manalabs

@cmuratori Good old CP437, how I miss it's TUI style

This was a really good comment, BTW! I always forget that the character set I think of as "ASCII" is not technically ASCII, it's the IBM character set, which can be different when you use any of the "weird" characters.

@WhatAboutThose @exQUIZitely Came here to say this as well 👍️

@exQUIZitely Original X-Com and I will hear no arguments.

Looking at the era between 1990 to 1999 - which round based strategy game would you rank at #1?

@exQUIZitely Oh man, I always wanted to get back to it. I remember playing it a bit when it came out. I also remember trying it again after quake and realizing it's controlled very differently -- main thing that stopped me from playing it!

Before Half-Life... there was Fade to Black (1995), a truly brilliant action-adventure game developed by Delphine Software as a sequel to Flashback. It follows hero Conrad Hart, awakened from cryogenic sleep in an alien prison on the Moon. You have to explore, fight, solve puzzles, and navigate a sci-fi conspiracy in a fully 3D polygonal world. Back in the day, it felt revolutionary with smooth 3D graphics, dynamic camera angles, and a perfect blend of shooting, platforming, and adventure way before Tomb Raider took the crown. Story, atmosphere, pace, graphics, sound effects - it was the whole package. In 1995, this was a real masterclass.

@cmuratori Just watched it on YouTube, great video!

[1/2] I felt like this question deserved a more complete answer than "undefined behavior", so I made a full walkthrough to show exactly what part of the x86 execution differs from the other two, and to demonstrate how you go about investigating an anomaly like this.

@Paninosoffline pure pixel, don't create a style difference between the background and the characters (is my take)

Two styles: Painted-Scanned or Pure-pixel. What do you think?

@exQUIZitely Never started, paying monthly always felt incredibly wrong... Even though I was a huge Blizzard fan when it came out and had lots of friends playing.

In what year did you first set foot into Azeroth, and when did you leave - or are you still walking its lands? My journey started in 2005 as a Pally (simply because I had been playing a Paladin in AD&D since the 80s), and I was overwhelmed - in the best way - by what I saw. I left around the same time as Arthas, in 2010. I simply didn't recognize the world anymore, literally and figuratively, after Cataclysm. So I returned to Northshire Abbey, sat down on one of the benches, and logged out for the last time.

@itsmelaurin 10 years ago me could have really used this advice

🔥 Marry right, not fast waiting won’t ruin you, but choosing wrong can. Loneliness is temporary, a toxic marriage is a cage. Use your time to build your body, stack your money, and sharpen your mind desperation picks, standards choose.

@esrtweet Been using Arch derivatives for about 8 years now, things rarely break -- has definitely been worth it for getting things sooner

Question for the X hivemind: I'm seriously considering switching my main machine from Pop!_OS (a reskinned Ubuntu) to Arch, probably CachyOS. The reason is I'm attracted to the rolling-release concept. Getting really tired of waiting 6 months for my development tools to upgrade after they ship. I understand the downside: Arch doesn't protect me from upstream breakage. The plan to deal with that is to install snapper so I can revert to an earlier, working version of my system if things go badly awry. If you think there are any reasons this is a really bad plan, tell me now.

@exQUIZitely My stuff is in storage, but for me it would most definitely be X-com, enemy unknown

If you collect (or collected) games, post one from the pre-2000 era that holds high nostalgic or emotional value for you personally. Only one rule: It must be a game in your current collection. I will start: Wasteland (1988) by Interplay/EA. Endless hours went into that one.

@esrtweet @FrameworkPuter You're not the first to have expressed this exact desire -- I believe it may have been @cmuratori whom I saw asking for this as well. I too would gladly have a much fatter machine for increased typing comfort (and bigger battery if we're fattening anyway).

@FrameworkPuter Hey Framework guys: I have a rather expensive and capable Legion 8 Pro (high-end gaming laptop that I picked up as a refurb) that I would cheerfully throw over for a Framework if you had only one additional hardware option. A real full-travel keyboard like Thinkpads used to have before Lenovo enshittified them. Words do not exist in any of the tongues of men to express the intensity with which I hate and loathe modern laptop keyboards. Short-travel chiclet keys with rubber-dome switches, AAARGH! I know I can't have Model M buckling spring switches on a laptop, but *damn* something mechanical with tactile feedback would be good. I know I'm not alone in this. There may not be a lot of model M fans out there, but if you have any hopes of selling into the gamer market you're going to have to go mechanical for that. Any chance of this happening?

@ScottApogee Is this recent? I hadn't seem him with gray hair before

Duke, too.

@McKamyk @theo @FrameworkPuter @storopoli Pretty sure he's running Linux, seem to remember him saying so elsewhere.

@theo @FrameworkPuter @storopoli how’s the actual strength/speed feel? have you done real workloads and what OS are you using on paper it’s slightly less horsepower than Mx Max but i feel like linux is going to make up some difference

I am genuinely really really impressed with the Framework 13 Pro. I was unhappy with the old 13. Awful keyboard, trackpad, and display. New one is way better in all categories. Best PC trackpad I've used, awesome keyboard, no more display wobbling. Feels 10x more premium.

@dhh Yes, even if it's just with a USB stick -- could be a nice custom shaped one. Add in a nice printed manual and some extra 'feelies', would be wonderful.

Half the joy of collecting retro gaming is the box art, the cartridges, the artifacts. We've lost something important giving up on those physical manifestations of software. Comeback?

@htmx_org @Apple God, how I miss proper removable media. I cosplay with SD cards, but it's just not the same.

OK @apple bring back this form factor in modernized form including removable media and a good keyboard

@htmx_org Congratulations. Very happy to see this!

ayyyyyyyy

@ModernVintageG @FrameworkPuter @theo It would be glorious!

@FrameworkPuter @theo lemme review one

Welcome to the team @theo!

@Sparkie_light @nicbarkeragain @miguelvitta You'd think so... but the amount of non-pragmatic things I've seen in the last couple of decades because of the abundance of RAM and CPU time...

@nicbarkeragain @miguelvitta I think everything you're saying is true but hyperbolic. Technology is a pragmatic field and this will sort itself out.

I have a bad feeling that in a few years this github situation will be remembered as the first sign of something much worse and more widespread

@agriffini @yarnf40580 @nicbarkeragain @miguelvitta You are absolutely right. As I'm a child of the 80's I can't speak for the industry during that time. But already in the '90s during the buildup to the .com crisis it was clear that people were entering the industry because of pay. It was the reason I was reluctant to join.

I think the problem started way before, when the push was about commoditizing programmers; the idea that by just creating a nice process, a programmer could be replaced easily with any other programmer on the market to keep the ball rolling. A software production line. This idea is IMO completely wrong and misplaced; software has zero replication cost... it's just design. If you build a single good car you did nothing: you need to produce that good car in series, you need to be able to replicate the plants. Each and every car you sell requires effort. This doesn't happen with software. If you produce good software (e.g. Doom), it doesn't matter if you're just 4 guys in a garage with no process at all, no ability to handle turnover etc... Once you have your software that is good you get millions of copies for free. Process is almost irrelevant, individual is almost everything. Process is about repetition, programming is avoiding repetition itself (you write a loop). A programmer doing the same thing every day is a nonsense. This includes dailys. Very few working in a production line do really care about the craft. Very few of them also do the same thing for fun in the weekends. They're just doing it for the pay. The are just looking forward for friday afternoon when they can stop doing something they hate. And the result of course sucks and you need to try to avoid disasters with checks and punishments. Why would be that surprising?

To be a little less vague, I suspect that we're likely (not certain, but likely) to be entering into a period of unprecedented software degradation, and we're going to be seeing an increasing frequency of outages like this across many high profile products. But IMO the cause is actually not just the-one-thing-that-everyone-is-always-talking-about, it's a number of things that have all been bubbling away at just below critical levels for a long time. Some of the things off the top of my head: - Poorly designed / optimised software has been getting a free ride on hardware improvements pretty much since the invention of the computer. That chapter is now coming to an end, and will only be worsened by the enormous industry-wide pivot to producing & innovating on AI specific hardware, rather than general purpose CPUs etc. - The ZIRP era created a temporary suspension of reality in our industry, and now that it's ended we need to deal with the hangover. Companies that spent years making no profit, paying extravagant compensation to employees / shareholders and giving away server time for free are now pivoting into extraction mode, which is putting further pressure on their low quality software. QA is being laid off, hardware budgets are being reduced, timelines for shipping features are becoming more aggressive, etc. - The enormous amount of free money incentivised too many new people to join the industry too quickly. This has led to an abundance of poor quality education programs (bootcamps, uncertified colleges etc) and an influx of people into the industry who frankly aren't interested in programming. If you compared the average person in the industry now to 20 years ago, I suspect the difference in motivations would be stark. I'm not saying it's these people's fault necessarily, it's simply an inevitable result of the absurd compensation / performance expectations ratio that our industry has enjoyed for the last 15+ years. Working for a tech company has also become socially prestigious, which further adds to the problem. - Because computer programming was once an incredibly niche area of interest, many of our fundamental systems are built on trust. We're now starting to see that if systems like open source, public supply chain, discussion spaces, education etc become flooded with bad actors, we have no real mechanisms to deal with them. - Our hiring / recruitment pipeline has totally misaligned incentives. Even before the AI resume / AI HR-filtering arms race disaster that we're experiencing now, the widespread adoption of the leetcode style interviews IMO selected for a very narrow personality type, and filtered candidates that would have made great contributions to the industry long term. - The pivot from purchasing long term stable releases of software, to paying a subscription for constantly updating software has done huge damage to software quality as a whole. Companies have lost their incentive to get their software "right" because they can just "fix it later", and for the consumer - you can't just go back to the version of github that still works because the new one has problems. This was all happening well before AI entered the picture. I won't belabor the point because there has been endless discussion about it. But to me personally, there are two additional and deeply worrying problems with AI code generation. - It's undeniable at this point that it negatively affects the people who use it. It stops juniors from getting better, and it burns seniors out and makes them hate their jobs. Like it or not, humans are still the core of this industry, and I don't see this ending well. - It's completely unfit for purpose in the most important, high-stakes situations. One of the reasons that we excuse all the small errors it makes, is because it's low effort to type "do it again and fix this bug". That kind of thing doesn't fly when you only get one attempt because a mistake results in data loss or an outage. The damage is done. All the above has led to a silent exodus of many of our most experienced and impactful people. There are so many amazing programmers who made enough through stock options / compensation that they didn't need to work anymore, and were only doing it because they enjoyed it. Many of these people have just quit the industry and switched to doing hobby projects in the last 5 years. These are the types of people who have the experience and foresight to prevent the types of outages that we're seeing at github today. It's very easy to assume that the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back is entirely to blame here. But I think it's a reckoning that has been on the horizon for a very long time.

@vZeroG @exQUIZitely Came here to mention it. If I remember correctly it's the same team / people that made the original descent (I participated in the kickstarter)

@exQUIZitely If you loved this then you need to check out Overload: store.steampowered.com/app/448850/Ove…

A game that truly innovated a genre? Introducing something that no other game had ever done before? You might not know it, but Descent (1995) was the very first FPS with true 3D graphics and six degrees of freedom movement. Players pilot the Pyro-GX spaceship through mineshafts on various planets, infected by a virus that has turned mining robots hostile. Movement is the game's standout innovation: full six degrees of freedom allows free flight in any direction - forward/backward, left/right (slide/strafe), up/down, and 360° rotation - creating a rather disorienting, stomach-churning zero-gravity experience. For someone like me, being claustrophobic and suffering from a fair bit of vertigo, this was both tough to play but also highly fascinating. I am sure those of you who played it know what I mean...