@ernest runs it, I think

@piotrsikora -- FYI in case you can do anything about it or have insight

It took about a minute for my comment from reddthat to show up here, but it looks like it made it through ok, so inbound comments are working. (Note: replying to myself from my kbin account)

Unless I'm missing something it looks like it doesn't use Denuvo? (Steam lists a custom EULA but I don't see Denuvo listed.)

Let me preface my response by saying: my answer is kbin specific. It might or might not also apply to mbin since they may have changed things (or kept older features that kbin changed) since they forked. I know a few of the differences between them, but I haven't kept up with most of mbin's specifics.

Also, if anyone stumbles into this in the far future: note that this post is from March 2024. If that seems like a long time ago, check for newer information...

Can searches be made more specific? On Lemmy, you could define whether you wanted to search for communities/magazines, threads, comments, users and urls.

You can search for magazines specifically from the magazine page. The general search searches in microblogs, thread text -- but not the thread title(?), and comments/replies, I think. You can search for exact user profiles as well with the "@ user @ instance" syntax -- e.g. searching for @TamperTanuki@fedia.io shows a link to your profile as the result. (That also applies to magazines/communties -- e.g. @kbinMeta@kbin.social will find both a user called "kbinMeta" and this magazine as search results -- but searching for magazines from the magazine page is probably better for most use cases.) You can sometimes also find the local version of a federated thread if you search for the original post URL. Note that searching for a post on another instance may not always work; if you're copying a link to a thread you found in a comment post and someone linked to their instance's local version of a thread and that isn't the original source it probably won't find it. (I've had decent luck with it in practice though. For the latter problematic case, load the post on the instance and then find the fediverse link which should take you to the original source and then search for that to find it on your instance.)

@piotrsikora @ernest -- FYI searching for this thread by the exact title "Multiple questions regarding Kbin" does not find it currently but searching text like "as a new Kbin/Mbin user" will find it. Is that a bug?

@piotrsikora @ernest -- Searching for a URL that is not a thread causes a 50x error.

Lastly, you can change the result order (newest/controversial/oldest).

You can change newest/top/hot/active etc. for the results on kbin by clicking on the tabs above the search results.

To send toots/tweets, do I have to specify a magazine? I seem to be unable to send a toot without specifying a magazine first, although I only try to adress a mastodon user directly.

Unclassified microblogs (e.g. from Mastodon users) usually end up in random, but I'm not sure how to post them intentionally since I don't use the microblog feature much. Hopefully someone else can chime in with an answer for this.

Is this even the right magazine to ask these questions in? Is there a dedicated kbin support magazine?

It's fine for kbin questions but you might get a better response for details about your specific instance (which runs mbin) on a local magazine like /m/fedia@fedia.io maybe? Sorry if that doesn't link correctly; I rarely link anything other than lemmy communities. (EDIT: https://fedia.io/m/fedia )

On Lemmy, users can send each others direct messages. It seems like Kbin/Mbin has no way of displaying those direct messages. Is that correct or is there a way to show direct messages?

DMs do not work between kbin and lemmy as far as I know. I have a lemmy alt linked in my profile in case lemmy users want to DM me.

You should be able to send messages to local users on your instance though by going to a user's profile and clicking "Send Message" on the right side.

Trying to access the send message interface for your account from kbin doesn't work here, so I doubt mbin/kbin DMs work. (@ernest this seems to redirect to login and then immediately to the home view instead of opening the message page or showing an error -- is this a bug?)

Hope that helps!

@piotrsikora @ernest -- this thread did not show up on other instances (e.g. I couldn't see it from my alt on reddthat.com despite being subscribed to this magazine from there as well) when I found it originally. I upvoted it here on kbin.social and now it shows up on reddthat. Is that a federation bug (either on fedia.io's side or on kbin.social's side)?

@piotrsikora -- FYI: I got a lot of 50x errors trying to edit this comment.

Hi @piotrsikora. Great to see that kbin is responsive again and returning to usability. If possible, could you please give an update on what is going on currently with federation? It looks like some things are getting through (e.g. I can see this thread on reddthat) but threads from most lemmy instances are not showing up in a timely way in /newest still and at a quick glance it looks like communities in my collections are maybe a half day behind -- with many threads from the past week or more missing entirely.

I'm assuming some of that may be on the lemmy side -- 0.19 has a major issue with sequential message distribution as seen with lemmy.world <-> reddthat.com federation (see this bug report and this comment if you're unfamiliar) -- but it'd be best to hear from someone who has access to the infrastructure about what's going on rather than guessing.

In particular, it'd be helpful to know:

• What kind of delay should we expect for threads and comments we create here to show up on Lemmy communities?
• What kind of delay should we expect for threads and comments other people create on Lemmy/mbin/etc. instances to show up here? (Obviously this may vary from instance to instance, but in general are things cleared up now on the kbin side for receiving new threads quickly?)
• Are comment notifications still delayed from local kbin replies -- or has that been fixed with the infrastructure changes?
• Are federated upvotes propagating quickly? (It is very discouraging if you post something and it gets no interaction at all -- knowing if there's federation delay in upvotes would help with distinguishing between "no one saw this", "no one liked this", and "people probably saw it and maybe liked it but the response hasn't made it to kbin yet")
• Is federation still playing catch up and old missing threads/comments will be backfilled eventually, or have they been dropped to get things back in working order?
• Have any major instances defederated with kbin.social during the recent problems?

Also, should we @ you in addition to @ernest if we encounter problems on kbin.social?

Thank you!

Federation is way behind -- like 5~6 hours behind, I think.

I don't. I use the timer on my microwave.

I boil water in a sauce pot on the stove. Slosh it into my mug. Plunk in a tea bag and set the timer on my microwave for 3:30 so that I don't forget and over-steep it. No milk. No sugar.

This is from ~54 mins into Tokyo Godfathers. (I just skimmed my copy to double check even though I recognized the character; it's been a long time since I've seen it!)

That's an issue in older versions of Lemmy that was fixed in the 0.19.x releases, I think. lemmy.world still seems to be on 0.18.5

Discussion on Github from last year: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3965

Have you tried Resonance? It's a mystery adventure game set in modern times where you play as four different characters whose stories interconnect. It's been a while since I played it (a decade or so?) but I remember that it had an interesting game mechanic that let you use memories like items in various interactions, as well as a number of puzzles that I rather liked the design of.

Hmm, so federated downvotes from Lemmy are public now on mbin, not just local downvotes and federated upvotes. Interesting. Does mbin-mbin downvote federation work? kbin doesn't federate downvotes to you. (I checked -- for science! -- but switched back to an upvote afterwards.)

artificial gestation

The word "matrix" literally means "womb" in its older sense.

It's not a GUI library, but Jupyter was pretty much made for the kind of mathematical/scientific exploratory programming you're interested in doing. It's not the right tool for making finished products, but is intended for creating lab notebooks that contain executable code snippets, formatted text, and visual output together. Given your background experience and the libraries you like, it seems like it'd be right up your alley.

Gundress (1999)

Yep. It's Garden of Words. I just skimmed through my copy and this image is from about 18 minutes in.

It might be easier to just fire up Wireshark and look for relevant traffic when you trigger the action.

I was just thinking about the image resizing thing again when I saw your message notice pop up. Another option for preview is a web browser. A minimal HTML page with some JS to refresh the image would avoid the image resize on reload problem, and gives you some other interesting capabilities. Python ships with a kind of meh (slow and quirky), but probably sufficient HTTP server (python3 -m http.server) if you'd prefer to load the preview on a different computer on your LAN entirely (e.g. cellphone / tablet / ... ) for example.

A simple HTML file for this would be something like:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <style>
      html, body {
        background-color: #000000;
      }
    </style>
    <script>
      function reload()
      {
          let img = document.getElementById("preview");
          let url = new URL(img.src);
          url.searchParams.set("t", Date.now());    // cache breaker; force reload
          img.src = url.href;
      }

      function start()
      {
          setInterval(reload, 500);
      }
    </script>
  </head>
  <body onload="start()">
    <img id="preview" src="output.png">
  </body>
</html>

Regarding input from a gamepad -- I've had some similar ideas before but haven't really had much success using a gamepad artistically outside some limited things where I either wrote the entire program or was able to feed data into programs that accepted input over the network (e.g. via HTTP and which I wrote a custom adapter for). It's been a long time since I've tried anything in that space though, and it might be possible to do something interesting by trying to make the system see the combination of a gamepad stick as relative mouse motion and trigger as pen pressure. I'm not quite sure how to go about doing that, but I'll let you know if I find a way to do it.

The Wikipedia article for hqx points out that an implementation exists as a filter in ffmepg.

You can run a command line conversion of e.g. a PNG -> PNG using hqx upscaling like: ffmpeg -i input.png -filter_complex hqx=4 output.png

The =4 is for 4x upscaling. The implementation in my version of ffmpeg supports 2x, 3x, and 4x upscaling.

As a quick and dirty way to get semi-live preview, you can do the conversion with make and use watch make to try to rebuild the conversion periodically. (You can use the -n flag to increase the retry rate if the default is too long to wait.) make will exit quickly if the file hasn't changed. Save the image in your editor and keep an image viewer that supports auto-reload on change open to see "live" preview of the output. (e.g. eog can do it, although it won't preserve size of the image -- at least not in the copy I have, anyway; mine's a bit old though.)

Sample Makefile:

output.png : input.png Makefile
	ffmpeg -y -i input.png -filter_complex hqx=4 output.png

Note the -y option to tell ffmpeg to overwrite the file; otherwise it will stop to ask you if you want to overwrite the file every time you save, and in case you're not familiar with Makefiles, you need a real tab (not spaces) on the line with the command to run.

ffmpeg also appears to support xbr (with =n option as well) and super2xsai if you want to experiment with those too.

I'm not sure if this will actually do what you want artistically, but the existing implementations in ffmpeg makes it easy to experiment with.

What upside down thing with a banana??

There was a viral video/meme maybe a decade ago about how monkeys peel bananas (might have actually been an orangutan or gorilla in the one I saw; been too long since I've seen it) where they peel it from the end opposite of how people are usually shown doing it. I'm guessing they mean that? Basically, instead of bending the stem bit (from where the bananas bunch up), you can pinch the tip at the other end and the peel splits open very easily -- it's easier to do, especially if the banana is still a bit on the greener side of ripeness and the stem part is flexible. (I tried it after seeing it and switched to peeling them from the "bottom" myself.)

What back bit?

There is a little black fibrous part of most Cavendish bananas near the tip I was describing; many people do not like eating it and avoid it.

Also…veins?

I'm not sure what they mean either.

I don't know if there are any existing implementations that work well enough yet for it to actually be relaxing, but it might be possible to set up a hands-free IF experience by hooking up speech-to-text and text-to-speech tools to the game.

Can Z3 account for lost bits? Did it come up with just one solution?

It gave me just one solution the way I asked for it. With additional constraints added to exclude the original solution, it also gives me a second solution -- but the solution it produces is peculiar to my implementation and does not match your implementation. If you implemented exactly how the bits are supposed to end up in the result, you could probably find any other solutions that exist correctly, but I just did it in a quick and dirty way.

This is (with a little clean up) what my code looked like:

::: spoiler solver code

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import z3

rand1 = 0.38203435111790895
rand2 = 0.5012949781958014
rand3 = 0.5278898433316499
rand4 = 0.5114834443666041

def xoshiro128ss(a,b,c,d):
    t = 0xFFFFFFFF & (b << 9)
    r = 0xFFFFFFFF & (b * 5)
    r = 0xFFFFFFFF & ((r << 7 | r >> 25) * 9)
    c = 0xFFFFFFFF & (c ^ a)
    d = 0xFFFFFFFF & (d ^ b)
    b = 0xFFFFFFFF & (b ^ c)
    a = 0xFFFFFFFF & (a ^ d)
    c = 0xFFFFFFFF & (c ^ t)
    d = 0xFFFFFFFF & (d << 11 | d >> 21)
    return r, (a, b, c, d)

a,b,c,d = z3.BitVecs("a b c d", 64)
nodiv_rand1, state = xoshiro128ss(a,b,c,d)
nodiv_rand2, state = xoshiro128ss(*state)
nodiv_rand3, state = xoshiro128ss(*state)
nodiv_rand4, state = xoshiro128ss(*state)

z3.solve(a >= 0, b >= 0, c >= 0, d >= 0,
  nodiv_rand1 == int(rand1*4294967296),
  nodiv_rand2 == int(rand2*4294967296),
  nodiv_rand3 == int(rand3*4294967296),
  nodiv_rand4 == int(rand4*4294967296)
  )

:::

I never heard about Z3

If you're not familiar with SMT solvers, they are a useful tool to have in your toolbox. Here are some links that may be of interest:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisfiability_modulo_theories
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_Theorem_Prover

Edit: Trying to fix formatting differences between kbin and lemmy
Edit 2: Spoiler tags and code blocks don't seem to play well together. I've got it mostly working on Lemmy (where I'm guessing most people will see the comment), but I don't think I can fix it on kbin.

Frames Per Stratum

If I understand the problem correctly, this is the solution:

::: spoiler solution
a = 2299200278
b = 2929959606
c = 2585800174
d = 3584110397
:::

I solved it with Z3. Took less than a second of computer time, and about an hour of my time -- mostly spent trying to remember how the heck to use Z3 and then a little time debugging my initial program.

I feel that one. I've had the programming equivalent of writer's block on my main hobby project for over a month now. Good luck!

Not sure, but I just checked and I have upwards of 3700 unfinished MIDI files I've authored over the past 20+ years -- more than 8MB of data. A lot of that is multiple drafts of the same songs (e.g. one song might have 3~5 variants from a single session where I was experimenting and kept all of the drafts as separate files, and sometimes I came back to an idea and experimented with it again and again like that over a period of years). I also tend to keep a lot of my musical doodles.

There's a couple dozen pieces in there that I think might be worth the effort of going back to and finishing someday, maybe; everything else is just my musical research notes, basically.

What I'd do is set up a simple website that uses a little JavaScript to rewrite the date and time into the page and periodically refresh an image under/next to it. Size the image to fit the remaining free space of however you set up the iPad, and then you can stick anything you want there (pictures/reminder text/whatever) with your favorite image editor. Upload a new image to the server when you want to change the note. The idea with an image is that it's just really easy to do and keeps the amount of effort to redo layout to a minimum -- just drag stuff around in your image editor and you'll know it'll all fit as expected as long as you don't change the resolution (instead of needing to muck around with CSS and maybe breaking something if you can't see the device to check that it displays correctly).

There's a couple issues to watch out for -- e.g. what happens if the internet connection/server goes down, screen burn-in, keeping the browser from being closed/switched to another page, keeping it powered, etc. that might or might not matter depending on your particular circumstances. If you need to fix all that for your circumstances, it might be more trouble than just buying something purpose built... but getting a first pass DIY version working is trivial if you're comfortable hosting a website.

Edit: If some sample code that you can use as a starting point would be helpful, let me know.

My guess is that if browsers as we know them weren't invented, HyperCard would've become the first browser eventually. No idea where things would progress from there or if it'd have been better or worse than the current clusterfuck. Maybe we'd all be talking about our "web stacks" instead of websites, and have various punny tools like "pile" and "chimney" and "staplr". Perhaps PowerPoint would've turned into a browser to compete with it.

If browsers were invented but JavaScript specifically was not, we'd probably all be programming sites in some VB variant like VBScript (although it might be called something different).

You can't really, as others have pointed out, but I like Philip K Dick's definition of reality: "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away."

GPT4-Vision can do it, sort of. It doesn't have a particularly great understanding of what's going on in a scene, but it can be used for some interesting stuff. I posted a link a few weeks back to an example from DALL-E Party, which hooks up an image generator and an image describer in a loop: https://kbin.social/m/imageai@sh.itjust.works/t/661021/Paperclip-Maximizer-Dall-E-3-GPT4-Vision-loop-see-comment

merde posted a link in the comments there to the goatpocalypse example -- https://dalle.party/?party=vCwYT8Em -- which is even more fun.

Still got any fun renders from back then?

POV-Ray, perhaps? You give it a scene description text file and it will render a raytraced image of the scene for you. You'd need to find or write an appropriate scene description though for what you want to randomize.

Hopefully both dishes come out great!

I've never tried to make a stew out of duck before, but if someone asked me to wing it anyway, I'd probably try to use it in a gumbo: Dark roux, Cajun Trinity (celery + onion + bell pepper), jalapeno, garlic, stock, fresh thyme, bay leaf, lots of fresh ground black pepper, spoonful of hot sauce (e.g. Crystal or Tabasco if I can't get that), plus your meat -- served over white rice. For chicken (e.g. chicken thighs), I'd sear it first but I'm not sure on the best treatment for gamey fowl. Personally I might try to blanch it first to try to reduce the gameyness (based on recommendations I've seen about cooking certain kinds of stewed pork -- like pork belly in Chinese dishes), but you'd do better to get advice from someone who's actually cooked with gamey ingredients more than I have if you can.

Adapting a coq au vin recipe might be another idea to try if gumbo doesn't appeal, but again, I've never tried that with duck either.

Thanks for introducing me to this. I hadn't seen it before. FYI, there's a higher resolution version on the Japanese Wikipedia:

• Tiger portion
• Dragon portion

What are the eyeballs made of?

I mean, we all know what happened when old Godzilla was hoppin' around Tokyo city like a big playground... right?

And Sim Tower I was obsessed with that game for a long time when I was younger. Couldn’t stop playing until I got everything completed and filled every empty space on the map.

Single, double, or triple story lobby? :-)

I remember having a pretty good time with SimTower myself -- I liked seeing all the little animations of people doing stuff throughout the building. I didn't understand the apartment pricing thing as a kid, but as an adult thinking back on it, it's clear that I was supposed to renovate the units if I wanted to keep renting them at the higher rates... (Delete and rebuild was not intuitive to me as a kid so I kept getting frustrated with the apartments and usually built massive amounts of hotel rooms instead.)

I haven’t heard of Sim Safari myself what was that one like?

I hadn't played it for 20+ years so my memory of it wasn't great when you asked this question -- but I went down a bit of a rabbit hole digging through my boxes of old anime DVDs and strange things I burned to CD-Rs as a teenager and such -- and it turns out I still have the original CD-ROM! It's got orange and white stripes. It's scratched up a little bit, but it's still readable enough that I was able to install the game under WINE and IT WORKS! (The installer prompted me to install DirectX 5 to "improve performance"... lol)

The game opens with a short animated splash screen -- a map of Africa with animated zebras and other animals shown over it before eventually displaying the game's logo. It then dumps me onto a main menu with a lantern that toggles an interactive tutorial on and off -- somewhat confusingly; it wasn't immediately clear that it was a switch unlike the other options. I turned the tutorial on but didn't find it very helpful.

The game itself is isometric and features a bunch of animals wandering around randomly while grass grows. (Screenshot) There are three different modes (park, camp, village) that I don't really understand the details of. Park shows your animals, of course. I think the idea is you build up the camp site to get tourists to come (and bring you money), do gardening and animal management and such in the park which attracts more tourists, and hire people from the village to keep things running (otherwise they poach your animals, probably?) but it's not clear how to actually get things going and most of the advisors seem pretty useless.

There's an ecologist adviser who has a field guide about plants and animals and can also show you various graphs and things. You can click on binoculars and then on an animal and it will bring up a window with a little animation of that animal.

The game constantly plays animal sound effects by default including crickets and various birds and a bunch of animals whose sounds I don't know well enough to name -- but could probably learn from the embedded educational material if I cared to. (I have a feeling many parents of kids who had this game were probably driven bonkers by some animal or other going "AWEEEEE heee heee heee hee!" over and over.)

I remembered the game being presented as more serious than SimPark (which has a talking cartoon frog guide you through things like leaf identification) -- and, indeed, the character graphics are more realistic cartoon drawings in this one, but it's also more cartoony than I remember with the sound effects for things like a "boing-a-boing-oing-oing" failure noise if you misclick the binoculars.

The controls are not very good. Moving around the map is tediuous and unintuitive (you have to click in a particular region near the window border and hold the mouse down there -- or else pull up a mini-map and navigate with that). The game also just builds paths immediately when you try to draw them with the mouse instead of letting you choose a route and drop to release to confirm the construction. You can "build" a 4 door car on your camp site for some reason as well as construct roads, but I think it may just be a decoration. There doesn't seem to be any way to pick it up and move it if you plopped it in a bad spot (bye $3k!).

Unfortunately I don't have the original box/paper manual/whatever else came with the disc and the README file (in an ancient .DOC format) is not very helpful. It does, however, contain some lines like:

By the time you read this document, the average home computer might be a 700MHz GazillaComp 2000 with 58 gigabytes of memory.

which is pretty amusing since the decade old machine I'm running it on has a 3.7GHz processor -- obscenely far beyond their dreams of high performance -- but a mere 32GB of RAM. :p

Somewhat oddly the game apparently has the ability to print -- although I haven't tried it.

I've seen Bubba Ho-Tep and Cemetery Man! Watched them during a movie marathon once that also included From Dusk Till Dawn and Jacob's Ladder. That was a night well spent.

Out of the games, I've played Sim Tower. I never made it to 5 stars but got as far as building the subway in at least one of my towers. I played way too many sim games as a kid. SimSafari is probably the most obscure I tried -- never really made much sense out of that one though.

I don't know if it's that obscure... but for anyone else who played a bunch of sim games -- do you remember the song with the lyrics "I'm just a splatter, splatter, splatter on the windshield of life"?

Didn't the GDPR have a data portability rule requiring that sites provide users the ability to easily export their own data? Does that not apply to Lemmy for some reason -- or, am I misremembering it? (I remember account data download being a big deal a while back on reddit, but it's been a few years...)