I write code and play games and stuff. My old username from reddit and HN was already taken and I couldn’t think of anything else I wanted to be called so I just picked some random characters like this:

>>> import random
>>> ''.join([random.choice("abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789") for x in range(5)])
'e0qdk'

My avatar is a quick doodle made in KolourPaint. I might replace it later. Maybe.

日本語が少し分かるけど、下手です。

Alt: e0qdk@reddthat.com

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  • 41 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 22nd, 2023

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  • Have you tried Resonance? It’s a mystery adventure game set in modern times where you play as four different characters whose stories interconnect. It’s been a while since I played it (a decade or so?) but I remember that it had an interesting game mechanic that let you use memories like items in various interactions, as well as a number of puzzles that I rather liked the design of.




  • What I’d do is set up a simple website that uses a little JavaScript to rewrite the date and time into the page and periodically refresh an image under/next to it. Size the image to fit the remaining free space of however you set up the iPad, and then you can stick anything you want there (pictures/reminder text/whatever) with your favorite image editor. Upload a new image to the server when you want to change the note. The idea with an image is that it’s just really easy to do and keeps the amount of effort to redo layout to a minimum – just drag stuff around in your image editor and you’ll know it’ll all fit as expected as long as you don’t change the resolution (instead of needing to muck around with CSS and maybe breaking something if you can’t see the device to check that it displays correctly).

    There’s a couple issues to watch out for – e.g. what happens if the internet connection/server goes down, screen burn-in, keeping the browser from being closed/switched to another page, keeping it powered, etc. that might or might not matter depending on your particular circumstances. If you need to fix all that for your circumstances, it might be more trouble than just buying something purpose built… but getting a first pass DIY version working is trivial if you’re comfortable hosting a website.

    Edit: If some sample code that you can use as a starting point would be helpful, let me know.


  • My guess is that if browsers as we know them weren’t invented, HyperCard would’ve become the first browser eventually. No idea where things would progress from there or if it’d have been better or worse than the current clusterfuck. Maybe we’d all be talking about our “web stacks” instead of websites, and have various punny tools like “pile” and “chimney” and “staplr”. Perhaps PowerPoint would’ve turned into a browser to compete with it.

    If browsers were invented but JavaScript specifically was not, we’d probably all be programming sites in some VB variant like VBScript (although it might be called something different).


  • Didn’t the GDPR have a data portability rule requiring that sites provide users the ability to easily export their own data? Does that not apply to Lemmy for some reason – or, am I misremembering it? (I remember account data download being a big deal a while back on reddit, but it’s been a few years…)





  • Any ways to get around the download failing

    I did this incredibly stupid procedure with Firefox yesterday as a workaround for a failing Google Takeout download:

    • backup the .part file from the failed download
    • restart the download (careful – if you didn’t move/back it up, it will be deleted and you will have to download the whole thing again; found this out the hard way on a 50GB+ file… that failed again)
    • immediately pause the new download after it starts writing to disk
    • replace the new .part file with the old .part file from earlier (or – see [1] below)
    • Firefox might not show progress for a long time, but will eventually continue the download (I saw it reading the file back from disk with iotop so I just let it run)
    • sanity check that you actually got the whole thing and that it is usable (in my case, I knew a hash for the file)

    [1] You can actually replace the new .part file with anything that has the same size in bytes as the old file – I replaced it with a file full of zeros and manually merged the end onto the original .part file with a tiny custom python script since I had already moved the incomplete file to other media before realizing I could try this. (In my case, the incomplete file would still have been useful even with the last ~1MB cut off.)

    There are probably better options in most cases – like Thunderbird for mailbox as other people suggested, or rclone for getting stuff from Drive – but if you need to get Takeout to work and the download keeps failing this may be another option to try.



  • I don’t have a complete solution, but I do have some ideas:

    • Have you tried hooking it up to an external monitor? Sometimes auto-config can help you recover from weird states if you plug in a different display.
    • On my Deck, I can reach a terminal by using CTRL-ALT-F4 that is separate from the main desktop mode (CTRL-ALT-F1 switches back). Default user seems to be called “deck”. You may need to set a password to use sudo. I am not sure exactly how the desktop environment is set up on the Deck so I am not sure exactly what you need to change or where the files would be – maybe check under /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d to see if anything is set to an insane value there?
    • You might try sending Valve a support request
    • As a last resort, you could try a factory reset. You’ll nuke everything else on it too though…

  • Pokemon (1st gen and 2nd gen – plus some of the spin-off stuff from that era to a lesser extent) captivated me in a way no other games have before or since. Honestly, I hope nothing ever grabs me that hard again; it’s kind of scary how obsessed I was in retrospect.

    A number of N64 games also made a big impact on me. Majora’s Mask was probably my second favorite game (after Pokemon) for many years. (OoT made an impression too, but I played MM first.) I loved the music in Diddy Kong Racing. I got 120 stars in Mario 64, and when I tried it again as an adult, I really appreciated how short and to the point levels could be (not that I played that way as a kid) – also the camera in that game sucked. Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness kind of disturbed me a bit as a kid, but it’s probably the first game I encountered a sort of “New Game Plus” in, which was neat. (People have since told me that’s the “black sheep” of the series and that it’s really weird that that’s the only one I’ve played significantly.)

    Duke Nukem 3D was the first game I modded, I think (very simple graphical stuff). Definitely wasn’t age appropriate but I played the heck of it anyway. Didn’t really get much into other shooters other than playing through the main game of Perfect Dark on N64 and playing split-screen Golden Eye with friends.

    I also played a lot of Sim\ games – particularly SimCity 2000, SimEarth, and SimTower. Also had a bunch of others like SimFarm and even some of the more obscure ones like SimSafari. Streets of SimCity and SimCopter being able to load SC2K maps was really neat though. Played a fair amount of other city builders and simulation games like Caesar III and Roller Coaster Tycoon too. My parents probably hoped I’d become some sort of business manager. :p

    I had a lot of creative tools back then as well which I treated as not-that-different from video games. Various Kid Pix programs (one of which had a bunch of odd video clips integrated – including a short documentary about jackalopes of all things), Kid’s Studio, Digital Chisel, some version of HyperCard, etc. Game Maker – which I found around the year 2000 back when it was still on www.cs.uu.nl – ultimately led me to being a professional programmer.


  • It probably makes more sense to host your novel somewhere else and post links to it chapter by chapter.

    I’d suggest doing one of the following:

    1. Host the images on a site that already supports image galleries and link to that. Most image hosts are kind of annoying, but this is an understandable way to do it if you don’t want to run a website. (Maybe someone can chime in with a suggestion for whatever they think is the least annoying image gallery host in 2023.)
    2. Host the images yourself on a simple website. Webcomic artists have been doing that for many years, so there are lots of examples to draw from. (e.g. Gunnerkrigg Court)
    3. Zip the images up chapter by chapter and either self-host the zip or toss it on a file host like catbox.moe. If you structure it as a .cbz (i.e. zip up a folder with the images named in order like 1.jpg, 2.jpg, 3.jpg, … and just change the extension from .zip to .cbz) then a number of document viewers (like evince) can be used to view the image sequence – or people can just unpack the images and use their favorite image viewer on their computer.


  • I think they’re specifically wondering if using @@ mention syntax will result in a notification popping up for the user on Lemmy.

    I’ve been wondering that too (in the context of threads though) – and if it does work, are there limitations regarding visibility between instances that people should be aware of. e.g. what happens if I @ someone in a post to a community on a lemmy server that is defederated from their home instance? Or, in a community that no one on their home server has subscribed to? Will they still get a notice?

    I guess I don’t really have a good mental model for how @ works on the Fediverse.


  • No way is AI going to end capitalism.

    In the medium term we will end up with AI corporations. I already consider existing corporations to be human-based swarm intelligences – they’re made up of people but their overall large scale behavior is often surprising and we already anthropomorphize them as having will and characteristic behaviors separate from the people they’re made of. AI corporations are just the natural evolution of existing corporations as they continue down the path of automation. To the extent they copy the existing patterns of behavior, they will have the same general personality.

    Their primary motive will be maximizing profit since that’s the goal they will inherit from the existing structure. The exact nature of that depends on the exact corporation that’s been fully cyberized and different corporations will have different takes on it as a result. They are unlikely to give any more of a damn about individual people than existing corporations do since they will be based on the cyberization of existing structures, but they’re also unlikely to deliberately go out of their way to destroy humanity either. From the perspective of a corporation – AI-based or traditional – humanity is a useful resource that can be exploited; there isn’t much profit to be gained from wiping it out deliberately.

    Instead of working for the boss, you’ll be working for the bot – and other bots will be figuring out exactly how much they can extract from you in rent and bills and fees and things without the whole system crashing down.

    That might result in humanity getting wiped out accidentally; humanity has wiped out plenty of species due to greed and shortsightedness. I doubt it will be intentional if they do though.


  • A vote on kbin/lemmy is closer to a retweet than to a vote on reddit in terms of its potential impact on folks. You are publicly saying you support/do not support a post by voting on it (which might be taken as publicly thanking someone with an upvote or publicly saying fuck you with a downvote in some contexts); that can be a workable system, but it’s surprising if you’re coming from reddit where basically no one but the admins (and whoever they told/sold the data to) actually knows what you voted up/down.

    Hell, consider all the drama around “YOU DOWNVOTED ME!!” / “No I didn’t!” BS that was so common even when it was just suspected – now it can be confirmed (again, for better or worse), for kbin users. I was on reddit for a long time and just thinking about that crap makes me feel tired… -.- Downvoting on kbin is potentially picking a fight every time. The end result is that I’ve basically never downvoted anything except some spam bots. I don’t need that shit in my life again – even for some of the posts that I think really should be downvoted, I’m just ignoring now. (Not getting into it further. Don’t ask. I won’t respond.)

    If your IRL identity is associated with your account (or can be figured out eventually…), upvoting something really spicy could also end up causing you the same kind of drama IRL as retweeting or commenting strongly on the post – e.g. job loss, loss of business, targeted harassment/violence campaigns, loss of friends/romantic partners, etc…

    I really don’t need more drama in my life, so I’m a bit more mindful of how I’m voting (for better or worse) and some stuff I probably would’ve voted on before, I am just leaving alone now.