I mean… you really can’t. Contracts and even people on the ground more or less reveal this real fast (and is what the OSINT community lives off of). The US and even Ukraine do the same. You can keep it a secret exactly how juicy a target is but you can’t really hide that missiles or tanks or whatever are being built somewhere.

For example, a buddy of mine lives near a US facility that is near some REALLY nice climbing areas nearby. Every couple of months the army swings by and tells everyone to go the fuck away. And it does not take much brain power to realize that THAT is when they are moving whatever they don’t want people to know is at that base. But any other time? You can literally watch equipment being moved from warehouse/hanger to warehouse/hanger while giving someone a belay.

It is the biggest “problem” of modern warfare. We don’t fight wars of conquest anymore because that tends to actually make other countries care (because those brown people have resources!). So we attack and then leave.

It is similar to why France and England (or China/Japan/Korea) were basically at continuous levels of war for hundreds (?) of years. Because when you roll up and kill a bunch of people and maybe steal a goat? The remaining people want revenge. When you conquer them and either ethnically cleanse them to nonexistence or integrate them into your society? They forget why they were angry after a generation or two.

I very much do NOT believe the world would be a better place with more ethnic cleansing and stealing of land. But we also are in a mess where retaliation between countries just continues with no real consequences to the people who are calling for the attacks. And the civilians just get rightfully angry when their kid is permanently blinded because she was looking the wrong way at the Lebanese equivalent of a Kroger.

And then you get the keyboard warriors who hop in decades (or even centuries) into the conflict, pick a side, and immediately say THESE terrorists are good guys and THOSE terrorists are bad guys.

The pagers were very questionable. Even assuming ONLY hezbollah had the explosive pagers, they were still detonating in public since the point of a pager is to be able to carry it around.

Walkie talkie wise? I still need to reflexively condemn anything that kills children. But… that actually does seem super targeted and would presumably not be something a terrorist “should” carry around in public during their non-terrorist lives.

And “it is already out there so they can’t take it away”:

swanstation is already a few versions back feature wise? But, regardless, it will rapidly become outdated as new “tech” is added to emulation and issues are found with third party libraries or code. Good software needs good support and just having a ten year old hash is almost always worse than useless.

Supply chains matter a lot and governments, let alone terrorist organizations, fail to protect them.

US centric, but far too much of policy is “Don’t buy Made in China” with no thought beyond that.

For this scenario? My assumption is they ordered from their usual supply sources and nothing was hinky. But Israel (or whoever) compromised a port or fedex center along the way and installed some explosives since the only people buying those pagers were terrorists. And nobody on the hezbollah side even bothered to weigh the packages before handing them out.

As much as I like Duckstation as an emulator:

Good for him. When the response to trying to protect the project and reduce harassment is… harassment and outlets insisting that they are shitting all over open source and continuing the false narrative that code was stolen? Fuck 'em. They don’t deserve the emulator and we don’t deserve it for letting them be the minimally opposed voices.

Yeah… I make it a point to not handle people with kid gloves when they are looking to make me convince them it is worth the mild inconvenience to not support a product with a long history of bigotry and harassment. Because, truth be told, it will never happen. Could give you a straight up handy and that would still not be neough.

So I’ll continue to make my disdain for people who knowingly use a product run by people who profit off of bigotry and harassment quite clear. Same end result but with the added benefit of making them feel slightly bad and me have a giggle.

Also, if you thought the above comment about ES-DE vs retroarch was “condescending” then… wow you are sheltered.

Its not even that much more convenient, truth be told. Yes, just double clicking to install a core is nice but you do that basically once per computer. Contrast that with downloading the emulator you like (most of which are installers on windows/mac and flatpak/appimages on linuxes) once per computer.

At which point… just use ES-DE. It automagically detects the majority of standalone emulators and gives you a nice controller based GUI to pick what game you want to play and so forth.

The unified control layout is nice-ish but basically every modern gamepad is “close enough” to xinput that defaults work. And for the more obscure stuff… odds are you are looking more toward a mister anyway or it is that you actually have a god awful claw for the four n64 games worth playing.

Yes, there is a lot to be said about being able to just double click to install (and I think that most gui package managers provide flatpak integration these days? So that might actually be there?). But if you don’t know how to install an application then you are going to have a bad time setting up retroarch/es-de in the first place and likely also difficulty totally ripping all your cartridges and yeah…

It isn’t about being “evergreen”. It is about having historical evidence.

Because maybe someone will do a study in 2030 and want to be able to compare to your UX research in the 2000s. If you wrote your paper properly they can reproduce your experiments (to the degree reasonable) and actually demonstrate progress.

Its the inherent disconnect between “News” and “Science”.

Science requires rigorous study and incremental advancement. A 2023 article based on 2022 data is inherently understood to be… 2022 data (note: I did not actually check but that is the timeline I assume. It is in the study).

But news and social media just want headlines that get people angry and reinforce whatever nonsense people want to Believe.

It is similar to explaining basic concepts. Been a minute since the last time I was properly briefed, but think stuff like “Do NOT say ‘theory’ of evolution. Instead, talk about how evolution is the only accepted justification based on evidence and research”

And, of course, the GOL article is written to make stenzek look like a jerk.

I like GOL as a blog a lot, but holy crap is Liam good at half-baked takes on nuanced subjects that mostly just rain shit down upon people.

More likely it is related to the years of harassment from the transphobe “running” retroarch and his horde of hateful shitheads who harass emulator developers until they work for him. Duckstation is far from the only emulator that has been targeted by this and “Swanstation” has always been incredibly sketchy for a “fork”.

If you spend years torturing open source developers, this is what happens. Which… has no real impact on the “legitimate” users but will hopefully bring more eyes to why we actively should not support retroarch and their campaigns of hate. Especially when tools like ES-DE do an amazing job of just scanning for what emulators you have installed and “making it work” without demanding developers make tweaks to support their framework.

If you need an “off the shelf, low effort” IDE then you pick whether you are using VSCode or Vim/Emacs and then go to youtube and google “best plugins for ${LANGUAGE} in ${EDITOR}”. And you get basically a minute of copy pasting to have it set up to about the same level of optimization.

Aside from that? The reality is that everything takes time to learn. It took you time to learn your preferred emacs config. It took me time to learn default vim and then what my preferred vim config should be and how to take advantage of it. Just like it took time to learn the editor that came with python on windows for years (still might?).

Which gets back to this being a boomer ass article.

Yes. A much less boomer-coded article would be better.

But as someone who has actually used a lot of the various IDEs over the decades and keeps coming back to vim (and is already expecting to go back to vim within a year because of invasive copilot shit…): Those niche editors? They are either genuinely bad ideas (think TempleOS levels of insanity) or they became plugins for every other IDE. I like vim a lot but emacs is the same (actually emacs is an OS with a text interface but…). And many of those plugins ALSO exist for vscode and atom/sublime and so forth.

Because good (uncopyrighted…) ideas propagate. That is development and design.

I REALLY hate articles like this

Saying we “lost” this software just shows that people don’t understand what software design/engineering is.

Basically every screenshot of the “lost” TUIs look like a normal emacs/vim session for anyone who has learned about splits and :term (guess which god I believe in?). And people still use those near constantly. Hell, my workflow is generally a mix between vim and vscode depending upon what machine and operation I am working on. And that is a very normal workflow.

And that is what we want out of software development. The good ideas move forward. The less good ideas become plugins for sickos. Because everyone loves vscode right now but… Microsoft is shitting that up REAL fast with copilot and just wait until every employer on the planet realizes that and ban it.

And the rest just ignores the point of an IDE. Yes, taking your hand off the keyboard to touch the mouse LOWERS YOUR EFFICIENCY*. But it also means you can switch between languages or even environments trivially. Yes, it is often more annoying to dig through twelve menus to find what you want or talk a co-worker through how to do basic git operations that would be three commands. But holy crap I hate the people who “can’t work without my settings” that mean they are incapable of doing any “live” debugging or doing any peer programming where they aren’t driving.

Back in the day we had plenty of people who were angry that not everyone was using vi and a bunch of tcsh scripts to develop because it clearly meant they didn’t understand what they were doing and were too dependent on compilers and debuggers. And it was just as stupid then as it is now.

In fairness, “gaijin” is any foreigner. And a lot of laws in Japan are very much based on warped Christian values (can’t imagine who they got that from…).

But yeah. One of my best friends is Japanese American and the way she sums it up is: You know you truly understand the culture of Japan if you realize why you only want to visit for a few weeks at a time.

With bonus points for anyone who can read quickly realizing why the general stance toward APA is “Only if you get a REALLY good deal”

… They really took a Keighley tweet and had charger generate some filler text, huh?

The texture was definitely funky and I want to say was used as the ground portal in a lot of Ep3 levels.

But I THINK that was still applied to a giant box on the edges of the map. Which is how a lot of games still do that.

Just from the screenshots in the tweet/article:

I would argue that is less transparency and more overlaying the skybox texture. In the city map with the Pinky you can’t actually see anything behind that wall, you just see the skybox.

Could just be “bad” examples but this makes sense. My understanding is that PC DOOM tended to use additive geometry in these cases so that the skybox is literally just a bigass box around the map. Whereas I assume the Saturn version had to do some magic to fit everything and may have used a different technique. Hence the ability to just overlay that texture over everything.

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