2025-01-23

Activity Log

hackers.town: 2025-01-23 Thu 08:05

I was going to celebrate my 53rd birthday by hyperventilating and worrying about employment but apparently @IamMrsGeek is going to love and celebrate me instead.

Always hard to accommodate a sudden change of plans.

hackers.town: 2025-01-23 Thu 08:10

@banjofox2 @IamMrsGeek let’s be fair

it’s a nice counter to doomscrolling

hackers.town: 2025-01-23 Thu 08:50

@tek That’s becoming more common unfortunately. Last few times I stayed at a hotel, I had to leave my room. They made me put pants on and everything!

hackers.town: 2025-01-23 Thu 09:03

@wordshaper @cwebber I did the whole IQ evaluation thing multiple times as a kid (moving to different states and each school district not knowing what to do with me). Got significantly different scores every time.

As an adult, shared that with an IQ enthusiast later and immediately “that’s impossible. That cannot happen. Your IQ is a fixed number,” and hey welcome to my brain.

But other than it’s a stupid useless classist racist metric, those anecdotes are why I don’t give IQ any credit.

hackers.town: 2025-01-23 Thu 09:33

@genehack Thank you very much!

hackers.town: 2025-01-23 Thu 09:35

#DwarfFortress adventure mode!

I wish I didn’t have to deal with an intermediate layer like Whisky on macOS. Makes it harder to impulsively / compulsively fire up the game, which is pretty much the only way I play.

But I’ll take that 15-second hit on my patience for this.

Dwarf Fortress Adventure Mode - Out Now - Official Release Trailer - YouTube

#FediGames

hackers.town: 2025-01-23 Thu 09:51

@boris not really. I’ve veered from the recommendation of a separate bottle (and associated Steam install) for each game, and sticking to graphically simple games like Let’s Build a Zoo and Dwarf Fortress in my one bottle.

hackers.town: 2025-01-23 Thu 10:00

@boris It works well enough on my aging 14" M1 MBP w/32GB RAM! I’ve made a point of keeping it to a minimum, but the games I’ve chosen run at native speed.

I hear good things about folks who’ve been bolder with game choices and figured out the fiddling, even on older machines.

hackers.town: 2025-01-23 Thu 10:26

@nat I struggle all the time with the value judgments buried in what I was taught: it’s fine and even good to give “no judgment” when I can but somehow never okay for me to ask? With that outlook, what am I really saying about people who do ask?

It’s a thing I’ve recognized and made incremental progress on since I was a tot but it’s still my biggest struggle.

hackers.town: 2025-01-23 Thu 10:41

Also a very big update to Stardeus, with revamped space travel, grabbing ships from Steam Workshop, and enough balancing / quality of life changes that it looks like a new game.

Stardeus - Stardeus “Hyperspace” Major Update - Steam News

#Stardeus #FediGames

hackers.town: 2025-01-23 Thu 11:01

@Scmbradley it feels like each of the last several updates involved a major reworking of important mechanics. Definitely worth poking at it again.

hackers.town: 2025-01-23 Thu 11:32

We got a nice coffee cup for family a while back, sent it off last month, and got an action pic back this morning and I couldn’t help noticing the nearby can of lighter fluid with cigarette ash right h*ckin’ next to it and

well

this is consistent risk evaluation for that family member

hackers.town: 2025-01-23 Thu 13:52

any job listing says “skill with $niche_language or excitement to learn” I will fscking apply and then go look up $niche_language I do not even care because I am always in that category.

hackers.town: 2025-01-23 Thu 14:00

Though whenever they used “skill with $x or excitement to learn” over the last couple decades, the number of languages I have had to look up and find out what language they were talking about has been exactly zero.

Skill? Not yet, at least not with $x. Enthusiastic curiosity? Every day.

hackers.town: 2025-01-23 Thu 14:55

The job application form said “upload anything” so I gave them one of my drawings.

Look they said poetry was an option and when your response rate is already near zero, why TF not.

hackers.town: 2025-01-23 Thu 15:03

@ireneista The folks I’ve know who worked at Microsoft (since back in the 90s, when I was serving coffee and they were customer phone support) have pretty much never mirrored the folks who run Microsoft.

So, yeah.

hackers.town: 2025-01-23 Thu 17:58

Knowing how quiet the cats’ normal vocalizations are, and how any meow of theirs we can hear is basically them shouting, and then how loud they get when meal prep is happening, I sometimes wonder how their dinner time demands sound to them.

hackers.town: 2025-01-23 Thu 18:20

Currently: trying to figure out if the code I haven’t touched in eight months was already broken when I got bored, or if something new happened in a dependency or in the files I’m processing.

hackers.town: 2025-01-23 Thu 21:10

@dandean I caught that tone when he talked about AI.

Unlike say Simon Willison, who is downright enthusiastic about LLMs but readily points out both technical shortcomings and the broader issues of their training data and power requirements, this guy spent way more time (when I was still paying attention to him) on the tone and how mean people are being about AI. A very whataboutism kind of feel.

hackers.town: 2025-01-23 Thu 21:14

@webology Those would be interesting conversations to have, I’m sure.

hackers.town: 2025-01-23 Thu 21:21

@webology honestly I’m still trying to understand the utility of the domain myself, but I haven’t buried myself in it or anything. I know there’s more than what I see. My particular pattern-matching brain mostly zooms in on the bits that don’t work right.

But it’s here and it’s here to stay in one form or another, so I’ll get the hang of it.

hackers.town: 2025-01-23 Thu 21:30

@webology All right, thanks! There’s some things I want to parse, so I have a use case. I’ll check out PydanticAI.