#Programming

[blur-from-the-north]

November 1, 2001. Oulu, Finland. Agfa ePhoto CL18.

This was my workstation at the software development job I had at the time. As you can tell from the amount of caffeine implied. This office was at Technopolis in Linnanmaa. The company isn't there any more. It's nowhere.

[this-user-loves-tech]

Whaohhhh I want em!

*me, getting ready to hit you with a sick-ass keyboard smash*:

[academicfever]

21/100 days of productivity!

Good day beautiful people! Hope u r having an amazing day filled with positive energy! Log: 24.4.25

Morning walk

Reading session

Proper lunch

4h Research session

afternoon cleaning

cook dinner - call home

Read before bed and yoga

Journal _MH check

I am safe in this moment, grounded and confident in my own skin. Good days are just around the corner, and even my darkest places are beginning to glow. Everything is unfolding as it should — I trust the journey, no matter what. With a heart full of gratitude, I welcome the miracles life is preparing for me.

[foldbaron]

TOTAL PARTY KILL (Live from Chicago) is now available for Beacon subscribers.

[omeletcat]

I made some judyhoppslover69 fanart

[rincewind87]

Weeeeell, see, this is why some people turn to ChatGPT et al when they want to "write a story". Because the AI marketing promises that it can turn their vision into reality with a sentence-long prompt. I mean, it can't, not with any serious reliability - when I asked it for a story, it switched the main character's NAME halfway through! I can't imagine trusting it with anything I intended to publish, even on a fan site, without spending more time editing and double-checking than the original writing would have taken.

But the call is really strong to try it.

I had a college professor tell us, just this week, that once we finish learning to code as an academic exercise we can and SHOULD use genAI to create more apps for publication. And I have some ideas that I feel like genAI could write (don't require any/a lot of assets/artwork) - it's super tempting to craft a prompt and just let ChatGPT create apps for me to sell.

But they probably would kind of suck in the back-end, assuming they work. I wouldn't know what the libraries in it are doing. I wouldn't know if the solutions it's using are scalable - is it going to break if I get a lot of users? Is it dependent on out-of-date APIs or deprecated methods? There are even bad actors out there making fake, malicious libraries located in the same places where AI code often hallucinates non-existent libraries to be. As in, your code won't error when it tries to get the hallucinated library, but it might try to do something to your system. So despite the speed, you're still better off writing your own code or at least using a vetted low-code program.

What do you mean I have to write. And draw the characters. And plan stuff. Why can’t I just project my mind visions onto paper this is cruel.

[maj77m]

Flashing warning ⚠️

[cidthecoatrack-blog]

Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1

The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.

So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.

So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.

Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.

And the probe is working again.

From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.

[academicfever]

22/100 days of productivity!

I am enough, just as I am. My self-worth is not defined by others. I deserve love, joy, and all the good things coming my way. I am grateful for this moment and everything it brings. I radiate calm, kindness, and inner peace. I attract positive energy into my life Today is full of opportunities, and I am ready to receive them. I am in control of how I feel, and I choose positivity.

screen time: <2h habit tracker score: 40

[specialkindofidiot]

[prokopetz]

Some highlights for those who haven't been following the Portal 2 patch notes lately (these are all verbatim):

March 14th, 2023: Fixed several remote code execution and crash exploits against co-op partners.

March 25th, 2023: Fixed two remote player crash exploits.

April 26th, 2023: Fixed several crash and remote code execution exploits.

January 5th, 2024: Fixed several remote code execution and crash exploits against co-op partners.

February 2nd, 2024: Fixed several exploits that could crash a coop partner's game.

June 3rd, 2024: Fixed some exploits that could lead to crashes or remote code execution against a co-op partner.

June 24th, 2024: Fixed a remote code execution exploit and out-of-memory exploit in cooperative mode.

January 20th, 2025: Fixed exploits used to crash remote players.

TL;DR:

Valve has evidently spent the last two solid years trying to fix a bug or series of bugs which permit hostile remote code execution against one's co-op partner in Portal 2, seemingly without success.

What the fuck is going on in the Portal 2 co-op scene?

[engravedlives]

random green blinkies

[chongoblog]

Programming is so funny. It says

"ERROR: int can not be converted to a string"

And you're just like "oh, okay. *adds ".ToString()" to the end*"

"Alright that's okay ^w^"

[ahsnapitskat]

Hey, I know we may not know each other but I wish you the best of luck with whatever you have going on. I hope something great happens to you, you deserve it. 💕

[eikotheblue]

How do you *accidentally* make a programming language?

Oh, it's easy! You make a randomizer for a game, because you're doing any% development, you set up the seed file format such that each line of the file defines an event listener for a value change of an uberstate (which is an entry of the game's built-in serialization system for arbitrary data that should persiste when saved).

You do this because it's a fast hack that lets you trigger pickup grants on item finds, since each item find always will correspond with an uberstate change. This works great! You smile happily and move on.

There's a small but dedicated subgroup of users who like using your randomizer as a canvas! They make what are called "plandomizer seeds" ("plandos" for short), which are seed files that have been hand-written specifically to give anyone playing them a specific curated set of experiences, instead of something random. These have a long history in your community, in part because you threw them a few bones when developing your last randomizer, and they are eager to see what they can do in this brave new world.

A thing they pick up on quickly is that there are uberstates for lots more things than just item finds! They can make it so that you find double jump when you break a specific wall, or even when you go into an area for the first time and the big splash text plays. Everyone agrees that this is neat.

It is in large part for the plando authors' sake that you allow multiple line entries for the same uberstate that specify different actions - you have the actions run in order. This was a feature that was hacked into the last randomizer you built later, so you're glad to be supporting it at a lower level. They love it! It lets them put multiple items at individual locations. You smile and move on.

Over time, you add more action types besides just item grants! Printing out messages to your players is a great one for plando authors, and is again a feature you had last time. At some point you add a bunch for interacting with player health and energy, because it'd be easy. An action that teleports the player to a specific place. An action that equips a skill to the player's active skill bar. An action that removes a skill or ability.

Then, you get the brilliant idea that it'd be great if actions could modify uberstates directly. Uberstates control lots of things! What if breaking door 1 caused door 2 to break, so you didn't have to open both up at once? What if breaking door 2 caused door 1 to respawn, and vice versa, so you could only go through 1 at a time? Wouldn't that be wonderful? You test this change in some simple cases, and deploy it without expecting people to do too much with it.

Your plando authors quickly realize that when actions modify uberstates, the changes they make can trigger other actions, as long as there are lines in their files that listen for those. This excites them, and seems basically fine to you, though you do as an afterthought add an optional parameter to your uberstate modification action that can be used to suppress the uberstate change detector, since some cases don't actually want that behavior.

(At some point during all of this, the plando authors start hunting through the base game and cataloging unused uberstates, to be used as arbitrary variables for their nefarious purposes. You weren't expecting that! Rather than making them hunt down and use a bunch of random uberstates for data storage, you sigh and add a bunch of explicitly-unused ones for them to play with instead.)

Then, your most arcane plando magician posts a guide on how to use the existing systems to set up control flow. It leverages the fact that setting an uberstate to a value it already has does not trigger the event listener for that uberstate, so execution can branch based on whether or not a state has been set to a specific value or not!

Filled with a confused mixture of pride and fear, you decide that maybe you should provide some kind of native control flow structure that isn't that? And because you're doing a lot of this development underslept and a bit past your personal Balmer peak, the first idea that you have and implement is conditional stops, which are actions that halt processing of a multiple-action-chain if an uberstate is [less than, equal to, greater than] a given value.

The next day, you realize that your seed specification format now can, while executing an action chain, read from memory, write to memory, branch based on what it finds in memory, and loop. It can simulate a turing machine, using the uberstates as tape. You set out to create a format by which your seed generator could talk to your client mod, and have ended up with a turing complete programming language. You laugh, and laugh, and laugh.