Zero Trick Pony @zerotrickpony@mastodon.technology
Posts about cars, cooking, travel, and generally my ridiculous life and career in silicon valley. No politics; see @angrylamp for politics stuff.
Joined Dec 2017
Zero Trick Pony
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i'm utterly fascinated by this prescient wired article from 1997, i think we have hit every single one of their "10 things that could go wrong"
(birdsite): https://twitter.com/hieronymus_burp/status/1461782628223365128
Zero Trick Pony
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The person in charge of the Nostromo set for Alien (1979) invented this interstellar standard for signs and labels in spaceflight
the screaming neighborhood children are irritating me so i am retaliating with loud sigur ros on the yard speakers
Zero Trick Pony
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birdsite joke
(referring to an "on the media" segment from last weekend)
"Anything less than five stars is BAD! Only give five stars!" Haha. I love how workers actively beg for as little dynamic range as possible in any evaluative feedback. It speaks volumes about what evil corporations do whenever they receive even the barest shred of signal that could be used for ranking or culling employees.
Zero Trick Pony
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Facebook Stole Our Name and Livelihood
there is a type of coworker I have who, whenever given work to do, always first asks, "what is any reason I can think of to make this wait on something else?" it's like a pathological instinct to get blocked and do nothing. I cannot understand it, but these people thrive here.
Zero Trick Pony
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linux game bug report copy pasta
38% of my bug reports come from the Linux community
My game - ΔV: Rings of Saturn (shameless plug) - is out in Early Access for two years now, and as you can expect, there are bugs. But I did find that a disproportionally big amount of these bugs was reported by players using Linux to play. I started to investigate, and my findings did surprise me.
Let’s talk numbers.
Percentages are easy to talk about, but when I read just them, I always wonder - what is the sample size? Is it small enough for the percentage to be just noise? As of today, I sold a little over 12,000 units of ΔV in total. 700 of these units were bought by Linux players. That’s 5.8%. I got 1040 bug reports in total, out of which roughly 400 are made by Linux players. That’s one report per 11.5 users on average, and one report per 1.75 Linux players. That’s right, an average Linux player will get you 650% more bug reports.
A lot of extra work for just 5.8% of extra units, right?
Wrong. Bugs exist whenever you know about them, or not.
Do you know how many of these 400 bug reports were actually platform-specific? 3. Literally only 3 things were problems that came out just on Linux. The rest of them were affecting everyone - the thing is, the Linux community is exceptionally well trained in reporting bugs. That is just the open-source way. This 5.8% of players found 38% of all the bugs that affected everyone. Just like having your own 700-person strong QA team. That was not 38% extra work for me, that was just free QA!
But that’s not all. The report quality is stellar.
I mean we have all seen bug reports like: “it crashes for me after a few hours”. Do you know what a developer can do with such a report? Feel sorry at best. You can’t really fix any bug unless you can replicate it, see it with your own eyes, peek inside and finally see that it’s fixed.
And with bug reports from Linux players is just something else. You get all the software/os versions, all the logs, you get core dumps and you get replication steps. Sometimes I got with the player over discord and we quickly iterated a few versions with progressive fixes to isolate the problem. You just don’t get that kind of engagement from anyone else.
Worth it?
Oh, yes - at least for me. Not for the extra sales - although it’s nice. It’s worth it to get the massive feedback boost and free, hundred-people strong QA team on your side. An invaluable asset for an independent game studio.
if you were curious what happens when you paint your house an ugly color in a neighborhood full of racist boomer karens, inquire within! (spoiler: yelling, crying, literal death threats.)
Zero Trick Pony
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bitbottle: a modern archive file format https://code.lag.net/robey/bitbottle | https://lobste.rs/s/ywxuxj #cryptography #rust #show
Zero Trick Pony
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TruthSocial, Fediblock, pol adjacent
As you may have seen in the news today, Trump's media team has set up their own social network "Truth Social".
What they aren't admitting is it's actually just a Mastodon instance with all the Mastodon branding removed, including all of the messages acknowledging that it is FOSS, as required by the software's free open source licence. This is breaking the terms of the licence, and is essentially stealing the software from the volunteer community which made it.
This kind of behaviour cannot be accepted by anyone who believes in FOSS. Keeping to the requirements of a FOSS licence is fundamental to building software together. If powerful people get away with stealing FOSS, people may be reluctant to build FOSS in the first place.
Hopefully someone will take legal action, but in the meantime we can block these instances in case they try to federate:
truthsocial.com
tmediatech.io
#Fediverse #Fediblock #TruthSocial #Trump #MastoAdmin #Mastodon
Zero Trick Pony
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hey aliens,
when we launch billionaires into space, those are for you. you're supposed to take them. those are free specimens for your research. on the house
you're welcome
Zero Trick Pony
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this is a fun romp thru how glibc's isalpha() macro can... segfault
https://drewdevault.com/2020/09/25/A-story-of-two-libcs.html
Zero Trick Pony
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our internet was down for almost exactly 24 hours.
in the time-honored tradition of technicians everywhere, they blamed:
- the incompetence of their predecessors
- squirrels
Zero Trick Pony
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our house internet went down in the last minute of this meeting and cut it off. We were done anyway, but I was just saying thank you and wrapping up... I guess we'll call that "The AT&T Goodbye"
Zero Trick Pony
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I've been working on this for three months and it's finally done. 78 pages on the history of leather, sluts, and families at US Prides, from 1965 to 1995. Includes background on Pride as a polyvocal celebration and leather as a queer subculture; multifarious sexual and gender expression at Pride; the Lesbian Sex Wars; reaction from the right; and the interplay of radical and normalizing forces within LGBTQ activism.
https://aphyr.com/posts/358-a-history-of-leather-at-pride-1965-1995
Zero Trick Pony
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I was apparently wrong recently regarding copyright on Hacker News
In a discussion of police playing copyrighted music to trigger automated takedowns of civillian video, someone pointed out that a recent US Supreme Court decision invalidated copyrightholders' right to sue US states for copyright infringement.
https://www.copyright.gov/policy/state-sovereign-immunity/
One would presume this might extend to any entity operating as state government.
Say, for the sake of argument, a state university library system.
Which would mean that such a system might take upon itself to, for whatever reason, host Sci-Hub, LibGen, or ZLibrary, in a legally-immune status.
That would be an interesting development.
(There's no specific need for it to be a library system. It could be the forestry department, prisons, or an individual legislator or elected official.)
Boosts appreciated.
#Copyright #SciHub #LibGen #ZLibrary #Immuity #Impunity #SCOTUS
Zero Trick Pony
boosted
Posts about cars, cooking, travel, and generally my ridiculous life and career in silicon valley. No politics; see @angrylamp for politics stuff.
Joined Dec 2017
