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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • Well, I don’t mean downgrade him totally! Give him super strength or something but take it to its conclusion.

    Authors realized this problem with Flash, so they added a mildly magic mystery Speed Force thing that solves the too-many-Gs problem with “nah he just slows time down or something and the Speed Force is mysterious and different” iirc.

    But without the handwaviness he’d need to watch acceleration and calorie counts and speed up his thoughts and not slip and fall into an inertial death. If that makes sense (-‿-")


  • All of this stuff makes me wonder how hard it would be to make a fully pedantic story.

    I’ve seen books where the hero was on the verge of winning but gets randomly concussed by a piece of shrapnel. Disoriented, hospital.

    Another where the hero had hearing loss issues from solo pistol badassing too much, sans ear protection. (Forgot the titles of these stories).

    But what would it take to meet everything? Imagine Superman. Now he has to mind his acceleration to save people. He also has to mind distribution of force, since he can’t lift a plane without puncturing it. (Maybe he can make a little energy net under the plane somehow to distribute pressure?) And then he has to mind the Law of Conservation of Energy unless he splits apart matter somehow. And then this and that…

    Will adherently realistic changes downrank most stories? I for one laugh my ass off when The Rock flexes his broken arm cast off in F&F.



  • Not fishy at all! It’s like a lockpicking fan asking about locksport.

    If you’re looking for examples, GitHub has a lot of CVE proof-of-concepts and there are lots of payload git repos across git hosts in general, but if you’re looking for a one-stop-shop “Steal all credentials,” or “Work on all OSes/architectures just by switching the compile target,” then you’ll have a harder time. (A do-one-thing-well approach is more maintainable after all.)

    If you want to make something yourself that still tries to pull off the take-as-much-as-you-can, you should just search up how different apps store data and whether it’s easy to grab. Like, where browsers store their cookies, or the implications of X11’s security model (Linux-specific), or where Windows/Windows apps’ credentials and hashes are stored. Of course, there’s only much a payload can do without a vulnerability exploit to partner with (e.g. Is privilege escalated? Are we still in userland? is this just a run-of-the-mill Trojan?).

    Apologies if my answer is too general.



  • Obligatory Linux comment (Lemmy moment):

    Windows is used often for its compatibility and defaultness but Linux is interesting in the sense that everything is patchable, everything is tinkerable and configurable. The low resistance to tinkering makes lots of Linux users tinkerers – including tinkering via code.

    I’m not saying wipe your hard drive or even dual-boot. Maybe an older computer or VM could help, depending on what you have. But just in the past week I’ve screwed around in low-to-medium-difficulty Linux projects that configured my lockscreen with C, that implemented mildly usable desktop GUIs with TypeScript, among others – just not-too-committal stuff that has a return value I literally see every time I lock my computer.

    Windows equivalent projects can be harsher on the beginning-to-intermediate curve (back when I first tried out Linux Mint, I’d been struggling to make a bookmark inspector in Visual Studio – ended up Pythoning it instead) – not to say that Windows fun is by any means out-of-reach.


  • I… don’t have ADHD (relatively confident) but I’ve used both of your hacks before and they’ve measurably helped me.

    The templating thing slung me over its shoulder and carried me through battlefields. Procrastinate 'til the last hour? Assignment must be in LaTeX? Don’t worry, everything is already formatted, just add the double-dollar-signs and equate!

    Bored? Need to get this article done but it’ll be even more boring? Watch random dubbed animations or something while hitting the keys – low-pressure colors and music cushions the harder-thinking part. Somehow the perceived expenditure of I Need To Focus mutes itself!

    (Footgun if the side-video is too interesting.)


  • Click to view diffs is super ergonomic; on the other hand, I actually have a story about the Git CLI trumping the GUI (spoiler: reflog).

    In high school we had gotten the funding to build a robot, and one of the adults in charge – guy was brilliant – was using GitHub Desktop to conduct a feature merge with the student who served as team lead. The thing was, he was used to older codebases, so all of his experience was with CVS instead of Git – so when the two slightly messed up the git merge, they discussed recloning everything instead of wasting time plumbing the error (relevant xkcd).

    That was one of the earliest times I had the cajones to walk up to a superior and say “No, you’re doing this totally wrong. You don’t have to do that.”

    He looked at me and nodded. “What would you do instead?”

    “Reflog.”

    “Reflog? I’ve never heard of it before. Can you show us?”

    I hopped onto the laptop and clicked around GitHub Desktop, but couldn’t manage to find any buttons related to reflog… so I went straight to cmd.exe instead.

    git reflog
    git reset --hard "HEAD@{7}"
    

    “Done. We can continue rebasing.”

    And after that, the advisor complimented me for using the command line tool!

    “Lots of GUI apps are just limited frontends to the real meat and potatoes, the command line. Nice job!”

    I felt like a wizard! And so I became the team’s Git-inator.

    edit: pruned story



  • Hahaha, I’m overjoyed that you’re joyful! Net positive.

    You aren’t alone on the absolutivity thing, autism or not. Absolute blanket statements have always made me uncomfortable. With stuff like

    Leftists are all self-righteous.

    American Republicans are all backwards.

    Christians are cultists.

    and the obvious accompanying internet convoy of

    Clicks -> discussion -> algorithm promotion -> pipeline -> opinions upgrade from “bad cases of” to “lots of them” to “all of them”

    not only sacrifice nuance and make it easy to Just Stay Agreeable, but discourage any questioning of the status quo.

    Of course, one can argue that this is an online thing, an archetype of Reddit and Tumblr and Twitter spaces, but now I don’t even question these things aloud in real life. I don’t want to be seen as

    The “see-from-all-sides” guy is obviously a closeted bigot lmao.

    in a place where reputation actually matters, but it’d be easy to lump me in like that. Nuancelessness is simple, kneejerk, catchy…

    Now, my point. I don’t think I’m making this up, and maybe I’ll get downvoted for this diatribe but I feel like disagreeing in real life has become much riskier. Am I sounding cynical again? As a solution (solutions aren’t cynical right?), optimally I’d want a way to discuss across views in an educated, “I’ll hear you out” way, but the real-life risk outweighs reward, and online spaces bubble-up really easily. Counterpoint: r/changemyview has put up promising resistance.

    The other day I saw this business school complaint discussion. It’s on a kind of out-of-touch subreddit, but what do you think of its survivalistic smile-and-wave message?

    Sorry for being so negative =.=


  • Wow, really interesting take! Made me realize…

    Wow. I’m the baddie.

    I’ve done my fair share of admit “AI bad, Twitter bad” and felt that shift towards cynicism, I admit – but 'til now I couldn’t see my own hand in the subject. I’d worked hard over the years to avoid the more overt frustrator communities like r/facepalm, but as much as I’d like to presume… I’m clearly not doing so much better after all.

    That ambient cynicism… I still perpetuated it, I still wrote those kneejerk comments, I still went on the preordained in-group spiel of valuelessnesses.

    It’s so easy to insult the things you mentioned, to partake in the “I Want to be Agreeable and Get Points” mindset and dunk. But it’s precluding our ability to experience the things you mentioned in para #4. I want more of para #4 in my life… I’ll need to think things differently.

    Idk. Thanks for the meaningful substance. :p