Merijn

building on decentralized protocols makes the network more resilient than any centralized platform #

In just 7 minutes, Vox takes a visual look back at the biggest events of 2022, including Ukraine, inflation, Musk/Twitter, tech layoffs, Serena retires, TikTok, the World Cup, the pandemic continues, the climate crisis intensifies, mass shootings, no more Roe, Iranian protests, the death of Queen Elizabeth, and more.

See also 2022 in Review (AP), 2022 Year in Review (Reuters), 50 Wonderful Things from 2022 (NPR), 2022 Year in Review (United Nations), 2022 in Review (New Yorker), and the Year in Search 2022 (Google).

Tags: video

I woke up this morning and, for some reason, needed Sarah “Smac” McCreanor’s hydraulic press interpretive dances to be the first thing you saw on this site in 2023. I’ve watched these on Instagram many times before (see the whole set here) but I think it’s worth stopping to appreciate just how great these are: the wardrobe, the inventiveness in interpretation, the physicality, the comedic timing, and the precise choreography with the press. It’s something completely ridiculous pulled off with unbelievable skill — more of that energy in 2023 please!

Tags: dance   Sarah McCreanor   video

the discoverer blogged about how she used Shodan to find the exposed server, AWS credentials, and S3 buckets #

These days, every language in wide use has support for unicode characters, at least in strings. This is excellent, because it means we can program like the kids these days, with loads of emojis. I'm cool. This is what cool looks like: 😎.

You know what else is cool? National ID systems. One particular European country has rolled out a new software backend for their national ID system. Dimitry has the privilege to see the code. This is how they show the user how complete something is, as a percentage:

private static string GetPercentageRounds(double percentage)
{
    if (percentage == 0)
        return "⚪⚪⚪⚪⚪⚪⚪⚪⚪⚪";
    if (percentage > 0.0 && percentage <= 0.1)
        return "🔵⚪⚪⚪⚪⚪⚪⚪⚪⚪";
    if (percentage > 0.1 && percentage <= 0.2)
        return "🔵🔵⚪⚪⚪⚪⚪⚪⚪⚪";
    if (percentage > 0.2 && percentage <= 0.3)
        return "🔵🔵🔵⚪⚪⚪⚪⚪⚪⚪";
    if (percentage > 0.3 && percentage <= 0.4)
        return "🔵🔵🔵🔵⚪⚪⚪⚪⚪⚪";
    if (percentage > 0.4 && percentage <= 0.5)
        return "🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵⚪⚪⚪⚪⚪";
    if (percentage > 0.5 && percentage <= 0.6)
        return "🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵⚪⚪⚪⚪";
    if (percentage > 0.6 && percentage <= 0.7)
        return "🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵⚪⚪⚪";
    if (percentage > 0.7 && percentage <= 0.8)
        return "🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵⚪⚪";
    if (percentage > 0.8 && percentage <= 0.9)
        return "🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵⚪";

    return "🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵🔵";
}

Sure, this is an ugly way to generate strings, but the real secret sauce is the first comparison: percentage == 0. That's fine in some places, like when you know percentage was initialized to 0, but when it's being calculated, it could easily be very close to zero without actually being zero, thanks to a loss of precision. That's why the Equals and CompareTo functions should be used, otherwise some user is going to be at 0% and see a completed progress bar.

killed by an unannounced and undocumented policy change from a company no developer should ever trust again #

a London furniture conservator suggested dots, lines, and symbols denote lunar months for tracking animal life cycles, making it the earliest writing in human history #

made with Dittytoy, a simple Javascript API for making generative music online #

surprising number of small but useful services for only $20/year, made by a single dev #

remarkable 2016 article about a woman who self-diagnosed her rare genetic mutation and spotted it in others #

My son had a sleepover and I had noticed that the kids were particularly hyper that evening. It was only a few days later that I noticed the trays of ice cubes i had made with white wine were missing. Those boys will never know what caused their sore heads the next morning.

This Christmas we both told our parents that we were at our partner's family. Actually spent the day at home with each other curled up on the sofa watching Lord of the Rings in our pyjamas and eating roast potatoes dipped in gravy. It was perfect

I have an expensive Lever Espresso Machine. I love the ritual of making a coffee with it and pretend I'm an 18th century chemist making a discovery. I hate the taste of coffee though so when I'm done I dump a load of sugar and vanilla syrup in it.

I'm an airline pilot. Sometimes we put the seatbelt signs on just so there's no line for the bathroom when we go out. Sorry not sorry.

Friend is a big conspiracy theorist but knows better to talk about it to the group. Made a fake profile and added him on Facebook to see that side of him. Bloody hell, it's darker than I could ever have imagined, and now I'm genuinely worried he's seriously mentally ill.

I matched a girl on Tinder on a Tuesday evening. She asked if she was ok to bring a change of clothes etc as she had work the next day. I woke in the morning & found her sat on my sofa tapping away on her laptop with a headset on. "I'm choosing to work from home today" she said

When my husband goes out drinking he always comes back smashed, so I get up in the morning and fleece his money where he leaves it on the floor! He then moans how much money he spent that night and he won't be doing that for a long time.

As my brother-in-law lost most of his hair at a very early age I deliberately avoid a haircut in the two weeks before a family get together

I told my uncle that I'd got him a new phone for Christmas because my dead dad - his brother - had asked me to, but it was because I was fed up with providing IT support for a Samsung that stopped updating in 2017.

Me: *Contacting them.* "Hi, just a reminder that my invoice is a few weeks overdue. When can I expect payment?" Client: "You'll be paid when the ad performs well enough?" Me: "What do you mean? I can see from my metrics that your ad-reach is quite high."

This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee recounts the five best, worst, and blandest video games of 2022.

For more major games Yahtz has reviewed lately, check out The Callisto Protocol, Evil West, Marvel’s Midnight Suns, Sonic Frontiers, Bayonetta 3, Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope, Gotham Knights, and Elden Ring.

And check out Yahtzee’s other series, Extra Punctuation, where he’s recently talked about the pacing-killing problems of audio logs and whether games actually have to be fun.

Want to watch Zero Punctuation ad-free? Sign-up for The Escapist + today and support your favorite content creators!

We have a merch store as well! Visit the store for ZP merch.

Transcript

And so we reach the end of 2022, or as it will be known by future generations, the year what Elden Ring come out in. You know when they reboot a franchise and use the same name, they always end up having to stick the year it came out on the end, as with Sonic the Hedgehog open brackets 2006 and Doom open brackets 2016? This is gonna be the opposite of that. The year 2022 will forever be known as 2022 open brackets when Elden Ring come out. Not that I want to spoil too much of what you should expect from this, the Zero Punctuation top 5, bottom 5 and blandest 5 games of the preceding year. Although I’ll spoil one more thing: neither God of War Ragnarok nor Sonic Frontiers appear in any of the following lists. Hopefully this time the Youtube video won’t have to sit atop its comments like a squirrel being dangled over a sack of understimulated pitbulls.

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Sometimes when the wife is out of the house I get the suitcases down and start pretending to pack stuff and leave them by the door. Nothing to do with the wife, it's just to fuck with the cat who hates it when we go on holiday.

Met the most beautiful girl at a bar. Somehow pulled her. Took her back to mine. Moved to the stand and carry and she came really quickly - as she did she shit all over my dick, balls and legs. Covered in it. I had to change carpets. Married her. We don't EVER talk about it.

Bill Tavis designed this lovely vintage-style map of the familiar fractal shape, the Mandelbrot set. He is selling a poster version of the map, starting at the very reasonable price of $24. I don’t usually highlight the price on this sort of thing, but an unauthorized seller on Amazon was selling poor-quality counterfeits of the map and even though it wasn’t his fault, Tavis offered to replace any of the crappy maps for free. Great map, and apparently a great human who made it.

I found Tavis’s map when I was searching for the creator of this similarish map that I found on Twitter (bigger here).

Anyone know who made this version? Jonny Laser made the map in the second image for VSauce (scroll down a bit). (thx, kirsten)

Tags: Bill Tavis   design   fractals   mathematics

links in tweets, DMs, and profiles are all now blocked, and clicking links in existing tweets are blocked for being "unsafe" #

Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book American Prometheus (Kindle), Christopher Nolan’s newest film follows theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer as he leads the Manhattan Project to build the world’s first atomic weapon during World War II. If this film is just 50% slow-motion IMAX-scale fluid dynamics simulations, I don’t think I’d be that mad.

I’m curious to see if this film has one of Nolan’s signature time tricks — aside from the Batmen, they almost all do.

Oppenheimer comes out in the US on July 23, 2023.

P.S. If you want to read an excellent book about the Manhattan Project, you can’t do better than The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes — one of my all-time favorite books.

Tags: American Prometheus   atomic bomb   books   Christopher Nolan   movies   Oppenheimer   trailers   video

Epic Games will end online services and turn off servers for a handful of its older titles, including many Rock Band and Unreal Tournament games. The company says that the decision arrives as it moves to “solely support Epic Online Services with its unified friends system, voice chat features, parental controls, and parental verification features.” While many of these titles will remain available to play offline, some will not be playable in any capacity.

Epic will end online services for all of the games on its list, including those Rock Band and Unreal Tournament games, on January 24. The full list of titles losing online support can be seen below.

A List of Games That Will End Online Services at Epic Games This January

• 1000 Tiny Claws
• Dance Central 1–3
• Green Day: Rock Band
• Monsters (Probably) Stole My Princess
• Rock Band 1–3
• The Beatles: Rock Band
• Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars
• Unreal Gold
• Unreal II: The Awakening
• Unreal Tournament 2003
• Unreal Tournament 2004
• Unreal Tournament 3
• Unreal Tournament: Game of the Year Edition

While Epic notes that Rock Band 4 online multiplayer and Dance Central VR online multiplayer will remain available, many of these titles were removed from digital storefronts today. The announcement also reveals that Mac and Linux versions of Hatoful Boyfriend and Hatoful Boyfriend: Holiday Star have been removed from digital storefronts today. Players who purchased these titles before today will still be able to access and play the games. Additionally, Battle Breakers will shut down and become inaccessible on December 30, and refunds will be made available to those who made in-game purchases in the past 180 days.

Meanwhile, Epic isn’t completely leaving Unreal Tournament fans in the dust. Just before the announcement that servers for older titles would be shuttered, the company revealed Unreal Tournament 3 X, a free version of the third Unreal Tournament. It comes with crossplay for all PC players and has no microtransactions. It’s a silver lining for those who still like to hop back in for a nostalgic match or two. However, all other Unreal Tournament games aren’t getting the same special treatment, at least for now.

Unreal Tournament 3 X isn’t available for download yet, and Epic has yet to reveal a release date. Stay tuned for updates on when we’ll be able to play this free version of the game and, hopefully, other Unreal Tournament titles.

When my husband asked me how much spaghetti to cook, all I could think to tell him was to imagine if he was having a wank, that much.

The sound effects lmfaoo

nitter.net/corrouchies/status/1602643084277420033#m

December 1985. Knew we were getting a ZX Spectrum 128 for Xmas. Parents went out one night, brother & I carefully unwrapped computer, set it all up, played Rambo all evening. Reboxed, wrapped back up when finished. Parents none the wiser. Soz mum & dad.