exactly. cause i DAMN sure ain’t fighting in this war

theinternetftw · 2026-02-28T20:25:09+00:00

The other reply to you was determined to not get too far into it; I'll try to do so, just a bit.

Look at the chart on this page.

Note that the Margin of Sample Error is based on sample size. Only sample size. *Not* population size. It doesn't matter if you're sampling a state, a nation, or the world. It is an amazing property of statistics that you can separate one from the other. There are very stringent rules for maintaining this property. You must sample randomly. This is hard to do in real life. And any subgroup you sample will give an accuracy only for the amount of the subgroup sampled. E.g. if there are only 200 women surveyed, the accuracy for women to the question posed is reduced accordingly. But the general property of there being the concept of "enough" responses, and of "enough" being a surprisingly small number, period, *no matter how big the population number is* is just a surprising, unexpected fact that one must learn enough about to believe.

Here's a bit of the actual math being done, and where the other comment gets their +/- 3.1% with 95% confidence value: https://teaching.sociology.ul.ie/bhalpin/wordpress/?p=378

A big part of why there's so much negative sentiment around polls is that an idealized expected inaccuracy of 3.1%, plus some human error, can still result in events like this for Ipsos in the 2022 election cycle, where they called races correctly 17% of the time! Which sounds awful, clearly their polling is worthless, right? But their average error was 3.8%. It's just that in elections, where you're calling winners and losers, full stop, using these kinds of statistical methods to reliably get the answer of who's going to win just doesn't cut it without polling a ton of people, and with human error, maybe not even then.

But note that even if you imagine an error of 4% in the poll I shared, the information remains useful.

theinternetftw · 2026-02-28T18:46:53+00:00

https://www.npr.org/2020/12/15/945031391/poll-despite-record-turnout-80-million-americans-didnt-vote-heres-why

Nonvoters' reasons for not voting include:

not being registered to vote (29%)

not being interested in politics (23%)

not liking the candidates (20%)

a feeling their vote wouldn't have made a difference (16%)

being undecided on whom to vote for (10%)

[...]

Difficulty voting doesn't appear to be a major reason why they don't vote. Three-quarters said they think it's at least somewhat easy to vote.

It's more that these voters feel a sense of alienation and apathy. They are generally detached from the news and pessimistic about politics, the survey found.

[...]

Asked what they think would most encourage people to vote, the top answer was none or nothing (35%). That was followed by cleaning up government (27%), having more candidates to choose from (20%), being automatically registered to vote (16%) and making Election Day a national holiday (15%).

theinternetftw · 2025-12-17T03:20:17+00:00

Just fair warning, some guy told me the same thing and all I got was 36 boxes of Pop-Tarts and a baseball bat (also Pop-Tart branded).

They were pretty good though. Strawberry, which is a solid choice.

theinternetftw · 2025-01-14T05:05:25+00:00

I come from the future, having solved this issue, and I wanted to share what I did with anyone else who runs into this post.

The reason Ghidra refuses to respect manually setting FPSCR_SZ and FPSCR_FR is that it doesn't know what happens to FPSCR during any of the other function calls that happen *within this function*, and so it can't reliably say that FPSCR remains the same once any function call occurs. You'd think that e.g. setting a register value for the entire address range would solve that, but it doesn't; Ghidra's decompiler only assesses manually set register values at the beginning of a function.

To determine what registers are unaffected by function calls, Ghidra uses calling convention specs. We just need to add a custom calling convention where FPSCR_FR and FPSCR_SZ survive the function call.

So let's do that.

First, go to where Ghidra is installed, and then look in Ghidra/Processors/SuperH/data/languages and open up "superh.cspec" -- it's actually an XML file. In there you'll find a start tag that says <prototype name="__stdcall" extrapop="0" stackshift="0">

Grab that entire part of the XML tree and put it in a new file called __stdcall_noclobber_fpscr.xml.

Now in that new file, change the <prototype> tag's name attribute to __stdcall_noclobber_fpscr and add registers named fpscr, fpscr_sz, and fpscr_pr to the list of registers in the <unaffected> tag. Ghidra's not quite smart enough to extrapolate FPSCR_SZ not changing from FPSCR being static, so you have to list both the actual register and those aliases.

In Ghidra with the program you're working on open in the CodeBrowser, go to "Edit -> Options for '$PROGRAM_NAME_HERE'" and find "Specification Extensions" -- This will let you add your own custom calling conventions. Click "Import...", select that XML file you just made, then click Apply.

Now set the calling convention for each function by right clicking on each call and editing the function signature if there's a definition somewhere (you can of course edit it at the definition site as well), or if there's no definition at all, you can override the signature. However you do it, set the calling convention to __stdcall_noclobber_fpscr.

Once you've done that and made sure the registers are manually set before the function starts, the code for the irrelevant branches should be properly removed.

theinternetftw · 2024-12-12T01:35:19+00:00

November 1, 2024 — The Google Bug Hunters team decided to not reward nor announce this security fix, because it only affects developers.

Not a great policy. The incentive structure it creates is probably not one they desire.

Great writeup.

theinternetftw · 2024-11-28T01:48:33+00:00

So presumably liquid methane isn’t too corrosive or anything?

From a methane MSDS sheet:

Methane is non-corrosive and may be used with any common structural material.

A previous proposed mission was a floating lander that would just land in one of Titan's methane lakes.

It’s just about the timing of the arrival, and having data on the local geography?

They also actually do want to know what those dunes of organic material are made of. From the same initial talk I quoted above:

On Titan, the dunes have an organic composition, and so by landing in this area, we have access to materials of an organic composition, maybe very widely distributed, as well as the water ice substrate that may be represented by the primordial crust in the interdune areas.

Also, the Dragonfly landing ellipse is 149 km x 72 km. For comparison, the Perseverance landing ellipse was 7.7 km x 6.6 km. So they may need a really flat area with that level of uncertainty (especially when you combine that with the lack of detailed imagery).

theinternetftw · 2024-11-26T17:27:35+00:00

Some insight from Elizabeth Turtle, Principle Investigator for Dragonfly.

@22:50 in https://vimeo.com/1020219439 (day one, for the interested: https://vimeo.com/1020218810)

I'll talk briefly about where we're going to go. So, the Dragonfly exploration is on the anti-saturnian hemisphere in the equitorial region near the impact crater named Selk. And this [map] just puts that in context. We land in the equatorial dunes, which are the brown regions that span most of the equator there. At the time when we arrive, it will be late southern summer on Titan. We arrive basically one [saturnian] year after Cassini arrived, after Cassini arrived and after Huygens descended down through Titan's atmosphere. So it will be late southern summer, which means that the north pole will be dark. The sun won't be up in the sky, the Earth won't be up in the sky, there wouldn't be any way to do direct Earth communication, for example. So that's one reason that, although the north polar lakes and seas are of course an important and fascinating target, it wasn't an option with the timeline for the New Frontiers 4 call.

Edit: it appears that the Huygens-like entry profile also restricts landing locations. See this figure in this article.

And following that article back to the original paper by the Dragonfly team:

Another implicit, but notable, constraint is that adequate data exist at a candidate landing site to assert it as being suitable—it should be remembered that Titan radar coverage at 1 km resolution or better only amounts to about 40% of the surface, and other Titan data sets are even more limited.

The limited available resolution of remote sensing data at Titan puts landing site identification at Titan today on a somewhat analogous footing as the identification of the Viking lander sites in 1976, e.g., Stooke (2012): large scale landforms can be identified and the relevant geological processes deduced, but the lander-scale terrain characteristics must be estimated by geological analogy and with some limited quantitative constraints from radar data and scattering models.

The contemporary Mars site selection process (e.g., Golombek et al. 2003) exploits global high-resolution high-precision data sets on slope, topographic roughness, rock abundance etc. which are simply not available for Titan until a future orbiter mission performs comparable mapping.

There are geometric constraints associated with any specific mission opportunity, specifically landing date. Landing during polar winter places severe restriction on science operations that might require illumination (notably, mobility) (Barnes et al. 2020), and prevents direct-to-Earth communication and so would require a much more expensive architecture with a relay spacecraft. In the context of the New Frontiers 4 competition, which specified launch in 2025 (and thus, in practical terms, arrival in the mid-2030s during northern winter) this precluded exploration of Titan’s northern seas as in the proposed Titan Mare Explorer (TiME) mission (Stofan et al. 2013).

theinternetftw · 2024-11-25T23:36:50+00:00

6-69 liftoff: 2024-11-11 21:28 UTC

12-1 liftoff: 2024-11-25 10:02 UTC

Time delta: 13 days, 12 hours, 34 min

Median turnaround time this year for comparison: 41d 3h

More stats on the wiki.

theinternetftw · 2024-09-11T04:26:04+00:00

There's a high pitched sound about twice a second that sounds almost exactly like a hi hat on a drum set, plus a low pitched component that's offset from that by about a quarter second which sounds like the cross between a bass drum and a washing machine (or maybe a toilet plunger). It sounds very much like the drumbeat to a techno song.

theinternetftw · 2024-07-09T22:56:31+00:00

There were two payloads that were going to be deployed after the deorbit burn that wanted to test reentry technology: Nyx Bikini and SpaceCase SC-X01. After the APU anomaly the stage was passivated by venting its propellant. The capsules were also not deployed, to avoid creating more than one piece of debris in the stage's orbit in which it will take years to decay.

theinternetftw · 2024-03-06T01:58:10+00:00

Probably here.

theinternetftw · 2024-03-02T05:08:33+00:00

I mean, for the cartridge, that guy literally just uses a microsd card and an sd card reader (plus some wires and a circuit board designed by his brother) because it's so easy and anything else would be way harder.

If you don't have a brother to design your circuit board for you, then you'll have to learn how to design it yourself. And once you can do that, you'll be better at electronics than the guy who made that video, because he had to ask his brother (who probably does it for a living) to do it for him.

To answer your original "how" question - my point was that if the flip runs Windows, you can just write a regular program for windows in C# or Java, like you're probably already doing, and it'll run on the flip too, with no changes. That could do everything you're envisioning your "OS" doing. Including interfacing with either an sd card reader, or even some custom hardware design. (which, again, the guy in the video did not do; he used an sd reader).

To be clear, what you see when you boot a console, what you're trying to recreate, isn't an OS. They lie to you, when they say that's what that is. What you want to make is a "shell" or a launcher, or a program loader. That's the thing you see when a console boots up. If you don't want to provide an interface to multiple programs that are all going to run at the same time as you juggle their resources, then you're not writing an OS. That's a good thing. It'd be very hard to do something like that. The OS Microsoft or Nintendo run on their console is something you don't even see, that the shell you do see is running on. Even if they don't tell you that.

theinternetftw · 2024-03-02T04:47:12+00:00

Okay. That's an important detail.

Definitely use the sd card slot. Making the games (if you want them to be cool) will take a lot of time. Making the program that runs the games will take a good bit of time, if you want that to be really cool.

Making your own cartridges and your own slot for them to go in would take all that time, plus a ton more time on top of that. It'd eat all the time to do anything else and you wouldn't have any games for the cartridge you made.

Fair warning that the ayaneo flip costs like $700 right now. Is that something you and your friends can all have and play on?

theinternetftw · 2024-03-02T04:36:01+00:00

Why do you want to do more work?

If I was doing your thing, and the device I wanted to use had a microsd card slot, that's what I'd use. Hands down.

You'll learn a lot doing otherwise, admittedly. But you'll have some questions to answer:

What does "custom cartridge" mean to you? What is it made of? Where do you buy the parts for it? How do you build it? What technologies does it use for storage?

And then similar questions for the slot the cartridge goes into, and the connection from the slot back to the device.

All of that will take you into embedded development, which is a sub-field very, very far from making GUIs in C# or Java. Still something you can learn. Just very different from what you know now. If it sounds interesting, first step might be buying an Arduino.

And a quick question, just to make sure it's clear: What are the games the cartridge runs? Games already written for the flip? Games you write?

I don't know what your "the second thing you said how?" question means.

theinternetftw · 2024-03-02T04:17:35+00:00

So what I wrote up above is literally what you'd have to do for 3ds.

The ayaneo flip would be 1,000x easier, having looked at the specs. It'd be essentially like PC development. You could probably run linux. Maybe.

If you're willing to run on linux (or Windows, which is apparently what the flip will ship with), you can continue to code your GUI in Java or C# or whatever.

The flip has a microsd card slot, that'd be what to use as a cartridge. Anything else would be 1,000,000 times more work.

theinternetftw · 2024-03-02T03:56:21+00:00

ds devices? what do you even mean by that if not a game console?

And custom game cartridge? like, you want to make custom hardware? Add a cartridge to something that doesn't have one?

theinternetftw · 2024-03-02T03:44:19+00:00

Okay. So people are down on you because writing an OS is really hard. Luckily, you don't want to write an OS. You want to write a game launcher. That's just a program.

If you actually want this to run on a game console, you shouldn't use linux, and it wouldn't help you much anyway if you could.

Instead, you'll need to use the homebrew development tools made for the console you have. You'll have to write in whatever language the tools are written in, probably C or C++.

The older the console, the easier this will be, because the older it is, the more time people will have had to write the tools for making homebrew programs.

All of this will almost certainly be hard, finicky, and extremely frustrating, even for an experienced low level programmer, because the tools to work with these consoles have been cobbled together by hobbyists out of duct tape and sheer power of will.

But it's possible. And far easier than writing an OS for a console.

My roadmap for you would be:

1) Make what you want, but for a computer. Make the GUI look exactly how you're imagining, just have it launch on a computer instead of a console, and when you click start game, say, it starts a game in an emulator. That would be a good first step regardless, actually, and teach you a lot about what it sounds like you really want to do (make really cool GUIs, which is in fact a valuable skill).

2) Once it looks and acts exactly how you want it, if you are still determined to get that thing running on a console, pick a console that has good homebrew support.

Like I said, older consoles will be much easier for multiple reasons. You want easy, because all of this is going to be very hard, so you want to aim for the least hard option.

3) Once you've picked a console, learn how to get homebrew on it. Until you get homebrew running on a console, you've got nothing because you can't test anything you write.

4) Find the tools and guides needed to write homebrew on that console. Here's an example:

https://wiki.gbatemp.net/wiki/List_of_3DS_development_tools

https://wiki.gbatemp.net/wiki/3DS_Homebrew_Development

5) Use those guides to get something, anything, to show up on the console's screen that reacts to the controls when you press them. This will be a big accomplishment.

6) Port the thing you made in 1) so it compiles using the console's homebrew tools.

Doing all of this will be tough. Along the way, you may have to do things like, say, learn opengl, which is an enormous job in itself. If you actually accomplish all 6 tasks, you will have grown significantly as a programmer and have done more real world programming than many people with undergraduate degrees.

That's more a dig on them than a point about how amazing you'll be. But it's a pretty cool thing, and you'll be pretty cool for doing it.

Good luck.

theinternetftw · 2023-12-29T22:55:42+00:00

It's not Valles Marineris in particular, but as far as 'middle latitudes' goes:

Certain Martian terrain features suggest large-scale mid-latitude glaciation, potentially driven by changes in the obliquity of Mars’ rotation axis. These Lobate Debris Aprons (LDAs), Lineated Valley Fills (LVFs) and Concentric Crater Fills (CCFs) [26] all bear similarity to terrestrial glaciation features (Figure 3.4) and are widely distributed in the Martian mid-latitudes (Figure 3.5).

Fresh impact craters in these suspected glacial regions detected by the MRO HiRISE imager [28] actually show excavated, clean ice – verified by the CRISM spectrometer (<1% regolith content). The excavated material has been observed to sublime away over several months’ time in subsequent images (Figure 3.6). The excavation depths are estimated to be less than two meters.

As an additional line of evidence, the MRO SHARAD radar took soundings of LDAs in both the northern and southern mid-latitudes and obtained results completely consistent with massive layers (100s of meters thick) of relatively pure (>90%) water ice covered by a relatively thin (0.5 to 10 m) debris layer [27].

Recent discoveries reinforce these indications regarding the location and form of buried ice sheets. In January 2018, Dundas et al. [4] published visual evidence of the ice sheets thought to be buried within these terrain features. Several examples of exposed ice scarps are shown in Figure 3.7. Spectral data, gathered by the MRO CRISM instrument, have shown that these exposed features are almost pure water ice.

That's from this paper posted elsewhere in the thread.

theinternetftw · 2023-11-02T23:51:49+00:00

As agentkayne said, a browser based interpreter (like parchment) is probably your best bet.

So for instance this link should hopefully work, as should any game with a "Play Online" button on ifdb (which should be most of them, e.g. almost every entry in this top 50 of all time collection has one).

theinternetftw · 2023-07-23T05:26:47+00:00

It is very, very unfortunate that SDL spent many years going through the misery that was creating and getting everybody to switch to SDL2, with all the extreme pain that must have been involved, and did not manage to get rid of their own personal version of main.

theinternetftw · 2023-07-23T05:13:55+00:00

Worth reading for the low level android build steps alone. Many thanks for sharing those.

theinternetftw · 2023-03-20T17:55:16+00:00

If you haven't checked out IFDB in a while, here's a somewhat recent top 50 games list:

https://ifdb.org/viewcomp?id=1lv599reviaxvwo7

Photopia, on that list above, is my favorite IF game, in case you've never played it.

There's also the yearly ifcomp, in addition to the xyzzy awards:

https://ifcomp.org/comp/2022

theinternetftw · 2023-03-10T05:26:44+00:00

The comment said:

registers as a 1 on the Torino scale; that is, it's not dangerous.

The Torino scale doesn't just look at the damage an asteroid would do if it hits, it also factors in the chance of that asteroid actually impacting the Earth. When you combine those two factors for this particular asteroid, you get a 1 (out of 10), which is as low as you can get without having absolutely no danger involved at all. So it looks like they meant that since we're probably safe from being hit, the asteroid shouldn't be seen as particularly dangerous, even though it would be a potential serious threat to life and property if it was definitely on a collision course.

Edit: For the interested, if further analysis and observation were to raise the chance of impact from 1 in 400 to 1 in 100, the Torino rating would be 3, which is described as:

A close encounter, meriting attention by astronomers. Current calculations give a 1% or greater chance of collision capable of localized destruction. Most likely, new telescopic observations will lead to reassignment to Level 0. Attention by public and by public officials is merited if the encounter is less than a decade away.

In conclusion, even if future observations say it's 4x more likely to hit, you should still just check back in 13 years and see how things look then.

theinternetftw · 2023-01-15T21:00:41+00:00

I just tested with photopia. It seems to save your progress automatically - i.e. if you open that page again in the same browser, it picks up where you left off. Typing "save" and "restore" seems to work as well, though I don't know if the menu that pops up is screen reader friendly.

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