I write code and play games and stuff. My old username from reddit and HN was already taken and I couldn’t think of anything else I wanted to be called so I just picked some random characters like this:

>>> import random
>>> ''.join([random.choice("abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789") for x in range(5)])
'e0qdk'

My avatar is a quick doodle made in KolourPaint. I might replace it later. Maybe.

日本語が少し分かるけど、下手です。

Alt: e0qdk@reddthat.com

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  • 19 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 22nd, 2023

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  • What upside down thing with a banana??

    There was a viral video/meme maybe a decade ago about how monkeys peel bananas (might have actually been an orangutan or gorilla in the one I saw; been too long since I’ve seen it) where they peel it from the end opposite of how people are usually shown doing it. I’m guessing they mean that? Basically, instead of bending the stem bit (from where the bananas bunch up), you can pinch the tip at the other end and the peel splits open very easily – it’s easier to do, especially if the banana is still a bit on the greener side of ripeness and the stem part is flexible. (I tried it after seeing it and switched to peeling them from the “bottom” myself.)

    What back bit?

    There is a little black fibrous part of most Cavendish bananas near the tip I was describing; many people do not like eating it and avoid it.

    Also…veins?

    I’m not sure what they mean either.


  • My guess is that if browsers as we know them weren’t invented, HyperCard would’ve become the first browser eventually. No idea where things would progress from there or if it’d have been better or worse than the current clusterfuck. Maybe we’d all be talking about our “web stacks” instead of websites, and have various punny tools like “pile” and “chimney” and “staplr”. Perhaps PowerPoint would’ve turned into a browser to compete with it.

    If browsers were invented but JavaScript specifically was not, we’d probably all be programming sites in some VB variant like VBScript (although it might be called something different).



  • I’ve never tried to make a stew out of duck before, but if someone asked me to wing it anyway, I’d probably try to use it in a gumbo: Dark roux, Cajun Trinity (celery + onion + bell pepper), jalapeno, garlic, stock, fresh thyme, bay leaf, lots of fresh ground black pepper, spoonful of hot sauce (e.g. Crystal or Tabasco if I can’t get that), plus your meat – served over white rice. For chicken (e.g. chicken thighs), I’d sear it first but I’m not sure on the best treatment for gamey fowl. Personally I might try to blanch it first to try to reduce the gameyness (based on recommendations I’ve seen about cooking certain kinds of stewed pork – like pork belly in Chinese dishes), but you’d do better to get advice from someone who’s actually cooked with gamey ingredients more than I have if you can.

    Adapting a coq au vin recipe might be another idea to try if gumbo doesn’t appeal, but again, I’ve never tried that with duck either.


  • And Sim Tower I was obsessed with that game for a long time when I was younger. Couldn’t stop playing until I got everything completed and filled every empty space on the map.

    Single, double, or triple story lobby? :-)

    I remember having a pretty good time with SimTower myself – I liked seeing all the little animations of people doing stuff throughout the building. I didn’t understand the apartment pricing thing as a kid, but as an adult thinking back on it, it’s clear that I was supposed to renovate the units if I wanted to keep renting them at the higher rates… (Delete and rebuild was not intuitive to me as a kid so I kept getting frustrated with the apartments and usually built massive amounts of hotel rooms instead.)

    I haven’t heard of Sim Safari myself what was that one like?

    I hadn’t played it for 20+ years so my memory of it wasn’t great when you asked this question – but I went down a bit of a rabbit hole digging through my boxes of old anime DVDs and strange things I burned to CD-Rs as a teenager and such – and it turns out I still have the original CD-ROM! It’s got orange and white stripes. It’s scratched up a little bit, but it’s still readable enough that I was able to install the game under WINE and IT WORKS! (The installer prompted me to install DirectX 5 to “improve performance”… lol)

    The game opens with a short animated splash screen – a map of Africa with animated zebras and other animals shown over it before eventually displaying the game’s logo. It then dumps me onto a main menu with a lantern that toggles an interactive tutorial on and off – somewhat confusingly; it wasn’t immediately clear that it was a switch unlike the other options. I turned the tutorial on but didn’t find it very helpful.

    The game itself is isometric and features a bunch of animals wandering around randomly while grass grows. (Screenshot) There are three different modes (park, camp, village) that I don’t really understand the details of. Park shows your animals, of course. I think the idea is you build up the camp site to get tourists to come (and bring you money), do gardening and animal management and such in the park which attracts more tourists, and hire people from the village to keep things running (otherwise they poach your animals, probably?) but it’s not clear how to actually get things going and most of the advisors seem pretty useless.

    There’s an ecologist adviser who has a field guide about plants and animals and can also show you various graphs and things. You can click on binoculars and then on an animal and it will bring up a window with a little animation of that animal.

    The game constantly plays animal sound effects by default including crickets and various birds and a bunch of animals whose sounds I don’t know well enough to name – but could probably learn from the embedded educational material if I cared to. (I have a feeling many parents of kids who had this game were probably driven bonkers by some animal or other going “AWEEEEE heee heee heee hee!” over and over.)

    I remembered the game being presented as more serious than SimPark (which has a talking cartoon frog guide you through things like leaf identification) – and, indeed, the character graphics are more realistic cartoon drawings in this one, but it’s also more cartoony than I remember with the sound effects for things like a “boing-a-boing-oing-oing” failure noise if you misclick the binoculars.

    The controls are not very good. Moving around the map is tediuous and unintuitive (you have to click in a particular region near the window border and hold the mouse down there – or else pull up a mini-map and navigate with that). The game also just builds paths immediately when you try to draw them with the mouse instead of letting you choose a route and drop to release to confirm the construction. You can “build” a 4 door car on your camp site for some reason as well as construct roads, but I think it may just be a decoration. There doesn’t seem to be any way to pick it up and move it if you plopped it in a bad spot (bye $3k!).

    Unfortunately I don’t have the original box/paper manual/whatever else came with the disc and the README file (in an ancient .DOC format) is not very helpful. It does, however, contain some lines like:

    By the time you read this document, the average home computer might be a 700MHz GazillaComp 2000 with 58 gigabytes of memory.

    which is pretty amusing since the decade old machine I’m running it on has a 3.7GHz processor – obscenely far beyond their dreams of high performance – but a mere 32GB of RAM. :p

    Somewhat oddly the game apparently has the ability to print – although I haven’t tried it.


  • I’ve seen Bubba Ho-Tep and Cemetery Man! Watched them during a movie marathon once that also included From Dusk Till Dawn and Jacob’s Ladder. That was a night well spent.

    Out of the games, I’ve played Sim Tower. I never made it to 5 stars but got as far as building the subway in at least one of my towers. I played way too many sim games as a kid. SimSafari is probably the most obscure I tried – never really made much sense out of that one though.

    I don’t know if it’s that obscure… but for anyone else who played a bunch of sim games – do you remember the song with the lyrics “I’m just a splatter, splatter, splatter on the windshield of life”?


  • It probably makes more sense to host your novel somewhere else and post links to it chapter by chapter.

    I’d suggest doing one of the following:

    1. Host the images on a site that already supports image galleries and link to that. Most image hosts are kind of annoying, but this is an understandable way to do it if you don’t want to run a website. (Maybe someone can chime in with a suggestion for whatever they think is the least annoying image gallery host in 2023.)
    2. Host the images yourself on a simple website. Webcomic artists have been doing that for many years, so there are lots of examples to draw from. (e.g. Gunnerkrigg Court)
    3. Zip the images up chapter by chapter and either self-host the zip or toss it on a file host like catbox.moe. If you structure it as a .cbz (i.e. zip up a folder with the images named in order like 1.jpg, 2.jpg, 3.jpg, … and just change the extension from .zip to .cbz) then a number of document viewers (like evince) can be used to view the image sequence – or people can just unpack the images and use their favorite image viewer on their computer.


  • No way is AI going to end capitalism.

    In the medium term we will end up with AI corporations. I already consider existing corporations to be human-based swarm intelligences – they’re made up of people but their overall large scale behavior is often surprising and we already anthropomorphize them as having will and characteristic behaviors separate from the people they’re made of. AI corporations are just the natural evolution of existing corporations as they continue down the path of automation. To the extent they copy the existing patterns of behavior, they will have the same general personality.

    Their primary motive will be maximizing profit since that’s the goal they will inherit from the existing structure. The exact nature of that depends on the exact corporation that’s been fully cyberized and different corporations will have different takes on it as a result. They are unlikely to give any more of a damn about individual people than existing corporations do since they will be based on the cyberization of existing structures, but they’re also unlikely to deliberately go out of their way to destroy humanity either. From the perspective of a corporation – AI-based or traditional – humanity is a useful resource that can be exploited; there isn’t much profit to be gained from wiping it out deliberately.

    Instead of working for the boss, you’ll be working for the bot – and other bots will be figuring out exactly how much they can extract from you in rent and bills and fees and things without the whole system crashing down.

    That might result in humanity getting wiped out accidentally; humanity has wiped out plenty of species due to greed and shortsightedness. I doubt it will be intentional if they do though.



  • I was getting 404 on /login itself for a while, and then finally got the login page after seeing this thread. Logging in at that point returned a 404 after submitting the login form – but it did actually succeed at logging in, it just didn’t redirect me correctly to the main page.

    After logging in, I’m still seeing tons of 50x errors. e.g. had to reload the “reply” link about a dozen times to get the comment submission form to show up; I think something is timing out when I get that sort of error. Maybe that’s part of what “For the next few hours, there might be issues with communication in the fediverse.” means in ernest’s message?

    I’m also seeing 404 when I go to https://kbin.social/newest?p=2 – which is rather strange since https://kbin.social/newest?p=3 works.


  • You could crawl the Fediverse looking for instances and communities of the sort that your instance understands, but new servers and communities can show up whenever, so you’d have to keep looking continuously. Stuff also gets interesting because different servers have different views of content.

    I’ve seen posts from users on two different servers talking in a thread on a 3rd server asking other users to help proxy messages manually between them because one of the servers was defederated from another and the messages were only going one way between the two users… I’m not sure in that case what the communication pattern was between the three servers (never mind me on kbin.social – which isn’t a Lemmy server at all – also able to see the conversation), but it seemed like a big headache.

    I’ve manually gone to different instances to make sure my posts show up when I make them; kbin is often pretty bad at getting new photo threads to federate out and sometimes needs a bit of coaxing… Looking at my profile on those instances though shows wildly different thread and comment counts sometimes. As of the time of writing this (before posting this comment) I have 30 threads and 85 comments listed in my profile on kbin.social. lemmy.world shows me as having 30 “posts” (threads) and 78 comments. lemmy.mindoki.com (your instance) shows 0 posts and just 10 comments!

    There’s also users on Mastodon and Misskey which show up for me as part of the regular experience of using kbin but which are a bit more awkward to interact with from Lemmy, I think? If I manually put in a mastodon.social user’s account into lemmy.world’s user lookup, for example, I can see some of their posts, but I’m not sure if they would ever actually show up anywhere on Lemmy without manually looking for a user?

    Nevermind the other parts of the Fediverse like Peertube and AP-enabled Wordpress blogs and whatever else is out there… You can probably get a decent view of most of the Lemmy/kbin-like communities if you have a good list of servers to scrape community lists from and subscribe to everything you find regularly, but I think you’ll still have some problems in practice.


  • I’m currently regularly posting to:

    I’m mostly posting screenshots and other people are mostly posting fan art when they post.

    It’s not very active, but I’ve also been posting (when I have content) to:

    I’m following with interest and occasionally commenting on:

    There are some really fun images being generated over there lately with a lot of variety!

    I like random art popping up in the sidebar from time to time on kbin. I’m not actively following but have seen some fun imagery occasionally pop-up from:

    So maybe take a look at those as well if they sound interesting.

    I’m also subbed to a bunch of other communities, but not interacting with them very much; no content of my own to post right now and they’re either (mostly) dormant or the people who are posting are not posting the sorts of content I’m interested in engaging with currently (but I might be interested in the future, so I subbed):

    I joined that last one to hopefully find other interesting communities as well.

    Occasionally I’ll interact with other communities when they pop-up in the newest threads feed on kbin.social – e.g. !196 or other meme communities. Sometimes people post things like technical problems they’re struggling with in !cpp or wherever and if I see the threads and have time I try to answer them.

    If you find a community that looks interesting but is dormant, start posting regularly (like maybe once a day). If you get upvotes or comments, there are still people around who just don’t have content to interact with!

    Edit: I should also add for the off kbin/lemmy part, I’m also on Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com) under a different username – although that has a tendency to piss me off, so I’m cutting back on reading it.





  • It’s been most helpful to me for tracking work and health issues like I said. e.g. being able to say specifically “I wrote the software for A,B,C,D,… and also did E,F,G,H,…” in my performance review instead of forgetting half of it. Reflecting on how many days I’d listed health issues was useful for getting myself to seek professional help instead of just sleeping walking through life as well; still working on that, but having the evidence there I can say things quantitatively like ~25% of my entries (923 days out of 3623 logged) include “tired”, “exhausted”, or “unproductive”… Life isn’t supposed to be like that.

    I had a bit of trouble getting started initially, but forced myself to do it for a couple weeks until it became a habit. For me it’s part of winding down towards sleep now; not doing it feels like not brushing my teeth.

    It won’t solve your problems for you, but it can help you see them if you have them, and having an auxiliary memory to brain dump into is also nice since you don’t have to keep everything in your head. I recommend anyone who can get into the habit do it; I wish I’d started sooner.


  • I started keeping a daily journal about 10 years ago. It’s helpful for tracking what I worked on as well as various health issues. I skim through it once a week before talking to my therapist and read all entries from the past year when I need to prepare documentation for my annual performance review at work. I’ll grep through the whole thing occasionally when I’m trying to remember when some particular event was. (I don’t do that very often, but it is handy when I need it!)

    I typically track:

    • current date for the entry (both in the file and as the file name)
    • date and time I wrote the entry
    • when I went to bed
    • when I woke up
    • health issues (if any)
    • what I worked on (professionally and for my hobbies)
    • places I went (if anywhere)
    • significant conversations (particularly if there’s something I need to follow up on)
    • what I’m watching/reading/playing/etc.
    • anything else that seems noteworthy

    I keep my journal in plain text files named like YYYY-MM-DD.txt. Right now it’s all in one big folder. I have it in version control and back it up to various places occasionally. I’ll probably split it so there is a folder for each year eventually.

    I started doing this after someone came up to talk to me and I realized that I’d recognized him from a particular place a few years earlier but could not for the life of me remember his name!