Where's the virus that wipes your EFI entries and replaces it with a payload that just plays nyan cat when you need it
Hey everyone. I must admit, I don't believe I have ever seen someone enter #utf8 #unicode characters on a #computer in a natural way. Which seems weird, because a bunch of languages use them.
I wrote a #commonLisp #asdf package that just looks up a list of symbols in a file that has every non-surrogate unicode codepoint in it, and an #emacs #elisp function that just calls the #lisp one.
https://codeberg.org/tfw/unicode-chars
Multilingual people, what can you tell me about doing this at all?
tonic 
The next part of the things i got this week.
An intel #SDK-85 with a NEC CPU.
Last year, Ian Bell released the source disk for Elite on the Apple II.
My latest guide shows how you can assemble the source in your browser and see exactly what Bell and Braben's build process looked like back in 1985.
https://elite.bbcelite.com/deep_dives/building_apple_ii_elite_from_the_source_disk.html
#riverwm #tilingwm #tilingwaylandcompositor #linux
I have been using river as my window manager for a while now so thought I would share my thoughts.
I am really enjoying it, it feels much closer to xmonad than hyprland did which I like and it runs mostly smoothly. I love the way that it handles multi-headed setups for the most part and the way it is configured is refreshing for a window manager.
On my desktop, I have 2 monitors and river lets each monitor have its own set of tags which is nice.
I have yet to make good use of the tag feature and for the most part have been treating the tags like workspaces. This doesn't cause too many issues but tags come with some extra restrictions that make it less ideal if you are only using them the way you would workspaces. Maybe these can be ironed out but I don't know a solution.
I have been using the tag system more on my laptop than on my desktop probably because it only has 1 screen. On my desktop, if I want to have 1 program open and rotate between 1 or 2 programs open next to it, I can have the main program open in my main monitor and my second monitor can be used to rotate between the other programs that I want to have open next to it.
On the laptop this isn't possible but I have found the tag system to be useful for this. I can have tag 1 focused, say on emacs, and when I want I can focus a second or third tag with lecture slides, a browser or something else. I can also put a floating window with a video on one of my tags and then focus that tag with whatever other tag I am currently using so that I can keep the floating window with me as I move around my system.
As for using the tags like workspaces, it works for the most part but I have noticed some quirks. I am unable to jump to a window using rofi. This is likely hard to implement as a window could be on multiple tags and there is no good way to decide which tag to focus. Maybe a way it could be implemented is to instead have the currently focused tag/s added to the window.
When using multiple monitors, you can't drag a floating window onto another monitor and so you have to use the keyboard shortcut which isn't too much of an issue. When you move a window to another monitor, instead of moving it to the currently focused tags on that monitor, it moves it to the tags matching the ones it occupied on the previous monitor. This isn't an issue per se, just something that was counterintuitive to how I thought it should work.
There have been 1 or 2 minor issues with hidpi support for some apps but I don't think they are necessarily rivers fault. One example is with element messenger. When I enabled 2x scaling, instead of scaling the app, it instead shrunk the size of the window. River seemed to think it was normal size though as other windows moved around it as if it was taking up the normal space and I had to click where UI elements would have been if it was taking up the normal space.
Overall I have been enjoying it a lot, and will continue using it for at least a few more months
looking for some feedback from video game achievement hunters 
a group with which i'm involved is working on a modernization patch for an early 2000s fps game. one of the community requests has been an achievement system for single player. this is easy enough to implement on a technical level but we are hung up on one particular thing...
we do not believe we can release with a fully complete set of achievements. it is almost certainly going to be the case that we want to add more achievements after the initial patch release. after all this is a community effort, so we may find that counter-based achievements are too easy or too hard, or we may think of entire new categories of achievements to add. we don't have a focus group or a big pool of playtesters or anything, so it's probably impossible to get it 100% right on the first try.
so here's the question. of course if we display someone's total achievement completion as a percentage, adding more achievements would knock their completion percentage down. i am told that achievement hunter types hate this. how would you personally like to see this scenario be handled?
two things to note
1. when i say add more achievements, i mean more achievements only. the content in the game is static and there will be no new content added. it would be literally just more achievements to unlock.
2. this is going to be a completely custom system by necessity, so we are not bound by the constraints of steam's achievement system. although of course it's a familiar reference for a lot of people, so our design probably will not stray too far from that.
For some reason I now have a compiler for an esoteric programming language nobody but me has thought about since 1996: a FALSE compiler that translates to QBE IR. It's not really efficient, it basically just emits what an interpreter would do, but it works decently. The backend code needs to be cleaned up a lot still though.
It would be neat to do control flow analysis to avoid pushing a value to the stack and then immediately pop it again like the naïve translator does, but I have no clue how to implement that lol. Even just figuring out the stack signature of a function (without real control flow tracking) is already very messy in a way that seems unavoidable in Rust.
I started following the hashtag #analogphotgraphy on #pixelfed and my feed there got so much better, impressed how many good photographers are actually continually posting there these days
I'm at @wakest on 
is you wanna follow me over there, or also you can just follows *this* account over there too but you'll get less photos and more screenshots of bugs and CSS glitches
Proposed new Laws of Robotics:
1. A machine must never show an advertisement to a human, or through inaction allow an advertisement to be shown to a human
If I think of a second Law of Robotics I'll let you know
this was a heartwarming story and reminded me of the best part of my former career.
folks in your 40s, 50s, 60s going back to school for the first time in decades:
every semester, there were at least two dozen 17-22 year old shitheads that came to me arguing about their grades and trying to magically manipulate a B- into an A+. i loathed dealing with them at office hours.
but there was always one 50 year old who decided to go to university and was stressed out as hell. they had kids they never saw at home, a mortgage payment they could barely make, many were divorced, and were constantly late submitting assignments. some missed midterm and final exams.
they hated asking for help, but by the last month of the semester they'd break down and ask for an extension. and sometimes two or three extensions.
my mom started university when she was in her forties and i was 13, and i never forgot it.
so when i was teaching in my 20s and 30s, i thought back to all the nights that my mom stayed up until 3am writing papers, and then dragging her ass out of bed at 6am to make breakfast for us before heading to class.
whenever a "mature student" showed up to my office burned out and asking for help, you're damned right they got all the help they could ask for.
if you're an older student and the workload is killing you - talk to your prof. yeah, some are heartless assholes - but the vast majority of us were rooting for you the whole time.
why I built a hyper-personalized seach engine that isn't very good
https://search.technomancy.us/why
Discussions: https://discu.eu/q/https://search.technomancy.us/why
As i said Yesterday i got lots of nice #retrocomputing stuff. I like to show every day one thing, and i will begin with a computer. It is a #ibm #PS1. It is from the first series of this kind of computers, the power supply is inside the Monitor - didn't know this before!
But this is a normal computer ... when you see what i got, too ...
The problem with people wishing for change is that they always imagine themselves as the winners. Ancient Rome? Only if you’re rich and free. Most people are slaves. Medieval Europe? Only if you’re rich and free. Most people are peasants forbidden from leaving the land. Gilded Age? Only if you’re rich and free. Most people are dirt poor. Modern authoritarian state? Only if you’re rich. Most people are being constantly cheated of fair chances and by nepotism and corruption.
A lesson many people are about to learn.
every year i accidentally rediscover kevin steele's essay on hypercard and the macintosh, and reading it is like stepping into a warm bath
https://web.archive.org/web/20240213190609/http://www.kevinsteele.com/smackerel/black_white_00.html
it looks and feels and reads like a little hypercard stack 😍
thanks again kevin. i hope you join us over on mastodon some day. you'd be welcome here.
I shit you not this job listing ask you to be proficient in Dreamweaver