Alright fellow queers, so what are celebrating next month? My top vote is Gluttony, as always, but I do also vibe with Sloth Month? Who couldn’t use a little r&r after all that pride?

Someone shared this on Mastodon so I’ll just repost my thoughts from there. (Bonus for Lemmy, I was forced to squeeze all my thoughts into 500 characters, so this is the most succinct I’ve been on this site!)

Pretty incredible how little people seem to understand these. For one thing, every method other than waterfall is a subtype of agile methodology. The major distinction is that waterfall has a series of phases from design through building, testing, and delivery that attempts to plan the whole project up front. Agile methods focus on smaller iteration cycles with frequent, partial deliverables.

Something like kanban is designed for continuous delivery: we want to go to mars weekly.

LEAN development is a scam though, that one is accurate.

Animals in captivity pace their living areas, an expression of anxiety.

But also an ADHD thing, I do this all day while thinking or on the phone. I have to turn off my camera for meetings because I tend to wander in and out of frame while I listen and ponder.

They say there are no asexuals in fox holes

Absolutely. Pandemic “inflation” threw all kinds of prices too high and nothing is coming back down because most industries are so small that they’re all essentially oligarchies now.

I am dead certain that the pandemic has actually put the US into a hard recession which the Fed has been covering up with various tricks. I’m pretty sure that after the presidential election, whichever way it goes, the economy is going to tank.

I can pretty rarely get under $30 for just myself ($50 for two i consider quite the deal now) and we live in a city with many options, and most places i would order from are about a 10 minute drive. I’m not saying it’s right or good, just that the prices you see are in line with what I’ve been seeing. Food is quite a bit more expensive right now.

Jesus, he almost hit himself in the head with the recoil his arm snapped so far back

Ah Texas, where children can’t make decisions or be held accountable in any way, unless they’re brown skinned and can be accused of a crime, then they must he tried as adults and sentenced to life as an imprisoned slave.

Lol, this is how I’ll eventually open source my game: completely new repo with one fresh checkin. No one will ever see how many curse words and diary-entry commit messages litter my fossil repo.

Out past the planets is the heliopause, the final boundary between the solar system and interstellar space. Voyager discovered it, but other probes have confirmed it. The radiation and particles emitted by the sun create a pressurized bubble around it, where plasma (energized particles, mostly hydrogen) is much denser than past the heliopause. Cosmic rays are more prevalent outside it.

I’ve heard it compared to the empty zone around where a sink faucet first hits, creating a little “wall” of water around it as the splashing water pushes back the standing water.

“Empty” space is anything but. There’s tons of particles and energy flying though it, just not as dense.

Arguably the first Dark Souls is one of these. Most of the classes push you towards shields as the cornerstone of defense. The studio felt like this overemphasis on shields was such a mistake they took 2 whole games (Bloodborne and Sekiro) in an almost entirely shield-free direction to teach players there were other ways.

Pyromancy (and magic in general) were also undervalued in DS1 initially due to how the game presents them. People eventually figured out that Pyro is so OP you don’t even need to use leveling with it to have an easy time.

Ah man, living the dream!

Oh is this why Biden is suddenly cracking down on immigration and wanting to build the wall too? I had assumed it was just blatant appeals to the right.

Ah, the classic Ultimatum Game. Economists would say that any amount of money should be acceptable for getting punched in the face, because its better than getting decked for nothing. The vast vast majority of people feel cheated if it isn’t a 50/50 split. This is what passes for a “paradox” to economists, who could probably all do with being punched in the face more often.

I, like most of the millenial lemmings it seems, am not shocked about this. I remember what Dubya said as president, the daily evils. I would have never thought it could get worse and then we got Trump, and I think it all does echoes out from 9/11. If there are future historians, 9/11 is going to be the pivot that this entire century stumbles over, probably leading directly to WW3 any day now.

But when I see articles like this, (in the Atlantic ofc, always this one or the NYT) my nostrils fill up with the smell of consent being manufactured. Has the shadow council decided that we shall war with the Saudis now? With Russia and China just flat-out taking land now, has the US decided to extend it’s “protection” more directly over a few strategic areas?

You ever notice how there’s like, zero brown-skinned people in Tim Burton movies? Glad the shrunken-head guy got a bigger role in this one though, he’s African right?

I really enjoyed this game back when, and replayed it a couple of years ago. Very unique RTS mechanics and engine, I’m excited to see this open sourced!

Perimeter had several weird gimmicks. Bases must be built on terrain that has been flattened with a terriforming tool (voxel/heighmap manipulation of the landscape is part of the game.) The titular permiter is an energy shield that you can put up around your entire base. There’s also only 3 basic units, but units can be fused together (and separated back out) to make more advanced units on the fly.

The terraforming-as-war approach is neat and I’ve always been surprised that more games don’t try to incorporate similar mechanics. The multi-units are interesting but to me suffer a similar issue as games with many guns but only one kind of ammo. By the time you’ve decided to switch tactics, you might already be too low on basic units of one type to change into what you need.

Picturing a wimpy sad hand labeled “The Klan” which has been left eternally hanging.

But then I decided, I wrote my own solution, a thing of 1,600 lines of code, which is, yeah, it’s like thousands of times less than the competition.

And it works. It’s very popular. … I got 100 emails from people saying that it’s so nice that someone wrote a small piece of software that is robust, does not have dependencies, you know how it works.

But the depressing thing is, some of the security people in the field, they thought it was a lovely challenge to audit my 1,600 lines of code. And they were very welcome to do that, of course. And they found three major vulnerabilities in there.

He makes a ton of excellent points, but the succinct impact of this little example really hit for me. As someone who often rewrites things so that I can both understand and fully trust in what I’m depending on, it’s always good to be reminded that you literally can’t write 500 lines of code without a good chance of introducing a major vulnerability.

The tech stack is so dizzyingly high today, and with so many interlocking parts, it continually amazes me that anything at all functions even in the absence of hostile actors.

I do wonder what’s up with fascist nerds and Tolkien names.