@syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@ivor@social.ivor.org @lproven@social.vivaldi.net @cstross@wandering.shop @RogerBW@discordian.social @zzt@mas.to @davidgerard@circumstances.run @denisbloodnok@mendeddrum.org There are a number of other cores available or in development. KS3 will include/ship later C64, QL, SAM Coupe, ZX81, CPC (may or may not include official ROMs for CPC), BBC is a third party core It's best thought of as a modern standardised Spectrum platform that can also run other cores than a simulation powerhouse. For the latter look at a Mister or the conveniently packaged Mister Multisystem 2

4

0

1

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@romabysen@mastodon.social @cstross@wandering.shop The general populace seek easy and convenient answers, and whilst Labour have not been great they are to a fair extent victims of global and local circumstance. The best possibility is either that Labour turns things around in the next three years (unlikely), or the councils run by Reform have enough issues, and there are sufficient challenges to their words that they're seen as the grifting bigoted charlatans that they are. You'd think after the experiences of Brexit and the repeated fuckups of the Tories people would learn to use their brain, but that's a forelorn hope.

5

0

1

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@cstross@wandering.shop @lproven@social.vivaldi.net @RogerBW@discordian.social @zzt@mas.to @davidgerard@circumstances.run @denisbloodnok@mendeddrum.org There aren't any Nexts available on a demand basis. The latest Kickstarter updates are that issue 3 are now all manufactured and are going to be shipping imminently (they're currently trying to work out the best/cheapest way to ship). Sometimes there are a very small number of Nexts left over after the production run, but really you're best following the Next Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/237301699960491 There are sometimes people selling their pledge or machine at very reasonable prices, and usually ebay sales (at varying prices from reasonable to excessive). I plumped for the issue 3 despite already having an Issue 2 I've not used much, I couldn't resist such a passion project despite not really being a huge Speccy fan. Probably going to sell my issue 2 at some point.

facebook.com

2

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@argv_minus_one@mastodon.sdf.org @benno@eigenmagic.net Yep. If you must run an LLM, it should be a local one. Otherwise you are a fool, and had better be getting a huge improvement in measurable advantage to be tied to someone that can charge what they want..

4

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@ApostateEnglishman This is exactly what royalty are for! Although I have to say, despite not being a fan, I actually feel a bit sorry for King Spaniel in this case.

3

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@root@isopod.zone I ran Java back in the 90s but work recently uninstalled the Oracle JVM due to licensing changes. Does that mean a DVR suddenly pops back into existence or someone makes a new device?

1

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@blogdiva @cwebber Other recent example include a fight between licenses and CPU architecture. A database server (cough Oracle) is ridiculously expensive once things go beyond two CPU sockets? Well, IBM would sell you a special two socket incredibly multi core CPU system for a wincingly high but not quite as high price as licensing four SQL cores. Of course, that only works for one release, the licensing catches up, and cores per socket become limited etc etc.

3

1

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@june I understand they're upset, but most sympathy evaporates once the itch.io page is checked. "Code license MIT License" The other people are doing what the license permits them to do. Don't like that? don't use that license The FreeBSD people did not wail and gnash their teeth when Sony took the source and used it to create their OS, they were glad their code was used. There is the implied expectation that ideally you contribute back as well, but it's not essential, that's why there's no limits.

4

1

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@the_wub@mastodon.social @bignose@sw-development-is.social @benno@eigenmagic.net The entire point of either a large language model or any nascent artificial intelligence is that it does exactly what you want (in some cases subject to the inherent difficulties with the technology). If there was a true artificial intelligence (there will not be, for a long, long time) and if it could not be leveraged then it's about as likely to do what its boring corporate overlords want, as if someone asked you to do your soul destroying job without being paid.

2

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@llamasoft_ox@toot.wales I haven't bothered with an e-bike yet, but I do live at the foot of a hill. Have to say You Are Allowed To Cheat. Don't like cycling up the hill? Get off, push the bike, get back on at the top. Lovely ride today. Lambs gamboling around, squirrels, birdsong, there's frequently deer (but not today).

2

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 5mo ago

Anyway I've just died scoring 0 points on the tutorial level, so that's a great start

2

0

1

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@annehargreaves@ioc.exchange @quixoticgeek@social.v.st A friend of mine said that before the Clean Air Act (probably 1968, rather than 1956 when they would have been about 5) everything was covered in soot, so yes, everything is very much relative!

2

0

1

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@GhostOnTheHalfShell@masto.ai @ptoothfish@beige.party That's nice, but we're not talking about school here where they shouldn't be using phones, it's about the remainder of the time. Modern kids are not going to be sending each other letters, and they're unlikely to be using phone calls either. You can't send memes over voice.

1

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@richintheflow@mastodon.social @thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io Please recognise that 'almost the same price' only applies if you consider a 50% increase in price 'almost'. Ereaders don't take up much space. Ereaders can be waterproof. Ereaders can be backlit. Ebooks can be searched, and in the case of certain Kobo ereaders have non destructive highlighting, writing, and diagramming. Ebooks can be bought and start to be read in under a couple of minutes. etc.etc.etc.etc. There are advantages to print books, but there are a lot of advantages to ereaders.

2

3

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@benroyce @mattblaze It's a funny idea, but as I'm sure you'll know this isn't like dropping your file/USB stick, it's not unlikely a customer will misplace their card and then 'miraculously find it again' in the surrounding area, as that's what they walked past

2

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@TechTangents@dialup.space Nice. Unfortunately I tried to browse the web using the Wii U browser the other day (I was attempting to upload a screenshot of Wind Waker HD), and a lot of sites now refuse to work :(

1

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@subtl@aus.social @maxpool@mathstodon.xyz @dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @robpike@hachyderm.io I mean, have you used and seen Perl? :)

1

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 5mo ago

Nethack 5.0 is out! https://nethack.org/index.html

It has a tutorial :O

Got it working on FreeBSD. May revisit it in a couple of days to do a proper hints file and get it working in X11 and GTK. Can't be bothered right now, just hacking it sufficiently to work in tty.

Turned SYSCF off for now. Also hacked out redefinitions of memcpy and memcmp to the deprecated bcopy/bcmp (why?!) in lines 336/337 of unixconf.h

It seems to want to stick itself in /usr/games which isn't appropriate even though I edited some of the config.

nethack.org

1

0

1

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 5mo ago

Installing Mint in a bhyve VM, because my Nvidia GPU is rather old and I only need to prove the principle of it working, not have very up to date games operational.

A VNC virtual screen of 1024x768 appears insufficient to run the update manager. Poor planning, lads..

The first time Mint ran it did display its logo on the Quadro K4000, but the key is if it can switch seamlessly between a Linux and Windows VM and back and still have GPU passthrough work without needing the host to reboot..

This is with bare FreeBSD 15.0p5, no Corvin patches. Someone claims it's working, so need to test.

1

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@thankfulmachine @arclight It should, and one way out of this mess is to create properly designed systems that don't need hand holding. Problem is, the end users generally aren't prepared to pay for that, and designing such systems requires either greater expense, or not following the bleeding edge. There is so much evidence that not only is software engineering, sysadmin, and support not a real engineering discipline, but that it actively and continually works against being a proper discipline. Sure, there are many exceptions, but for instance I am ashamed that at work we don't support Unicode thirty fucking years after its introduction when I was young and saw it as the great new thing. A thing, in fact, that was actually properly designed. Work don't care. The end users don't care either. Should I rail against this professionally? Maybe. I have mentioned it is embarrassing to have architecture that would have been old in the 80s, but neither am I willing to be pure and slash my salary.

1

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@cafuego@misanthrope.social @tallpaul@mastodon.scot landline, physically entering your home so a 'home phone number' Rapidly becoming obsolete as the entire network is moving to VoIP. I still have my 'home phone number' but it was also ported to VoIP years ago, and whilst I still have copper coming into the house for a bit, it doesn't accept phone calls.

1

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@benroyce @mattblaze Well, yeah, Steve is just too nice, isn't he?

1

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@congusbongus @tattlemuss Film and TV are non interactive, passive entertainment. Games should be interactive entertainment where the player's actions affects outcomes, but no, far too many games want it to be all about fancy cutscenes where the player has no choice, or where the game must be played in The One True Way. 'Press A at the correct time to see the next quick time event' is no better than Dragons Lair in the 80s

1

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 5mo ago

Graaaaghh.. Mullvad's DNS interception on its VPN is staying up for basically zero time at all. It's been fine for months and now is just not working - it's only a forwarder config with unbound at my end.

I wish Mullvad didn't intercept DNS traffic at all, there's not an easy way around this if I want to continue using Wireguard.

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 5mo ago

OK. That's NetHack easily compiling in tty mode for FreeBSD with a hints file. Only installing under /home for now, not bothering with shared directories.

First get it compiling with all the windowing systems, then look at installing into the proper place.

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 5mo ago

Yeahh.. that's a no. Mint 22.1, official Nvidia driver, boot up, hangs with a cursor flashing five times.

Doesn't change if I reboot the host. Joy. Fine.

Image server again. Revert to 14.whatever, apply Corvin patches, retry.

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@lionelb@expressional.social @RolloTreadway@beige.party I wouldn't call it 'crooked' - there are advantages and disadvantages with each system. However, yes, regardless of my opinion on Reform if a party gets 27% of the votes, it should generally have 27% of the representation. It'd also mean a lot of compromise, Reform being shown their arse on a lot of issue quickly, and the electorate having to grow up and realising they can't have everything. Win win.. Of course I don't expect it to change, because if Reform are trying to lead calling the system 'unfair', they are also very keen indeed on a referendum result from 2016 and should therefore be fully on board with a referendum result from 2011 that had a much greater majority.

0

1

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 5mo ago

Investigated the VPN issue further - it's a duff server at Mullvad again. Switched to another one and everything magically swung into action.

This is irritating as the actual tunnel was fine other than the DNS interception, so doing automatic failover will require more effort.

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 5mo ago

Finished book for book club, and played a little more Nethack. Not sure I want to actually finish a game as a Ranger, so after a while I Started Taking Risks. Some of them worked out. The one that caused rocks to fall did not and trapped me.

It revealed I'd managed to pick up a cursed luckstone too when I quit :O.

I was really missing being able to dig with a pickaxe, and as I was playing as a gnome, also unable to find one as dwarves with pickaxes don't spawn so much!

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@ratsnakegames@mastodon.social @simontatham@hachyderm.io This. So much this. When the reward for being efficient is more work that you don't like, there's not much motivation.

0

1

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 5mo ago

I also wonder, looking at the Witcher Bestiary, if the difference between a Drowner and the Drowned Dead is more apparent in Polish. In English, like many others I presume, I picked a Drowned Dead quest thinking it referred to Drowners, but no, it does not!

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 5mo ago

Also playing a bit more of The Witcher. Especially after getting into Vizima, the level of jank is approaching acceptable levels.

I still think the combat system sucks, but it looks and sounds good, and has a decent atmosphere.

I don't think the game does many favours with its initial learning curve though, & there are multiple occasions when you're mobbed on entry to a location, and other occasions where you'd not allowed to escape because.. reasons.

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@chantaryu2@pataterie.ca @burger_jaap@mastodon.social It is different in the UK. Electricity is expensive, and the government are currently unwilling to decouple it from (effectively) gas prices. Plenty of houses where they don't have the insulation to support a heat pump. Also, the last time I looked the government grants didn't allow for heat pumps with a/c functionality.

0

1

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 5mo ago

Have a horrid cold at the moment, so not doing much. I have been watching both the Artemis II mission, and a load of For All Mankind.

Interestingly this makes me staggeringly less eager to ever leave the Earth.

Personally I also don't care much about manned missions - I'd prefer lots of interesting probes; landing on a comet was amazing!

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@jonn_blanchard Yeah, that's just a CR2032. Note that the connection to this battery is frequently dodgy. Lovely machine though. You can persuade it to run CP/M, and mod it to use a CF card as a hard disk

0

2

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 5mo ago

'oh, we don't recommend you run a new kernel with that old card, run an older release and upgrade keeping the LTS kernel'

Dudes, Linux looks more and more like Windows every fucking day.

Sadly FreeBSD really isn't there to run everything I want as is, so I'm going to have to run Linux or Windows in a VM until it catches up for stuff like games.

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 5mo ago

Well, github can get fucked. Patched bhyve, didn't work. No surprise because either github is telling me bollocks, or more likely, I don't understand what it's doing.

It says it's comparing FreeBSD 14.4 with Corvin 14.2, but it can't be, because it says a unified diff of /usr.sbin/bsdinstall/scripts/firmware is adding the file entirely, and well, it already exists in both 14.4 and 14.2 and if I use the actual diff utility it says there are : zero fucking differences.

It was a bit much to expect it would be this easy. Learned slightly more about diff and patch. Looks like I'm going to have to download the tree and do a diff manually.

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 5mo ago

Bit more Path of the Righteous. The camera really is a big problem, how on earth was it released in this state?

I know it's not necessarily an easy problem to solve, but even so.

Party management is way more irritating than Baldur's Gate too, although you can set members to 'hold' to tell them not to move.

Killed a water elemental by getting my fastest character to run around and snipe from a distance. 150XP for all that hassle with no loot drop..

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@mullvadnet@mastodon.online system designed as intended

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 5mo ago

Shifted myself and compared FreeBSD 14.4 source with the CorvinK patches which has 97 modified files from the standard source.

However, manually look at what the patches do and well, it's 2 files. One to set the NVIDIA vendor ID, and one to modify the PCI passthrough file, which basically can be reduced to one file :O.

It is code specific to Nvidia though, so forget fiddling with Intel without some modifications.

Basically all it appears to change is
usr.sbin/bhyve/pci_passthru.c and set elsewhere #define PCI_VENDOR_NVIDIA 0x10DE

peoplemaking.games

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@elvisish@mastodon.gamedev.place @tuxicoman@social.jesuislibre.net @janbeta@chaos.social To be strictly accurate, it was questions the majority of adult Americans would know at the time. Ask a European about some US TV programme 'everyone watched' and it's a bit more tricky! Researching was more difficult then, as the public Internet wasn't a thing. Of course, it was a Sierra game, so much of it wasn't actually worth playing even when you did get in.

0

2

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 5mo ago

Tonight in FreeBSD hacking, restored to saved 14.4 image, updated it to latest patchlevel, enabled DHCP on a bridge, now saving it as an image again.

It does not help that syncdhcp isn't included in man page documentation (well, at least 'man -k' isn't returning anything), although it is in the FreeBSD handbook.

If dhcp is used instead of syncdhcp for a bridge in rc.conf there isn't enough time to initialise things properly and it fails. Joy.

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 5mo ago

On a related note, I figured out the reason why quieting the fans on my home server doesn't work on bootup is the same lack of waits. If I add a sleep 2 in-between each ipmi call it works just fine.

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Tijn @svelmoe @sue Using Google/AWS etc gives you something to stick on your CV. Avoiding it or making your own probably doesn't

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 5mo ago

Feeling a tad more human, if not 100%. Upgraded FreeBSD on my bleeding edge box to 15.0p5, will try passthrough, & if that fails go back to 14.4 and apply Corvin patches. Got an SSD to store Clonezilla images so should be able to easily swap between configs.

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@elvisish@mastodon.gamedev.place @tuxicoman@social.jesuislibre.net @janbeta@chaos.social The games have their moments - but the puzzles, the parser in earlier games is utterly atrocious, and the game design masochistic.

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@lettosprey@tech.lgbt @soatok@furry.engineer I've not had a problem in the UK getting tested, but you do have to book. On the other hand I've also been to a convention which had people visiting doing STI tests, and all that was necessary was to queue!

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@lionelb@expressional.social @RolloTreadway@beige.party In your opinion and viewpoint. Many would disagree. It's notable the number of Reform voters who think FPTP is OK has almost doubled since they thought they had some sniff at winning outright, so they can push through their nasty little bigotry without opposition. I don't personally like it, but FPTP tends to favour stronger parties. It's still democratic, and a decision on how the country should be governed, even if it is a messy system. More granularity may mean 'more accurate representation' but what voters actually want are their views enacted. Going to be tricky if everything is PR based and each action is a heavy compromise.

0

Pete / Syllopsium @syllopsium@peoplemaking.games

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@kianryan@oldbytes.space I'm not really a fan of Charlie, but I have to take my hat off to him and his team for the soft power on display. It probably won't have enough effect, but at least they tried, and being able to send a suitable message to Congress helps too. I even feel sorry for him. Stuck in a gilded cage, forced to do this sort of work when close to 80..

0

1

0