Posts made by Sponge

This is what I've been doing: http://www.clinicallyawesome.com/2015/06/le-diet.html

Down 9.5 pounds in like 3 months. It's sooo slooooow, but pretty minimal in suffering.

@HelloRaptor said:

@Sponge said:

If you find yourself saying "I don't mean to X but..." stop right there. The most effective way to not do that thing is to just not do it. If you have to, hold your lips closed because any sentence that starts with that format is not going anywhere anyone wants to go.

This peeve comes up a lot. I have to wonder if none of the people who bitch about it have ever said anything they realized might be taken out of context or otherwise in completely the wrong way due to who they're speaking to.

I realize it's often enough used as if it gives a get out of jail free card (it doesn't) when prefacing something that is absolutely racist/sexist/assholeish/whatever, but c'mon, really? You've never said, "I'm not trying to be mean, but that outfit is a terrible choice for what we're doing." and legitimately were not trying to be mean, but knew you're talking to your histrionic sibling/friend/whatever who takes any such observation as if it's the end of the world?

Oh I have, and it didn't go anywhere anyone wanted to go. As a cerebral alpha-nerd (or maybe just Hue-Man) I've said all kinds of stupid, insensitive shit I've regretted.

If you find yourself saying "I don't mean to X but..." stop right there. The most effective way to not do that thing is to just not do it. If you have to, hold your lips closed because any sentence that starts with that format is not going anywhere anyone wants to go.

Doom OMGOMGOMGOMG. I couldn't even.

It really looks like they took the best elements of all the games and fused them into one and lit it on fire and I want it so bad.

@Rook said:

@Thenomain said:

Except those reports every two months saying how your router's firewall can be actively bypassed because of Apparently Cool Feature X, nevermind the inherent network insecurities from The Internet Of Things.

Firewalls cannot be 'bypassed' if your router (any modern) uses stateful packet inspection. Nothing can just 'come in' unless you invite it in. The reports that state that your firewall can be actively bypassed are fear mongering, or written by someone who has no idea how they work.

That's dangerously not the case. Routers themselves are subject to software vulnerabilities, user-configuration issues, and (large-scale) ISP misconfiguration. There have been infections of cable modems. There's malware brought in by guests you let use your WiFi or wired LAN.

There's HTTP: The universal firewall bypass protocol. Your router trusts the connections you initiate, even if you shouldn't. Go to the level of DPI, that's defeated by SSL.

Regarding AV software, looking up Tavis Ormandy's Sophail paper. TL;DR: he decided to pick on Sophos because it was installed on computers he was given to use. He found that Sophos itself was 1) Using CRC32 for file sig matching, which is just bonkers bad, and 2) vulnerable to memory-corruption vulnerabilities that would allow a file to infect Sophos itself (running as System) just by being scanned.

@Alzie said:

@Chime said:

You're right though, it'd be nice to help people make things safer. Replacing mushcode entirely would be a better direction, I think.

There's evennia if you'd like to take that dive.

In the context of arbitrary users writing code, making it a language that interfaces with the host platform scares the hell out of me. Lua would scare me a little less given the existing platforms that have managed to isolate hosted code securely.

I haven't poked at Evennia in any meaningful way. I'd guess they never intended not-administrator users to add python modules.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqzqcriM3ek

http://boingboing.net/2015/06/01/how-to-talk-about-caitlyn-jenn.html

Handy for those like myself who are dumb but want to be considerate of transgender people.

I've long understood the distinction between gender assigned at birth, gender identification, expression, etc, but haven't really known which terms are considered polite and which offensive. Granted, just being generally respectful of people and addressing them according to the way they express themselves as been pretty okay.

The Vanity Fair thing seems cool to me. A lot of people are going to get worked up and dumb about it but in the US at least we need a lot of reinforcement of the idea that gender isn't binary and is multidimensional.

strmatch(setinter(%qm,%qv,.),sort(%qm,,.))

Edit: tablet typos

@Miss-Demeanor said:

Strange as it seems.. some people just can't get the hang of self-checkout. A lifetime of having someone else do it makes them complacent and resistant to learning, no matter how easy it is.

The self-checkout machines at the stores I go to have some kind of anxiety disorder I don't understand. "You took an extra 4 milliseconds to put your item in the bag. I'm gonna to wait for authorization. Brought your own bags? I'm gonna have to wait for authorization. Scanned your club card? Hold up, lemmie signal for authorization..."

If I have more than like three things I make the humans do it because the machines can't even. I also might be mentally deficient in ways I'm too mentally deficient to perceive.

@Chime said:

Like most modern datacenters, HE has diesel generators that come on line right away to prevent this. One of them suffered some sort of mechanical failure. Guess which one we were on!

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess the host didn't have the benefit of independent power supplies.

Do you need host in the meantime? I got much capacity.

Speaking about TinyMUX only:

To do it purely through @ConFormat every single room on the game will need to beset INHERIT, because it is the room itself running the code, not the parent.

You can create a global function with @function that can fetch this information on behalf of the room. See; "wizhelp @function". The function will need to be /privileged.

Use this with caution. The function running with wizard privileges will be able to see contents that are DARK and on reality levels other than the observer. Off the top of my head I don't recall if the enactor will be the room or the observer.

With the function being global, anyone will be able to use it. If it turns out that the enactor is the room you could write the function to verify that the enactor is in fact a room, but a player could just use a room they control to run the function.

Just finished John Wick. Not much of a plot but great action, well-acted for an action movie.

Just finished The Babadook. The first third of the movie I wanted the kid to be gone. About halfway through it started to get creepy. Then it kind of fizzled out with a Stephen King ending.

@il-volpe said:

If it's for a MUSH, just make it look sorta like a flow-chart, with boxes and lines.

I've previously done the inverse: written a bot that can log into a game, map out all the rooms and exits, then spit out a graphviz file which gives you the boxes and lines. It's a pain to get graphviz to produce sensible output for complex graphs like a MUSH grid though

There's stuff like this.

To be clear, your asking about creating new geography, not mapping an existing place (MU), yeah?

Posted! The code tag on this wiki doesn't line-wrap but you can download the log from the link above the code block.

http://www.newprospectmush.com/guides/fundamentals-1

In a couple of weeks I'll have office hours on New Prospect in case anyone wants to ask questions about what was covered in this session.

The next session will be on understanding Commands, Substitution, and Help. It's probably a month out.

Siteban carried over from CoH. They've all been flushed. Please try again.