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
You want to know something about how bullshit insane our brains are?
OK, so there's a physical problem with our eyes: We move them in short fast bursts called "saccades", right? very quick, synchronized movements.
The only problem is: they go all blurry and useless during this

having your vision turn into a blurry mess every time you move your eyes is obviously not a good idea, so our brains hide it from us. Now, imagine you're an engineer and you have this problem.

You've got some obvious solutions you could do.
1. make the vision go black during movement. (Some VR games do this!)
2. just keep showing the last thing we saw prior to movement

both are good options with different downsides, but OH NO. this is assuming everything makes sense and is chronological and (regular) logical.
Your brain does neither of these options, really.

first, it basically puts your visual system on "pause". You're not seeing blackness or even nothing, you're just not seeing period.
then when you finish your saccade, it shows you what you now see at the new position. and then it pretends it can time travel.
ALL
foone
foone
@Foone
I was todays years old when I learned that Final Fantasy VII's Midgar Zolom is an exceptionally badly translated reference to Jörmungandr, the world serpent from Norse mythology.


The other name for Jörmungandr is Miðgarðsormr, which got rendered into katakana as ミドガルズオルム, or "Midogaruzuorumu".
But when it was translated back into English, the translator didn't get the reference.

So they split that into the city name Midgar and the rest as... "Zolom".
Which is not a word.

It was supposed to be a bit of a pun in Japanese. Midgar, the big city in FF7, is named after Midgard, the Old Norse name for the Earth (as opposed to the other realms of the Nine Worlds)

so obviously a big snake living near the city of Midgar would be the Miðgarðsormr, since that basically translate as "Midgard Serpent"
GAME
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foone
foone
@Foone
you know how Atari called the Jaguar as a "64bit system", because it had two 32bit CPUs? (or because it had a 64bit bus, but let's not worry about that)
we should apply that logic to the current generation of consoles.
So the Switch is a 256bit console. It's the Nintendo 256.

The Xbox Series X? terrible name.
Better call it the "Xbox 512 Blu-ray".
like the Jaguar CD, the Sega CD... the good old days when consoles had their media type in the name.

Boringly the PS5 is also a Playstation 512 Blu-ray, because both of them are using the same AMD Zen 2 CPU.

The Switch one is weeeird. It's built on an Nvidia Tegra X1, which is an 8 core 64-bit CPU, so that should be 512, right?

Well... no. Four of them can't be used. And later documentation doesn't even mention them.

it's some weird system where the system-on-a-chip has four Cortex-A57 cores and four Cortex-A53 cores but only the A57s are usable?
TECH
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
I didn't have a picture handy to post today for my sleep-picture, so here's an old picture of when we brought in our recliner and Babby SCSI thought it was a fun new toy to climb on


she also liked to get in the way of keyboard repair process


her favorite youtuber was @TheCaptainSauce


and sometimes she'd just hang out near the keyboard and be like "why are you reading wikipedia and not PETTING ME?"


sometimes she was unaware that an evil wizard was sneaking up on her
FUN

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foone
foone
@Foone
now that's a title screen


foolish people like to quote that "science says there are only two genders". This is incorrect.

Science instead says that in addition to the regular genders, there are 25 Science Genders, shown here. (tag yourself I'm Skull)


I have no idea how to continue with this game.
I clicked a bunch of things and the game just pauses for a second, except when I clicked electron it animated and then was replaced by... something


Quarky & Quaysoo's Turbo Science!

Turbo Science is like regular Science, but FASTER


oh I see

is this Gizmos and Gadgets but by Sierra?
SOFTWARE
John Fetterman
John Fetterman
@JohnFetterman
buffalo uses dominion scoreboard software so not really


DEAD PEOPLE SCORED FOR BUFFALO!

A truck delivered off a suitcase full of points at halftime from Canada for Buffalo.

#StopTheSteel !!!!

I’ll be submitting sworn affidavits from Steelers fans than they saw the Buffalo rigging the game but I want to emphasize that I’m not under oath.
SOFTWARE
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Yan Cui is making the AppSync Masterclass
Yan Cui is making the ...
@theburningmonk
I've gotten a few questions about Aurora Serverless v2 preview, so here's what I've learnt so far. Please feel free to chime in if I've missed anything important or got any of the facts wrong.

Alright, here goes the 🧵...

Q: does it replace the existing Aurora Serverless offering?
A: no, it lives side-by-side with the existing Aurora Serverless, which will still be available to you as "v1".

Q: Aurora Serverless v1 takes a few seconds to scale up, that's too much for our use case where we get a lot of spikes. Is that the same with v2?
A: no, v2 scales up in milliseconds, during preview the max ACU is only 32 though

Q: is the cold start for Aurora Serverless v2 still a few seconds?
A: yes, unfortunately...
Q: so if you want to avoid cold starts, what's the minimum ACU you have to run?
A: minimum ACU with v2 is 0.5

Q: does v2 still scale up in double increments, e.g. 4 ACU -> 8 ACU?
A: no, it scales up in increments of 0.5 ACUs, so it's a much tighter fit for your workload, so you'll waste less money on over-provisioned ACUs
SOFTWARE
Kenneth Cassel \U0001f40d
Kenneth Cassel 🐍...
@KennethCassel
Software engineering interview experiences don't have to be terrible.

Thread on my best software engineering interview experience.
👇🏼 (Thanks @PaulYacoubian for the idea)

Starting from the top of the funnel, I heard of this company (fintech startup, close to $1b valuation, based in NYC) from a podcast they were advertising on, and I liked the mission.

I went to their website and applied.

Their application portal used greenhouse. One page and no need for re-typing resume info.

They had an open field that said "Tell me something we should know about you".

I wrote about how I was a career switcher, had kids, went to school while working full time, etc.

Here's where they started to stand out.

They emailed me back a few days later and sent me a calendly link to schedule my first interview.

Letting the candidate choose a time for an interview is a small detail but is great for reducing candidate stress.

I scheduled my first interview. I received an email detailing what the interview would be about, what to expect, and what to prepare for. It would be a casual chat.

My interviewer mentioned and asked tons of questions about the free-response field I had filled out earlier.
SOFTWARE
John Mashey
John Mashey
@JohnMashey
@mattblaze AFAIK the only group to discover Ken’s hack was us in PWB/UNIX. One of the other guys noticed C prepreprocessor had gotten bigger, looked at binary namelist, found symbol not in source code. I got onto Ken’s system, found the code, very clever.

A bit latet, I was in Lab 127’s terminal room, talking to dmr or bwk, and overheard amusing conversation between ken and Robert Morris Sr, who sometimes consulted for NSA.
(RM Jr of worm fame was just a kid then.)

They were chortling away over cleverness of exploit. Then one (must have been ken) said “think we could put this over on NSA?” (which already had UNIX systems... we did favors now and then).
More chortling, then (must have been Bob): uhh, NSA really doesn’t have sense of humor.

PWB crew ran 1st real UNIX computer center & we were hyper-sensitive, partly because someone had called at night, told operator he was Ken Thompson & needed root password ... and got it. Turned out to be high schooler ... proving that social engineering tactics have been eternal.

Years later, as many BTL Directors were buying PDP11-70s for labs as general service systems, some PWB crew were asked to do security audits, given experience running biggest UNIX site. One lab was very proud of enhanced password software.
We did audit, agreed with that, BUT:
SOFTWARE

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What Happened To Bhakt Prahlad after Hiranyakashipu Vadh
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Prahlada attacked the gods and defeated Indra in battle, forcing the King of the Gods to run for his life. Indra sought help of Lord Vishnu. Infused with his power, Indra defeated Prahlada. The latter understood that Vishnu was helping Indra in battle and he withdrew his forces.


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Ryan Caldbeck
@ryan_caldbeck
1/ I am seeing more and more founder secondary in venture rounds (Secondary = founders selling some of their shares before some other shareholders are able). Series B-D. I see both as an investor and through entrepreneur circles.

2/ I like secondary for entrepreneurs. Moderation is key but in a lot of situations I think it helps accelerate the co. Lots of very smart investors disagree. Here are my thoughts.

3/ Magnitude: My basic rule of thumb from what I see is market is 4+ yrs and up to 10% of founder’s equity stake with some $ cap that makes sense given stage etc. (typically <$10m)

4/ The entrepreneurial journey is brutally hard. Giving some financial relief helps remove one piece of pressure. I don’t think that secondary in the magnitude mentioned impacts the drive/persistence of great entrepreneurs.

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ACHARYA SUSHRUTA and SUSHRUTA SAMHITA

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Sushruta (circa 7th or 6th century BC) was a surgeon who in present times is known as the “father of Indian medicine” and “father of plastic surgery” for inventing and developing surgical procedures. He lived in Kashi on the banks of river Ganga.(1)

His work documented in the Sushruta Samhita (compendium) is one of the oldest texts in the world on plastic surgery and regarded as one of the trilogies of Ayurveda. The other 2 being the Charaka Samhita and Astanga Hridaya.(2)

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Vibhu Vashisth
Vibhu Vashisth
@VIBHU_Tweet
Did you know?

When Saudi Arabia's King visited India in 1955, PM Nehru ordered all the Hindu Temples and Idols of Hindu Deities that came in Saudi King's way to be covered up.
Our temples are the architectural marvels in their own league.


Each of our temples tells the story of our rich history and cultural heritage. Was Nehru that ashamed of his own nation's heritage that he had to cover them up or there was some other reason? The answer would be best known to him only.

PM Nehru invited the then Saudi King Saud bin Abdul Aziz to India who accepted the invitation and planned a 17 day long official visit to India in 1955. Saudi King had brought a large delegation with him and he had to visit various Indian cities like Mumbai, Hyderabad, Agra,


Aligarh, Shimla, Mysore and Varanasi. However, when Saudi King reached Varanasi, Nehru ordered to cover all the temples and Idols with curtains that came in the way of the Royal Convoy. During his stay in Varanasi, Govt buildings were painted with the words "Kalma Tayyiba".


'Kalma Tayyiba' means 'There is not God but only Allah and Mohammed is his messenger'. In addition to it, Pooja and Aartis were also stopped at temples. I can call it the appeasement politics of the highest order and Nehru was indeed the greatest appeaser of all times.
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