Irenes (many)

AD&D second edition was the best version of D&D and we will not be moved from this position

@r@glauca.space @MaddieM4@raphus.social @mcc@mastodon.social @decay@gts.todayiwilllaunchmyinfantsonintoorbit.com @amarioguy@social.treehouse.systems the entire fucking country would collapse if not for people who made that choice at a young age, to learn despite being punished for it and it's too much to put on children. it's completely unfair.

these red butterflies are attracted to blood; a flock of them can drain a large mammal in ten minutes. their usual prey is in decline in recent years, please do a controlled feeding. feel free to consult your colleagues for practical tips on how to survive it.

now we'd just very much like to know how it got that way, but that is not a thing a crash handler can tell us. hm hmmm.

@r@glauca.space @amarioguy@social.treehouse.systems @mcc@mastodon.social @MaddieM4@raphus.social we actually have a lot of thoughts on .... the paper that introduced Unix streams was titled How shall we connect our software tools? and streams were a good answer for the problems at the time, but there's this kind of specific niche of software that's used by researchers or creative professionals or both, which has the job of playing host to everyone's algorithm experiments and managing the UI ...

@MaddieM4@raphus.social @davidgerard@circumstances.run @thekhanj@mastodon.social @datarama@hachyderm.io @deech@mastodon.social yeah, we went through a whole emotional journey about suckless. we wound up deciding that, yes, there are "good" versions of those technical virtues, which we do believe in, but the rhetoric the actual project uses to describe its technical goals has dogwhistles that ideologically tie it to futurism and to isolationism, which we hope we'll spot faster next time.... sigh ah well

endangered lava worms are a keystone species, without them both the giant spiders and the fire birds go hungry, so we need brave rangers to go out there and scrub the microplastics off their scales so they can dig better. what? a sword? no, but you can have a handheld radio

the Sphinx has requested help with ear-cleaning and expressing her anal glands. though she is a sentient being, for bureaucratic reasons we are still the responsible agency. unfortunately she has a track record of asking riddles to conservators and devouring those who fail. she claims this is a matter of instinct. for staffing reasons, we are only willing to risk a single conservator on this mission, so no teamwork, but you may check out a reference book to bring with you if you think it'll help.

@kirakira@furry.engineer this seems highly likely

chipmunks have been storing magical gems in people's chimneys, and unfortunately, touching the gems for removal causes unpredictable side-effects. this is outside our jurisdiction but as a good-will gesture, advise the mage's guild on how to dissuade the chipmunks from pelting them with gems.

@static@aus.social we read a lot of assembly code as teenagers, but only wrote a tiny bit, and it was on the Z80, which is a fine chip but we didn't enjoy it because we felt the 6502's instruction encodings were much prettier. we have a rejected 6502 wafer hanging on our wall, we like to look at it.......

@r@glauca.space @amarioguy@social.treehouse.systems @mcc@mastodon.social @MaddieM4@raphus.social and it uh involves a lot of reinventing ways for small pieces of software to play nice with each other within a single address space and UI framework, and we have thoughts on how to make that easier

@r@glauca.space @amarioguy@social.treehouse.systems @mcc@mastodon.social @MaddieM4@raphus.social like Blender is in that niche, and we've seen robotics software in that niche, and we know, because we understand the shape of human desire, that each research field must kind of have its own "workbench" program like this, or several

@r@glauca.space @MaddieM4@raphus.social @mcc@mastodon.social @decay@gts.todayiwilllaunchmyinfantsonintoorbit.com @amarioguy@social.treehouse.systems yeah, sigh, that matches our observations (and also explains why we didn't perceive it as having any actual content, as kids)

magi-ecologist's notes: "As far as anyone has ever been able to tell, there is nothing magical about goats. However, they act like they know something ecologists don't. Be careful around them."

so we did the official release yesterday, but work continues on Evocation :) currently we're working on adding support for external files, which will let us stop using those huge pipelines for the build process

@mcc@mastodon.social @amarioguy@social.treehouse.systems @MaddieM4@raphus.social there's also a thing where... our friends who do CPU stuff don't seem to think riscv is going to be outside of the systems of oppression that cause trouble, and we do for sure see how stuff like core layout and fabrication are bottlenecks that allow hegemony to form... by all means a GPU that's as open as riscv is would be awesome, but there's more to aspire to

you know the site of that battle with the necromancer, 800 years ago? with all the walking skeletons? the skeletons are outside our remit as they're not alive, but a traveler recently reported seeing a finch that was thought extinct, nesting in their skulls. please see if you can verify this. don't destroy any skeletons, they're registered historical artifacts.

next up is labels, there's no way around it. ironically these are only a couple lines of code to add, we've already written it (though there will be other places it needs to touch too, once we have this bit working) unfortunately we have a mystery crash which crashes in a way that our crash handler can't diagnose

a poacher killed one of the aquatic gorillas yesterday, deeply tragic, and we need you to place some wards in the hope of catching them in the act next time. the gorillas are very smart and are likely to mistake you for a poacher, but don't worry, they're not the most dangerous thing in the lake.

@static@aus.social yeah, that makes more sense to us as well. we didn't have an opinion on it before this year, but we now feel we've done enough that we do...

@r@glauca.space @amarioguy@social.treehouse.systems @mcc@mastodon.social @MaddieM4@raphus.social we did know that. it's a big task. we think the immediate next step is to try to list out all the important types of simulation and what they're used for.

@r@glauca.space @MaddieM4@raphus.social @mcc@mastodon.social @decay@gts.todayiwilllaunchmyinfantsonintoorbit.com @amarioguy@social.treehouse.systems it makes us really angry that the only way to actually learn anything in the US is to decide that you're fucking well going to learn what you think is important even though everyone in authority will punish you for doing so and you'll have to put up with twenty years of insults about your intelligence

@r@glauca.space @MaddieM4@raphus.social @mcc@mastodon.social @decay@gts.todayiwilllaunchmyinfantsonintoorbit.com @amarioguy@social.treehouse.systems thank you! very helpful list sigh, yes. maybe we can beat some swords into paintbrushes though...

the game should also have a repeatable quest where you add bits of data on the daily habits of each skeleton to help future conservators identify which is which

you will recall that the crash handler is also our code, so before we fix it we also need to figure out why it's not saying anything useful...

@MaddieM4@raphus.social @r@glauca.space @mcc@mastodon.social @decay@gts.todayiwilllaunchmyinfantsonintoorbit.com @amarioguy@social.treehouse.systems it's the schools to blame, and the policymakers who decided it should be that way. it was never your fault. 💜

@r@glauca.space @MaddieM4@raphus.social @mcc@mastodon.social @decay@gts.todayiwilllaunchmyinfantsonintoorbit.com @amarioguy@social.treehouse.systems (since we already had that way of thinking from self-study done at the expense of our grades and against the wishes of our teachers)

a hidden option on the Sphinx quest is that you have better odds of survival if you wear ear protection, though in this case you will have to find a way to convey your intentions through pantomime

@r@glauca.space @MaddieM4@raphus.social @mcc@mastodon.social @decay@gts.todayiwilllaunchmyinfantsonintoorbit.com @amarioguy@social.treehouse.systems say more about what's in-scope for "signals and systems" as a curriculum?

@munin@infosec.exchange strace does part of that...

a cloud serpent and a flying squid picked a fight with each other over an inhabited region. several of the squid's tentacles became detached, and as you know, their barbs are spring-loaded and remain active. assist with cleanup.

there's a plausible future in which software development ceases to be a viable business model because executives are unable to restrain their own greed, and push to race as fast as possible by using generated code, while refusing to believe that there needs to be somebody at the company who understands how it works

as an anarchist we don't really see institution-building as a particularly great theory of change it might have something to do with having wound up at odds with organizations we created, you know? that bit of personal history might make the seemingly abstract concern feel a lot more concrete to us. just speculation but to whatever extent you do end up building institutions anyway (and there are reasons to, even so), remember that preventing Nazi takeover is mandatory. you must have a strategy for that.

we've been tracking the migration patterns of the giant flying squid, and we finally figured out where they set down to drink water on their way south. unfortunately the carnivorous flamingos there have become toxic to them due to pollution, so to keep the squid from eating the flamingos, make a lot of noise to get the squid to attack you instead, then run for your life

you get the idea :)

@r@glauca.space @amarioguy@social.treehouse.systems @mcc@mastodon.social @MaddieM4@raphus.social speaking as someone with some modest success in tech labor organizing, the trick is to dangle a shiny thing just out of reach :3

there's a territory dispute between the three-meter-long bullfrogs and the one-meter-long poison jumping frogs. there's not much you can do to directly intervene, but please go study their habitat for any ideas. wear your slime suit in case you get eaten.

@mcc@mastodon.social @decay@gts.todayiwilllaunchmyinfantsonintoorbit.com @amarioguy@social.treehouse.systems @MaddieM4@raphus.social Fourier and wavelet transforms are really important though, even though most programs don't do them. but you raise a good point.

augh this really does have us fired up and creatively engaged, we really do need to find a way to make something around it T_T

okay, so to lure out green dream tigers, go to sleep in their hunting grounds. then while they circle around your prone form, your partner can brush their teeth.

a group of adventurers killed a dragon and carried off as much gold as they could. the mayor of the nearby city briefly celebrated them for this, to our office's distress, until the dragons sent their emissary backed by a full flock to express their distress. the gold they took has been returned, and they have been reprimanded, but it was only a small fraction of the hoard. in the spirit of peace and diplomacy, please track down the items of the hoard that nearby wildlife got into and scattered.

we should probably pick one of these tasks and build a minigame around it, just so we can publish a thing to feel good about ourselves

okay, we added a message "control stack pointer out of range" when it wants to print a stack trace but has no joy in that task. that at least looks like clearly-deliberate behavior to a new reader, we hope.

oh but one good thing, with the block-sliding thing there are no longer any string pointers in the metadata that are invalid at the time they're printed. so that's great.

the ordinary non-magical goats and the giant carnivorous plants have been teasing each other, to everyone's detriment. we think they got the behavior by watching passing adventurers. help prepare signage telling adventurers to please not reinforce it.

@amarioguy@social.treehouse.systems @mcc@mastodon.social @MaddieM4@raphus.social one hopeful note in our experience when a company is very big on having NDAs around its tooling, it's because there's nothing hard to replicate about the tooling itself, once you know the basic idea of it we suspect people who do chip design can already basically say, yeah you need these specific types of simulator to eliminate whatever specific classes of problem that seems like a thing the community could take on, in principle