rezmason

As others mentioned, there are Discord and IRC pockets. I'm in a Fediverse community with a bunch of nerds, and many of us just met in person at this week's Handmade conference.

You can watch the entire conference here. I want to disclaim that not every attendee and talk is nerdy. It's more that this is a space where nerds are thriving.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2306676590 https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2307512869

Nerds needed support in the nineties, and they need support today. Our error was in accepting the success and fame of a few representative nerds as evidence that nerds were overcoming these challenges collectively. We allowed in people who never faced the challenges nerds face to identify as nerds— why turn down a friend?— and they've now made society worse for everyone, in our name. In a single blow they've amplified anti-intellectualism and squandered the faith people thought they were investing in us.

Related: http://nobodyscores.loosenutstudio.com/index.php?id=556

I'm pretty critical of my tech's ability to fulfill me exact needs, and the Magic Mouse is fine 98% of the time. The remaining 2% are when I want to play a video game that leverages multiple mouse buttons and a discrete scroll.

Anyone who's played more than five minutes of Unreal Tournament knows full well how essential it is to have distinct physical inputs for primary and secondary fire.

And some of the more outside-the-box RTS input schemes expect me to left-click while holding down the right mouse button.

It may seem like the default Mac mouse is a decades-old grudge against the context menu. But I can understand Apple's motivation in the 80s— ideally, mice shouldn't require more than one button, and if it isn't required, why put the secondary one on a default mouse to begin with?— and in the 90s— when Apple's mere existence became a pure act of defiance. But nowadays, the message they send is, "We're big and successful enough to never have to compromise our the most fundamental ingredient, and if you want more, buy an alternative".

One thousand times, this.

My first decade of software development was on the Flash platform. Don't get me started. When I began building what I considered "Flash-caliber" HTML+CSS+JS things in 2015, I knew to avoid everything that wasn't TIG-welded to Firefox, Webkit and Chromium. I'm reluctant even about using three.js and regl instead of rolling my own little bit of WebGL.

Docker, React and TypeScript pay my bills. But they will rip away from the world, along with everything built on top of them, as soon as discourse around WASM gels into a sexy low-sodium panacea with a meaningless two-syllable name. Web devs guzzled kool-aid before and they will again, and like hell will I toss any personal code in with it.

You're cleared for takeoff: https://rezmason.github.io/excel_97_egg

Sorry, folks.

I think Quanta discovered people like me rarely get past the third paragraph, and they made this to keep my attention. And it's working.

—By "working", I mean I can experience it in Chrome and I feel like I'm retaining information. In Safari 17.5, the images don't load.

Is this the first time a spaceship disembarked from a space station and landed back on the ground, all while unpiloted?

One of these days, I'll write a TypeScript reinterpretation of an early version of the Macintosh Toolbox, and a little sandboxed web environment for its software to cosplay in

This was on the TV show Movie Magic ages and ages ago, but they certainly never went into this much depth and backstory. This is a great writeup.

My dad used array languages throughout his career— APL at some point, A+ at Morgan Stanley, and K later on at Conning, a finance modeling company serving the insurance industry. They moved what I think is a flagship product (a macroeconomic monte carlo sim thingamajig) from K to Julia a while ago. Here's his old boss at JuliaCon talking about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EE2yz0ptSzQ

I don't think he keeps any old code lying around, but in the past I've tried reading it without success. That makes me a DSF— a Domain Specific Failson :[

Maybe this is what it'll take to seriously combat global warming. Filling zoos with wooly mammoths, and then extorting us into dropping global temperatures to keep them alive.

Unless we're headed for a Day After Tomorrow situation. Then it might be the mammoths keeping us in zoos

I wonder what software is available NT4 on a Power Macintosh.

Same. Looks like the "numeric" JS library is no longer hosted at the URL they link to in their dependency list— I had to replace it with "https://unpkg.com/numeric", which seems to have fixed it for me.

The ability to purchase and download whole seasons of shows from iTunes was one of its major advantages. I bought all of West Wing ten years ago, and I know for a fact that it's all physically in this room, three feet away.

This is also the only way Ainsley Hayes can possibly manifest outside of Aaron Sorkin's imagination.

I'm happy to see this studied and published. Still, if you have to explain a joke, you kill it.

I'm an office clown but I've learned to keep it all in the chatrooms and ticket descriptions. Cross the wit/work barrier at your org's peril!

Case in point: at my first job, I got bored with a stock image that displayed when the app ran, so I replaced it with a photo of Obama laughing. Handsome devil! And then I committed it by mistake. It could have easily reached production.

The right approach would have been to edit my hosts file, or to use a proxy like Charles to map the image URL to a local Obama. It's a great technique for replacing the Jenkins butler with a rage face. Just, keep it away from the repo!

Intel and Qualcomm (seriously? one and then the other, while taking potshots at Apple silicon?) working with Justin Long suggests that they believe he was the active ingredient of the old Mac ads. That he was some major reason why they worked.

John Hodgman's the only essential part of that ad campaign.

Long's only role was to look a little more put together, and to be good-spirited. Now he's neither.

I'm really looking forward to reading its technical blog.

If you're more into evoking a feeling than simulating countryside, I humbly suggest (aka shamelessly plug) my project and another person's project:

https://rezmason.github.io/drivey

https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/nightdrive.html

PR submitted!

I've downloaded saharan's repo and poked around the Life Universe project in Chrome and FF— it seems that the pixels representing the compressed animation are retrieved through a Context2D::drawImage call, and are different in Firefox and other browsers.

It makes sense that ETP would mess with the pixels output from a drawImage call, to fight fingerprinting.

Maybe the ImageLoader can be replaced with a more direct PNG decoder stapled to a fetch(). If I can make that work tonight, I'll create a pull request; this is how I meet the coolest people.

I didn't know Wolfram was even available in short form.

I bought NKS for fifty bucks twenty years ago because I thought I could form a group around it that would take turns summing up chapters for each other, but unfortunately, if humans who give a f** represent states and the number of f**s a human can give represent colors, we're talking about a 1,0 turing machine here.

Many are undeniably garish by today's standards, on today's devices, and although they were maybe more refreshing to our palettes at the time and less intense in the default monitor color spaces back then, I must confess, I distinctly remember vetoing several of these desktop pictures as a late 90s Mac user, including the ones you pointed out. And the era of subtler, muted colors and tones showed up pretty quickly after these for valid reasons.

I still like the UFO ones a whole lot though ^_^

I really like how much utility we've all managed to get from Cairo. It is everywhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(graphics)#Notable_usage

I don't know the full story behind it, but from an outsider's point of view, any open library that pulls that kind of weight for so long should be considered a major feat of engineering.

Don't forget the OS 9 wallpapers:

https://512pixels.net/projects/mac-os-9-5k-wallpapers

My favorites among these are the gradient-rich desktops that dropped in Mac OS 8.5 back in '98, like those UFO ones.

That's when the OS gained support for icons with 24-bit color and 8-bit masks, which are the direct ancestors to today's 1024x1024 32-bit app icons. Perhaps to commemorate this full leveling up of the classic Mac desktop to millions of colors, Apple hired a small team of designers to custom make the UFO, Capsule and Tub desktop pictures.

Screen sized gradients between two relatively close colors almost always land in the sandbar of banding or dithering in order to quantize all those subtle variations to the limited color depth. But these desktops do a beautiful job at avoiding that. I'm not sure, but I think they achieved it by color grading a zero-to-255 3D render with a high bits/channel ratio in Photoshop, tuning the grade and quantizing to 8 bits per pixel from time to time as a sort of gamut warning. Any problematic areas could then be "buffed out" with careful blend mode shenanigans on the boundaries.

I think for many reasons the security model for code execution in HTML and SVG ought to be completely identical. They ought to just be slightly different DOM specifications.

In other words, if I can set an SVG file as the image of an img tag or as the URL in a background-image style property, then I ought to be able to use an HTML file, too— and JS should run in both or neither, with the same sandbox properties. Probably neither.

Likewise, if I can set an HTML file as the contents of an iframe, then I ought to be able to use an SVG file that way, too— and JS should run in both or neither, with the same sandbox properties. Probably both.

I think I now have to create an online version of it. Web Audio and CSS transforms should be more than up to the task.

Wild speculation: maybe the attacker's motive was to usher specific Sourcehut hosted repositories to the jurisdiction of the EU.

If you hated Windows in the nineties and you're feeling sentimental, seems like there's plenty of anti-Microsoft stuff in there for old time's sake

Are you talking about this?

https://enterprise.ft.com/en-gb/blog/ft-app-now-available-io...

This says they just wrapped their web app in a native app, like a web view, so they could then use system features that their web apps couldn't access. So are you sure you're not using a web app after all? You might be using the same tech as you were before.

That is a real problem. But if that problem manifests in web and native software alike, then neither the web nor the app stores directly cause it, right?