swashberry @swashberry@social.linux.pizza

@256
God, the iPod Mini used to be $249? I paid less than that for the smartphone I'm using right now. It's crazy that tech can become so much better and cheaper in my lifetime.

I would like to thank people who design and implement new #programming languages for doing the work that no one else wants to do with allocating and manipulating arrays the way that you have to do by hand in older languages. It's nice to know someone's looking out for the newbies who would otherwise get put off and decide they don't like programming.

@tk
I think it must be. I know some albums are only available as imports these days, and unfortunately my interests seem to disproportionately favor such albums. Eurobeat is a frustrating addiction.

I feel like the price of audio CDs has massively inflated while I wasn't looking. A fresh copy of Symphony of Enchanted Lands, which isn't even out-of-print, goes for about $200 USD on Amazon.com. TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS! Are they making these CDs out of solid gold now‽

Small update: After some fiddling, I've managed to get a Windows version of the program to compile and have included a win32 download for dev build 2.

Note that a friend of mine whom I sent this to reported that Norton hates this program and will try to kill it, so... be warned?

I was really hoping I'd have a Windows binary ready, but for the life of me I can't get it to compile with pdcurses. I think it's because pdcurses only supports 32-bit programs and I can't bloody find a 32-bit Windows compiler. I might have to remind myself how to cross-compile from Linux.

Happy #ScreenshotSaturday everybody! This one's pretty simple. A #gamedev I follow on birdsite told me that I should focus on making smaller projects I can complete in a week, so this one's a Snake clone that runs in the console. I'm actually pretty happy with how much I've done in only two days.

The current development build is available on my GitHub if any of y'all want to try it out!
https://github.com/swashdev/uroboros

That feeling when you just got done implementing something and then you spot a more efficient way to do it by combining a couple of functions and now you're not sure whether to squish them together to make your code run better or keep them separate to make it read better.

#programming

The year is 2022. We have juicers that seamlessly connect to WiFi. It is still damn near impossible to get a virtual machine to read a USB drive

I find it very easy to forget that software projects vary wildly in scope.

PDCurses has been developed for about 40 years now, but its git repository can be cloned in seconds.

Godot, on the other hand, can take several minutes just to tally what commits you're requesting after a few days of changes.

Obviously the discrepancy is because Godot is a much larger project, being a 3D engine with a long list of people contributing with a non-linear history.
PDCurses is much simpler by comparison.

@FediThing
I'm fairly certain that H.P. Lovecraft's works are already in the public domain. At the time that he was writing, U.S. copyrights only applied to works which were distributed with an accurate copyright notice and were surrendered if you failed to include that notice with any distribution. It varied a lot by jurisdiction, though, and that's where things get a bit confusing.

@cy @crashglasshouses @wholemilk
Your friend would have more food if the state hadn't appointed itself as the authority on what is fair, equitable, and in good faith, and regulated the agricultural sector to rely on handouts in order to survive. Food would also be cheaper if not for taxation and excessive and provably unnecessary regulation. Maybe you ought to think about that the next time you propose that seizure of another person's assets is the only option, Fed.

@cy @crashglasshouses @wholemilk
Barter is not a myth. People engage in barter all the time. The invention of writing is even correlated with the keeping of tallies in order to document trade between neighbor states. It's impossible to be at all educated in basic economics and not understand how barter and negotiation are at the basis of the exchange, and by extension distribution, of resources.

@cy @crashglasshouses @wholemilk
Yeah, things started getting way better, what with forever wars waged by states vying for economic control of global trade, the adoption of government monopolies on the money supply, the abandonment of the gold standard leading to massive inflation, and various major hegemonies' economies collapsing suspiciously shortly after major increases in socialist policies. Oh, and 9/11.

@cy @crashglasshouses @wholemilk
Resources are distributed by the free market. How do you think goods end up on store shelves and in the hands of consumers? Humans have understood the process of trade and equitable exchange for probably as long as there have been recognizably human creatures on the planet. No one needs the government to explain to them that an excess of resources can be exchanged for something you lack in a fair display of good faith.

@cy @crashglasshouses @wholemilk
Until the Industrial Revolution, the average American lived on a dollar a day, in today's money.

@cy @crashglasshouses @wholemilk
In any case, history has shown that the solution to poverty is not to make the rich poorer, but to make the poor wealthier. That's the strategy that's elevated us to the legendary echelons of the Information Age, where even the poorest citizen of a Western country is among the richest people to ever live. We didn't discover El Dorado - we built it.