Is My Blue Your Blue is a website I found through Cloudhiker and one thing I’ve learned about me recently (along with the fact I’m cross dominant), has been I perceive greens a lot more than blues.
Not sure what to make of it, but it was nice to learn.
Leave a comment on MOPy – A screensaver that was bad for the environment
I saw a post by Ben Daubney that brought back suppressed memories – a screensaver called MOPy, that was controversial due to it’s way you would feed and nurture your virtual pet.
As Ben stated on his post:-
To make your MOPy goldfish happy, you had to buy accessories and food using points generated by making Multiple Original Prints on your (ideally HP) printer. For a while, every kid was spending every lunchtime printing out a single character on a sheet of A4 over and over again just to get enough points to give their virtual fish some virtual bubbles, and hundreds if not thousands of pages were tossed into the bin.
13 year old me didn’t have a printer, so I seemed to remember if the fish went without food, water or their environment enriched by printing out waste of paper, the fish would die. It was incredibly distressing seeing a fish on the surface of the screensaver.
Anyway, there’s a gallows humour joke to be made how a virtual fish ate resources, so ChatGPT could boil the oceans. I’ve not had enough coffee to make it, however.
RIP MOPy Fish, we hardly knew ye.
Yesterday I was on the WP Builds “This Week in WordPress” podcast episode 355. It was my second time on This Week in WordPress and I showed off a couple of projects I found (the Kagi smallweb browser and the Kagi bloopers page), as well as talk extensively about the FFmpeg to Google article I covered on this blog previously.
Away from things I discussed I also discussed the upcoming WordPress 6.9 release, building WordPress blocks with AI (and the security implications that provides) and changes to the Plugin ecosystem.
Thanks to Nathan and Michelle Frechette for having me on!
2 Comments on FFmpeg to Google: Fund Us or Stop Sending Bugs on The New Stack
A rabbit hole I went down yesterday was this article on The New Stack and it went deep into places I don’t ever want to frequent1. In the article, it talked about the sustainability in open source, particularly when large corporations that turn over huge profits view contributions as “here’s a bug, fix it”. I don’t want to believe it, but it does seem like open source is only a viable business solution when somebody gets screwed somewhere down the line.
I remember when I started getting “security researchers” reporting bugs in my plugins, and it got exhausting when individuals came with their cap in hand to my free plugins, putting the bug behind a bitcoin paywall. Oddly since my plugins have joined the Patchstack Vulnerability Disclosure Programme these updates have pretty much stopped.
It got frustrating and stressful for me to push security updates when I was getting a couple every month, and I don’t have Google’s finest security researchers and AI breathing down my neck because my code probably isn’t being used internally in Google, or in Amazon, or Meta. I can understand why people who maintain these libraries are quitting when these are corporate entities are overwhelming volunteers, often with no compensation.
Pay your fucking open source maintainers.
Leave a comment on How one developer got rollback netcode working in 1997
I saw an interview with one of the developers of ZSNES – one of the first truly great emulators. One of the key points, highlighted by PC Gamer and Time Extension was this great quote – how a developer achieved rollback netcode in 1997.
“30 times a second, I do a secret save state. The emulator plays ahead, maybe 30 milliseconds, and whenever it gets a packet saying the controller has changed, it rewinds to that frame and replays the emulation until the current point with that new input buffer.”
zsKnight – Zophar’s Domain Interview
Rollback netcode, even nearly 30 years later, is still a sticking point for many online games. It’s fine for first person shooters where you don’t need millisecond accuracy, but for things like fighting games like Street Fighter, it’s crucial. Really the only first enjoyable experience on fighting games online for me was Super Street Fighter II Turbo: HD Remix which was released in 2008, and even now the first thing many fighting game enthusiasts talk about was how it’s like to play online.
The fact that the problem was solved in 1997 before it is even a thing is so joyful.
I did manage to play ZSNES online in Business Studies class back in the day. Usually we were playing Bomberman or Mario Kart. Never got it working over dialup, but for a free version over a decent network, it is probably better than a lot of rollback netcode today.
You can watch the full (2 hour) interview below.
