swordsmanluke @ swordsmanluke @programming.dev

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Joined

2 yr. ago

I pick all my drinks by their lyrical scheme.

Western! I'm currently studying Germanic two-handed longsword, Ringeck specifically. The level of improvement in our modern understanding of European sword styles has grown so much over the last 20 years it's insane.

I used to cross train with a buddy who studied kenjutsu! We'd attend our respective classes and then spar with each other. It was really cool to get that different perspective on sword fighting from each other.

(One time, he managed the coolest disarm on me where he managed to hook my guard with the tip of his sword and pulled the blade from my hands. Caught me 100% off guard.)

I have an alarm clock that lights up. It simulates dawn about thirty minutes before I need to wake. Makes it a lot easier to get going on dark winter mornings.

Other thing that helps is modafinil. Turns out I'm medically overtired.

In my late teenage years, I got really into hitting my friends with sticks - competitively.

Am now in my forties and still use the same damn username.

Out of curiosity then... what are the weirdest things you've had someone ask for?

... Befriending his opponent and trying to convince them not to kill him in a tense series of cat and mouse conversations?

...Can confirm. I had a bit of a macho steak at nineteen where I kept trying to test my pain tolerance.

I learned that I max out somewhere around taking a sword thrust to the eye. After that, I didn't feel the need to test it any more

For anybody else curious, he's using KalibriOS.

It's an open source, ultra-lightweight os that is not a fork of Linux... I think.

Neat project though!

Ha ha, yup. I love telling this story, but it's also a definite indictment of the state of medical care in the states.

I never felt my hand break.

The tip of my opponent's long sword snapped into the back of my right hand, just behind the pinkie. There was no flash of incandescent pain, no stars in my sight - my mind was too focused on the swordfight. My opponent had scored a hit - and it had hurt, even through my glove - but adrenaline, as they say, is a hell of a drug.

After the tournament, it became clear that something was wrong. My hand began to swell and deform, my right pinkie levering itself inward across my palm until it was sitting at nearly 30° off true. Its nail sat jauntily behind the second knuckle of my middle finger. Making a fist was impossible.

Unfortunately, I was nineteen and had neither cash nor insurance for a doctor. So I did the next best thing - ignored it and told people it was probably just a bad sprain. When people suggested I see a doctor i responded, "What's a doctor gonna do? Tell me it's broken and take it easy? I'll save the money."

After a few weeks the swelling had gone down enough that I could finally feel the bones in my hand. Where there had once been a single line from wrist to knuckle, I could now feel an 'x'. An 'x' which had clearly spent the last few weeks knitting together at a now permanent bad angle.

It occurred to me then what a doctor would do - set it properly. But now they'd need to re-break the bone.

Unfortunately I still had neither insurance nor cash.

What I did have was a freezer full of popsicles and a small toolbox. I ate a popsicle. And then put the stick between my teeth as I braced my right hand on the table and raised a hammer in my left.

WHAM ... WHAM!

I hauled on my pinkie to pull the now-separated bones out straight then massaged them into position until things felt roughly aligned properly.

... Many years later I had health insurance and told my doctor this story and asked if he could x-ray it for me. A week later I received a letter in the mail. Inside was a printout of my hand x-ray with the healed break circled in pen. Besides the circle was a note: "Good job with the hammer".

All things considered I did a pretty good job, but it's not quite perfect. My pinkie still leans inward - just a hair. Just enough to remind me.

To be fair, writing parody songs with wierd AI is 100% a thing you can do online now.

AI is a forever-in-the-future technology. When I was in school, fuzzy logic controllers were an active area of "AI" research. Now they are everywhere and you'd be laughed at for calling them AI.

The thing is, as soon as AI researchers solve a problem, that solution no longer counts as AI. Somehow it's suddenly statistics or "just if-then statements", as though using those techniques makes something not artificial intelligence.

For context, I'm of the opinion that my washing machine - which uses sensors and fuzzy logic to determine when to shut off - is a robot containing AI. It contains sensors, makes judgements based on its understanding of "the world" and then takes actions to achieve its goals. Insofar as it can "want" anything, it wants to separate the small masses from the large masses inside itself and does its best to make that happen. As tech goes, it's not sexy, it's very single purpose and I'm not really worried that it's gonna go rogue.

We are surrounded by (boring) robots all day long. Robots that help us control our cars and do our laundry. Not to mention all the intelligent, disembodied agents that do things like organize our email, play games with us, and make trillions of little decisions that affect our lives in ways large and small.

Somehow, though, once the mystery has yielded to math, society doesn't believe these decision-making machines are AI any longer.

... That's honestly a pretty good plot hook

... It's Tekken.

It's always been a muscle man soap opera with stupid hair. (Though, in the realm of fighting games it still has one of the most fleshed out storylines.)

Visually, Tekken 8 is definitely for the fans of "bitchin van art". Admittedly not everybody's cup of tea.

But... if you like that sorta thing it's got some pretty badass moments. Lightning, lava, giant demons - it's the whole package!

I'm quite enjoying it. I like the addition of the Heat systems, both giving an opportunity for special attacks without waiting to be nearly dead first and giving (healable!) chip damage. Making it timed - but triggered - adds a layer of strategy for when to kick it off.

It's fun!

Whether it's the "best" in the series is gonna be a matter of taste, but this is definitely a stronger game all around than 7.

Punch cow instead. It's safe to eat raw.

Have you tried one of the panorama plugins? It's not quite the same but it works for me.

Once upon a time, I built a proof of concept distributed social network that ran entirely on cell phones.

I eventually ran into enough complications that I abandoned the project. But the tech did work. I could create posts, add friends, etc. (It just wasn't reliable in its sync mechanism and I gave up trying to fix it.)

So... Imagine Lemmy, but a community's data is stored collaboratively on mobile devices, the load shared by all its subscribers.

We all walk around with goddamn supercomputers in our pockets. We should put them to work.

Interesting. I thought Iroh was implementing the IPFS protocol.

Maybe IPFS can be described by one of Willow's parameterized forms.

less effort than properly setting up sendmail

My brother in *nix, while I agree with your conclusion, that bar is so low you can't use it for limbo.