Have you tried Resonance? It’s a mystery adventure game set in modern times where you play as four different characters whose stories interconnect. It’s been a while since I played it (a decade or so?) but I remember that it had an interesting game mechanic that let you use memories like items in various interactions, as well as a number of puzzles that I rather liked the design of.

artificial gestation

The word “matrix” literally means “womb” in its older sense.

It’s not a GUI library, but Jupyter was pretty much made for the kind of mathematical/scientific exploratory programming you’re interested in doing. It’s not the right tool for making finished products, but is intended for creating lab notebooks that contain executable code snippets, formatted text, and visual output together. Given your background experience and the libraries you like, it seems like it’d be right up your alley.

It might be easier to just fire up Wireshark and look for relevant traffic when you trigger the action.

I don’t know if there are any existing implementations that work well enough yet for it to actually be relaxing, but it might be possible to set up a hands-free IF experience by hooking up speech-to-text and text-to-speech tools to the game.

Can Z3 account for lost bits? Did it come up with just one solution?

It gave me just one solution the way I asked for it. With additional constraints added to exclude the original solution, it also gives me a second solution – but the solution it produces is peculiar to my implementation and does not match your implementation. If you implemented exactly how the bits are supposed to end up in the result, you could probably find any other solutions that exist correctly, but I just did it in a quick and dirty way.

This is (with a little clean up) what my code looked like:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import z3

rand1 = 0.38203435111790895
rand2 = 0.5012949781958014
rand3 = 0.5278898433316499
rand4 = 0.5114834443666041

def xoshiro128ss(a,b,c,d):
    t = 0xFFFFFFFF & (b << 9)
    r = 0xFFFFFFFF & (b * 5)
    r = 0xFFFFFFFF & ((r << 7 | r >> 25) * 9)
    c = 0xFFFFFFFF & (c ^ a)
    d = 0xFFFFFFFF & (d ^ b)
    b = 0xFFFFFFFF & (b ^ c)
    a = 0xFFFFFFFF & (a ^ d)
    c = 0xFFFFFFFF & (c ^ t)
    d = 0xFFFFFFFF & (d << 11 | d >> 21)
    return r, (a, b, c, d)

a,b,c,d = z3.BitVecs("a b c d", 64)
nodiv_rand1, state = xoshiro128ss(a,b,c,d)
nodiv_rand2, state = xoshiro128ss(*state)
nodiv_rand3, state = xoshiro128ss(*state)
nodiv_rand4, state = xoshiro128ss(*state)

z3.solve(a >= 0, b >= 0, c >= 0, d >= 0,
  nodiv_rand1 == int(rand1*4294967296),
  nodiv_rand2 == int(rand2*4294967296),
  nodiv_rand3 == int(rand3*4294967296),
  nodiv_rand4 == int(rand4*4294967296)
  )

I never heard about Z3

If you’re not familiar with SMT solvers, they are a useful tool to have in your toolbox. Here are some links that may be of interest:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisfiability_modulo_theories
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_Theorem_Prover

Edit: Trying to fix formatting differences between kbin and lemmy
Edit 2: Spoiler tags and code blocks don’t seem to play well together. I’ve got it mostly working on Lemmy (where I’m guessing most people will see the comment), but I don’t think I can fix it on kbin.

If I understand the problem correctly, this is the solution:

I solved it with Z3. Took less than a second of computer time, and about an hour of my time – mostly spent trying to remember how the heck to use Z3 and then a little time debugging my initial program.

What I’d do is set up a simple website that uses a little JavaScript to rewrite the date and time into the page and periodically refresh an image under/next to it. Size the image to fit the remaining free space of however you set up the iPad, and then you can stick anything you want there (pictures/reminder text/whatever) with your favorite image editor. Upload a new image to the server when you want to change the note. The idea with an image is that it’s just really easy to do and keeps the amount of effort to redo layout to a minimum – just drag stuff around in your image editor and you’ll know it’ll all fit as expected as long as you don’t change the resolution (instead of needing to muck around with CSS and maybe breaking something if you can’t see the device to check that it displays correctly).

There’s a couple issues to watch out for – e.g. what happens if the internet connection/server goes down, screen burn-in, keeping the browser from being closed/switched to another page, keeping it powered, etc. that might or might not matter depending on your particular circumstances. If you need to fix all that for your circumstances, it might be more trouble than just buying something purpose built… but getting a first pass DIY version working is trivial if you’re comfortable hosting a website.

Edit: If some sample code that you can use as a starting point would be helpful, let me know.

Yeah; I also tried subbing in case that kicks off federation and searched a few titles to see if they ended up in random incorrectly as well (stuff like that happens sometimes with kbin). The magazine has seen a few microblogs mentioning the channel, and it clearly picked up the avatar/icon, description, etc. somehow, but doesn’t seem to be getting any videos as threads/posts and I couldn’t find any floating around disconnected either. I think kbin most likely doesn’t understand what PeerTube is publishing through AP, but there could always be federation weirdness or something.

Doesn’t seem to work right on kbin, unfortunately, although it does show up as a magazine: https://kbin.social/m/thelinuxexperiment_channel@tilvids.com

[coreutils-announce] coreutils-8.31 released [stable]

stat now prints file creation time when supported by the file system,
on GNU Linux systems with glibc >= 2.28 and kernel >= 4.11.

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/coreutils-announce/2019-03/msg00000.html

(found thanks to this blog post titled “File Creation Time in Linux”)

Any ways to get around the download failing

I did this incredibly stupid procedure with Firefox yesterday as a workaround for a failing Google Takeout download:

• backup the .part file from the failed download
• restart the download (careful – if you didn’t move/back it up, it will be deleted and you will have to download the whole thing again; found this out the hard way on a 50GB+ file… that failed again)
• immediately pause the new download after it starts writing to disk
• replace the new .part file with the old .part file from earlier (or – see [1] below)
• Firefox might not show progress for a long time, but will eventually continue the download (I saw it reading the file back from disk with iotop so I just let it run)
• sanity check that you actually got the whole thing and that it is usable (in my case, I knew a hash for the file)

[1] You can actually replace the new .part file with anything that has the same size in bytes as the old file – I replaced it with a file full of zeros and manually merged the end onto the original .part file with a tiny custom python script since I had already moved the incomplete file to other media before realizing I could try this. (In my case, the incomplete file would still have been useful even with the last ~1MB cut off.)

There are probably better options in most cases – like Thunderbird for mailbox as other people suggested, or rclone for getting stuff from Drive – but if you need to get Takeout to work and the download keeps failing this may be another option to try.

Haven’t used that particular library, but have written libraries that do similar sorts of things and have played with a few other similar libraries in C++ and Haskell. I’ve taken a quick glance at the documentation here, but since I don’t know this library specifically apologizes in advance if I make a mistake.

For OneOrMore(Word(alphanums)) + OneOrMore(Char(printables)) it looks it matches as many alphanum Words as it can (whitespace sequences being an acceptable separator between tokens by default) and when it hits ( it cannot continue with that so tries to match the next expression in the sequence. (i.e. OneOrMore(Char(printables)))

The documentation says:

Char - a convenience form of Word that will match just a single character from a string of matching characters

Presumably, that means it will not group the characters together, which is why you get individual character matches after that point for all the remaining non-whitespace characters. (Your result also seems to imply there was a semicolon at the end of your input?)

For OneOrMore(Word(alphanums)) + OneOrMore(Char(string.punctuation)) it looks like it cannot match further than ( since 1 is not a punctuation character; so, you got the tokens for the parts of the string that matched. (If you chained the parser expression with something like + Word(alphanum) I’d expect you’d get another token [i.e. "1"] added onto the end of your result.) You may eventually want StringEnd/LineEnd or something like that – I’d expect they’d fail the parser expression if there’s unconsumed input (for error detection), but again, haven’t used this specific library, so it may work different than I expect.

There appears to be a Combine class you can use to join string results together; that might be useful for future reference.

i was trying to parse a string with pyparsing so all the words were separated from the punctuation signs

Have not tested it (since I don’t have a copy of the library installed anywhere and can’t set up an environment for it easily right now) but perhaps something like OneOrMore(Word(alphanums)|Char(string.punctuation)) would be more like what you are looking for?

I don’t have a complete solution, but I do have some ideas:

• Have you tried hooking it up to an external monitor? Sometimes auto-config can help you recover from weird states if you plug in a different display.
• On my Deck, I can reach a terminal by using CTRL-ALT-F4 that is separate from the main desktop mode (CTRL-ALT-F1 switches back). Default user seems to be called “deck”. You may need to set a password to use sudo. I am not sure exactly how the desktop environment is set up on the Deck so I am not sure exactly what you need to change or where the files would be – maybe check under /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d to see if anything is set to an insane value there?
• You might try sending Valve a support request
• As a last resort, you could try a factory reset. You’ll nuke everything else on it too though…

Pokemon (1st gen and 2nd gen – plus some of the spin-off stuff from that era to a lesser extent) captivated me in a way no other games have before or since. Honestly, I hope nothing ever grabs me that hard again; it’s kind of scary how obsessed I was in retrospect.

A number of N64 games also made a big impact on me. Majora’s Mask was probably my second favorite game (after Pokemon) for many years. (OoT made an impression too, but I played MM first.) I loved the music in Diddy Kong Racing. I got 120 stars in Mario 64, and when I tried it again as an adult, I really appreciated how short and to the point levels could be (not that I played that way as a kid) – also the camera in that game sucked. Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness kind of disturbed me a bit as a kid, but it’s probably the first game I encountered a sort of “New Game Plus” in, which was neat. (People have since told me that’s the “black sheep” of the series and that it’s really weird that that’s the only one I’ve played significantly.)

Duke Nukem 3D was the first game I modded, I think (very simple graphical stuff). Definitely wasn’t age appropriate but I played the heck of it anyway. Didn’t really get much into other shooters other than playing through the main game of Perfect Dark on N64 and playing split-screen Golden Eye with friends.

I also played a lot of Sim\ games – particularly SimCity 2000, SimEarth, and SimTower. Also had a bunch of others like SimFarm and even some of the more obscure ones like SimSafari. Streets of SimCity and SimCopter being able to load SC2K maps was really neat though. Played a fair amount of other city builders and simulation games like Caesar III and Roller Coaster Tycoon too. My parents probably hoped I’d become some sort of business manager. :p

I had a lot of creative tools back then as well which I treated as not-that-different from video games. Various Kid Pix programs (one of which had a bunch of odd video clips integrated – including a short documentary about jackalopes of all things), Kid’s Studio, Digital Chisel, some version of HyperCard, etc. Game Maker – which I found around the year 2000 back when it was still on www.cs.uu.nl – ultimately led me to being a professional programmer.

• “To hell with wearing your heart on your sleeve – bare it all!”

• “Opinions are like assholes – and here’s mine!”

• “…and now, for a real hot take!”

Wow, that’s a heck of a lot cheaper than I expected. I mean, it’s still more than I’m willing to pay for it on my own, but it’s not the “haha no way could I ever buy one” level of impossible I was expecting. My boss probably wouldn’t bat an eye if I asked for one to stick in a workstation… Hmm.

OK, that’s fun and all, but how much does that crazy SSD cost? :p

If you want minimal effort to get a good Linux setup for Steam, just buy a SteamDeck. Get the dock if you want to use it like a regular computer or console with a wireless gamepad. I did that – hooked it up to my monitor, headphones, plugged in a mouse, keyboard, and my old XBox360 USB wireless dongle and it all just worked. I’ve got a few ideas for fun projects I want to try with it as a handheld and have written some software on it using desktop mode (little Python utility scripts for shuffling data around) but mostly I just use it like a gaming console; it works well for that.

• GLFW is intended to be built with cmake.
• After unzipping the source, make a build directory, and configure glfw3
• ^^ I like using ccmake to do this interactively, but you can also just pass flags to cmake if you know what they are
• You should build with GLFW_USE_WAYLAND and GLFW_USE_OSMESA turned off to get it to try to build against X11.
• You will probably also want to turn off GLFW_BUILD_DOCS, GLFW_BUILD_EXAMPLES, GLFW_BUILD_TESTS
• You can adjust CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX if you don’t want to use the /usr/local default install path.
• After generating a Makefile, run make and make install
• glfw3 generates a pkg-config compatible .pc file as part of its build process that lists flags needed for compilation and linking against the library. Normally, you’d just call pkg-config --cflags --libs --static glfw3 to get this info as part of your own build process (in a Makefile, for example) or else require glfw3 as part of a cmake-based build, but you can read what’s generated in there if that program is not available to you for some reason. In case it’s helpful for comparison, what I get with a custom build of the static library version of glfw3 installed into /usr/local on a slightly old version of Ubuntu is output like -I/usr/local/include -L/usr/local/lib -lglfw -lrt -lm -ldl -lX11 -lpthread -lxcb -lXau -lXdmcp but you may need something different for your particular configuration.

Basically, something like this, probably, to do the compilation and get the flags to pass to g++:

wget 'https://github.com/glfw/glfw/releases/download/3.3.8/glfw-3.3.8.zip'
unzip glfw-3.3.8.zip
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -D GLFW_BUILD_DOCS=OFF -D GLFW_BUILD_EXAMPLES=OFF -D GLFW_BUILD_TESTS=OFF -D GLFW_USE_OSMESA=OFF -D GLFW_USE_WAYLAND=OFF -D GLFW_VULKAN_STATIC=OFF ../glfw-3.3.8
make
make install

pkg-config --cflags --libs --static glfw3

If you want to just compile a single cpp file after building and install, you can do something like

g++ main.cpp `pkg-config --cflags --libs --static glfw3` -lGL