BC SOFTWARE
Saved by @CodyyyGardner

I'm pretty sure whoever designed this control usually makes gender selectors for websites...

Poly Bridge has a language SLIDER.

 all languages exist on a spectrum from English to 한국어
next I want to see a game with a "choose language" button and it brings up this language map like it's a skill tree
gonna spend 200 XP to unlock Tamil
that's from here:
https://t.co/QaV1tKK4oa
also I'm not saying this game's online leaderboards have been exploited, but the top 15 (at least) scores for this level spent zero dollars on their bridge.

so they won without placing any bridge pieces? that sounds hard.
I thought I'd finally try Poly Bridge 2 to see if it has the same language slider but, uh, it doesn't seem to work as well
I think it just didn't like me alt-tabbing away to mute it.

Sadly, no: they've moved to a much more sensible drop-down
Poly Bridge 2: Just Like Poly Bridge 1, but we upgraded our UI toolkit!
I want a game where all the options are sliders
jump key: [slider from the top left key on the keyboard to the bottom right]
online leaderboard playername:
name length: [slider 1-10]
letter 1: [slider a-z]
letter 2: [slider a-z]
letter 3: [slider a-z]
good to see that Poly Bridge 2 inherits the mouse control bug where it always applies the mousewheel movement even when the game isn't the active window
I'm alt-tabbed over to twitter and as I scroll up and down the poly bridge 2 window is just zooming in and out
so one of the Neat New Features of Poly Bridge 2 is the replays system. Along with making your own bridge and comparing prices on the clearly-hacked leadboards, you can now view other player's solutions!
so obviously I want to know how this works. There's two obvious ways it might work:
1. the leaderboard contains videos. these are just mp4 files of the game being played
2. the leaderboard contains the data for the bridge designs, and it's being rendered in-game
the fact that it shows them all in a little window does make me think they're just video files, though.

and even though people aren't hacking 0$ wins into the leaderboard now doesn't mean they aren't cheating. They just do it with physics, not RAM hacking
here's one that shows a bit better what's happening.
They made a "bridge" which is a bit of dense road that falls and crushes the car, but since cars can't "crush", the physics engine ends up squirting them out like a watermelon seed
ok, three things I've figured out from wireshark:
1. it's talking to cloudflare
2. it's using TLS
3. it's probably about 750 kilobytes for one playback
TLS means I can't super-easily tell how it works.
and #1 and #3 mean it's probably just videos. tiny videos.
of course now the question is:
does it compress the videos in the client and upload them to the server?

or does it upload the solution to the server and let it render them?
because if it's #1, I might could beat a level with the video of Never Gonna Give You Up.
not that I would ever do such a thing, of course.
anyway I could now MITM the game and see into the TLS connections... it doesn't have a proxy setting, but it probably uses the IE one.
And thank fuck for that, because I'd hate to configure my proxy using a slider.

More from foone

foone
foone
@Foone
I went looking for a remote-controlled power switch (the wireless christmas kind, not the modern IoT kind) and didn't find it, but I did find this thing I bought just to figure out why it exists.
It's a timer outlet, but you program it from your phone... but it's not wireless.


Yeah instead it plugs into your phone's HEADPHONE PORT


I got it on sale.
probably because iphone dropped the headphone port and they had to get with the 21st century and make it bluetooth


So inside the box is the device. it's got a little 2-prong polarized outlet with no ground.


on top is the only controls: on/off/timer.
TECH
foone
foone
@Foone
So I got out some CF cards and noticed something odd about this one. Do you see the weirdness?


How the fuck is a CF card "USB Enabled"?


So CF cards are a weird beast that act as either a PCMCIA card or an ATA/IDE card depending on a mode pin.

They're definitely not USB.

And it's not like that weird SanDisk card I have which you can fold in half and plug it in as a USB device.


It turns out the reason for "USB Enabled" is because it's a Lexar drive from the jumpSHOT era.
This is a normal CF card in most cases, you can use it in normal CF card readers and such
FUN
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foone
foone
@Foone
love to see a youtube video that references a script that's linked in the comments and it's an obfuscated link to a one-click hoster.

THAT'S DEFINITELY STILL GONNA WORK IN FOUR YEARS

it does still work, but that's because it's only been 2 years.

also, wow, this is horrible.

the script is to generate random kanji/han characters and insert them into minecraft books.
but the video references there being two hotkeys to generate two distinct books, which seemed odd. so I thought I'd check.

it turns out by "random" they mean "pre-randomized and is hardcoded into the 45 kilobyte autohotkey scripot"


I mean, I get it. I don't want to write AutoHotKey scripts either. it's a horrible, horrible language.

BUT STILL
CULTURE
foone
foone
@Foone
A fun fact on the wikipedia page for the metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor:
it is the most frequently manufactured device in history, and the total number manufactured from 1960-2018 is 13 sextillion.

That's 13,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.


Though this picture is a bit misleading.

Even with devices this small, we couldn't make 13 sextillion of them in 60 years.

So imagine a chip like this. It's the 555 timer, which is one of the most popular integrated circuits ever made.

In 2017, it was estimated a billion are made every year.


And at the heart of it is the die, which looks like this:
(from Ken Shirriff's blog)
https://t.co/mz5PQDjYqF


And that's fundamentally a bunch of CMOS transistors (along with some diodes and resistors), which are a type of MOSFET. How many of them are on a 555?

about 25. Not many, but it's a very simple chip.
TECH
foone
foone
@Foone
1. in the beginning, browsers didn't have download statusbars
2. firefox got a browser statusbar extension. it was configurable and worked well
3. chrome cloned it without options and it didn't work as well

4. firefox realized chrome was faster and more secure at everything and therefore dropped extensions
5. now firefox doesn't have a download statusbar either

6. someone reimplements download statusbars in firefox's new web-extensions format. it's terrible because of the inherent limitations of the significantly less flexible and powerful extension format

7. CHROME WINS! (with its terrible download statusbar implementation which can't be fixed by users, because No Options and No Skins and No Extensions)

this is where we are now
SOFTWARE

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Opemipo: The 15-year-old developer\U0001f680
Opemipo: The 15-year-o...
@coderoflagos
Here are some resources you need as a designer/developer to work on your level of productivity.👨‍💻🍀

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1. Focusmate: Focusmate changes the way you work by connecting you to other professionals who have committed to being accountable for finishing their most important

2. Habitica: Habitica is a free habit and productivity app that treats your real life like a game. Habitica can help you achieve your goals to become healthy and

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1/ In early 2004 we were heads down executing on Edit and Continue across a large contingent of teams. There had been several iterations of scoping, redesigns, and customer feedback.

2/ We had a weekly meeting every Thursday morning when representatives from each of the teams would get together and review progress. It was fairly heavy weight, but there were so many teams involved that it was necessary to have a regular sync.

3/ Regardless, E&C was coalescing, but teams were stretched thin working diligently to enable scenarios, improve performance, fix bugs, etc. It had been a month or so since we decided to add support for C# to the matrix as well, so folks were a bit stressed.

4/ That set the stage for the meeting that we had on the first Thursday in April. A debugger PM named Habib Heydarian ran the meeting and after a brief intro he gave me a ring to come in and present.

5/ I walked in and handed out a document that I had written up, titled DCR: C# Edit and Continue for Venus. DCR meant design change request, and Venus was the design-time code name for ASP .NET support.
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Mark Newton Total Landscaping Supplies
Mark Newton Total Land...
@NewtonMark
It's incredibly hard to become a customer of @Telstra so you can give them money. They absolutely despise money, and do everything in their power to erect as many obstacles as possible in the way of a normal person establishing a billing relationship with them.

First: "I'd like to buy a 4G WiFi hotspot please."
"Umm, we don't have any. Maybe try K-Mart."

Are you serious? You can't sell me a mobile broadband service, and you'd prefer me to go to a department store. Okay...

So I go to the department store, and they have the same Telstra product $20 cheaper than Telstra does.

Go to activate it. Error message, SIM serial number has already been activated. Well goddamn.

So, back to the @Telstra shop. "Yes, I know I can return the whole thing, but all I want is a $2 SIM to get started. Can you just sell me one of those?"

No. They don't have any. Zero SIMs in the store.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME? WHAT OTHER PURPOSE DOES A TELSTRA SHOP HAVE?

Their first suggestion was to buy one from @AusPost, but they take 24 hours to activate their prepaid SIMs. Maybe try Woolies?
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Matt Bennett
Matt Bennett
@LongvueMatt
There is real opportunity to:

- scale a HoldCo
- focused on a portfolio of software & digital-forward assets
- serving niche and/or traditionally sleepy verticals

A playbook to follow...

But first... why is there opportunity?

- software is eating the world (& APIs are eating software)
- there are great product opp's for those who know where to look
- theres no real competition
- SaaS/subscription is the best delivery model out there (build once, sell twice+)

And why now?

We’re entering what I call the ‘Deployment Era’ ... where more traditional (sleepy) businesses will increasingly leverage software/tech to improve their model

And the best part is... we're on the front-end of riding this longer-term wave

So what does this mean?

Software (& other digital-first products) will eat more of the ‘traditional SMB’ stack

But most aren’t focused here bc it isn’t sexy or cool…

Which is where the opp is for those who have the right deal nose & know what to build & for who

There is big opportunity to build/scale in overlooked places...

Where you can build/acquire assets that have the best econ delivery model (SaaS/sub), w/ low competition, where you have an inside edge/know everyone in industry, & can do it when no one is looking
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Abhiram Reddy
Abhiram Reddy
@nrabhiram
It’s been a minute since I’ve written code. So, I figured that now might be a good time to start learning how to use the Blueprint system in #UnrealEngine. I felt that it’d be interesting to share my progress and mistakes. So here goes!
🧵

1.
Firstly, I made use of the auto-rigging feature in Mixamo to give my character a skeleton. This allows you to use the Mixamo animations for the character in Unreal Engine.


2.
In the Animation Blueprint, I tried to add a punching state to the character. The problem I faced initially was that the character glides while punching. This occurs because multiple states of the animation are active (as their transition conditions are satisfied).


3.
There are a couple of solutions for this:

👉Blending the punch and idle states (character can punch while running) by using the Layered Blend Per Bone node.

👉Disabling input while the punch occurs.


4.
I didn’t like the outcome when I blended the animations. as the hip rotates more than we’d like it to. This leads to the character punching upwards and to the left. This isn’t favorable as the enemy is usually straight ahead. Disabling the input worked way better!
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Shocking fact: Millennial men are less likely to work than any other age and gender demographic in America.

Today, there are 500,000 young men missing from the U.S. workforce.

Research suggests video games & improved leisure tech plays a role in the problem. 👇 Thread:

Following the 2007 to 2009 recession, 25 to 34 year old men exited high school with fewer middle-skill job opportunities than years prior.

During this time, we saw an increased number of men living with parents & choosing unemployment over lower paying jobs.

It's estimated that 24M millennials live w/ their parents.

1 in 4 living in their parents’ home neither go to school nor work.

What's more surprising? 9 in 10 who lived with their parents a year ago are still living there w/ no plans to leave.

Economists are calling millennial men a lost generation.

According to economist David Dorn:

“If you get to the point where you’re turning 30, you’ve never held a real job and you don’t have a college education, then it is very hard to recover at that point.”

Economists suggest this choosiness is a generational trait.

Forbes interview w/ a high school educated man:

"I’m very quick to get frustrated when people refuse to pay me what I’m worth."
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अस्य श्री गायत्री ध्यान श्लोक:
(gAyatri dhyAna shlOka)
• This shloka to meditate personified form of वेदमाता गायत्री was given by Bhagwaan Brahma to Sage yAgnavalkya (याज्ञवल्क्य).

• 14th shloka of गायत्री कवचम् which is taken from वशिष्ठ संहिता, goes as follows..


• मुक्ता-विद्रुम-हेम-नील धवलच्छायैर्मुखस्त्रीक्षणै:।
muktA vidruma hEma nIla dhavalachhAyaiH mukhaistrlkShaNaiH.

• युक्तामिन्दुकला-निबद्धमुकुटां तत्वार्थवर्णात्मिकाम्॥
yuktAmindukalA nibaddha makutAm tatvArtha varNAtmikam.

• गायत्रीं वरदाभयाङ्कुश कशां शुभ्रं कपालं गदाम्।
gAyatrIm vardAbhayANkusha kashAm shubhram kapAlam gadAm.

• शंखं चक्रमथारविन्दयुगलं हस्तैर्वहन्ती भजै॥
shankham chakramathArvinda yugalam hastairvahantIm bhajE.

This shloka describes the form of वेदमाता गायत्री.

• It says, "She has five faces which shine with the colours of a Pearl 'मुक्ता', Coral 'विद्रुम', Gold 'हेम्', Sapphire 'नील्', & a Diamond 'धवलम्'.

• These five faces are symbolic of the five primordial elements called पञ्चमहाभूत:' which makes up the entire existence.

• These are the elements of SPACE, FIRE, WIND, EARTH & WATER.

• All these five faces shine with three eyes 'त्रिक्षणै:'.
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What The Trans!?
What The Trans!?
@WhatTheTrans
A thread on how absurd the UK is on transgender issues and how the UK got so transphobic

In 2015 Parliament held an inquiry looking into the state of Transgender equality. Trans people of all stripes outlined many different problems across many, many different areas.

As a result Parliament created a list of recommendations including legal recognition for non binary people, gender recognition act reform, allowing 16 year olds to change their legal gender and reform of NHS gender identity services.

The government under Theresa May ignored everything that was recommended except for Gender recognition act reform. This act came into law in 2003 and gave trans men and women (but not non-binary people) the ability to legally change their gender on their birth certificates.

The process at that time to change your birth certificate under the GRA was to make an application to a panel of cisgender people who would decide if you were sufficiently trans based on your payslips, photo ID and bank statements. You would not get the option to speak to them.

(Also this process cost £140 which is just a tax on being trans)
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Bharadwaj
Bharadwaj
@BharadwajSpeaks
Hinduism is a minority religion in Punjab.

During the Khalistan movement, the minority Hindus and Jains were subjected to several attacks. Hindu and Jain temples were frequently vandalized and desecrated. This thread documents a few instances.

Thread

Durgiana Mandir is one of the oldest temples of Amritsar. According to the regional Hindu tradition, the temple was built on the spot where Lava and Kusha bound Hanuman. The temple annually attracts millions of Hindus from all over the country.


Amristsar has a very ancient Hindu history.

According to the regional Hindu tradition recorded in the "Survey of Amritsar", Amritsar got its name from Amrit immersed by Lava and Kusha in a pond.


Durgiana Mandir was rebuilt in 1921.

It was used to house the Murtis of Vishnu and Durga which were thrown out from the Parikrama of Harmandir Sahib in 1905.

Because of its presence in Amritsar, it became a frequent target of radicals during the Khalistan movement.


In 1982, in what was a completely unprovoked attack, the Dal Khalsa "activists" threw a severed cow head inside Durgiana temple.
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Em\U0001f383jipedia \U0001f4d9
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