Skip to main content


Hey, after trying out Friendica for a while I changed to Mastodon after all.
Feel invited to connect with me at https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@paralax
Well, I don't know if it's my setup (I'm using Firefox with quite a lot of extensions) or if it's the site itself but coming from Twitter I found it relatively hard or cumbersome doing basic things such as attaching images to a post, integrating with third party apps on PC and mobile and even simply following other people.

The more popular third party apps I had a look at seem to mostly be made for Mastodon and so despite the underlying Fediverse protocol I had a mixed experience. For Friendica this means that often I could kind of get them to work but then I couldn't enter certain screens such as the settings screen or toggles wouldn't work here or there.

I wanted a comparison with Mastodon and so I set up an account to see for myself. Turns out, that over there - at least for the specific server I chose - all those things tend to be a little faster, with way less clicks and just feel a bit more modern. Mastodon doesn't have a calendar tab but that's okay for me. It also seems to go for an overall design more in line with the one from Twitter. No problem with app integration either.

Following people on Friendica - unless I misunderstood the approach - is this whole process where I have to copy a user's handle into a form and submit everything, pulling me out of my current context, while on Mastodon I can just click the follow button and I'm done.

I get that Friendica focuses on privacy and so this may involve some tradeoffs here and there. For me personally I just found that for continuous use things have to be streamlined enough for me to want to come back and I'm getting that more with Mastodon.

I might not have wrapped my head around Friendica entirely though because, at least on paper, the platform including its UI seems way more customizable and interoperable with other decentralized social media platforms. It seems to be more focused on power users which I am admittedly not ;)

Mastodon is not Twitter - it's way less addictive by design and has its own little quirks but I guess for me it's somewhere in the middle between a power user system like Friendica and Twitter itself.

In any case, I know that managing a server is hard work and so thanks for putting in the effort and providing this service for free! Since Twitter is morphing into this democracy endangering lunatic platform it's even more important getting people off there and providing sensible social media alternatives out of reach of sociopath billionaires and unaccountable corporations.
thanks for that writeup. i was expecting something like that, i roughly feel the same about it. we stupidly ran a mastodon instance on the abraum.de main domain for testing 2 years ago and deleted it, because it was very confusing, so that domain is now burned for mastodon/fediverse because of key-exchange blah... it is quite obvious that mastodon has much more development going on. i think at some point we will set up one here as well on a different subdomain to check it out again. i also feel that friendica is too cumbersome at places to be used as my daily/main social media thing.

"This Riva TNT 2 belongs in a museum!"
an attempt was made

Paralax^SD reshared this.


the internet isnt "a series of tubes" its basically just one tube owned by The Worst Guy

Paralax^SD reshared this.



Demo coding productivity advice:
Always take the least important item from your to-do list, obsess over it to an unhealthy degree, rinse and repeat. #burnside #automated-release-announcements


Work on the new demo tool auto updater is progressing somewhat nicely...


Oxygene Pt. 4 by Jean-Michel Jarre (1976), reinterpreted in Javascript.
Really spot-on, respect to the author!

https://dittytoy.net/ditty/24373308b4

Storm Electricity reshared this.


Paralax^SD reshared this.


Guerrilla's "Making Tools for Big Games" (CEDEC2019 talk) was just posted: https://www.guerrilla-games.com/read/making-tools-for-big-games -- super interesting. The last part on "we just don't use any local files, but rather in-memory keyvalue store on a server" is :mindblown:

reshared this

I have read this talk today, man, it is good; but one thing Michiel said really confuses me: if they have this global store that are smart enough to serve clients whatever data they need, why do they still need perforce? they could have done the versioning themselves at this point? (I guess Michiel isn't on mastodon yet? or else I would ping him :)
@bitinn my guess would be on “not everything at once”. Michiel mentioned on Twitter that they have been moving “more” of what they have in P4 to this. Also will do an update on this tech at GDC


Finally confirmed: ASCII artists not yet endangered by automation!
#demoscene #chatgpt

reshared this

Also totally the wrong font (:

Paralax^SD reshared this.


A Christmas fun thing - making small graphical things (called #Sizecoding - because it's small. And fun.) is going on here:

https://tcc.lovebyte.party/day0/

This is for anyone who has wanted to do something but doesn't know how yet, and wants to start; or people who want to brush up on stuff, or (like in my case) want to polish up how you're doing it in another language.

EVERYONE is welcome to join us.

Which means: YES, I really do mean everyone. ESPECIALLY people who aren't in the traditional "white, older male" category.

And if join do join and anyone gives you ANY crap about not being in the "white, older male" category: Let me know and I'll make so much god damned fuss they'll attack _me_ so you get some rest from the crap.

Also: this is fun. Please join us!

#Demoscene #CreativeCoding
@jackpearse THAT'S who you are (:

Right cool, mutual follow coming (:
Thank‘s for letting me follow you. ;-)
I am really happy, that you are here. A daily portion Demoscene makes the day brighter.


Holo decks, Klingons, oh my!


I made chat GPT run as a holo deck simulation and in true fashion it allows me to edit all participating actors. What a trip :D
This entry was edited (9 months ago)


Just spent 5 minutes worrying about my laptop's dying ventilation until I realized it was YouTube playing this super smooth brown noise video in the background.
It *is* really top notch brown noise though...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_gzyYQJgOo

Paralax^SD reshared this.


At the 1978 Science Fiction Film Awards, William Shatner provided one of the most unique covers of a pop song, certainly in a sci-fi convention, but maybe at any convention, or anywhere.

Over the years, Shatner has weirdly denied it happened, but it did, and Flemishdog found a U-MATIC videotape with an unaltered, high-quality version of Shatner's "Rocket Man". And here it is.

https://archive.org/details/william-shatner-rocket-man

Paralax^SD reshared this.

I watched this in the original broadcast. It was painful. 😱

Paralax^SD reshared this.


I thought I'd try to play game master and have the ChatGPT play my adventure... this is how it went
Q: You find yourself on a green meadow. To the east lies a path that leads to an emerald tower in the distance. To the east leads a roadsign labeled "To the enchanted forest".

Make a choice.

A: I will take the path to the emerald tower.

Q: You take the path to the emerald tower. On the way there you notice a small silver key lying on the ground.

A: I will pick up the silver key, thinking it might be useful later on in my journey.

Q: You arrive at the emerald tower. The place seems abandoned. The door is unguarded.

A: I will cautiously enter the emerald tower, keeping an eye out for any potential dangers or traps. I will also use the silver key to unlock any doors that may be locked inside.

Q: The door is locked.

A: I will use the silver key to unlock the door and enter the emerald tower.

Paralax^SD reshared this.

The adventure continues...
And still it goes on...
@RosethornRangerTTV there is not enough space for it. i'm leaving it out and will endure whatever consequences may come my way
... and the conclusion (for now).
This was a delightful way to start my morning. Thanks for sharing!
nice. I wonder if it can do multi-character role-playing too, where you prompt it in turn for what each character would do
@jon_valdes if i had to bet on it right now, i would say, it could totally do that.
I am mindboggled at what is coming from this AI. Absolutely insane. Are we close to AGI?
@marcel yeah I think so. at this point it's mostly a problem of spending hours and hours of computing power on training, modeling storage and processing queries.

the AI itself downplays what it can do, but I have barely any complaints. For the first time, I am obsessed with it.
i just had it generate a transportation network in The Underdark using one-way gates only. Because every fantasy realm needs a believable logistics backbone in the world building


We've come a long way since Eliza. The quality OpenAI's new ChatGPT system brings to the table is truly fascinating. Here it's reasonably comparing memory safety features in two different programming languages.

Paralax^SD reshared this.


This past week I’ve learned more CMake than I (n)ever wanted to know. So this sounds still appropriate
Want to learn CMake? No.

reshared this

well... watch the introduction into #handmadehero by Casey Muratori :)
@mephisztoe I did, a while ago. Yes I know about build systems, but when you are working with someone else's codebase you often don't get a choice which one to use.
darn it, looks like others already took all the “Yes” slips.


Some progress on the tooling front


Underappreciated demo tool milestone:
being able to open a project, close it and reopen again without everything exploding!

https://imgur.com/a/fAlzV0A

👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

Paralax^SD reshared this.


new RTX gpu prices are insane, let’s ditch all for software renderer!

Paralax^SD reshared this.

A CPU pretending to be a GPU? Inconceivable!
@TomF this is my time to shine!

Paralax^SD reshared this.


Google has now migrated maps.google.com to www.google.com/maps thus if you grant Geoloc permission in your browser, every G-service on www.google.com can track your location.

https://garrit.xyz/posts/2022-11-24-smart-move-google


More Steven Seagal content!


The nice thing about being in a chat room with 3D artists is that I'm exposed to a weird mix of stuff I'd never have found on my own. This one's especially hilarious while I also learned a thing or two!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aCMTpJx2cs&t=3s

Paralax^SD reshared this.


So #mosstodon is cool and all about moss, but sadly not about Moss and I'm here to fix that
Moss, the character from the IT Crowd tv show

Paralax^SD reshared this.


Paralax^SD reshared this.


Thanks to everyone!

reshared this

I voted, so very happy!!! Congratulations!
You absolutely deserve it! It’s my favorite of the six Monkey Island games!

Paralax^SD reshared this.


Announcing 'Dear ImGui Test Engine' + 'Dear ImGui Test Suite', available now.
- automation/testing for Dear ImGui apps/tools;
- run in your live app or headless on CI;
- run at robot speed or simulated human speed;
- export screens/videos for e.g. generating docs;

https://github.com/ocornut/imgui_test_engine

#imgui