
Notices by Talon (talon@dragonscave.space)
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Talon (talon@dragonscave.space)'s status on Monday, 20-May-2024 00:05:13 JST Talon -
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Talon (talon@dragonscave.space)'s status on Monday, 20-May-2024 00:05:12 JST Talon Show me something that a programming language you know can do that you just simply find syntactically pleasing!
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Talon (talon@dragonscave.space)'s status on Saturday, 11-May-2024 00:10:21 JST Talon I have a folder full of thousands of git repos that I've cloned over the years.
It's like a little hoard!
I wrote a script to move stuff around. Make things easier to find.
Always test your scripts. Always. I just ruined part of my hoard. :dragon_sob:
It wasn't important enough to keep regular backups. I'm not too hurt by it. But I'm still disappointed that I let this happen! -
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Talon (talon@dragonscave.space)'s status on Tuesday, 07-May-2024 17:30:39 JST Talon I dunno.wav
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Talon (talon@dragonscave.space)'s status on Friday, 12-Apr-2024 00:48:18 JST Talon I really firmly believe that the answer to how do we fix computers using up so much energy in the world does not have to be rewrite it in Rust.
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Talon (talon@dragonscave.space)'s status on Tuesday, 09-Apr-2024 21:10:37 JST Talon I saw another big thread about people talking at each other concerning Linux accessibility where one side goes "no this sucks" and the other side goes "But how?", and then it's a constant back and forth with no real resolution.
I wonder if a lot of this stems from the fact that a lot of people actually putting in work for Linux accessibility don't really need it? Like, for example if I boot up a Linux distro, sometimes I'll be able to do what I want, sometimes I won't. One of the biggest issues is that Orca and the accessibility stack will randomly fall over. Like I'll be in some app like Mate software update center or whatever and then it just stops reading. Even worse if Orca was playing a progress beep at the time, which then becomes stuck. So I have a constantly beeping unresponsive system. That's anything but pleasant. But here's the thing. These systems working together are complex. You can have just a slightly different config, or sometimes even just different apps open, and you'll get a completely different experience. Sometimes the update center works fine. Sometimes it doesn't. Telling me that this is a bug with the update center doesn't help because it's the screen reader that died, and without it, I can't do anything. So that's not the solution. The solution is clearly to make the screen reader or accessibility stack somehow work despite this.
But the real thing I'm trying to get at is that we're expecting a largely sighted developer base to fix this for us. Then they do some work, it works theoretically, so they throw on Orca and mess around for a few minutes and everything seems to work fine, so issue solved right? So off goes Orca, and back to visual working it is without a screen reader.
But not much longer and someone blind tries to use it, has lots of apps open, is doing complex and elaborate work, and something falls over again. So they report it. "Wait, but this was fixed wasn't it? Let me try." So they do. And it works for them. Can't reproduce, must be user error, and Orca gets disabled again and on with normal work.
And who can blame them? I mean this makes perfect sense right? We don't really want to use something we don't need to use. There's really no reason to keep using Orca if you can read the screen just fine.
Don't take this as fact. For example I know that there are at the very least a few blind devs and devs with assistive tech background working really hard on trying to make Linux accessibility better, and I'm not sure how many. But that's probably gonna take some time. Because if all this stuff was easy, we wouldn't even have all these issues right?
Anyway if you're working on Linux accessibility, don't take it personally. This is a hard problem to solve, and it's not your fault. Neither is it ours. If something sucks, listen to the ones who're complaining. It's the same stuff over and over. :) -
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Talon (talon@dragonscave.space)'s status on Wednesday, 03-Apr-2024 02:17:32 JST Talon @simon @tspivey @FreakyFwoof From the issue: I can see no point in setting up people with CAPS LOCK by default when that changes the behavior of the CAPS LOCK key when using it for its native purpose. That's just asking for unnecessary confusion, whether Narrator does it or not.
lol but the insert key is fine? That one also has a native purpose, you know. Also capslock is one of my least used keys for its intended purpose. In fact, every single time, and I do mean literally every single one as far back as my memory goes, turning capslock on was a mistake, and not something I actually wanted. Am I alone here? I always use laptop layout. Always. Even on desktop keyboards. I don't even have to think about it at all, it should be on by default.
You have two options. Option one only works on some keyboards, option 2 works on all keyboards. Which one do you pick? I know which one I'm picking. -
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Talon (talon@dragonscave.space)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Mar-2024 00:53:56 JST Talon Oh fucking god no Apple don't do it please don't do the Gemini thing please please don't do it I'm gonna throw literally all my tech out the window it's done it's over it's all over
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Talon (talon@dragonscave.space)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Mar-2024 20:32:12 JST Talon Here is a quick tip for you on this fine day.
Should you ever find yourself in an international setting and need to very quickly start an all consuming argument, and who doesn't find themselves in this situation regularly, simply ask:
Is it a chicken burger or a chicken sandwich?
You're welcome. -
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Talon (talon@dragonscave.space)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Mar-2024 00:46:43 JST Talon A cool thing about JIT is that you can write code that should be slow as hell and it'll still perform OK.
A bad thing about JIT is that you can write code that should be slow as hell and it'll still perform OK.
A worse thing about JIT is that you can write code that should be hella fast but it's actually really slow. -
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Talon (talon@dragonscave.space)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Mar-2024 00:46:42 JST Talon While we're at it, garbage collection is weird because some things are slow as you'd expect, other things are fast as you'd expect, but then there are the cases where you really think GC should take more time than it does and GC takes more time than you think it should.
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Talon (talon@dragonscave.space)'s status on Sunday, 17-Mar-2024 00:15:18 JST Talon Look don't listen to me because I have absolutely no business running a business, but if you want to start a social media business it might be worth considering why all popular social media businesses have the monetization strategies they do. How many make money actually running the social media business instead of doing something else, like running their data harvesting and selling business, advertising business, and so on, even though they have the majority of active social media using people signed up to them.
This idle thought provided to you by a bunch of blog articles and youtube videos. I will not be running a social media business. Ever.
See, the cool thing about running a Mastodon instance is that it's small. It doesn't need to grow. In fact, it's better if it doesn't grow too much. This not only keeps federation healthy but also doesn't run the risk of making me go bankrupt. Also me and everyone else here on this instance has the same goal. Use the social media. That's it. That's the entire goal.
Social media sounds like a terrible business to be in. I feel for anyone who tries it as their core offering. Also maybe don't. Worth considering. :) -
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Talon (talon@dragonscave.space)'s status on Friday, 15-Mar-2024 16:00:07 JST Talon Just realized that this year the cave will turn 6 years old and I really don't know how to feel about that.
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Talon (talon@dragonscave.space)'s status on Friday, 15-Mar-2024 16:00:06 JST Talon I'm happy that it's been active and alive for so long but also... this is a mastodon instance? 6 years old? Definitely doesn't feel like 6 years ago when I set it up but also somehow it feels longer than that? Oh gods
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Talon (talon@dragonscave.space)'s status on Friday, 15-Mar-2024 16:00:05 JST Talon We went from mastodon to hometown to glitch, we went from server to server to server to server, we went from just me to around 230 to 240 active users and that number appears stable... I used to be able to keep attachments on the little virtual server but now it's so big that I can't. Our database is growing so much and we still have a very long way to go before it's big enough to be a problem but I don't even have a plan for what to do once we hit that limit. 6 years. Wonder what this place looks like in another 6.
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Talon (talon@dragonscave.space)'s status on Friday, 15-Mar-2024 01:30:42 JST Talon Been working on and off, very slowly, on a game engine that should do most of the things I want an engine to do. One of the tips I've heard and can definitely echo is to work on a game first, and engine second. Make the engine work with your game, not the other way around.
For the longest time I've been working in a relatively OOP style because that's how I learned, and that's how things made sense. But it always ended in a mess. Whenever I wanted to reuse code I had to untangle it and rewrite stuff or copy a bunch of other stuff I would never need. So i decided I'm going to try an entity component system.
And like I dunno... Over the last year my brain slowly started rewiring my thought patterns and now it makes sense to me intuitively. You don't even have to be an ECS purist to get massive benefits out of it. Even just going in an ECS direction helps a lot.
While making a game, you will still end up depending on other entities and systems and what not. Games are complex. You can't stop dependencies. But the difference is that if you do want to break off a bit of code and reuse it, it is much more obvious where to do that.
Like while developing this thing, I switched the project I'm developing it for (or maybe with?) several times. The game changed. But I was always able to drag most of the code with me into this new game idea and keep iterating on it. And I'm fairly sure this would have been a lot harder if there wasn't this very compartmentalizable idea of components and systems.
Again I'm not an ECS or die kind of person. Especially if you're working alone, it's preferable to take some shortcuts. But even if you only loosely structure your projects in this way things seem much nicer to just... I don't know... find your way around? Reuse?
Just like any paradigm, you have to apply it in a way that makes sense to you. I've taken shortcuts. It's not pure ECS either. But even so things make sense, things fit together nicely, and there's no mess that immediately makes me want to tear the whole thing down. Which is more or less the case with literally all of my other games. Which is also why I never update them. Always learning, always growing, it's a pretty nice feeling sometimes. -
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Talon (talon@dragonscave.space)'s status on Friday, 15-Mar-2024 01:30:41 JST Talon Maybe this will eventually lead me to actually release a new game. That'd be nice wouldn't it? I'd like that. Unless that Godot accessibility branch gets merged first. Then I'll spend another little while learning a new thing.
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Talon (talon@dragonscave.space)'s status on Friday, 15-Mar-2024 01:30:40 JST Talon I don't even want to make an engine if I'm completely honest. I want to make games. I've wasted so much time on this. But accessibility concerns... it's always the same story, really.
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Talon (talon@dragonscave.space)'s status on Friday, 15-Mar-2024 01:30:39 JST Talon Like for example tools to wysiwyg a world. You could just drop into an engine with an editor and just do that. And make some objects. And attach scripts and what not. You even have other tools to help like modelling software and whatever else. None of that's accessible. So we kinda reinvent the wheel very terribly to make this work. And a lot of the time this wheel gets reinvented per game. Most of the time we don't even wysiwyg a world at all. It's all a big mess.
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Talon (talon@dragonscave.space)'s status on Monday, 11-Mar-2024 05:18:43 JST Talon For what it's worth, so basically not much, I think renaming "unlisted" to "quiet public" was not a good idea.