ANTSANTS

I am pseudonymous, though. I don't really care if you can e-stalk ANTSANTS to find that they posted in X forum or played Y game, as long as it stays separate from my real identity.

However, if you're gonna be creepy about it, maybe I should be more proactive.

A little bit, chummer. Not enough to catch your drift, though.

Seconding this. I have browsed forums where important users threw temper tantrums and deleted all of their posts, making it downright impossible to follow years worth of valuable dialogs.

I am a staunch proponent of anonymity and privacy (hence why I post here under a pseudonym), but you need to make the decision about the level of privacy you want before you post. Changing your mind 1. screws over the community and 2. won't save you from the determined taking a trip through the wayback machine anyway.

I agree, I love FM and will always think good FM or "real chiptunes" are more impressive than good sample-based synthesis, because you can't just lean on your sample library. There are a few Genesis trackers out there, including Deflemask[1], vgmmaker (which sadly, the author took down because he got tired of dealing with unappreciative jerks, so you'll have to Google a bit to find a copy), and YMDj [2] (a "native tracker" that runs on the Genesis itself)

[1] http://www.delek.com.ar/deflemask

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTDiPqkoFnc

A little over a year ago, Titan released a demo for the Genesis called Overdrive, and, well, it's fucking amazing, go watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQqJm14sHRY

And I'm unimpressed by the technology but dig the music! It takes all kinds.

I like dubstep when people put some thought into it and aren't just lazily fiddling with an LFO, but to be fair, getting into breakcore as a teenager might have permanently ruined my taste.

Absolutely nothing.

I do like these demos for their music and their visual aesthetics, but I'm sorry to say, they aren't in any way technically impressive. The first one [1] is literally an FMV, it's all pre-rendered video. The second has one neat effect, the rotating scanline-aligned box that you've seen on other platforms, but all the hard part for other platforms, rasterizing it in realtime, is trivialized by the "mode 7" affine transformation video mode. Just need to calculate one 2D affine matrix per scanline, or load it from a lookup table, and the graphics hardware handles the rest. Plenty of commercial games had similar effects; it's just barely more impressive than seeing a rotating cube on a PlayStation. And even the (admittedly awesome) music isn't doing anything new, it's just using higher quality samples than most devs could afford to use in their games back in the day, synthesized on a PC with more powerful synthesizers.

I'm sorry, I know I sound like a total dick writing that. Again, I do enjoy the music and the visual aesthetics of this group's demos a lot more than a lot of other unarguably more technically impressive demos. Hell, I've watched Smash It about a dozen times now! I'm sure that we can expect really awesome stuff from them in the future as they get more experience. Just had to point out that "THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING OF WHAT WE CAN DO ON FUCKING SUPER NINTENDO" is an apt description of the tech on display, which is important, because the demoscene is about the intersection of style and technical achievement, not one or the other.

[1] https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=62927

>Text evolved from shapes chiselled into rock or pressed into wet clay, so the roots of typography are as tactile and 3D as it's possible to be.

>Even ink on a scroll has a 3D feel. The 'paper' - whatever it's made of - has texture, and the way the ink sinks into it has depth and texture too.

>Likewise with traditional printing. The sequence of pages creates a 3D object, and old-fashioned heavy letter press books have texture and depth you won't get on a screen.

But you don't see the depth of the stroke or the texture of the paper when you're reading. You see abstract lines. You don't see the imperfect squiggles our meat-appendages create unless you really focus; at a glance, your brain autocorrects them into the intended strokes.

>Minimalism has one big problem - it lacks scale-independence. A hand-printed book has visual detail across a range of physical dimensions. You can see the cover across a room, but if you look at the print with a magnifying glass, you'll see detail at that scale too.

>Minimalist digital typography has detail at exactly one dimension - the size of the content. Zoom out, and you can't see the content. Zoom in, and you see pixels.

Uh, no.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_graphics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_font

>So minimalism is literally shallow.

"It seems that perfection is attained, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away." - Antoine de Saint Exupéry

A symbol is a symbol. A flat monochrome floppy disk icon represents the concept of saving a file just the same as a lovingly rendered 3D floppy disk or even a photograph would.

Text glyphs are very flat, abstract symbols that represent sounds or ideas (indeed, I'm pretty sure the whole "flat design" trend was inspired by typography in the first place). Sure, we've been hunting beasts for much longer than we've been reading and writing, but written language is still a very old invention in the human timescale. And art predates even that. Humanity has had plenty of experience with symbolic visuals over the ages, I think we're equipped well enough to use basic smartphone apps.

I also used ME for about a year but I don't remember it crashing once. Never understood why everyone had such problems with it, I thought it was just Windows 98 with USB drivers.

John Romero was making shareware games for years before he met John Carmack. He wrote the level editors, much gameplay code, created many levels for, and significantly contributed to the game design of all the id games from Commander Keen to Quake. His absence is arguably a big part of why most of the later id games just aren't as fun as Doom. Daikatana bombed for a lot of reasons (zero experience as a manager, dotcom-era ridiculousness in hype and project scope, infamously horrible marketing campaign that he had no part in, etc), but not because John Romero was an incompetent programmer or game designer.

If you have the time, watch this series in which John Romero and (Bioshock level designer and apparent Doom fanboy) Jean-Paul LeBreton play through the first episode of Doom and analyze its level design in depth:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygp4-kmjpzI

Yeah, the possibility of a "gatekeeper effect" is what's worrisome here. There's no way you can anticipate everything a user might want to do with their computer, so while opt-in sandboxing can only help, mandatory sandboxing could stifle the creativity of developers who must go through a gatekeeper (even a benevolent one) any time they want to ship a program that uses hardware or software abstractions in some unforeseen way.

Or alternatively, Joe User goes "[grumble grumble] guess I gotta delete that dang PulsePolicyD that's keepin' me from runnin' muh binaries [copies and pastes the first command found when googling "how i run X" into shell]" and it's all for naught.

Media players are rather large programs that users feed lots of untrusted data (gigabytes of pirated movies/tv shows/porn from suspect sources etc) into. All it takes is one exploitable bug in your media player of choice (or more likely, in a hardware-accelerated codec it uses) and one maliciously malformed video for your home directory to be nuked, keylogger to be installed, or worse.

I watched it last night and can confirm that C was not explicitly mentioned once.

Yes. Asynchronous image loading and rendering is already built into the browser, and the rest of the content shouldn't take long to load to begin with. Fancy dynamic Javascript frameworks that break up what should have been a single response into 20 different responses, asynchronously firing dozens of superfluous repaints as the data trickles in, cause far worse performance, latency, and usability problems than rendering a single chunk of HTML ever did.

I don't know of anyone that has ever experienced any kind of technical problem with their landline telephone or cable TV services. Rather, you pretty much need a cell phone and (to a much lesser extent) a home internet connection to participate in society today, and the marginal utility from having a separate home line or a cable TV service in addition to those services is not enough to justify the cost for most people.

I fear I may never get a better chance to mention Garage:

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

http://lostmedia.wikia.com/wiki/Garage:_Bad_Dream_Adventure_...

That's debatable. Even in 64-bit mode, x86-64 processors treat 32-bit integers as the default word size for the majority of integer instructions, requiring a operand size prefix byte (on top of the larger integer itself) for almost every instruction that operates on a 64-bit integer. If you want to complain to anyone about this, complain to AMD. Really though, 32 bits are enough for the vast majority of array indices and symbolic constants, why waste memory bandwidth and cache space on 64-bit ints for the sake of consistency?

Modern Blogspot strikes again.

>I never would have guessed that. The tech press keeps telling me how hot mobile is and how lame PC's are.

There was an interesting discussion on this topic here a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8879927

It's really sad to see some indie devs (or even, to go off on a bit of a tangent, projects like GNOME and Ubuntu Unity) killing themselves following the "PC is dead, mobile is the future" hype off a cliff instead of focusing on the much more stable and receptive PC userbase.

I think you mean Bettie Boop.

Common Sense, the pamphlet that inspired many to fight in the early years of the American Revolution, was published anonymously. Don't discount the power of anonymous dissent; the US owes its existence to it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Sense_%28pamphlet%29

How about "amoral 'journalists' trolling for clickbait," "far left-wing nutjobs salivating at the chance to strike at the tender underbelly of a vulnerable target hesitant to defend itself," "people with low social status desperately trying to act 'progressive' for kudos," "people who politick because they can't cut it technically," and "yuppies with no interest in computers who joined 'the industry' purely for the money, who 'appropriate' the culture of the native geeks while shaming and condemning them for the slightest trespass?"

It's particularly ironic that the author included this quote:

>“When I coach women, I tell them how wonderful they are. Women won’t make the ridiculous projections about their companies that the guys will. They won’t say the really stupid thing the nerds do. They are a lot more realistic and practical and humble.”

Soon after this line:

>They told investors their project was the next Pinterest—the way screenwriters tell movie moguls their scripts are the next Titanic.

And then they quoted Shanley Kane and I lost the ability to take the article seriously.

"The story of the guys that created the FPS" sounds pretty cool to me.

>I loved the parts when Romero swam across the lake to work all night with the rest of the crew,

That was also one of my favorite passages:

"The lake house was filled with the sense of unlimited possibilities. And the bond between Carmack and Romero was becoming stronger by the day. It was like two tennis players who, alter years of destroying their competition, finally had a chance to play equals. Romero pushed Carmack to be a better programmer. Carmack pushed Romero to be a better designer. What they shared equally was their passion.

This was most clear to Carmack one late weekend night. He was sitting in the house working at his PC as lightning flashed outside. Mitzi curled lazily on top of his monitor, her legs draping over the screen. The heat of her body was causing Carmack’s heat-sensitive display to ooze its colors. He pushed Mitzi gently from the monitor, and she scurried away with a hiss.

A rainstorm had picked up, and it was mighty. Cross Lake spilled into the backyard like the prelude to a horror movie. The lake was so high that it pushed the ski boat to the top of the boathouse. Long black water moccasins slithered toward the deck. The bridge leading to Lakeshore Drive was completely washed out. When Jay arrived after having been out for the day, there was no way to get in. It was, as he described it, “a turd floater” of a storm, bringing everything from the bottom of the lake to the surface. He turned away to wait it out.

Romero arrived with a friend later to find the bridge even worse than when Jay got there. There was simply no way he was going to get his car over the flooded expanse. And there were probably alligators and moccasins now making it their home.

Back in the house, Carmack resigned himself to working on his own that night. After all these hours, he had come to appreciate Romero’s diverse range of talents, gleaned from years of making his own Apple II games. Romero had been not only a coder but an artist, a designer, and a businessman. On top of all that, he was fun. Romero didn’t just love games; in a sense, he was a game, a walking, talking, beeping, twitching human video game who never seemed to let anything get him down. Like a game character, he could always find an extra life.

Just then the door behind Carmack swung open. Mitzi dashed under his feet. Carmack turned to see Romero standing there with his big thick glasses, soaking wet up to his chest, lightning flashing behind him, a big smile on his face. It was a real moment, a moment so impressive that Carmack actually saved it in his thin file of sentimental memories. This one he wanted for future access: the night Romero waded through a stormy river to work."

Interesting, thanks. The idea that Chrome is moving to garbage collected C++ is... a bit surprising to me, though I suppose it makes some sense given their focus on security.

I can see why you'd want to get away from C++'s compile times, though they're a lot more manageable if you can avoid templates like the plague. Have you considered a coroutine library for C or C++? I'm using libco right now for my hobby game project and much like "goroutines" would, it's significantly improving the clarity of a lot of systems (though of course I don't get the "free" parallelism because it doesn't handle scheduling across threads or anything like that).

I think you're right about Go's memory model helping a lot when compared to e.g. a typical dynamic language, but I have to ask: if you're going to be using manual memory management techniques like object pools and avoiding heap allocation whenever possible, what exactly does a garbage collected language buy you? I'm more of a C guy myself, but presumably RAII with smart pointers in C++ would get you most of the productivity benefits of garbage collection for the parts of the code that "don't matter" with much more reliable soft-realtime guarantees, while providing you with much greater memory management controls and optimization opportunities for the parts that do, and having far superior debugging support to boot.

It's kind of hard to "draw a parallel" when your writing implement of choice is a giant image macro.

I'm well aware of all that, but with all of the intentional unjustified downvoting that goes on around here, I'm happy to burn some meaningless internet points calling people out on it from time to time.

Downvoting for disagreement is allowed, but I still think it's a dumb policy. I upvote people I disagree with all the time for moving discussion along with pointed questions, so it's saddening to see people downvoted or be downvoted myself merely for holding an opinion contrary to the hivemind. Not because I give a flying fuck about internet points, but because it reflects poorly on the community and its capacity for debate. But then again, I think upvote systems are dumb to begin with.

Perhaps the most rebellious thing you can do to the liberal elite is to be a white person, marry another white person, and have a lot of children. No wonder they hate the Mormons so much!

I agree with your thoughts about "shock" as we know it being a tool of political conversion that modern conservatives have learned to tune out, but I wouldn't discount the effect of some different kind of shock on modern liberals. Certain people pretend to be shocked and offended when anyone so much as disagrees with them, but they're mostly using this offense as a tool, part (as you say) "look how offended and thus good I am!" and part "now I have another person to point to as the source of 'the problem.'" But I am genuinely curious about how one would go about actually shocking those people. What first comes to mind is outspoken, public, mass disagreement with liberal norms, done proudly and on the public's own terms rather than the meek "give me a chance, guys, I so agree with you about X Y and Z but maybe W" contrarianism you usually see. I think this is exactly why people have gotten themselves whipped up into such a furor over Gamergate and anonymous messageboards; the offended have done an excellent job of reframing the controversy in terms of misogyny and neckbeards, but the sheer magnitude of the response on both sides indicates that some kind of shock is afoot.