axby @ axby @lemmy.ca

See https://alexbarry.net/ for projects I'm working on, and contact info.

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2 yr. ago

I don't host a Lemmy instance, but I post links in my comments. I sometimes generate and share unique-ish URLs to share updates with specific versions of my hobby projects. I've seen them queried a few times in my Apache logs by useragents claiming to be from OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. Also search engine crawler bots.

Here's the IP whose useragent claimed to be an Anthropic bot, seems like others have encountered the same behaviour: https://abuseipdb.com/check/216.73.216.135

Ah, thanks for the feedback. Can you give me an idea of areas that I should improve? I tried to keep it simple, you should just be able to select a game and play, but maybe there is a pain point that I don’t notice anymore now that I’ve gotten used to it.

Thanks! What do you mean about smartphones, can you share what phone OS and browser you are using? It should work on Android (Firefox/Chrome) and iOS (Safari), I consider mobile to be just as important as desktop. Ah, I remember some FOSS mobile browsers have WebAssembly disabled... here is an older version compiled to JS instead of WASM, let me know if that works: https://alexbarry.net/dev/games/reversi-ai2-no-wasm-2025-01-05/

In hindsight I should add some browser side detection of if WASM is supported, then show a warning at least, if not redirect to a JS version.

And yes, it's all one big code base (https://github.com/alexbarry/AlexGames), each game is pretty small though, maybe 500-1000 lines of Lua on average: https://github.com/alexbarry/AlexGames/tree/main/src/lua_scripts/games . Overall it's quite simple, the Lua/Rust APIs just call simple browser APIs to draw shapes and graphics. The harder part was being able to re-use the same code on Android and desktop (wxWidgets). Also I'm running into some WASM/browser limitations when trying to do heavy processing for board games AI.

What do people think of my hobby project, "AlexGames": (F-Droid) (Web version) (Source on Github, AGPLv3).

It's a collection of simple games, mostly solo or local multiplayer, though the web version supports network multiplayer by sending your friend a URL: solitaire, chess, go, reversi, checkers, minesweeper, backgammon, some word puzzle games, and some arcade type games.

I was planning on adding AI next. And I really should polish the Android app, I've mostly only focused on the web version. And if people want, I could also submit to Google Play. My calculator app seems to be a lot more popular on F-Droid than Google Play, so I haven't bothered uploading this one to Google Play yet.

Happy to hear any feedback! I suspect that it looks too bland and unpolished for many people to be interested, or maybe it needs different kinds of games? My goal was to not need to download a bunch of ad filled free apps from the play store for when I wanted to play games with a friend on a flight or something, or just idly play something simple like solitaire.

edit: also in the Android app, stick to the "webview" version... the native Android version is mostly an experiment, I meant to hide it behind a setting but never got around to it.

Is OVH $4.67/mo? (source)

I'd be interested in a Canadian version of something like this, for $15 USD/yr: https://tinykvm.com/

I've been using it for a few years now and it's great for a few hobby web dev projects. I feel like ~$5/mo is a lot for something I just play with now and then and host a simple static site on, but ~$1/mo feels fine.

And +1 to the other person who responded about how self hosting email is too much work, I've heard that it's extremely difficult not to end up getting blocked, presumably because spammers significantly outnumber legitimate self hosters, and most people use one of the big email providers anyway. (I don't like this, I feel like email is very important and we deserve the right to self host it, but I don't know what can be done about it)

+1 to this, I feel like having a ton of money is what corrupts leadership, not necessarily their technical background.

Maybe Spez and Zuck haven’t changed much, but I feel like some others started out as relatively reasonable people who were also technically brilliant, but eventually their companies started doing shitty things and they are both aware and apparently unwilling to stop it.

Perhaps corruption in the Soviet Union is a good example of how even people from normal hard working backgrounds (i.e. not billionaires who have never worked a day in their life) can still be corrupted by power and a lack of accountability.

What does "boundaries" mean here? Did you mean "binaries"? Apologies if this is obvious to most people, I never used BBS myself and only saw my father use them. I know he used BBS to find shareware games for me, I'm not sure if he actually downloaded them through usenet.

The cookie popups (you mean the cookie consent ones, right?) weren't really common until like ~2016 or so, were they? (I found this post that claims May 2018) And I thought there were actual pop up ads before then, though yeah not as bad as modern internet browsing without an ad blocker, in some ways.

But there were other usability quirks... I remember always downloading Firefox on a new computer, because Internet Explorer 5 or whatever didn't have tabs (and Firefox did). Then Chrome was faster and seemed to quickly take over. I remember that javascript alert popups were somewhat common, and would force their window or tab to the top, so a site could easily kind of hijack your whole desktop session, since I think you couldn't resize the window or even close it until dismissing the popup. In fact at some point the major browsers added a checkbox "prevent this site from showing this dialog" (or something like that) as a mitigation. Before that you could do like while (true) { alert('hello world'); } and I think the only workaround was to force-close the browser? Other random tidbit: you could also execute arbitrary javascript by putting it in the address bar, javascript:alert('hello world') would show the popup. And ha, I remember when the address bar didn't default to search, it would only accept URLs.

In 1996 I was quite young, but I remember my father connecting to bulletin boards to download free shareware games for me, and it would use up the home phone line. (For anyone who doesn't know, bulletin boards were text based, like a terminal... and he'd have to call a number, we'd look up some in our area code to avoid long distance fees, I think. When visiting my grandmother's house in another province, we used a different set of bulletin boards, I think. I remember seeing something like a phone book that would list a bunch of servers that could be called for different things. I remember seeing something like this on Reddit a long time ago:

Its like this area of tall building that has little to no safety. No elevators, a staircase that ran from ground floor to like idk 7 or 8 floors? And the stairs were exposed to outside the building, meaning you could accidentally fall and die. It took a half an hour to get to the main road where you can actually take a bus and where the malls are at.

Could you share a picture of this? I tried to find one myself on the internet but couldn't. That sounds really interesting... were there handrails?

I think I first started regularly using the internet in the early 2000s, when I was a little older than 10.

I mostly remember looking up N64 game walkthroughs on “GameFAQs”, reading some big text file with occasional ASCII diagrams. I think I’d sometimes print them. I also used MSN Messenger to talk to some friends. Not many people had microphones so often I’d still use the house phone to call a friend if we were chatting over MSN but wanted to say a lot over voice.

But for most of my PC gaming time before that, I would just ignore the (network) multiplayer option in games, since I never had a LAN party and mostly only had dial up, where you would tie up the home phone line, and I assume actually call the person you want to game with, or maybe call some specific server (and I was too young to do that on my own anyway).

But I remember one day playing StarCraft (the original), realizing that I finally had a dedicated and decent internet connection, and that I’d be ignoring the multiplayer button unnecessarily. I joined a random multiplayer game, a 7 vs 1 “comp[uter player] stomp”. It was quite novel for me to get to play a computer game and chat with random people, I remember showing my parents. Later I played “James Bond: Nightfire” on PC a lot with randoms, and joined clans and all that. Later I played Runescape and most of the rest of my friends and classmates eventually played too.

It’s kind of sad now that everyone is on the internet, and that we’re “always” on. You don’t really say “brb” anymore. I kind of liked when the internet was something that you’d only get to see when using the shared family computer, not something that’s constantly accessible to us at all times. I even wrote this when I meant to just relax in the sun, not scroll on my phone.

After reading a bunch of comments about people using electronics in this post, I had initially pictured “jumpers” as either “jumper cables”, the things people use to boost car batteries with, or small plastic coated pieces of metal or wires that can be placed over exposed pins on circuit boards to connect them (e.g to enable some behaviour). Generally I’d only assume this meaning in a discussion about electronics, though.

(I’m not the person that you replied to, and I knew that jumper means sweater or jacket or something in British (and possibly Australian?) English.)

And now that I think about it, most of my clothing gets worn after a few years, at least on the elbows.

TL;DR: how could you ever trust anyone to define a social credit score based on actions/words? And how can you offer debt without having something like a (better implemented) credit score?

I think I understand where you are coming from, assigning people a “worth” based on something financial is messed up. Ideally there would be some way to instead reward people for good things like being polite to people, and not littering. And possibly to penalize people for engaging in bad behaviour.

But even if I trusted the current government to implement this with the right goals, I would never trust future governments not to abuse this system. I don’t think I’d really trust any sort of group to do this right. I’m already disappointed enough with our current democracy (in Canada) for not getting rid of first-pass-the-post, and I’m skeptical that much will change with interprovincial trade barriers (why not sooner?).

But the idea of a better implemented credit score to track only severe abuse of debt doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable to me. Obviously the current system is messed up and has major problems, but I feel like it could plausibly be fixed and done in a reasonable way. I think debt to buy a house (and maybe sometimes a car) is generally a good option to have. And I don’t know how you could offer this without tracking people who don’t pay. (Though maybe I’m wrong, maybe just going based off of income history is enough.)

But yes, the current system is ridiculous. People should be rewarded for never needing debt, not disqualified from getting future debt without notice. And it should be much easier to track and fix problems on our credit score. And things like cell phone bills don’t seem worth being affiliated with credit bureaus. I think most people would be better suited to prepaid plans if they were options. And I feel like financing phones is a really bad thing, people don’t realize how expensive they are. I’d rather if all my utility bills just collected some deposit instead of potentially being able to ruin my credit if a bill gets lost in the mail after I moved out. (But this could be too expensive for a lot of people, so again the credit score seems to have a purpose).

Which one are you referring to:

• Synthetik: Area (free to play): https://store.steampowered.com/app/984110/SYNTHETIK_Arena/
• Synthetik: Legion Rising: https://store.steampowered.com/app/528230/SYNTHETIK_Legion_Rising/
• Synthetik 2: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1471410/SYNTHETIK_2/

I’m interested in the top down kind of style, I was expecting an FPS but this could be fun.

I also liked Doom 2016 and it worked well on Linux. I’m sad to hear that the later ones weren’t as good.

Do you know of any games similar to Doom 2016 that you’d recommend? I liked how it didn’t waste time trying to tell a story, usually I’d watch a movie or read a book if I want a good story. Doom had enjoyable steady action and I felt like I could enjoy it for half an hour at a time without needing much time to get into it.

If this is it then OP should just offer to get coffee to-go and go for a walk or sit in a nearby park, perhaps with a playground. Then they wouldn’t have to worry about bothering others. A coffee shop seems like a boring place for a 3 year old.

My assumption is that there is a chance (not sure how large) that kids could be restless and need constant attention, and then it would suck for OP and is a bit much to expect someone you barely know to meet up just for that.

But I think there’s a chance that the young one will just sleep, and the older one could occupy themselves at the playground or even with a tablet or something. Then it should only be a minor hassle for the OP.

Maybe OP could just ask the person if they think they’ll be able to actually talk or if the kids will need constant attention.

What sort of numbers are people expecting for this? I read somewhere that the NDP proposed a tax of 1-2% on assets above $10M, does that sound right?

I was curious about specifics but couldn’t find any in the article.

I leave my credit card stored with some places, but I specifically don’t leave it on steam just to add a speed bump for me to avoid buying a game unless I really want it. I tend to add games to my wish list, then sort of impulse buy if they go on sale for really cheap, or remove them later if I’ve decided I’ll never get around to playing them.

I’m not too worried about security, worst case I can get a new credit card number. But it seems like steam and other online retailers are pretty good about not leaking your credit card number.

Thanks, this is something I was considering. I’ve always wanted to dive into the code for something like VLC or Firefox, but I feel like it would take a while before it becomes fun. I still plan on doing it when I feel like I have more free time. Maybe I need to find simpler projects.

I guess in this post I was hoping for something that could have meaningful progress made in a few hours, without a ton of ramping up time. Maybe that doesn’t exist?

I agree and am surprised that this isn’t more in demand. I like matrix.org and use it as a regular messenger for people that I’ve convinced to use it. But it is dependent on people hosting their own instances, or using the official public one (for free).

They do have a “peer to peer” matrix experiment that I’ve heard about but it was in its early stages when I last looked at it: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/06/02/introducing-p2p-matrix/