A frog who wants the objective truth about anything and everything.

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  • 32 Posts
  • 158 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • That sounds similar to this quote:

    “It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.” — Edsger Dijkstra, 1975

    But there’s been a good deal of programmers who have said that BASIC, and its ease of use and seeing almost instant results is extremely useful to not turn people off learning to code to begin with. Python is functionally the new BASIC in that regard, and while the language itself may not teach you to become an expert programmer, it may have gotten more people in the door than otherwise would have.

    But that’s just my 2 cents.



  • Long is an interesting example, since he definitely did strongman Louisiana politics, but he did seem to have the working class interests at heart, where as Trump only pretends to. We didn’t get to see what he would do long term, but its been argued that his presidential run, and more specifically his ‘share our wealth’ program forced Roosevelt even farther left in his policy.

    Share the wealth proposed to put into federal law a wealth cap of 5 million for every American, with the excess used to fund what amounts to a universal basic income back in the 1930’s, and didn’t discriminate against minorities. It also advocated for free education, free healthcare, and a 30-hour work week.

    From all the information I’ve seen, including the excellent Ken Burns documentary, the poor and working class of Louisiana loved Huey for legitimate reasons, while the rich and politically corrupt, who were targeted by him, absolutely hated his guts.


  • I grew up in a religious household that eventually became infatuated with what essentially amounts to doomsday cultism after the 2008 financial collapse.

    The religion encouraged a lack of critical thinking development, and I easily bought into the scheme. We became fairly extreme preppers, stockpiling food, planning to move somewhere even more remote that wouldn’t be a nukeable target while also not being downwind of fallout from a neighboring target. We purchased plans on how to build various styles of underground bunker on a budget, and guides on how to rear animals and farm for subsistence.

    At some point I came across a video of Christopher Hitchens debating a Pastor. I almost didn’t watch it, as I was afraid that to even entertain the ideas of someone trying to tempt you away from the faith would be dangerous, a way for Satan to worm his way into my mind and prevent my soul from being saved during the end times that were right around the corner.

    But I was curious too, very curious. So I watched it. And I couldn’t come up with a single logical argument of how he was wrong.

    That was the first glorious crack in the mental armor I’d put up against doubt of any kind. I would think about it frequently, which led me to want to find evidence that would prove him wrong, so I watched a different debate with a different pastor, then another, each one widening the gap, until one day I had to admit to myself that it was bullshit, from top to bottom.

    That opened the floodgates. What else have I not questioned? All this prepping, for what? All the mistrust in others, the seclusion, the countless hours of research on how to (impractically) survive as independently as possible… it was all pointless, or worse, actively mentally harmful.

    Amazingly, when I slowly presented all these findings to my family, they saw reason. I think they were all as worn out from the constant terror we guzzled down from crackpots too, and if anything were relieved that it could come to an end.

    From that point on, I made an effort to give myself a proper education, to finally trust in the scientific process, and to not be so intellectually lazy that I could be tricked into something like that ever again.

    So the last time I really changed my mind in a major way was about a decade ago.











  • That was a fun review, I like the style you went for with it!

    I played this back in the day on the 360, which didn’t seem to have the bugs you encountered. I recall having a pretty good time with it, and it was short enough not to overstay its welcome. The jumping mechanics and training for it were unique at the time, and I thought it was a nice twist on the WWII formula.

    The lacking narrative (or at least, I don’t remember one, or any characters) hurt it, as it felt sort of like I was playing a multiplayer game alone at times.

    I also thought it was neat how the sniper rifles were more accurate/less wobbly if you slowly squuezed the analog trigger, I’m not sure I’ve seen that elsewhere.

    But yeah, good review, I’d honestly enjoy reading more from you.




  • Regarding the voting account having no name, does that mean it will be a random string of letters and numbers? I get that it will still be possible to discover vote manipulation or mass downvoting with that, but I suspect it would be more difficult to detect initially or without some deeper analysis, since it’s harder to recognize or remember a random string compared to a human made username.


  • It’s extremely difficult for me to enjoy most 8-bit games, as there’s very little there to intrigue my tastes. However, there are a few standouts that I still play to this day on an emulator handheld, like H.E.R.O. or Mr. Do!

    The good ones generally have a really solid little gameplay loop that’s quick to get into, with tight controls that let you get into a flow-state easily, and a difficulty curve that isn’t infuriating (something far too common from that era). The story heavy games from that era usually had mediocre or terrible writing paired with repetitive grinding gameplay, so the classics like Final Fantasy are sadly off limits for me.

    H.E.R.O. is one of my favorites since it has somewhat uncommon gameplay where you control a man with a helicopter pack in a mine, avoiding various hazards to rescue a trapped miner at the end of each level. It rewards memorization, which is a knock against it, but even though I’ve played it heavily, I keep coming back to it as I never can quite remember the layouts of the later levels, and once control of the backpack is mastered, it just feels good to zip around all of these creatures and caverns of instant death without nicking yourself. I’m not sure how someone who has never played it before would feel about it, since it can take a while to get the hang of the controls, but I think it holds up pretty well from that era.

    It also received a pretty massive number of ports to various consoles and home computers. The original Atari 2600 version is good, but personally I found the MSX port to be the most polished, and it adds some nice additional graphics as well.