https://i.redd.it/19vjgctmwvjg1.png

One reason Norway does so well at the Winter Olympics is that their flag contains the flags of six other countries, which confuses the scoring system.

https://www.futilitycloset.com/2012/02/17/united-nations-2/

i always admired those “engineer” characters in media who could cobble something together from the spare parts in the junkyard that were lying around into a useable device the service the furthering of the plot and get the protagonists out of a sticky situation.

normal maps and bump maps are…

I’ve been kind of obsessed with Parcel Simulator lately and I definitely recommend giving it a try if you:

• are autistic about organization
• like sorting things
• like incremental/automation games

it’s basically like Papers Please except you’re sorting packages, and over time you unlock ways to automate more and more of the package sorting. it is so addictive and it’s so satisfying to automate away a particularly annoying step in the package inspection process

unfriendly reminder that halo uses .ass files which contain poop objects. in case you need documentation, microsoft has you covered

Hover to show content

random question but, when using a #Lisp how do I look up forms to use? like for example let’s say that I’m new to Scheme and I want to know how to get input from the user, and then turn that input into a number

how would I look up the names of the forms that would do those things for me?

with Janet I went through all ~360 top-level forms and created a categorized cheat sheet for myself, with categories like “for handling errors” and “for organizing data structures”. but that took hours and was really laborious, and most Lisps have way more than 360 top-level forms so that would be pretty impractical

I’m starting to think that maybe monads are only a useful concept in languages without union types, or languages without type-checking - and the reason why I can’t understand their value is because I don’t use the type of language that would benefit from them

I’ve heard a few different arguments for why monads are helpful but they all either don’t make sense to me (their explanation for why monads are better expects me to make an inference that I can’t) or they only make sense in a language with limitations that most popular scripting languages don’t have (for example, a language where any primitive can be null and you have to manually check all the time)

My lovelies, I want to hear the wonderful stories of how your name came to you. True or fanciful, poetic or prosaic, how did you meet your name?

#Trans #TransJoy

This is a
Conduit
Through
Which I
Can hold
You for
Just a
Moment.
Hello, you
Are loved.

#poetry

I hate feeling limited by a programming language. I want the language to adapt to how I conceptualize the problem, instead of being forced to adapt to how the language can conceptualize the problem. and statically typed languages feel really limiting to me. like you can only do the things that you can explain to the type system, and I feel like the type system is either:

• kinda dumb and very limited on purpose (C#, C)
• so complex that you basically have to learn a whole new branch of advanced math to understand how to use it properly (Rust, Haskell)

although on the other hand, I wonder if folks who are used to statically typed languages find dynamically typed languages to be scary because they let you get away with so much bullshit lol

they should make a Soulslike where dodge-rolls have no iframes whatsoever just to piss everyone off

Draculo is now streaming!! Come and join the fun!!!

Doom: Hideous Destructor Co-op !!

#retro #gaming #foss #linux #games #streaming #videogames #owncast

https://secret.draculo.net

I am no longer the girl I was
But someone altogether new
Assembled from the pieces of
Everything I once was
And everything I have come to be
Yet incomplete
Still evolving
Into what, perhaps
I was always meant to be

https://tiefling.bardicperspiration.com/index.php/2026/02/08/evolving/

#writing #poetry

genuine question: what is actually gained from DDR5 memory in a practical sense? theoretically much higher bandwidth, yes, but I don’t know how important that actually is for anything that matters

this will be long winded, sorry

on the average desktop/laptop, I’m not even sure DDR4 was a notable gain. the theoretical bandwidth was straight up identical in the early days, there wasn’t really a significant bump there until DDR4-3200 became commonplace, and even then, it’s not the kind of difference that will be noticed by anyone other than the 1% of people who know what that means, how to spot the difference, and actually do things that benefit from the difference. prefetch is the same, latency isn’t meaningfully different either. the biggest improvement that I can see is that the voltage was significantly lowered, which is cool I guess. I’m quite sure that most people could use a computer with DDR3 memory today and be completely fine, as long as the processor holds up, which is the real bottleneck here anyway

but DDR5? I just plain don’t know what it’s for. from the regular desktop perspective, it’s just annoying more than anything, and it created a brand new issue for novice pc builders to be terrified by, being extremely long memory training times where the computer is on but with a black screen for anywhere from a minute to many minutes. I’ve seen a lot of people rave about the “on-die ECC” that DDR5 has, but that is very much not what people think it is, regular DDR5 memory is no more stable than anything that came before it, that “ECC” is only there as a band-aid fix for the instability inherent to the incredibly high clock rates. the performance difference between DDR4 and DDR5 on the same processor (thanks intel for making alder lake compatible with both) looks to be between negligible and unnoticeable in all cases that a regular person would encounter, and while I’m sure there are some server workloads that would like higher memory bandwidth, I also happen to know that you can run basically any web software you want with a $20 single board computer, so I don’t care about that. and of course I am Very Aware of The Datacenters and what they do with the stuff these days

but in the end, the only thing I know is that I don’t know. there must be some real, actual, good reason for this, other than just making numbers go up. is there some kind of real, actual science being done that eats up memory bandwidth that DDR5 was a revelation for? anything other than machine learning, neural networks, or computer vision

the more I look at modern computing, the more I begin to feel that computing died a decade ago. performance keeps increasing on paper, but in the real world, it matters less and less, without considering the added problem of software being made worse as the concept of optimization dies at the hands of productivity

if there really is an honest to goodness practical use for DDR5 that truly justifies its existence in a way that I can see and can be explained to the average non-techy person as well, then maybe I’ll become a little less pessimistic

but on the other hand, I kind of feel like a much cooler path forward for computing at this point would be for older architectures to be revived and reworked with a laser focus on power efficiency. that would be great for everyone. and if super high powered and high bandwidth stuff really is still needed for some things, it can stay in the datacenter as its own separate thing