deskthority

edit: probably not nice!

Charlie don't surf!

I've had a herd of sheep and I know that that guy is probably terrified. That's why I don't find the video funny. It's almost cruelty to animals, just for an ad.

mr_a500 wrote: ↑Charlie don't surf!

I've had a herd of sheep and I know that that guy is probably terrified. That's why I don't find the video funny. It's almost cruelty to animals, just for an ad.

aw man i didn't know that. i don't know much about sheep but i do enjoy their company and they don't deserve that kind of thing. i just thought he was doing a great job balancing.
that said you ought to give it a little credit because sometimes animals are totally rad like my favorite goat, gary:

He is doing a pretty good job balancing. I wonder if there were any outtakes though.

I think a goat would probably make a better surfer.

Edit: What a coincidence. I was posting about a goat at the same time you edited your post to add a goat video.

mr_a500 wrote: ↑He is doing a pretty good job balancing. I wonder if there were any outtakes though.

I think a goat would probably make a better surfer.

Edit: What a coincidence. I was posting about a goat at the same time you edited your post to add a goat video.

heh. this nice lady goat looks less stoked than mildred the sheep:

sth wrote: ↑that said you ought to give it a little credit because sometimes animals are totally rad like my favorite goat, gary:

Gary is awesome. I'm thinking of getting a pack goat to go with me when hiking.



Though I've heard that once they find something good to eat (flowers, bushes, etc.), it's hell getting them to keep going. You might as well camp there for the night.

sth wrote: ↑ heh. this nice lady goat looks less stoked than mildred the sheep:

Yeah, goats are tough. They don't panic like sheep.

mr_a500 wrote: ↑

sth wrote: ↑ heh. this nice lady goat looks less stoked than mildred the sheep:

Yeah, goats are tough. They don't panic like sheep.

no no what i'm saying is the sheep seemed fine compared the goat in the video i posted later!

new blog post: happy hacking keyboard appreciation, sentiment #5619

i just wanted to make a quick post today about how much i love my happy hacking keyboard.
at some point, i believe i can be converted to utron but unfortunately my pockets are rather empty until january because of moving expenses.
that said, i'm not sure i'd be able to stick with the utron! my happy hacking keyboard is the best keyboard I have ever used, good enough to turn me off of mechanical switches pretty much altogether. there are a few mechanical switches that I still really enjoy such as the burroughs switch and some alps models, but to me nothing beats the oneness with cup rubber. also, it is adorable. also, the layout is so nice. also, i can press the return key with my index finger or thumb without moving my hand from the mouse. also, i have some nice keycaps on it and nobody else at my work can use it. also, i modded it for silence, and while i do sort of miss the full travel, the sound reduction is worth it, and the actuation is a bit higher which means i can glide on the keys a bit glidy-er, so i'd say that balances itself out. also, it's a happy hacking profesh numero uno, which i was so happy to find in trade after months of half-hearted searching. at first i was a bit disappointed in the slight yellowing of the case but now i don't mind at all. i think it gives it a little character compared with the stark white boards people post. those ones that look like they never get touched, with tape on the spacebar and a click clack skull covering some actually-useful key. that just ain't me, dogg.

i know nothing i've said here really breaks any new ground but i like this keyboard enough to type a bunch of nonscientific redundant crap about why i like it, just for the excuse to type on it. also i am desperately procrastinating at work. holla at me, happy hackers, and raise those well-loved, yellowed, run-down, shiny-spaced workhorses high

new blog post: when work-life balance fucks you over

so apparently it's pretty much totally cool to decide you want to take 2 days off when some woman you dont even really know tells you shes not interested in a relationship after a SINGLE DATE

and then i get stuck working double duty because you need to mope or something?

fucking get over it man

who the hell thinks it's ok to take time off for that

Your dog?

nah. i could really use a dogpal right now though. anyone want to bring a dog for pets?

You need a goatpal - like Gary. Then you'd need an Australian accent so you could properly say, "Good show Gary! That's great form, mate!"

mr_a500 wrote: ↑You need a goatpal - like Gary. Then you'd need an Australian accent so you could properly say, "Good show Gary! That's great form, mate!"

Right now I need an Australianpal to cheer ME along for the last two hours of my shift

Your dog?

that´s a serious faceplant.

bump for more posts

While we wait:



Caption Contest!

new blog post: Hi guys.

Sorry, so sorry. I guess I have some things worth blogging about, which is why I haven't been blogging much lately. So sorry.

Let's see here: I moved into a new apartment. It's very spacious. My old place was about 19sq meters including the bathroom and kitchenette and about the width of a bed, lengthwise. I lived there for about 9 months before doing anything about it. Now I live almost dead-center in the middle of the city AND my street has less car traffic on it. Holland is weird. My new place overlooks a canal. It costs more per month than anywhere I've ever lived and the adultness of it all is getting on my nerves a bit. But being able to play guitar, turn around and not hit anything is phenomenal. I also have a real-ish kitchen now with a gas stove, and a little smoking/tea terrace. So cyuuute ^__________^
My girlfriend moved to Holland! She lives in my new apartment. Our new apartment. So that's nice. She actually cooks real food which is blowing my mind right now after 10 months of usually pasta. We started reading Lord of the Rings together. She's never read it, but she's into theatre, and I just discovered that I love reading Tolkien out loud almost as much as I love reading him in quiet, so it's pretty lively and fun. She's never read the series before but she didn't have a problem with me hanging up not one, but two different maps of middle earth. I love this woman.

Yesterday I bit my tongue SO HARD. It still hurts. Yowee Wowee Stroopwafels inhibit culinary safety.

Also, I don't have internet access at my new place. That has been, dare I say it, extremely nice, considering I do have 8.5 hours per day at work. I think that's plenty enough for my brain. Maybe too much. The old lady isn't too happy about it though, being so far away from home, and being that Skype is sort of awkward and inconsiderate in a cafe setting. So... we will be getting an internet connection.
Dang, DSL is fast in Holland. I can get 50mbps down on a POTS line here?! Having worked for a local small-town ISP in the 'States with the world's curmudgeonliest ILECs and a sore need for the reevaluation of common carrier status in relation to digital services, this absolutely blows my mind. Here we were fighting to be allowed access to provide DSL at 12Mbps and y'all over here blazing trails on the internet and blazing hot smoke at the same time. At least my home state is on the right path to one of those. I don't have much hope for the Internet situation in America though.

I'm losing my @ three letter domain email address this year. It's breaking my heart. Please let me know if you are interested in going in on a three letter domain with me, because my old boss is trying to sell it rather than preserve Internet history. This is why I don't want to be a business man. Maybe someday I can land a sweet gig like esr and just be a Keeper of Lore* and not have to actually work or make decisions to keep a business alive. Anyways the domain's probably going to go for at least $15000 so I'm pretty bummed about that.

In other nerdy related topics, I read a piece on Medium by the guy who started tilde.club and it inspired me to set up a box like his as a semi-social linux server. Let me know if you're interested in getting an account and maybe we can talk. It's still in the early stages now but I've got http with /home/foo/www on the internet. If there are any tmux wizards out there who might like to help me set up a "default" config for new users, come on down. Additionally, if you have any suggestions for cool console apps, I'd like to hear them. My idea is eventually to have a tmux dashboard on login via ssh, with a small clock, a terminal or two, dedicated chat, maybe mail and maybe a scratchpad, all in different panes in the same window, or split into two if it gets unwieldy.

*

new blog post: are you a "gamer"?

do you identify with the word "gamer"? no - i'm not asking you if you play video games, no matter how fanatically. but who here actually falls into this marketing group? are there any of you out there that are more outraged about a perceived lack of integrity in the gaming journalism community than, like, literally anything else in the world that matters even a little bit?

Dangerous topic. Don't touch the gate! It's electrified with oppressed majority fear and self entitled loathing, and it smells kinda funny. Like Cheetos and dried jizz…

Meanwhile, I was once a gamer. If strategy games and real time strategy count. (Apparently they don't, says the games industry this century.) I also did a mean Battlefield back when 1280x1024 was the sniper's resolution. Definitely retired now though. Zero games on anything I own. Web's already too distracting!

yes i too used to be a video game enthusiast and i would have considered myself a gamer too.

goody, i've learned how deeply the marketing hole goes. now i don't play games AND i'm bitter about everything that's supposed to be fun.

Wait, you think this is even just a tiny bit "about" ethics in games journalism? (Spoiler: there is no such thing as ethics in any journalism, that's how mingling professions work.) As long as guys are screaming at women, it can be about nothing else.

I think I stopped playing games when I started using my Mac clone as a web server and FTP server, since games wouldn't yield the CPU back to the server software. Pity, as I had some cool games on there including Hemiroids and The Zone. (And Jazz Jackrabbit 2, which decided to use a screen resolution that caused my monitor to overload and burn out … RIP Diamond Pro.)

There are certain games that forever stand out in my mind, with Magic Carpet being towards the top of that list for its amazing achievements, one of which was the ability to alter the level map. You could create buildings, set fire to trees (and the fire would spread), blow holes in the ground, damage buildings, raise up volcanoes, and split the ground into a chasm.

I've yet to see another game even reach Magic Carpet's 1994 standards, let alone something that is as good now as that was back then. Descent for example: you had no remote control for the doors, so your choices were either a) ram them, b) fire flares at the, or c) just shoot them (with anything, including the fusion cannon). None of which had any effect on the integrity of the doors, which would simply politely open. Magic Carpet implemented a world that responded to natural attempts to modify it in a way that I've never seen again.

The graphics are getting better and better, but modifiable levels still seems to be off the industry's road map. There are also things I don't get like, in Train Simulator, headlights are more effective in daylight as they are night, i.e. it looks like you've fitted a megawatt arc lamp to your loco, since it outshines the noonday sun. Hopefully better game engines now have a proper concept of illumination with a dynamic range beyond that of the computer display.

I also get put off by how big games need abhorrent (and fragile) monstrosities like Steam just to run. I don't want that rubbish messing up my PC, thank you.

Great, i played Magic Carpet (also with 3D goggles) and Descent too! Great games. I also liked Civlization 1+2, Little Big Adventure, and also played Doom, Quake, and much more. But i would say i was never a gamer, by title.

I would love to be at the same age now when i was playing back then these titles. Because of things like Steam! There are so many nice games, but sadly i have no time and lost interest in gaming. I have about 30 games in my Steam account, but always play a game only for a few hours.

I'm with Daniel on loathing Steam. I tried it for a while, but a couple of things really bugged me. One was the inability to touch installed files. I was playing the Sniper Elite demo and its egregiously loud intro video got on my nerves, so I found the file and deleted it. Steam then refused to run the game at all. Grr! The other big grief was the inability to refuse gifts. A friend was trying to tempt me into genres I don't care for at all (it wasn't Metal Gear Solid, but that same one man vs. the rails kind of thing, oh and then there was Saints Row, ugh). Refusing to install his gifts made me the jerk, as he'd already paid for them. That's it Steam! Fuck me? No, fuck you!

But there have been games with persistence and malleable worlds. I'd need to ask my friends who're current on this stuff, but I recall being able to blast houses into pleasing rubble in one Battlefield-like game; which they'd remain throughout the battle. And then there's the artful oddity of such things as Katamari Damacy. Creativity in game design ain't dead yet. In fact, there's a good argument that we're only just beginning.

My favourite these days, that alone has the ability to really draw me back in now that I have (a surprisingly capable but ancient) desktop again is Kerbal Space Program. I managed to land a one way suicide mission safely on the moon, in the demo, using the barely adequate parts available there. Colour me chuffed! Xkcd isn't kidding about that one:

Muirium wrote: ↑I'm with Daniel on loathing Steam. I tried it for a while, but a couple of things really bugged me. One was the inability to touch installed files. I was playing the Sniper Elite demo and its egregiously loud intro video got on my nerves, so I found the file and deleted it. Steam then refused to run the game at all. Grr! The other big grief was the inability to refuse gifts. A friend was trying to tempt me into genres I don't care for at all (it wasn't Metal Gear Solid, but that same one man vs. the rails kind of thing, oh and then there was Saints Row, ugh). Refusing to install his gifts made me the jerk, as he'd already paid for them. That's it Steam! Fuck me? No, fuck you!

I can change stuff in Stalker or Arma's game folders just fine wihtout Steam refusing to launch them - the game probably relied on the file you deleted.

If you don't install the games people gift you, nobody will know, they simply stay in your library. I don't think I even have enough space on my PC to install all my games from steam

Muirium wrote: ↑But there have been games with persistence and malleable worlds. I'd need to ask my friends who're current on this stuff, but I recall being able to blast houses into pleasing rubble in one Battlefield-like game; which they'd remain throughout the battle.

Sounds like Battlefield Bad Company 2 to me - a fantastic game, far better than any Battlefield game that followed imo.

Today I only play Arma 3, already put more than 900h into that game, mostly scripting/debugging missions.

Muirium wrote: ↑Wait, you think this is even just a tiny bit "about" ethics in games journalism? (Spoiler: there is no such thing as ethics in any journalism, that's how mingling professions work.) As long as guys are screaming at women, it can be about nothing else.

is this in response to me? or did somebody delete their post?


anyways i've been thinking about AI a little bit.
Where do y'all stand on the concept of AI?
As a kid I thought it was cool - and like most things I thought were cool as a kid, I have pulled back the curtain of novelty.
I do think the research into AI is fascinating as a model for our own brains... in a way. But not in a direct way. We used to compare our brains to steam engines -- now we compare them to computers, and increasingly with an emphasis on networking. As a study of what our brains can do to understand themselves, I think AI research says more about our limitations than it does about our capabilities.

Now for the bad stuff: do we NEED artificial intelligence? would we be better off creating something like that? moral/quasi-religious hoonanny aside (as in, is it our right/responsibility to create a new form of life? I argue that there is no intrinsic purpose or nature to anything, and anything that comes close to one is prescribed rather than actually intrinsic) what do we stand to gain other than the pride of creation? do we need robotics to be sentient past a problem-solving capability (that I would argue is logical but not intelligent)? are we prepared to face the cold logic of our creations as reflections of our own fallacious, incomplete and idiotic concepts of intelligence?

In the nineties they thought they'd invent AI. They hit a wall. We seem to be going through the motions as that wall is still there, there is no solution in sight, no matter the networking, mass-data, etc. Computers are still inherently stupid. Siri with all its mass data is stupid, a dressed up bot which picks up key words from sentences and does a standard data search. Google Car won't hit the real roads for years, because of the same problem - it is stupid. It can't see traffic lights when it rains. It cannot distinguish between a crumbled newspaper or a puppy - will brake insanely for both. It can't make real decisions. They hit a wall, as they can't program it with all of reality's complexity, an infinite task and the wrong approach. They're making the same mistakes of the nineties, just with more computer power. Then there's research where they're sort of trying to rebuilt a brain. The brain of which we don't even know yet how it exactly works. I doubt you'll see a sentient computer in your lifetime.

I doubt that too. There is some interesting research into combining neural networks with data storage - "learning" computers, like the ones Google are teaching to write rudimentary code. And I am not against the idea of computers that can learn things on their own - I think that, with a major overhaul of the world's economy and distribution of resources, could largely do away with unskilled, low-paid labor. But that would involve rich people getting less rich so... back to square one.

That said I think there is a difference between learning capability and intelligence, and furthermore the kind of intelligence that we as humans possess.

It's called learning computers, but it should be called adaptive. They don't learn a single new thing based on insight, but provide a programmed reaction to data (no matter how the data is delivered, such as by sensor or "neural network").