swordsmanluke @ swordsmanluke @programming.dev

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2

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310

Joined

2 yr. ago

I'll be done worrying about work today, I tell you what.

The ending of Limbo when I realized what that game had been about left me fucked up for weeks.

Similarly, the bathtub scene in What Remains of Edith Finch ensures I can never play that game again.

Man. The moment in there where you have to actually do the digging... Still haunts me. It'd be a cutscene in any other game, but the impact of the change in the control scheme and everything in that moment. Brutal.

Gentoo is the og, "Linux from scratch" distro, where you compile everything yourself. Arch is kinda like that, except everything is compiled already. 😁

You still select all the parts of your Linux system, from the desktop environment (if any) all the way down to which initialization system you want to use. Along the way, you'll dive into a lot of the various text files Linux uses for configuration and learn which files live where.

It's a very thorough dive!

If you're looking for reading material about Linux though, I don't really have any books to recommend offhand... I will say that the basic tooling in Linux, the POSIX-standard stuff, like grep, vi, sed, and so forth remains mostly unchanged (at least in all the important ways) from year to year. Some of it has remained essentially the same since the seventies, so even a six year old book will still be able to cover all of that just fine.

The things that it would not be good for would be some of the more recent developments in, say, UI tech, like the slow, but ongoing migration from X to Wayland.

Command line scripts and config files are likely to largely be the same (though a few files have a tendency to move around depending on the distro).

Tools for administration outside of the venerable POSIX tooling is gonna be a crapshoot in book-form. Still, it'll give you a place to start from!

Honestly, it depends on what you're trying to do with your machines. If you are looking for a stable desktop environment, you don't need to dive that deep. (At least, to start.) Just install the defaults, and read a basic tutorial on using the Bash shell. (Even if you move away from bash, lots of scripts and such use it by default, so a passing familiarity is highly recommended.) Especially learn about installing programs with the package manager. ('apt-get' for Mint and other Debian-based distros.) The defaults are gonna be generally sane, especially in Mint. If you want to get into deeper waters from there, you'll have a stable base to start from.

But. If you want to configure your machine, top to bottom and really understand how Linux works... Install Arch. Not even joking. Arch installation docs are very detailed and walk you through setting up every part of your Linux system. Be prepared for your first time to take a few days to complete. It's a lot to take in. Start with a computer you can leave offline for awhile.

I learned a ton by installing Arch. And then I went back to Debian-based distros because there was less active maintenance. (Note that this was over a decade ago, so things may be better now. YMMV). This is definitely Learning The Hard Way, but it's honestly the most effective thing I can think of.

Linux is insanely customizable. You can swap out and/or customize pretty much every aspect of it. It can be overwhelming. I recommend taking things on a bit at a time, but I've rarely used software that's as easy to find free support for.

Welcome to the party!

I'm the oldest of a big (real big. Crazy big) family.

I don't get along with all of my siblings, but more in a "we don't hang out" kinda way, not a "please die in a fire" way.

Our family reunions are the stuff of legend. Days of hanging out; taking turns cooking meals for an army; hours spent swapping stories and just enjoying hanging out together.

My best friend in the world is one of my brothers. I could spend years just hanging out with him. (I mean, we did, growing up, but I'm still not sick of it.)

My siblings and I don't see eye to eye on everything. We all have gone down different life paths as the years have gone by. Some of us are very liberal and some are very conservative. Some of us live in major cities, others in the heart of the country. Some are atheists and some are devout.

We aren't perfect. There have been cruel words spoken, tears shed. I've broken up fistfights (...and been in a couple myself).

Growing up, my mother taught us how to talk things through. How to start from a fight and finish as friends. She set us an amazing example that I am trying to teach to my own children.

My family is one of the best things in my life. I love my siblings and my parents. I know not everyone gets a happy family. My wife really didn't. I'm not sharing this to brag. I just want to say that... It's out there. A family that loves each other and largely gets along is possible. I don't know if we're a fluke of nature or a miracle of nurture.

But next year is our family reunion. And I can't wait.

using one is a high crime, punishable by death... by Morganti blade.

Man, if I were a soul killing assassin, with knowledge that souls and the afterlife is real... Getting my soul dissolved vs going to my eternal reward ... sounds like a pretty good deal.

"Mirroring" isn't an insult, or necessarily manipulative. It is literally built in to us humans! Our brains have specific portions dedicated to imitation and empathy called "mirror neurons".

These neurons help us feel what others around us are feeling. It's why you feel sad when you see someone else being sad. Or why it can make us smile to see someone else having a great day!

The behavior of mirroring someone is a form of social bonding ("See! I'm like you!") which is the basis of building human relationships.

Having in-jokes and picking up particular quirks of people around us probably has a special jargon to psychologists.

But I think it's really just being friends.

This is apocryphal anyway. There is a bug in Lovelace's algorithm.

https://twobithistory.org/2018/08/18/ada-lovelace-note-g.html

The article is fascinating, but if you just want to jump to the end...

NIce! I spent weeks trying to get Fusion 360 to run in wine back in 2020. Eventually I gave up and learned Free CAD/Open scad/blender like all the other penguins.

No Man's Sky.

After the mildly stressful intro (which isn't bad, just uses more sticks than carrots in the tutorial section), you basically just pick a direction and go.

If you wanna quest, there are quests available in (almost) every system.

If you wanna farm, pick a nice planet and get to building.

If you wanna fight, go find a planet with hostile Sentinel presence.

There's always something interesting to do, but you can also just find a nice view on some planet, build a couch and just watch the iridescent grass blow in the wind for a bit.

Awesome! Thank you!

I don't have a civitai profile. I got into this to try to generate profile pics for a home ttrpg session, but I really enjoyed it and I've been having a ton of fun learning and trying to create better images.

I appreciate the resources! I know what my evenings are gonna be for awhile! 😁

That's pretty cool! I like the Max Headroom variants. Somehow, I think Mr Headroom in particular would approve of generative AI tech.

I'm just getting into this realm myself. I'm using ComfyUI, with SDXL 1.0 and the new LCM LoRA, but I'm really struggling to get, e.g. consistent framing. (Like, I'll ask for "full length photo of X" and get nothing but close-up headshots for a dozen images)

Any advice or good resources you recommend?

Either way, very cool work, thanks for sharing!

I built myself a HUD using a VuFine LCD and a raspi Zero W. It runs a custom TUI I wrote for myself that provides an interactive terminal session surrounded by configurable text widgets.

Currently, I have widgets configured to display the date/time, the weather (near-term and week), and CPU/Mem utilization. With the main display running my combined to-do/calendar app to help keep me organized.

It's tacky as hell, bulky and exposed wires, but I love it.

I'm with you.

In fact, I made my own. It's fugly and dorky as hell, but it's everything I want and nothing I don't.

I used a VuFine LCD eyepiece and hooked a raspi Zero W to it. Input via Bluetooth keyboard. Not a lot of screen real estate, so I went full CLI and wrote my own TUI with widget support so I can have an "active" app, plus a bunch of passive data widgets.

I've been doing long sword fencing/HEMA since the late 90's. (Back when it was unnamed, then became HACA, etc...) I friggin love a good swordfight.

In all that time, I've only broken one finger bone; plus three or four knuckles; ...and one time I got stabbed in the eye hard enough for the shinai to hit the back of my eye socket (wear your masks, kids!).

Would still do it all over again. 10/10 for fun.

This is one of my all-time favorite languages. But every time I bring out my code samples at a place looking for rockstar programmers, they shut down.

Yes... But actually no.

ChatGPT is amazing for generating reasonable-sounding prose. That means you can have an NPC say things that largely make sense... If you know what they need to say.

For instance, let's say you ask an NPC for directions to the mayor's house. In this scenario, you need your NPC to

1. Parse and understand the player's speech. (This is a question. The question is about reaching a location. The location is the mayor's house.)
2. Modeling the NPC's knowledge. (Does this NPC know where the mayor lives? Do they know someone else who does?)
3. Disambiguating conversation. (Do we have a mayor? Are they asking about our mayor, or - from context- someone in a different town?)
4. Constructing an answer. (Left, right, right, straight...)
5. Converting the answer to a conversational tone. (Well, if ya' head south down wewhauken, turn right on glottis st...)

Chat GPT solves #5 for sure. But 1-4 are...iffy. Sometimes, you can give Chat GPT a list of factoids and it'll reply with the data you gave it. Other times it'll "hallucinate" an answer, especially if a player asks something you didn't expect. (And people will definitely come up with stuff you don't expect.)

Still, LLMs do solve a really hard piece of the dynamic-NPC puzzle. I'm sure we'll see them in use. It's just not necessarily even the hardest part of this problem.

Plus one for prazosin. I have a family member with PTSD nightmares. Prazosin has made them able to actually sleep for the first time in their adult life.

RSS is an aggregation protocol that is

• distributed
• pull-oriented
• self-curated

This is in contrast to reddit, digg, lemmy, or other aggregator services which are

• centralized (even if federated)
• push-oriented
• public input w/ moderator curation

Each of these decisions has tradeoffs.