TurkTurkleton (u/TurkTurkleton)

TurkTurkleton commented on Darkrealms BBS darkrealms.ca/... · Posted by u/TigerUniversity

I lived in the middle of nowhere in small farming town and the BBS scene really saved me when I was a kid. I had clear opinions about BBS software and Renegade was always my favorite. I always considered Wildcat to be boring looking and for old people. I think it was just that all of the Wildcat boards in my area were run by boring graybeards.

Every board in my area (not many) served a text file called The Alchemist's List — a huge list of regional boards — and it was absolutely responsible for a lot of very contentious long distance bills. Sometimes I miss the simplicity of that time but I do not miss the UX.

The ANSI art scene is still alive and kicking. Still my favorite style of art. https://www.instagram.com/explore/search/keyword/?q=%23ansia...

TurkTurkleton · 2 days ago

As I recall, Wildcat was one of the more expensive BBS packages that was still within reach of hobbyist budgets--I want to say a license for a single-digit number of nodes was between $200 and $300 in mid-90s dollars (around $450-$650 in 2026 dollars)--so it's not surprising that it would have been mostly older people running it. IIRC, it was pretty popular where I grew up, and the demographics in that area definitely skewed a bit older.

TurkTurkleton commented on I ported Linux to the PS5 and turned it into a Steam Machine xcancel.com/theflow0/stat... · Posted by u/doener

tw04 · 4 days ago

I don't think he's making a comment on the hacker spirit. He's making a comment on the fact that it has somehow become not just commmon, but accepted that a vendor can tell us and force us to use something in the way they want.

Imagine, for instance, if you bought a flat head screwdriver, but the manufacturer told you that you could never, ever, under any circumstances use it to pry something open. It was stricly to be used for installing or removing screws.

We would all laugh that vendor out of the room and tell them they're insane. Somehow we stopped doing that with all sorts of newer technologies.

TurkTurkleton · 4 days ago

> it has somehow become not just commmon, but accepted that a vendor can tell us and force us to use something in the way they want.

The PS5 is a games console and is marketed as such, not a general-purpose computer. Of course they want, and "force", you to use it to play PS5 games. I have a hard time seeing this as coercive when computers still exist, even if architecturally a PS5 is virtually identical to a general-purpose computer in most of the ways that matter, because at least since the Fairchild Channel F, it's always been the case that consoles are just constrained computers.

> Imagine, for instance, if you bought a flat head screwdriver, but the manufacturer told you that you could never, ever, under any circumstances use it to pry something open. It was stricly to be used for installing or removing screws.

> We would all laugh that vendor out of the room and tell them they're insane. Somehow we stopped doing that with all sorts of newer technologies.

Imagine, for instance, if that flat head screwdriver had a means to prevent you from using it to pry things open. Some kind of magical negative mass in the handle that kicks in to cancel out leverage but not torque, or an explosive charge that blows your hand off if more than a certain amount of force is applied non-rotationally, or something. It might seem a little less risible then, and you would probably just opt to buy a screwdriver that doesn't have such restrictions (especially if those restrictions were explosively enforced).

Like, I get it. I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the argument that we should be able to do whatever we want with hardware that we own. At the same time, being upset about the PS5 making it impossible to run arbitrary software without hacking feels a little like being upset that your washing machine doesn't clean your dirty dishes as well as it cleans your dirty laundry: it's not made for that, and it's not really reasonable to expect it to be able to do that well if at all.

TurkTurkleton commented on Bugs Apple loves bugsappleloves.com... · Posted by u/nhod

direwolf20 · 2 months ago

GOG may have the right to revoke a sale, but since it lets you download the game without DRM, it doesn't have the ability. Unless you delete your copy of the game and then try to download it again.

If you buy milk from the supermarket and they reverse the transaction 2 days later claiming you used a fraudulent card, but you didn't use a fraudulent card, you have the right to keep the milk and the loss of money is the store's problem.

TurkTurkleton · 2 months ago

GOG has a Steam-like client application that you can use instead of downloading the installers (which, in the case of Cyberpunk 2077, would be more convenient because its installer is in 28 parts, with another 11 for the Phantom Liberty expansion). It may be that if you install games through that, GOG can remove them if they revoke a license for any reason. I don't know that for sure, though. Just pointing out that they may, in fact, have the ability, at least in principle. But to be clear in case there's any doubt, I think we're on the same side: I think if nake89 had downloaded and installed CP2077 manually instead of through GOG Galaxy, and had continued to play it even after GOG decided the license was fraudulently acquired, they would have been in the right in every way that matters, and at least from a moral perspective, GOG could go pound sand.

TurkTurkleton commented on Bugs Apple loves bugsappleloves.com... · Posted by u/nhod

charcircuit · 2 months ago

Using it would be copyright infringement since the license is revoked since it was refunded.

TurkTurkleton · 2 months ago

Let me guess, you think GOG was perfectly justified in unilaterally taking away nake89's copy of--excuse me, I meant unilaterally revoking nake89's license to play Cyberpunk 2077--when they judged the gift transaction to be fraudulent, just because it could have been a conspiracy between nake89 and their wife to defraud GOG of the princely sum of eighty United States dollars[0]?

I don't dispute that GOG has the right, from a strictly legal standpoint, to revoke a license for any reason their terms of service allow, and that someone continuing to play a game after their license was revoked would be in breach of contract. What I do dispute is that this is a correct, fair, or desirable state of affairs, especially when the license in question was received as a gift and believed in good faith by the recipient to have been acquired non-fraudulently.

And in particular, if GOG wants the absolute and irrevocable right to prevent consumers from using products for which GOG has decided to revoke the licenses, they shouldn't advertise themselves as a DRM-free platform, nor claim that "Here, you won't be locked out of titles you paid for, or constantly asked to prove you own them - this is DRM-free gaming." -- advertising copy may not have the force of law, but courts tend to take a dim view of ad claims that are provably false.

[0]: the list price of the Cyberpunk 2077 Ultimate Edition on GOG as of this writing (though it is currently on sale for 38% off)

TurkTurkleton commented on Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work claude.com/blog/cowork-re... · Posted by u/adocomplete

cbm-vic-20 · 2 months ago

RSX-11M for the PDP-11 had filesystem versioning back in the early 1980s, if not earlier.

TurkTurkleton · 2 months ago

And if they were releasing Cowork for RSX-11M, that might be relevant.

TurkTurkleton commented on How the Atomic Tests Looked Like from Los Angeles amusingplanet.com/2016/09... · Posted by u/ohjeez

happytoexplain · 4 months ago

"How ___ like" is probably the single most common mistake I see among non-native speakers. Also, unlike other mistakes which can just sound informal, this one "sounds dumb", to use a mean phrase, but it's good to know for people trying to sound proper.

TurkTurkleton · 4 months ago

As a native English speaker who learned a foreign language (German) in high school, I have a pet theory about this, which is that I suspect most other languages use a word roughly equivalent to English "appear" (with which it would be correct to use "how", such as "how the atomic tests appeared from Los Angeles") even in colloquial speech, whereas English tends to reserve those synonyms for more formal registers of speech; in casual conversation in English, you wouldn't ask someone "how did he appear?" (unless you meant the other sense of "appear", as in "become visible"), but you would in, say, German (wie hat er ausgesehen? or wie sah er aus?). Of course, I'm sure learners of English as a foreign language are taught to say "what does he look like?" and not "how does he look like?", but I can imagine them struggling with remembering that just like I struggle with remembering genders and cases and declined forms in German.

TurkTurkleton commented on How the Atomic Tests Looked Like from Los Angeles amusingplanet.com/2016/09... · Posted by u/ohjeez

sillyfluke · 4 months ago

Hah, this reminds me of the Isaac Asimov story about catching Nazi spies inflitrating the US...

Given Americans' general indifference to perfect grammer, if it "sounds" right they usually don't make a fuss. So they might have learned something new as well.

TurkTurkleton · 4 months ago

Hi, American here and "how" + "to look like" makes my teeth itch. However, people generally find grammar corrections to be needlessly pedantic when the erroneous grammar does not impede comprehension, so I've personally decided to choose my grammatical battles and simply fume about people talking about "how something looks like" in private instead.

TurkTurkleton commented on How AI hears accents: An audible visualization of accent clusters accent-explorer.boldvoice... · Posted by u/ilyausorov

bashtoni · 5 months ago

The fact that they believe there to be a single 'British' accent means this can be quickly discounted as nonsense.

TurkTurkleton · 5 months ago

I mean, if you want to be like that, you could generalize that statement to "the fact that they believe there to be a single `$LANGUAGE_OR_REGION` accent means this can be quickly discounted as nonsense". Other languages, and other varieties of English, have regional variation as well, after all--although in the case of other languages, I'll grant that the accents of, say, two German speakers from different regions might not be as distinct from each other in English as they are in German.

At any rate, I was looking forward to finding out what the accent oracle thought of my native US English accent, which sounds northern to southerners and southern to northerners, but I guess it'd probably just flag it as "American".

TurkTurkleton commented on Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping (2017) ventspace.wordpress.com/2... · Posted by u/uncircle

markus_zhang · 8 months ago

I’d argue that immersion has little to do with graphics, even for FPS. Actually I had more immersion in some text adventure games than in some AAA games — and not out of nostalgia because I never played the said text adventure games before.

I’d agree that certain degree of graphics helps with immersion, but photorealistic graphics only offers cheap immersion which turns off the immersion centre in the brain — Ok this is just my babble so 100% guess.

TurkTurkleton · 8 months ago

Agreed. Immersion in a game world, at least for me, is less about how accurately it visually reflects reality and more about how detailed the overall world feels -- whether the designers have crafted worlds that feel like they live and breathe without you, that you could imagine inhabiting as someone other than the protagonist. For instance, I can imagine what it would be like to live in Cyberpunk 2077's Night City, whether I was a merc like V or just one of the nobodies trying to get by that you pass on the street; I can imagine living in Dishonored's Dunwall (or the sequel's Karnaca) in the chaos and uncertainty of their plagues; I can put myself in the shoes of one of the faceless, downtrodden members of the proletariat of Coalition-occupied Revachol in Disco Elysium; a lot of AAA games, on the other hand, feel like theme park rides--well-crafted experiences that are enjoyable but don't stick with you and discourage you from thinking too deeply about them because they don't withstand much scrutiny. But Cyberpunk 2077 is evidence that they don't have to be that way, and Dishonored and Disco Elysium are equally evidence that you don't need a half-billion-dollar budget and photorealistic graphics to create immersive worlds.

(edited to clarify that I'm not laboring under the misapprehension that Cyberpunk 2077 isn't a AAA game)

TurkTurkleton commented on Complete silence is always hallucinated as "ترجمة نانسي قنقر" in Arabic github.com/openai/whisper... · Posted by u/edent

stndef · 8 months ago

Yeah, I can confirm seeing that a fair bit specifically during non-verbal parts of videos when someone is using a tool.

TurkTurkleton · 8 months ago

Can confirm as well, although to my recollection it just shows up as if it's a word the transcription model heard, not "[foreign]" in brackets like with "[Music]" or "[Applause]". It's especially weird to me because I recall the auto-transcriptions being reasonably serviceable when they first rolled them out, only to degrade over time to the point where it was hallucinating the word "foreign" and dropping letters from words or using weird abbreviations (like "koby" for "kilobyte", "TBTE" for "terabyte", or, most memorably weirdly, transcribing the phrase "nanosecond-by-nanosecond" as "nond by nanc") if it didn't decide it heard another one entirely.

I also noticed a couple of months ago that YouTube seems to have quietly rolled out a new auto-transcription model that can make reasonable guesses at where capitalization, punctuation, and sentence boundaries should go. It seems to have degraded even more rapidly than the old one, falling victim to the same kinds of transcription errors. Although the new one has a different hallucination in silence and noise that it wasn't able to classify (which, incidentally, its ability to recognize things like music and applause seems worse than the old one's): where the old model would have hallucinated the word "foreign", the new one thinks it's hearing the word "heat", often repeated ("Heat. Heat.").