Notices by JP (jplebreton@mastodon.social), page 3

@tante can't think of a single thing altman has said where my response was "hm you know that's actually a really interesting and insightful point". 100% of everything he says is some combination of fundraising and stockpiling clout. despicable human being

@inthehands @williampietri @mcc "any sufficiently advanced complexity is indistinguishable from irrationality"

One of my earliest DOS gaming memories, Populous (1989), is apparently now on Steam. But I can't tell if it includes the "Promised Lands" expansion disk, which added several new maps and graphics sets, including one that turns the Good vs Evil factions into Amiga vs Atari ST, respectively - a rivalry I had no idea about, as an american kid.

new normalized signed floating point game review scale (-1.0 to 1.0) where 1.0 is "adds tremendous value to capitalist economies, prolonging their dominance" and -1.0 is "removes value from capitalist economies, hastening their demise". Fortnite is a 0.98785, Doom (1993) is a -0.26525. what's the closest to -1.0 we've gotten

there's something uniquely offensive and inhumane about stuff that is written to superficially make sense even though in substance it is complete gobbledegook: if you don't know that's what you're getting into you start reading in good faith, using your limited energy and time on this planet to untangle the writer's meaning, only to stumble - this doesn't make sense, am i just not getting it? - before finally realizing that some shitty human made an active choice to waste your time with garbage.

https://github.com/pkgxdev/pantry/issues/5358 the lesson here i guess is that a certain % of programmers will happily exist eyelid-deep in dogshit

@parismarx "we'll survive on an island / mountain bunker even if 99% of earth's population dies" is such a common rich guy fantasy and it's always been so infantile - where the fuck are you going to get food and medicine from once your stores run out? a child thought-experimenting it could see how unworkable it is. we are a deeply interdependent civilization and only people who have amassed horrifically alienating wealth have the luxury of fully forgetting that.

The creator of the Living Worlds app - beautiful old color cycling pixel art from the 90s by the legendary Mark Ferrari - is looking for new artists to do new scenes: https://iangilman.substack.com/p/next-living-worlds

part of my long-held "it's us or them" stance re: the online ad industry is that ultimately all speech will become, in the name of corporate comfort, as anodyne and contentless and unchallenging to power as advertising itself, if they continue to control the web.
https://www.404media.co/advertisers-dont-want-sites-like-jezebel-to-exist/

Was reminded recently that Discord has taken nearly $1 billion in VC cash: https://tracxn.com/d/companies/discord/__5rlLgsamoGCjo5gATenpy383J_jyBToAQkMl2B_f99w
No judgment if you've already built a community there, but everyone really needs to treat it as a ticking time bomb. It's already failed its users many times over; it's just a question of when those failures will escalate beyond even the most indifferent user's tolerance. Every community deserves better. Good alternatives are a survival imperative.

@mcc logging in as admin to deploy my docker image of The White Album so i can listen to The White Album

@parismarx I'm glad he said that because more people need to know how close he is politically to orgs like GrowSF and the horde of tech ghouls like Garry Tan who trade on being reasonable neolib centrists who "only want what's best for the city" and constantly invoke concerned citizen bullshit as they try to remake SF in their image.

https://nostalebots.xyz Glad someone is speaking out about this. Closing bugs when they're not actually fixed is a plague on open source projects. A bug tracker exists partly to help the team find and fix bugs, obviously, but it also serves as a knowledge base for users about issues other users have had, and automated issue closing makes it useless for that (as well as making it easier for devs to miss real bugs). This is a biz-quota-brained nonsense practice that should end.

@dosnostalgic info on this tool, which I'd never heard of, plus a download: https://valvedev.info/tools/virtus-deathmatch-maker/
sick box art though!

@torproject web3/crypto is an extremely untrusted space for very thoroughly proven reasons, and you are dealing massive damage to public trust in your project by associating with it.

stop giving these people credit they don't deserve and indirectly contributing to their legend, it makes us look silly and it's not helping anyone fight the very real destruction they're causing.

"musk bought twitter so he could destroy a vital left/liberal activitist space" - no he didn't. listen to yourself. trump wasn't playing 5-dimensional chess either. malice + overconfidence + incompetence are the only convincing explanation for everything that's happened. the closest to "deliberately ruining the website" he got is clearly wanting to *reclaim* it for white supremacists, incels etc ("owning the libs", etc) and those are distinctly different things.

@grumpygamer on the one hand, 3x5 is pixel typography on hard mode because of how little one has to work with. on the other hand, there are only so many answers one can come up with for a particular glyph in that size because it's so constrained, so it almost feels like solving a puzzle.

i imagine the few people still working on and around the X Window System technology stack, their travails wearying enough already, waking up today and reading tech news headlines and letting out a long, ragged sigh, loud enough to startle flocks of crows from their trees.

@adrianhon the comforts of the familiar and the psychological nourishment of new experiences have always existed in symbiosis, for me - one only means what it means to me by contrast with the other.
currently relaxing with a heated blanket at home after slogging around a rainy downtown afternoon exploring new nooks and crannies of the city i know well, but still don't know anything near all of. one without the other wouldn't be a nice day.