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warvair | 8 months ago | on: A compact bitset implementation used in Ocarina of Time save files

This seems quite nice. Simple bit-shifting of the 16-bit ID gives both the index into the array of 16-bit words and the bit in the word and allows up to 65536 bitflags. This makes for a very efficient and easy to implement bitflag set/check system given these constraints.

warvair | 1 year ago | on: I Am Tired of AI

90% of everything is crap. Perhaps AI will make that 99% in the future. OTOH, maybe AI will slowly convert that 90% into 70% crap & 20% okay. As long as more stuff that I find good gets created, regardless of the percentage of crap I have to sift through, I'm down.

warvair | 1 year ago | on: What happens in a mind that can't 'see' mental images

I think there's a profound difference in the aural vs. visual experience. For me, imaginging songs, "hearing" an earworm, even for songs in other languages, I think I'm using my inner monolouge system. Instead of thinking, I'm "inner humming". The profound difference being, we can produce sounds, we can sing, hum, go "ba-doom-tish!" in our heads. But we can't (at least I can't) produce visions at will. I must be able to in some sense because I remember things I "saw" in dreams. And I can get a sense of places I know - usually the best remembered are from my childhood. Things that I've remembered a hundred times. But if you ask me to imagine an apple, there's nothing to be seen even though I can think of its shape, and details and draw what I'm thinking of, which is basically a memory of an apple. However, at night, with eyes closed when drifting off to sleep, if I think about what my closed eyes are "seeing" I can get very vague impressions of random things. On occasion I've been able to influence what pops in there to an extent but I can't do it on command. What I think is happening here is there's enough noise in my visual processing that lines up to remind me of something - a house, a tree and my brain fillsin the rest. But even this is like a looking at a photographic negative with candlelight that goes out after 250 ms.

warvair | 2 years ago | on: USB hubs, printers, Java, and more seemingly broken by macOS 14.4 update

Strangely enough, at about the time this macOS update came out, the virtual USB hub in my Win7 VM (Fusion 11.5.7), which I run on a Catalina (10.15.7) Mac broke. This is after years of no issues. I didn't update anything except maybe Chrome & Tailscale on the Mac, maybe Firefox & Cisco Anyconnect on the VM. No changes to the VM settings or the devices I normaly plug into the Mac's USB. Now I did update a MBP on the same network to macOS 14.4 when it came out, but how could that affect anything?

warvair | 2 years ago | on: A reason for high housing prices: restrictive land-use regulations

Why doesn't anyone mention real estate agents/agencies when talking about housing prices? When I bought my first home in the early 90s it seemed like a confidence game back then and it's only gotten worse since. What I'm basically talking about is everyone in the business of selling homes, including "your" agent gaslighting you into thinking that home prices will always go up. "You should by this now. You can't lose money. This is a great investment." In recent years it's been "You should offer 20% over asking." It used to make some sense that prices would generally go up for well built/maintained homes in good neighborhoods but that nod to sanity went out the door when AirBnB came along.

warvair | 4 years ago | on: Guide to Firefox Containers (2018)

I have the same issue, but I don't see the same thing.

I have bookmarks set up with URLs like your first set:

  company1.sigin.aws.amazon.com
  ...
But as soon as I click one, it gets redirected to:

  signin.aws.amazon.com/oauth?<War and Peace>
Which is interpreted as the same URL for all accounts.

One solution would be to have FF containers tie into the bookmark editing code so we can set the container by bookmark. That is, when I click a bookmark with a container set, that container should be used to open the site regardless of the URL.

warvair | 5 years ago | on: America's True Unemployment Rate

You're right, I was skim-reading it as a few thousands (and jumping to conclusions). Not sure what's going on with that dip.

Edit: It would be interesting to compare this to an up-to-date graph of US deaths (all kinds), if one exists.

warvair | 6 years ago | on: Mathematics for the Adventurous Self-Learner

Might want to ask current students about those classes first.

My experience with community college math developmental classes was: "Go to this AV room, watch these videos, do these workbooks. If you have questions, I have office hours on these days.". Which was terrible. I did have someone I could come to with things I didn't understand, but it was obviously not something they liked doing and you had little choice about the material used.

This was decades ago, but I'm betting that now it's: "Watch these Youtube videos, do these workbooks. If you have questions, ask them in our online forums." Which is likely worse than just doing your own thing.

warvair | 6 years ago | on: iTerm2 3.3

I wasn't even thinking about local term vs. remote until you mentioned it, but you're right.

I guess it's because I don't use a Mac very often and when I do I don't usually have a reason to use the local terminal. I find that's true on Windows as well, I don't often need to use the command line.

OTOH, I'm SSHed into remote Linux servers 40+ hours a week.

warvair | 6 years ago | on: iTerm2 3.3

Pease test ZOC Terminal: https://www.emtec.com/zoc/.

I use it on Windows, like it very much, and don't notice any lag. I'm wondering how it compares to the rest of these on a Mac.

warvair | 10 years ago | on: SoftICE: a kernel mode debugger for Windows

Jeez, where's the tribute page/retro-computing documentary on this guy? I remember these pages fondly from a decade or more ago and I have looked for them from time to time in the past few years without luck. But I don't know anything about Fravia (other than what's on his "about" page. Did he actually pass away?
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