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I've been working on an open source cat-themed virtual pet running on an ESP32: https://github.com/moonbench/catode32

It was inspired by tamagotchis of yesteryear (and my two cats). It uses a small common monochrome SSD1306 display with 128x64 pixels of resolution.

All of the pixel art is my own. And the cat features a bunch of different animated poses and behaviors, as well as different environments. And there are minigames (a chrome dino clone - but with a cat!, a breakout clone, a random maze generator, a tic-tac-toe game, and I plan to add more.)

I'm currently working on tweaking the stats so that they go up and down over time in a realistic way and encourage the player to feed and interact with the pet to keep stats from going too low. Then I plan on adding some wireless features, like having the pet scan WiFi names to determine if its home or traveling, or using ESP-NOW to let pets communicate with each other when they're nearby.

I made a reddit post with a video of it a few weeks ago [1] and have various prototypes of artwork for these little screens on my blog [2].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/arduino/comments/1r8i1vx/progress_o...

[2] https://moonbench.xyz/projects/tags/SSD1306/

give out anonymous time-limited tokens from the gov site, with no logging

Awful idea.

This gives the government the power to deny you access to mass communication by deciding that you're no longer allowed to verify with these platforms.

"Been protesting the wrong things? Been talking about the wrong war crimes? Been advocating for the wrong LGBT policies? Failed to pay child support? Failed to pay back-taxes? Sorry you're no longer eligible for authenticating with social media services. You're too dangerous."

That is not beyond the pale for the Australian government.

You're also at the mercy of them to actually adhere to the "no logging" part, with absolutely no mechanism to verify that. And it can be changed at any time, in targeted ways, again with no way for you to know.

A better idea would be to sell anonymous age verification cards at adult stores, liquor stores, tobacco stores, etc. Paid in cash. An even better idea is to not do any of this and spend the money on a campaign to educate parents and institutions on how to use existing parental controls.

Well that's kind of exactly my point, really.

Ostensibly these laws are to protect kids from porn, but that isn't really the case. They instantly expand to everything else "adult", and it's very easy to argue that talking about politics, or discussing evidence of war crimes or genocide, or apparently showing a real and current protest, are "adult" conversations.

And with laws like this, people, adults, everyone, lose the ability to participate in those conversations without doxxing themselves. Some of these things are difficult to discuss when you fear retribution.

It's not about the porn. It was never actually about the porn. The porn is just the difficult-to-defend-without-looking-like-a-pervert smokescreen. It's designed to curtail the free flow of information and expression in far more areas. The people behind these laws are liars.

I heard from a friend last night that they were unable to see posts on X about current protests in their country because those were considered "adult" content which can now only be viewed after submitting to an ID check. Not porn, video of a protest.

You're 100% right that it's happening today.

Even if they can't be traced back to a name/photo identity, it would still be a privacy disaster if you could only make one proof per service.

If a user can only make one then they'll have to use that identity with that service forever. That's a nightmare for privacy. Sometimes people need another account, unknown to their employer/family/friends. People should be able to make multiple accounts without those being tied together through a common "age check" identifier. But, of course, there is no way to prevent those from being distributed.

At some level I believe that's the purpose behind some of this. If someone can only have one proof, then someone can only have one account to speak with. They'll be easier to monitor, easier to identify, easier to silence. That's why I think these types of laws and behaviors should be resisted and protested.

I've mentioned in a previous comment that it's telling that big tech isn't resisting these totally-just-coincidental ID laws coming from western countries. It supercharges their surveillance and tracking abilities, and widens their moats.

Also, porn is a smokescreen. The definition of "adult" content will rapidly expand, and these put the ID issuers in censorious a position of control over people and services. Nothing stops a government attestation server from rejecting a request because someone is blacklisted from "mass communication services" because they're a felon, protestor, LGBT activist, etc... or because a service has fallen out of favor.

I think it's telling that this is happening via "policies" instead of laws, because almost nobody cares or wants it.

It's also telling that Google and Microsoft aren't in opposition to this new burden, they're giving quiet yet full support. This will *necessarily* entrench the big players through the burden to implement, make it easier to track individuals across different accounts and services, and endanger the privacy and anonymity of all adults in Australia. And I think that's all the goal.

If they cared about protecting kids they'd focus on resources and campaigns to educate parents on using parental controls. Then parents could decide if they care to block these things in their homes. It should be up to them.

The "you can just log out" loophole, that's just boiling the frog slowly. It would be foolish to think that will stay around.

That's mentioned on the "Conclusions" page of TFA:

Large-scale simulation: So far, we have only focused on systems with a few objects. What about large-scale systems with thousands or millions of objects? Turns out it is not so easy because the computation of gravity scales as . Have a look at Barnes-Hut algorithm to see how to speed up the simulation. In fact, we have documentations about it on this website as well. You may try to implement it in some low-level language like C or C++.

Sorry, I meant Arena/PvP, the multiplayer parts in general.

I loved this game growing up as it was one of the few games which ran well on our family computer, despite not having an internet connection to participate in any of the PvP elements. It was probably the most played game of my childhood. I've also logged almost 300 hours in the redux version on steam.

Interestingly, since I didn't have the internet to participate in the MMO elements of the game, my views of it are entirely rooted in the storyline and campaigns. The community is something I haven't experienced. And none of these netcode or pvp bugs or phantom players showed up there.

I love the game. In the single player modes, you can play as the NSDF (US) forces, USSR, (and later as the Chinese forces too) in a sci-fi retelling of the space race where you discover alien relics throughout our solar system and try to piece together where they came from, and more importantly, where they went. And it did this while combining a first-person vehicle combat mode with a top-down RTS system that, in my opinion, worked really well together. And I still take inspiration from it in hobby game projects I work on.

Now that I've grown up as a software developer I've thrown so many hours into writing Lua scripts to build my own missions and AI, and creating custom maps!

I'm so happy to see this post. One of my professors back in college mentioned that "just" was a "four letter word" (akin to a cuss word) and that's stuck with me since.

"How long should this take? It's JUST calling an API."

"Why did it take so long to fix that bug? It was JUST a one line change."

"Stripe handles payment stuff, we JUST need to add it in!"

What a devious little word. It just papers over all the complexity!

I think there's an obvious slippery slope here, and it's visible in how these sorts of age verification requirements are implemented. Specifically, requiring a government ID to access, creating a log of who/what/where/when.

The slippery slope comes from someone then asking the question: "Well, we already require an ID to allow someone to access porn... so can we require it for other things online where people have less desire for privacy? Why shouldn't we require an ID to post to social media, or participate in online video games (especially those violent ones!)"

The slope I see, is once you set up a system for ID verification and require it for a primary thing people want to keep private, it becomes easier to mandate it in other areas where privacy is less demanded.

Concern about that slope would be a nonissue if the laws mandated adult sites tag themselves as "adult content" for trivial filtering at the household network level, instead of establishing and normalizing the ID verification regime.

I recently put together some very small fonts (3x3, 3x4, 3x5, 3x6, 4x4, and 5x5) and tried to enumerate most of the possible glyphs as part of working on little projects on SSD1306 OLED screens: https://moonbench.xyz/projects/tiny-pixel-art-fonts/

For developers the per-install fee is an additional unwelcome cost, and one that can continue to nibble at you in perpetuity as players install and inevitably reinstall games over time. It seems to imply that if I ever upgrade to a new computer and reinstall my favorite games the developers will incur a cost and Unity will obtain revenue for... no real reason?

For gamers, this seem to indicate that all games developed with Unity phone home back to Unity HQ at the very least during the initial install (possibly on every launch?) with information about my machine. I'm not sure how they could conceivably be enforcing this otherwise. It makes me inclined to avoid installing games developed with Unity to avoid sending information about my machine and my gaming habits back to Unity and IronSource. Sorry guys but I don't want my "profile" to be part of your "ad tech" just because I decided to install games I purchased.

This is a handy resource, SSH tunnels are something that I always find easier to grasp when displayed visually.

I use a reverse SSH tunnel to access my home network when traveling.

Ex:

- [Machine-A (on my LAN, behind NAT, with a dynamic IP address)] maintains a long lived SSH connection to [Machine-B (a VPS with a public IP)] with a reverse tunnel configuration.

- I can then SSH into Machine-B and follow the tunnel back into Machine-A, and from there access the rest of my home network.

It works pretty well. I can access files on my NAS and check on my Raspberry Pi cameras without needing to put either on "the cloud". Although I have to admit I always have to pull up a resource like the one in OP whenever I want to setup something like this, I've never learned it by heart and always need a refresher.

That reminds me of this post [1], which seems relevant to this circumstance

I read on a post somewhere that if you replace "the economy" with "rich people yatch money" a lot of headlines make more sense.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25507123

In fact, couldn't we go even further, taking inspiration from Apple?

Plumbing installed in people's homes should scan for illegally consumed narcotics or prescription medications and check them against pharmacy records. Your home's electrical wiring should make sure it's not being used to illegally grow drugs. Cellphone cameras should make sure they never record a naked body without a signed consent waiver. Guitar amplifiers should verify that you're not playing an owned piece of music without a license.

How could we ever survive in a world where we relied upon targeted investigations and probable cause? How could we ever live in a world where pipes just moved things from A to B without inspecting them.

/s

Why they can't just use ads without the targeting...

Two years ago I changed my trends location to a county whose language I can't read (Japan). The trends box still exists, but I can't read it and can't care about any so-called trends.

It's one more example of how yesterday's "misinformation" can become tomorrow's "information", and how dangerous it is for sites to censor entire conversations because they (or their so-called 'fact checkers') believe in one side of a narrative.

Will there be apologies given to the people banned, isolated from participating in socialization during a pandemic where online communication was a vital tool for human connection?

This is an interesting idea. YouTube is that last big Google service that I struggle to cut out of my life since it seems to have so much more content than the alternatives. It would be great to know when I can switch to another one for a video, and maybe build that into a habit.

But looking at the service, I wish that this site provided a simple form where I could input a URL and see if there's any alternatives. It would be an opportunity to see if this service has alternatives for the channels I typically watch before agreeing to install the extension in my browser. For some reason I'm hesitant to install new extensions and I'm not comfortable having all the URLs of YouTube videos I watch being sent to someone's server, but a form or bookmarklet would let me find alternatives when I choose to look.

Good luck, and thanks for working on a project that's trying to wind back the gatekeeping and extreme censorship we see today.

I use it when I'm drawing on my Cintiq to have a small video in the corner I can idly watch while drawing.

When playing video games I can use PiP to place a video on top of my fullscreen game.

Cool to see this posted. I've been using it for the past few weeks while making some simple 2d games Godot (my winter hobby).

Overall it's been pretty good. Sometimes it slows down during tasks (a lot more than Photoshop or Clip Studio do while doing things like transforming a selection) but most of it works well. The animation features have been handy and were just simple enough to be useful.

There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors.

I often wonder if it's possible to encourage lawmakers to pass laws in the opposite direction.

I.e., to instead pass laws that guarantee the right of citizens to share information, make content, etc in ways that shall not be infringed. Laws that affirm freedom of expression and free speech in the digital space, instead of laws that increasingly punish common behavior in the name of copyright or "think of the children" type rhetoric.

I don't have much experience in law so I don't know if something like this is even possible. Can laws only dictate punishments? Is it possible to use legislation to make encroachments of freedom harder, or does that require a constitutional amendment? Is it a question of financial lobbying power?

Perhaps a more legally informed user could chime in about how feasible it is to push for legislation in the other direction.

Yes. I could not agree more.

The mind absolutely boggles trying to understand how a legislator can force an unpopular act like this into an unrelated appropriations bill and think they're doing something good.

I don't know if they're acting on greed, malice, or if their campaign funding is somehow tied into the companies and lobbies that push for these bills, but they know as well as we do that this would never pass if citizens had the opportunity to lobby against it and other legislators had the opportunity to question it. It's a failure of our system.

It was a requirement for my Software Engineering degree (my university was in the US). When discussing with my coworkers in the past, I don't think many of them were required to take any ethics courses, unfortunately.

Ethics in software is something we should all probably talk about a little more often.

As someone who values their privacy and anonymity I don't like this. I don't want records or identifiers embedded in my body, full stop.

the medical record is stored and controlled by the patient within the patient’s skin

Can the patient remove or alter it? If not I don't feel like it's accurate to say they "control" it.

the patches deliver a pattern in the skin that is invisible to the naked eye but can be scanned with a smartphone that has the infrared filter removed.

So any attacker can pull up your vaccination history (in theory your identity depending on what is imprinted in the dots) with a drive-by attack that requires nothing more sophisticated than a cellphone camera? That is exactly the opposite of how I want my medical records secured.

Something feels disconcerting here. It’s not that I care personally about this particular action; in truth I have almost only ever seen meme videos on Pornhub. But it feels like it could be a precursor to another push to censor pornography and the internet.

I would go even farther to worry that this might begin to push the Overton window towards demonizing any content posted online that isn't "verified" by a real identity. MindGeek (the company behind PornHub) was also backing the UK's law requiring an ID to watch porn online. If users get comfortable with the idea of having even their porn tied to a real ID, wouldn't they become comfortable with less "private" content also tied to their legal identity?

I don't want to read this headline from the future: "Pornhub requires an ID, should Reddit, Twitter, and 4chan do the same?" And I also don't want to read the future headline: "Pornhub's ID database hacked, thousands of models names and addresses exposed"

Anonymity is important (imo) and it would be a shame to see people use porn as the excuse to curtail it. Surely it's possible to remove illegal content without stripping away privacy and anonymity.

There is a difference between "allowed to" and "ought to". It's a question of ethics, not law.

In my opinion it feels immoral for someone who has this much control over human interaction to act in a way that undermines free discourse so blatantly. To see an American company ignore the value of free speech is disheartening to me. YouTube is so popular and I wish they took a different stance on these issues.

The draft order would push the Federal Communications Commission to issue rules clarifying the issue, potentially allowing users to sue over takedowns if they were inconsistent with companies’ terms of service, did not provide enough notice or meet other suggested criteria.

I find this interesting and I'm not sure where I stand here.

On the one hand I'm not happy about an executive order that limits liability for online platforms. The onus for posts being on the user, protecting the platform, is a core part of running any service. On the other hand, this doesn't seem like it would make platforms liable for content that users post, instead it's liability for the content that the platforms choose to _remove_. I've never considered that angle before.

Would it be akin to compelled speech on the part of the platform, or does it make them more like common carriers that can't pick and choose who gets access?

I suppose the biggest risk here would something along the lines of having bad actors post content that follows the rules for a site, but is also obviously against the spirit of the site, causing the posts to be removed and opening the site to a lawsuit?