Testing a thing 2 #tagspub
In case y'all are wondering why ADHD medication is a good thing, somebody I follow recently posted about discovering the same track that launched my last hyperfixation deep dive and I didn't immediately fill their mentions with half a dozen suggestions of next things to listen to despite not even knowing their music taste. Impulsive behaviour is a thing when I'm not medicated.
In other news, you should absolutely go check out these tracks from Wing that I didn't spam into someone's notifications because sharing hyperfixations is fun (if you're not spamming)!
- Killing me Softly: not a cover, an original beatbox blues song with a guitar solo. youtu.be/hQZJ-23r_Sg
- Phenomenon: most recent track, deep bass dance track still with lots of musicality: youtu.be/eDcLqMp7idQ
- Doppelganger: Wing sings a nice little introspective song ooutside a cafe but snuck a band into the back of his throat when no one was looking youtu.be/YqRBULfanQI #ADHD #beatbox
WING - Killing Me Softly (Official Video)
YouTube
WING - Phenomenon (Official Video) (BEATBOX)
YouTube
WING - Doppelganger (Official Video)
YouTube
My names is Reginald, and I am a drug addict.
"Welcome Reginald! Join the circle!!"
WING - Dopamine (Official Video) (BEATBOX)
YouTube
@[email protected] the rabbit hole is quite deep...
@aeva xml is for people born in 60s/70s. if you're born in 80s/90s, it's yaml for you.
@[email protected] @[email protected] NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORWAY
bonfire.mavnn.eu/pub/objects...
Starting the day with a moderately spicy take to help me wake up. It's the 'finishing last nights vindaloo' strategy for social media.
@[email protected] I'm going to say it: if as an industry we'd done SOAP properly and built the tooling to support it in more languages, it would have been awesome. XSD is so much better than json schema for specifying a domain.
@[email protected] I'm going to say it: if as an industry we'd done SOAP properly and built the tooling to support it in more languages, it would have been awesome. XSD is so much better than json schema for specifying a domain.
@[email protected] Of course, we were never going to do it properly. The very first paid dev work I did was integration software between a UK fire and rescue service and a brand new reporting service set up by the national government for collecting stats.
During the launch, the project lead on the government side pulled me aside to thank me for writing the only implementation out of over fifty that sent xml that validated. Several of the other implementations were written by large consulting firms at orders of magnitude greater cost.
xml stands for excellent markup language
@[email protected] I'm going to say it: if as an industry we'd done SOAP properly and built the tooling to support it in more languages, it would have been awesome. XSD is so much better than json schema for specifying a domain.
it is funny to me that Meilai is one of the few characters in this story who has a very normal, real life name, and all her distant cousins from Chald write their names in her native script as HIDDEN MERCY and DEFENDER OF THE HEAVENS like the overdramatic fantasy characters they are
@[email protected] To be fair, you can have fun with that even with every day real life names. I mean, going the literal translation route my own marriage was between "One who is like God" and "The Woods", which, much as I value my marriage, sounds a little over the top and mythic.
I know MS Teams is awful on every platform. But it's a special sort of awful when you have to run it in a browser on Linux
@[email protected] Procol Harum's lesser known hit, "A special sort of awful"
@kirtai @whitequark @iris *glances towards profile picture* I think I'll be ok :)
@[email protected] this comment prompted me to go to your profile as up to this moment I'd only viewed your profile pic in feed - where my brain has always interpreted the mini version as a teddy bear with a party hat.
xoxo.zone/users/Ashedryden/s...
Oof. This. The combination of #adhd and #chronicfatigue is a life of constant war between "you should rest immediately when you need to" and "here is your reminder of critical thing that if you don't do it right now it will drop into a black hole for ever"
When your laundry timer goes off the second you finally decide to sit down
@grimalkina @mavnn Huh. Well, OK! Practical data beats theoretical concerns, so if it's helpful I shall grumble more quietly. (What, me, not grumble? Hah, as if :)
I suspect this is another facet of "everything everywhere is a mess, nothing is ever perfect including the definition of 'perfect', so you do what you can with what you have at hand."
Life. Just a never ending series of compromises, but beats the alternative.
@[email protected] @[email protected] Yeah, this is fascinating as I'd only hit the reverse issue; people thinking they had 'taught' the LLM something and then being surprised (and sometimes embarrassed while showing off the progress) that the explanation had no impact on the next time they asked the LLM to do the same task.
Using 'learning' as a way to explain how the question you are asking shapes the response is something I'd never thought to try, but is certainly something I'll keep in mind for the future.
Anyway, sorry for derailing the thing you were meaning to spend your time on this morning; this is very much idle curiousity on my end, so please don't let it highjack you.
@grimalkina I think what bothers me about the (in my view, which is of course inarguably 100% correct 😊 use of "learning" is that it carries implications that are inaccurate and leads people to making assumptions and decisions based on that inaccurate implication. Not even in a malicious way, pareidolia is absolutely a thing, but secondary decisions are made based on primary misunderstandings, and once those get hardened into a system... it's difficult to fix, because systems are persistent.
@[email protected] @[email protected] The language space is getting pretty overloaded in this area in ways that are unhelpful, it has to be said. I recently nearly skipped over a genuinely interesting piece of machine learning (sorry!) research as it had AI in the title and was something LLMs would obviously be terrible at - but they weren't using LLMs.
> I really mostly saw people correctly take it to just mean "this changes in response to information"
It's interesting to see you (Cat) say this, as one of the issues I have with LLMs is that people assume they will learn while in reality the 'learning' already happened at the model training stage (with added bonus confusion if there is or isn't any context being stored), and the thing you're actually using doesn't change in response to information. Which is true of a lot of machine learning tools in general, not just LLMs, but LLMs have the added disguise of tracking context within a conversation (and frequently now an internet connection), so interface almost implies that longer term learning is happening (despite not having 'learning' in the name :facepalm:).
Tempted to write a json-ld library for #zig as a way of learning Zig properly and because it might be a better way of implementing #fediverss (blog.mavnn.eu/2026/04/10/fed...) for low resource environments than dotnet. #activitypub #rss
Me, being clever: so I don't want this RayCast node firing every physics tick, so I'll disable it and only enable it when I force it to update.
adds all the code to enable and disable the ray casting
Me, actually reading the doc comment for the force raycast update function: "Note: enabled does not need to be set to true for this to work." sigh
It's almost like the devs considered this use case! #godot #gamedev
My latest modern art creation: the warming of the soup.
Worth at least an extra ten thousand due to the ephemeral nature of its satisfying beauty.
@katemorley
Did you whack him with it?
@[email protected] @[email protected] Doing this to random people on the internet seems rude and lacking self awareness. Doing this to your employer seems to take a... special something, and maybe limit future life opportunities
bonfire.mavnn.eu/pub/objects...
Could these be... new features related to the new course draft?
Yes. Yes they could. #visualnovel #gamedev
Crunchier pixels in VisualInk
Read this post in its full formatted glory at https://blog.mavnn.eu/2026/05/01/crunchier_pixels_in_visual_ink.html
Pixel art has a certain charm all of its own, and visual novels in particular often borrow from the older games of yesteryear for their artistic inspiration.
But unfortunately, that means that if you're using a web based visual novel engine like VisualInk your assets can end up looking blurred and smudgy depending on the screen size where they are viewed.
VisualInk now has the pixel_style variable for choosing whether images that need to be resized are scaled using "Smooth" style (the default, good for photos and scanned hand drawn artwork), and "Pixelated" style for low resolution pixel art to be scaled up keeping nice sharp edges between the pixels.
As an example:
Figure 1: Smooth style with photos
Versus (excuse the placeholder images):
Crunchier pixels in VisualInk
Read this post in its full formatted glory at https://blog.mavnn.eu/2026/05/01/crunchier_pixels_in_visual_ink.html
Pixel art has a certain charm all of its own, and visual novels in particular often borrow from the older games of yesteryear for their artistic inspiration.
But unfortunately, that means that if you're using a web based visual novel engine like VisualInk your assets can end up looking blurred and smudgy depending on the screen size where they are viewed.
VisualInk now has the pixel_style variable for choosing whether images that need to be resized are scaled using "Smooth" style (the default, good for photos and scanned hand drawn artwork), and "Pixelated" style for low resolution pixel art to be scaled up keeping nice sharp edges between the pixels.
As an example:
Figure 1: Smooth style with photos
Versus (excuse the placeholder images):
@blog Of course, the only issue here is that the screen shot on the blog is itself going to get scaled, but hey ho!
Ideas for the new course starting to solidify, with the plan being a five week online intro to creating #visualnovel assets of your own for under 18s with no budget (above and beyond having a computer) using tech you probably have around the house and open source software like #krita and #audacity. Official announcement coming soon. #HomeEd #GameDev
Also, if you have less terrible ideas for a course name, I'm all ears