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Busy month with Improv and a Theatre trip and a rock gig yet still I’ve spent most hours working on the new game and learning about new hardware from Valve / Steam.

Diary

Improv

Hey, look, I am doing an improv show.

In London.

You could even come see me on stage! What about that for an idea!

It’s on Tuesday the 17th November at 8:00pm, finishing by 9:30.

Then we’ll be in the bar for a bit after if you wanna chat.

Upstairs at the Miller in London Bridge.

https://www.ticketsource.com/hooplaimpro/t-yzgnjky

The team will also enter a couple of mixers, December 5th and 11th, but there’s no link for that, you gotta turn up and hope it ain’t full. (It won’t be).

Stranger Things Play

Watched the Stranger Things Theatre-play prequel in The Phoenix.

Amazing staging. The lights and projections and choreography and sets were dumbfounding. Whole stage of two dozen people rotating around and pacing about on the rotating stages near made me dizzy.

And that was the best thing about it. Yes.

Had the same mood as the show. Mostly that’s music I guess.

I barely remember the Netflix show, only watched two seasons before losing interest. Guess this was all leading up to 11 being born.

Some of our party left early coz the story was so uninspiring but I barely noticed that, being entranced by the spectacle.

Wedding Present Gig

Went to see The Wedding Present play at The Empire in Shepard’s Bush.

Thirty five years ago, David Gedge and his bandmates released “Seamonsters” which was very likely the most played record of my uni years and still a favorite of mine.

Now, thirty five years later, David Gedge and his bandmates played all of “Seamonsters” in Shepard’s Bush for us. And surely that record is older than most of the band now 😆

Great crisp sound and those songs are ace and that guy is cool even now he’s old and his audience is all fat bald men in their fifties.

First track on that album is “Dalliance”, if you were wondering where my website name and fedi user name come from.

Good times anyway. Nice one Gedge. 👍️

AI Programming

I found myself saying to someone recently that yeah, the programming-bot is very capable when you describe what you need it to do in excruciating detail, function by function, explaining how the source-code should look. But what do you think programming IS. You can get those results, but it still usually can’t on it’s own, that is not the end of the profession.

Looting

Terrible business what’s been going on in France (and increasingly everywhere) with all the protests and looting!

The looting is wrong!

That’s why there’s protests of course: protests against all the looting by the oligarchs of the surplus created by the workers, and the violence of the police in ensuring that looting can continue.

I guess shoplifting and smashing windows is also bad, but it is not on the same scale!

Or, as The Onion put it, don’t do your looting until you’ve first formed a private equity firm.

Psybernetic Warp Explosion

My psychedelic tunnel-shooter game has a name now and a website and a social account on Fedi! Presenting: Psybernetic Warp Explosion, a psychedelic tunnel-shooter with VR support.

https://psyberneticwarpexplosion.com/

How’s is that tunnel-shooter game coming along then Pre?

I have successfully made it run as a standalone Frame VR game.

Completely failed when trying to do so by compiling it for windows/proton. I suspect because of some of the ImGUI stuff failing.

And failed for different reasons when trying to build it for ARM/linux native on the thing. But that time definitely because of the ImGUI stuff I’d lazily included because interface options menu programming is tedious.

So instead I did the tedious thing for a week to build the godot-native UI, rip out the ImGUI stuff, and build enough settings menus to reduce graphics and physics settings.

There’s a steam app Steam Devkit Client or some such name. You use that to upload the project-directory over to the Steam Frame as a Steam App.

And it works!

Feels pretty nice already really, but really quite frame-droppy to start with at the most hectic times.

I think this was mostly the Godot physics system which is nice to use but apparently quite CPU costly compared to what I need really.

I just got the two collision cases really: Proximity, and tunnel-wall.

Godot’s physics can build a platformer game in 3d and model the roughness of the friction in a bouncing ball.

But it’s not particularly good for a tunnel in space where almost none of that matters and only our special-case of bouncing from the tunnel-wall needs to be done, and we can take advantage of the tunnel-segmentation to reduce physics combination explosions.

So I riped out and replace already is the everything that uses Godot’s physics engine and replace it with simpler faster bouncier tunnel-physics.

Then the main shader needed lots of changes to make it cache instead of calculate the noise it needs. Added texture and emit images to that too.

And it runs nicely on that Steam Frame now.

I am finding myself having quite a bit of fun exploring the vast caverns and tiny passageways of the seed-generated tunnel maps. They sometimes look very pretty, and there’s a lot more improvement to be done there too.

Stay tuned for more updates, expect I’ll have to figure out what’s involved in having a project on the Steam Store before the end of the year.

Doctor Who

Saw a clip of the first time The Doctor met the Cybermen.

The thing about the very first time that The Doctor met the Cybermen, is that the Cybermen really did think they were here to save the humans.

Time-coded Youtube Link: https://youtu.be/TNBtBY2XMuE?t=545

They’re like,

We’re here to help! You’re all doomed! It’s inevitable! Unless you come join
the collective and upgrade to the hive-mind.

Honestly its not so much that resistance is futile, as that it’s counter-productive to your own interests because of all the doom and pain we are saving you from.

As Buddha teaches: you are suffering from emotional attachment to material things, and should ascend to the next level of version-number, to prevent the terrible horrible pain of the inevitable demise of everything you hold important and the death of everyone you love.

So that’s how I’d re-invent the cybermen for 2028 Doctor Who:

They are cyber-monks, come to peacefully recruit everyone into detachment from the inevitable death and decay of everyone you love and everything you think important upon the destruction of your world (which is needed to provide fuel for the expansion of galactic cybernetic love and harmony).

So do join us, we can live as gods! Better than watching everyone you’ve ever known decay and die. You’d know about that, right Doctor?

The peace-Cybermen should arrive going:

The swarm is coming, we are just about keeping pace as an advance-wave. There’s only light-days to go! - Your atoms are going to be turned into computronioum in orbit of the star when the swarm gets here.

We can save you! Join us in the mission of saving the other people in the wave across the universe of this inevitable conversion of all matter into computronium.

You know, join us in the cloud, upload into the computronium cloud, and live through these robot bodies on the advance-line like the sexy ones we have in the fashionable headsets and robes.

Just one cyber-injection. Before your atoms are inevitably taken anyway by processes in the swarm beyond the control of our entropy.

Stand and deliver. Upgrade or your life.

By Election Result and Labour’s Climate Record.

Holborn result came in.

Labour’s down only four points from the general election, from 49% down to 45%.

The Green’s have tripped their vote from like 10% to like a third.

Massive swing towards green, but not enough to take the seat. Needs another 1500 people to change their mind.

Obviously all the media say this means Burnham is winning and Zack has to go. I hope not. He’s doing great.

No way to really find out how it would have been different if the Zionism motion had gone the other way.

Thing is, the commentariat are used to the idea that if there’s a policy they don’t like they can campaign to get the leader changed and then the new leader will change the policy.

But the Green Party doesn’t work like that. Zack didn’t write the policy, would have voted against it if he wasn’t busy, and a new leader can’t change it any more easily than Zack can.

The job is spokesman, not chieftain.

There’ll be a leadership election soon anyway, has to be one. In the constitution. My guess is Zack will win again. I’ll be voting for him I think. If someone better stands I’ll vote for them, but I’m not aware of anyone that could be.

Then, after the result, as expected, Labour announce opening fossil fuel drilling.

Its sad that we’ll never know what happened this morning in the parallel world and alternate reality where the Green Party defeated Labour in Holborn.

Would Labour still have announced they’re going to open oil-fields in a world already warmed by 1.5 degrees?

As I say, sadly we’ll never know.

We do know that opening the oil fields will contribute towards that warming, that it won’t reduce energy costs for UK citizens, that it won’t increase energy independence, and that it will create fewer jobs than a similar investment in renewable energy industry and that those jobs will be more dirty, dangerous, and bad for the employee’s heath.

So why do it?

One can only assume The Labour Party donors must benefit in some way.

Now in PMQs at the house you’ve got the Conservative leader of the opposition saying About time, you should do even more!

While the PM lies, saying that household bills will go down as a result of this somehow. And that he’ll change tax laws to make that so?

They both agree it’s brilliant to drill for more fossil fuels because if we do it in Europe then we don’t have to buy it from Russia.

They both think (wrongly) that it increases energy security to drill more oil and sell it on the global markets.

🙄

Agreement from both sides then.

We are so doomed.

In ways only a bigger Green Swing even admits to, let alone tackles.

AI Maths

They tell me that Open AI have solved four hundred previously open maths problems this month.

The news media, and even the mathematicians, seem quite credulous about it.

No way to know how many of those will really stand up in the end. Lots of proofs turn out not to be really proofs coz they have a mistake, and AI is quite good at discovering mistakes as well as now apparently discovering maths.

Some of them are counter-examples that prove the conjecture is false and those are gonna be good at last. Machines can check it.

Some have other types of mechanical machine-checkable proof, which is interesting in that we can all believe the checker-machine: coz it’s deterministic and understandable.

We can’t trust the machine that isn’t deterministic or understandable as much though.

GPT says these things are true. Now maths people have to check, because OpenAI staff aren’t expert mathematicians either, mostly.

Some of the 400 proofs will fall, I’m sure.

How many tokens will be spent before machines find the flaws that are surely still there? How many tokens until you decide to stop?

But if a machine can prove a thing to itself, but not explain it to any person, is it really doing maths? Even if it’s correct more often than people are? Or is doing maths more about making meat understand a thing?

🤔

I’m sure I can’t tell if the proofs are true or not. No point me reading them. Mostly won’t even understand the question. The boundary of my meager meat-mind’s maths-understanding was around barely-degree level.

Can the academic discipline continue as one which is devoted mostly to trying to understand the output of a machine writing about maths, which is mostly right but nobody can really tell without an entire academic discipline trying to check.

In other words, mathematicians now also face a spam problem familiar to many software project leads.

Steam Frame

Last month the new VR headset from Steam arrived, and this month the new desktop computer arrived. Both on a wait-list if you want one, both super expensive since Sam Altman cornered the RAM market, and sadly both slightly too shonkey for me to recommend to noobs really.

Battery life on the Steam Frame is really rather poor for sure.

Barely getting more than an hour from it.

Fast-chargers are going to be be an important thing, coz all the chargers I had lying around are taking 4 hours to charge it up for an hour of a game? Something like that.

Better chargers are here now.

Also, a battery with fast-charge of many watts which is suitable for a pocket with a wire to the back of the head.

Back of the head there does feel quite well designed for having an external battery pack. The way the lead isn’t in the front of your face.

The range of quality of USB-c cables and chargers is immense. Most devices don’t even tell you how much current they could negotiate. The new battery is great for having a dial saying how much power is flowing, so you can use the good cable in the good socket and charge 10x faster.

I love that I can check on the charging progress while it’s in the bedroom by the fast-charger, by sshing into bash running on the headset and running upower -d, to see how full the battery is and how fast its charging and all the detail you can’t get from a 5-bar battery indicator.

When it reaches 80% the charging slows down, even on an already-slow charger, so you might as well play for an hour then plug it back in at 20.

Game I mostly played with the Frame was Unloop, which you would think is a pretty simple game requiring not a lot of performance.

But the headset has not been performing well with it. It gets by. Slows down and drops frames as it gets latter in the loop with more actors acting.

So compared to the Quest, the Frame is more expensive, and it’s worse performing, and it’s battery life is worse, it’s less comfortable and it needs more expensive and rare chargers.

So obviously I think the Frame is clearly better by some considerable margin! Mostly because Steam is not a nightmare end-of-the-world surveillance capitalist and spook-collaborator run by the word’s biggest creep! Whereas Facebook’s Quest is that!

Instead Steam have built a device which is open for programming, and which I am interested in writing software for, and which doesn’t feel pwned by the man before it even arrived.

Now they should build a phone which should be expensive yet clunky and barely functional and only lasts the night if you charge it at lunchtime, but has a keyboard and doesn’t constantly spy on you and can stream Grand Theft Auto from your home machine.

Steam Machine

Speaking of Steam, The Steam Machine has finally arrived!

Due to the fact this one will have ridiculous amounts of external storage drives plugged in, it has half as much internal SD space than the VR headset does.

But will get 25+ Tb of external stuff anyway like a good media machine wants.

The WiFi dongle did work, at least a bit, sometimes. So that must be a 7.4 kernel?

Seems to claim ‘disconnected’ quite a lot in Desktop mode. And currently Steam VR is failing on the Steam Machine in desktop mode entirely. Though it did work for a moment at lunchtime.

So. Once again, not a great start.

Its small and pretty and cubic and has no audio-jack (but the USB-c -> optical I have is fine).

The VR-streaming mode’s special wifi-6G dongle works, just, with frequent crashes. Barely better than the 5g wifi though really.

With the Display-port socket plugged into a dual-HDMI active adapter, this thing can indeed power the three screens I need.

That was the main worry really. Need to drive 2 monitors and a projector from this machine with only one HDMI and one Display-Por socket.

It can apparently cope with any arrangement of screens, all unique or all mirrored or overlapping as you like.

I mostly just want them mirrored really. One is the main monitor, the other mirrored on the treadmill desk and that mirrored to the projector when I turn it on.

So that all worked right away. Figured it might not coz none of my Display-Port to HDMI cables worked. Apparently they need to be ‘active’ which I guess means ‘powered’ and this dual-screen thing is that.

One of those cable is a 10 meter active optical. Light down a fibre with converters in the plugs. Fancy eh?

Arguably the main purpose of the new Steam Machine really is to be the screen and keyboard on the treadmill desk.

Finally, that thing isn’t running of the portable games console, and is capable of doing actual work.

Haven’t spent much time with Arch or KDE before, let alone this SteamOS variant in particular.

Weird and funny that’s it’s username is ‘deck’ and it’s hostname is ‘steamdeck’

Half an hour at a potentially-keep-it-up-all-day sedate pace.

The work I got done is entirely just configuring this machine though 😆

The link has the bash script I now have which I can copy to a new steam machine, and maybe any Arch / KDE machine, to install Vim and set up keyboard shortcuts so you can move the windows around with ctrl-alt-J and the keys around that on the keyboard. Nine shortcuts for nine sides/corners/center.

Links

Will Burnham Burn Oil?

Why don’t the media tell the truth about climate?

What does it say about the new Prime Minister that climate barely merited a mention in an hour-long speech about his vision of the future? And what does it say about the ‘mainstream’ media that he was not lambasted for ignoring the severity of the threat hanging over all of us?

Happy Toast

Happy Toast has some some great work this month:

Fascinating Mindscape this month about information and dna and robots.

He describes how if you put molecules into a solution and let them settle, they come to equilibrium. But if you heat, cool, re-heat, in a cycle, the molecules can capture energy from the heat into a meta-stable state which, when they are cooling, they can release in a very programmed way.

we have these little dna-units that start assembling into a
two-dimensional crystal, during that crystal-growth … right
next to the melting temperature of the crystal which is where
you get the lowest error rates, at this point molecules are
assembling/dissembling, coming on, coming off, but they’re all
doing a computation, they’re creating that tapestry that is an
algorithmic pattern tapestry.

But they are doing it for as close to zero energy as you want, the closer you run to the melting temperature of the crystal, the less free energy difference there is when a piece comes in, vs when a piece falls out, and so the system is naturally exploring this regime Charles Bennett was talking about…

To get the lowest error rates you introduce a form of proof-reading… not which burns energy to do so but a form of self-assemby proof-reading which is based on cooperative interactions. So the growth-process can’t go forward unless two things come together at the same time, and of one of them missassembles then the other one won’t fit and self-assembly stalls out.

You can prove some interesting things about the kenetic and error-rate trade-off based on the co-operativity (the type of self-assembled pattern)

Passkeys

I still don’t really know what they are or how they are supposed to work. It can’t be fingerprints, fingerprints are just data. Maybe this article will help?

no wonder i never really understood passkeys. they aren’t one thing theyre at least 16 things only some of which are evil.

Oh, they’re an evil corporate attempt to enclose the commons and charge rent. Yeah. Thought it would be something like that.

Fedi

This month Facebook deleted the accounts of protest-groups on the run up to elections on the eve of their protest. The corporate internet continues to just fucking suck and be ruled by nazis.

There is an alternative though. Not owned by anybody at all, let alone nazis.

But this month more or less the only thing I boosted was Rob’s post about his book, and he uses bluesky mostly anyway. Boo! Buy his book anyway but boo! Bluesky is just crypto nazis cos-playing at decentralisation.

I’ve written an absurd joke book where I’ve illustrated everything by hand in the exact limitations of a ZX81. Why I’ve done this, is largely because sometimes an art impulse seizes me and I can’t stop myself. Please support this nonsense by throwing £20 my way to buy it. I promise you it’s a lot of fun. 81 Jokes For The ZX81

https://spelk.press/gb/products/81-jokes-for-the-zx81

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