Lockpicking Floppies!

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.

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.

Do I look like I know what an MPEG is?

di i look like i know what an mpeg is

do i liook like i pw what am ,[eg os

So someone on IRC mentioned the ending(s) to Zero Wing and I found out there's a cheat code to skip to it. I thought it might have some more "All your base" style dialogue I could put in the generator, but I really wasn't prepared for what ending #1 looked like

ending #2 is some very thin credits

ending #3 is reportedly the "true ending", at least on the European release. The Japanese version has 35 endings.

This one is... more serious? a little?

The other 32 endings are translated here, by

functionally all the japanese endings work like this. you get CONGRATULATIONS and then CATS says something to you.
usually something silly, or possibly the debug menu cheat code

I'm watching these videos about the Georgia Phone Call and they're talking about if Dominion did any kind of weird hacks, and all I'm thinking is:

I need to get a voting machine.

Yeah, it turns out if you select the party vote option and toggle it Democrat-Republican-Democrat then tap the Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen three times, you'll trigger the Easter egg and you can play DOOM!

Set your location to California, vote no on Prop 22, party vote democrats and select the Green presidential campaign Howie Hawkins, then toggle Prop 22 to yes, then longpress "reset ballot" and you'll get rickrolled.

This is how my brain works. "the voting machines could be hacked! The president might be trying to steal the election! What should I do?

Oh yeah, get a screwdriver and make a voting machine play DOS games."

I wonder if they're still x86 based? The last time we had a big electronic voting scandal, of the they were... But now we're in the arm era.

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.

Torn between "I think losing $100 million when someone beats you at security research is pretty much exactly what you signed up for doing yield farming" and "Maaaaaaaybe not the future of finance you were expecting, huh."

How to put this in regular finance terms...

Suppose hypothetically you have an account at a brokerage with some valuable asset in it. You take a margin loan against that asset to fund your normal spending, or pay a tax bill, or maybe buy something at another brokerage.

For reasons known only to the brokerage, they don't denominate your loan in dollars. They denominate it in shares of a money market fund, which are worth $1 +/- epsilon and basically never deviate from that.

And you think "Hmm, I have a large equity cushion against this loan."

One day, a computer system at the brokerage reports, sorta-kinda erroneously, that the value of the money market fund is actually $1.30 per share. The equity cushion is gone. Your valuable asset is sold, at timing you didn't choose, at wrong price, to pay an inflated phantom debt

And your recourse is... probably tweeting at patio11 saying he finds too much joy in this.

Which I don't; I just feel like this is why you don't trust a CPU built out of redstone to build reliable financial infrastructure on top of.

I’ve been flooded with Snapchat Spotlight questions after posting I’ve qualified for a payout 4 times. Here are the answers to the most common questions I’ve gotten in my DMs. These answers are my own experience and may differ from others .

Q: How will I know if I am getting paid?
A: You will get a message from Team Snapchat that looks like the below message 2-3 weeks after the snap has gone live. At this point it important that you verify your email address.

Q: How long after I’ve been notified I qualify, will I know for how much?
A: my experience is that usually 7-10 days after you get the qualifying message, you get a message with the amount, it will look like this. This message will include a unique access code for HyperWallet.

Q: How do I set up my HyperWallet?
A: Around three weeks after you get the payment amount you will get an email to your verified email from Snapchat Pay. It will look like this and will require you to fill out some tax forms, takes like 10 min.

Q: How long does it take to actually get the money in my account?
A: it took me like 7 days from when I had my HyperWallet approved before I got the money into my HyperWallet account. I recommend you set up auto withdraw. You can send money to PayPal, Venmo or bank account.

A thread about Eastshade's bike mechanic!

When I originally thought of putting a bicycling in Eastshade, I was pretty sure it wasn't going to work, for the simple fact that if it was easy, we'd see a lot more rideable bikes in games. Well, I was wrong. It took a mere week.

Its essentially a first person controller with extra momentum, resulting in the the movement direction lagging behind your look direction. Then I used the angle between the look and the movement to dictate camera "bank" and handle bar rotation, and voila! Game changing feature!

The look of the bike was harder than the movement. Bicycles are fairly modern, so it was tricky to fit it to the setting. I took some artistic liberties and settled on a penny farthing (but wooden), ignoring how impossible that would be to ride on the rugged terrain in Eastshade.

Surprisingly, the hardest part was sound. It didn't feel like riding a bike until I found the right sounds and how to trigger them. For a while I was stuck thinking too realistically. A penny farthing is fixed gear, pedaling sounds nothing like a regular modern bike.

Finally I abandoned realism and went with sounds normal people would associate with biking. We're all so used to modern bikes that we strongly associate the distinct ticking of a freewheel mechanism (think of the sound when you stop pedaling and coast on a modern bike).