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GnomeToys

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Posts posted by GnomeToys

  1. On 8/27/2018 at 2:25 PM, glorydays said:

    that dude was beyond salty

     

    and let's not throw the mentally ill under the bus for this one.

     

    People who were close to the shooter said he was a normal dude and just "snapped"

    Most of my friends thought I was just "eccentric" before I had a psychotic break and went into 2.5 years of terrifying hallucinations (subjectively the first two weeks were upwards of several thousand years, but I'm going based on the societal norm of time here) so I'd take that part with a grain of salt.  That said, I wouldn't blame mental illness on this.   This guy doesn't sound psychotic from the described events.  If he'd gone in and started yelling at all of the fucking neon pink rabbits to stop molesting his crisper drawer I'd buy that as a reason.    There's a certain level of meditation on something like this that doesn't mesh as being compatible with the level of mental illness that would be required to not have control over it. 

     

    On 8/28/2018 at 2:29 PM, Mercer said:

    To me it doesn't necessarily mean someone is sane/insane though. A lot of people consider climbing a huge billboard and writing your name on it insane, and can't comprehend the thought patterns behind it. Those same people probably wouldn't hand down a not guilty due to insanity decision if they were on a jury. 

     

    Definitely on the graffiti.  Hell, 90% of my hobbies are shit most people who don't know me would consider completely batshit insane at first glance but they're really just very strange / fringe hobbies. 

     

    As far as the insanity / not guilty thing, it can't be used very often.  From what I can find personality disorders aren't usually accepted as a defense, and almost certainly wouldn't apply in this case since most of the likely candidates for things this guy might have had fall under the excluded disorders:


    http://www.psi.uba.ar/academica/carrerasdegrado/psicologia/sitios_catedras/practicas_profesionales/820_clinica_tr_personalidad_psicosis/material/dsm.pdf

     

    Also, from wikipedia:
     

    Quote

    Most courts accept a major mental illness such as psychosis but will not accept the diagnosis of a personality disorder for the purposes of an insanity defense. The second question is whether the mental illness interfered with the defendant's ability to distinguish right from wrong. That is, did the defendant know that the alleged behavior was against the law at the time the offense was committed.

    Additionally, some jurisdictions add the question of whether or not the defendant was in control of their behavior at the time of the offense. For example, if the defendant was compelled by some aspect of their mental illness to commit the illegal act, the defendant could be evaluated as not in control of their behavior at the time of the offense.

    The forensic mental health specialists submit their evaluations to the court. Since the question of sanity or insanity is a legal question and not a medical one, the judge and or jury will make the final decision regarding the defendant's status regarding an insanity defense.[12][13]

    In most jurisdictions within the United States, if the insanity plea is accepted, the defendant is committed to a psychiatric institution for at least 60 days for further evaluation, and then reevaluated at least yearly after that.

    That last part about the psych institute for at least 60 days with "at least yearly" evaluations is the reason I wouldn't do the insanity thing, aside from it hardly ever applying in the first place.   It means a potentially lifetime stay in a mental facility, instead of a jail stay which they at least have some hope in being released from  and where they may get better treatment.    Personally I'd go the exact opposite route and confess to some random unsolved treasonous act / unsolved mass murder and attempt to get execution rather than either.  A smooth OD on pentobarbital sounds very attractive compared to being force-fed drugs that slowly cause parkinson's disease over a period of many years. I wouldn't be in that situation to begin with though, so it's kind of moot.

     

    Keep in mind that the first listed criteria in the DSM-5 is:

    Quote

    An enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior the deviates markedly from the expectations of the individual's culture.

    This line is effectively there because otherwise it's impossible to lay out guidelines for diagnosis from a scientific standpoint without making every religious person insane by definition otherwise.  

     

     

    • Truth 1
  2. Yeah it's a very bizarre thing to think about.  One of my weirdest experiences involved "dreaming" in large dosages ? and I wound up being able to see in the 6th dimension.   Just picture an array of 4th dimensional time-space lines that all contain independent versions of the 3D universe we live in and the entire history of it, and a bunch of bored...  "entities"...  sitting around and messing with the parameters of them for fun.  It was sort of like Schroedinger's cats playing with an infinite number of strings.  They handed me one and told me I could mess with it, but every possible modification led to it turning into something worse than it already was so I stopped around the time I was trying to remake the world wars into something else.  After a while that retreated back into being able to see 4th dimensional strands and play with them in normal 3D space which was a lot less confusing. 

  3. So I joined the only room with people in it this late, and there are people actually doing decent manga style sketches there.  We could just host off drawball.net or whatever as a public room and mess with people who showed up while grafftagging the canvas. 

  4. I posted this in a games thread but I just found this shit:

     

    https://drawpile.net/

    Quote

    Drawpile is a Free/Libre networked drawing program that allows multiple people to sketch on the same image simultaneously. It supports the OpenRaster image file format and thus works well with applications such as MyPaint, Krita and GIMP.

    I couldn't find it in a search here so I figured I'd post it...  it looks like there are a bunch of public servers, possibly moderated, but it might be a cool way to randomly hang out and draw shit aside from the drawball spamfest.

     

    Has layer support, pen tool, custom brushes, so it's not a terrible quick sketching program.

     

    It also has support for pens / tablets and has various pressure options for different things, so that's cool.  Pretty much anything that works with Windows Ink looks like it will work.  No rotation or tilt support (just tested).

     

    I know there are other HTML5 / browser versions of this kinda thing but most of them are kinda shit.  Thought I'd see if anybody is interested in getting a server going (or oontzing on a public one)?


    As a bonus, there are furries.  Coloring tools aren't bad.

    furries.png.fce82ce64c2d08b226b09d13195de90a.png

  5. Drawpile does have Windows Ink support so it works with Wacom tablets & whatever else you can use with that.  It's not doing rotation or tilt but the pressure options work well.   I'll see what the server requirements are, probably don't have the bandwidth but we can take over a public or find somewhere else to run one...  Most of the cloud hosts are free if you stay with their basic machines so I might be able to throw it on my AWS account.

  6. It looks like the memory upgrade cost between 64 & 128 is a ~$30 ripoff, and the one between 128 & 256 is a $10 savings...  so $20 over on the parts cost,  subtract Chinese factory labor and it's $19.75 profit across memory options assuming consumer prices, likely more for them but the scaling is close.    ? ?

     

     

  7. So this is what the guy behind Metal Gear Solid is doing.   Ate up as fuck. 

     

     

     

    On 12/17/2016 at 9:55 PM, wanderlvst said:

    Kingspray Graffiti Simulator is kick ass creative tool. Multiplay lets you collaborate with other players. Choose different tips, pressures, colors, walls, and save your artwork to watch replays of after. It's awesome to have this instantly.

     

     

     

    Does it have support for non VR?  AKA a normal display?

    Does it support Wacom tablets, touchpads, or mice, which everyone is used to using instead of holding dumbbells and waving their arms in front of themselves like a fucking jackass?

    What about a LeapMotion? 

     

    Basically, instead of $300-500 worth of computer hardware that's absolutely fucking useless otherwise, can you use it with fucking anything that can do other useful things?  Even a mouse and normal monitor would count. 

     

    I mean dear god.

     

     

    For everybody else here, anyone want to mess with https://drawpile.net/ ?    There are a bunch of public servers going if nobody wants to start one. 

     

  8. I need to play the metro games I have still.  I hit some place early on with my old video card that just ruined performance / crashed.  None of the settings seemed to fix it ?

     

    On 12/15/2017 at 2:51 PM, OliverHart said:

    what are some good playstation 3 games?

    Disgaea: Hour of Darkness  -- The disgaea series are more or less Pokemon for adult sadomasochists.  Your characters can level up to some ridiculous number like 300+ in the first game.  To get everything "powered up" you need to reincarnate them and level up to 300+ again, then go into their items and level those up by beating 100 floors multiple times per item.  The later games removed a bunch of the caps or raised them so level cap is 9999 with various other crap running into the billions / trillions.  Basically they created a game absolutely nobody was expected to finish / play all of, then because reasons people did anyway.  Worth checking out for the main campaign levels which don't have any of that insane grindfest and actually aren't all that long for a jrpg.

     

    I can't think of a ton else really.  I'm considering picking up The Last of Us if it will actually run on either of the crazy dev PS3s I have, need to find that out first.  Otherwise I mostly use it as a PS2 / PSX player...  one of them has the emotion engine hardware. 

     

     

  9. On 8/27/2018 at 11:08 PM, diggity said:

    Was talking t my wife tonight about these furniture mover things that are like Whoopi’s cushions. Came to bed. Got amazon ads for them. Never looked them up. No idea what they are really called. Have an ad. Back offf Hal. 

     

    Quick edit. We were talking irl. Not on the phone. Our phones were locked and not in use at the time. 

    Locked doesn't mean much on modern phones.  Hardwired switches on the mic and camera might be the best option for that if you're good with a soldering iron.  Flip the mic on when you need to use it, flip it off after, problem solved.

  10. One of the funniest targeted ads I got was after I kept chain-posting a bunch of deep dream'd pictures of Tubgirl until I found one that would get through the image recognition neural net of some website...  at that point the neural net they were using for targeted ads either exploded, got weird data from the analysis of "objects in image" on deep dreamed tubgirl, or was way the hell too accurate...  the next page refresh gave me an ad that was a link to apply for a job as a forensics agent at the FBI.   I nearly shit myself laughing. 

     

    On the minimal hardware thing, lots of people do that I think...  or in the case of lots of people I know they just hack the fuck out of anything they're concerned about.   It seems like most fall into the "totally embrace" or "get the hell off my lawn" categories depending on how jaded they are from dealing with the whole mess, and I can imagine Bill Gates is pretty fucking jaded about now.  IMHO a lot of the attitude change towards technology is more a function of the fact that most people using it don't understand the implications of it. 

     

    For example, one thing Apple probably got right in the long run was never adding support for BluRay to their machines...   the standard effectively requires a black-box rootkit to be loaded with the operating system if you want to play movies.  It isn't a rootkit in the sense of somebody being able to remote control the machine with it, but the standard itself requires that it be so heavily obfuscated / encrypted that there's no real way of auditing that without an enormous amount of effort. 

    One of my projects at work was to spend about 6 weeks trying to reverse engineer commercial bluray player software for both the bluray people and the company involved to determine what kind of effort it would take.   Ironically the movies that they bought me for that task were the first non-pirated movies I'd owned in years, and part of the reason I had to sign an NDA for the whole thing was that they gave me the keys required to pirate them (let's pretend the internet didn't exist and I couldn't look that up in 5 seconds).  It didn't really matter whether I knew exactly what I was looking for or not, I was seeing how much of a clusterfuck it would be to get to them using just that piece of software and whatever crazy shit I could come up with.  I failed to find anything, which probably kept that company in business. 

     

    Anyway, the sheer amount of software functioning against anything you try to do to it on the machine you paid for is fucking amazing in the case of something like that.  I'd think of one way in, oops, too obvious, their driver is blocking me.  Ok, how about...   now the operating system itself is blocking me.   Etc, etc...  Obviously someone broke it, or this wouldn't have been an issue.  I just think they used a huge shortcut that didn't involve any of that mess.  ?    The point is all of that crap basically tossed in at the insistence of a single industry...   I don't really think any of this is being used for monitoring or anything dodgy other than the usual copy protection that you can circumvent by spending 10 seconds on google, but it's interesting how pervasive it is. 

     

    Another fun fact:  Pirated BluRay disks in exactly the same video format with the encryption stripped off play faster.  This isn't anything to do with the encryption itself, which is pretty much transparent, it's the crazy-ass Java virtual machine the player has to run in order to initialize the decryption process and run the menuing system.  Just like in Windows 95 days, Java manages to make everything it touches slow.  ? ?  

     

    Anyway, I'm relating that fun bit of experience because it's just an example of a high end consumer level variant of invasive software / hardware.   It's absolutely nothing compared to stuff like:  

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Active_Management_Technology

     

    ARM has a similar set of layered crap running under the OS and I wouldn't be surprised to find nasty crap in it either.  I haven't looked at it much so I'm not sure. 

     

    https://developer.arm.com/technologies/trustzone

     

    It isn't just processors, either;  anything that has a boot ROM can be made into a weapon of sorts.  This comes to mind immediately:

     

    https://www.wired.com/2015/02/nsa-firmware-hacking/

     

    So the biggest problem (and the reason I tend to just bitch about targeted ads / corporate / marketing) is that nearly all of the hardware that could be called a computer is designed to be spied on and breaking it free of that state varies from extremely difficult to impossible depending on the design of the hardware itself.  Because of that I'll bitch about the lower level stuff, but at this point in time I can't see any way around it without spending a year auditing the relatively simple (1990s) level of hardware I'd be capable of auditing myself for firmware crap like this, another year learning enough about circuit layout in processors and ROM to de-cap and analyze a bunch of identical models of those, etc...   anything on that level quickly becomes silly. 

     

     

     

     

  11. I studied mathematics but it doesn't help much with the higher dimensional stuff in terms of visualization...  the easiest way to interpret pictures is that the 4D ones are 3D "slices" along the 4th axis.  You can move on that axis, but that's it. 

     

    With 5D you get an extra coordinate to mess with, so you're looking at something like a line through a 5D object instead, which can have either coordinate changed.  He displays that in the x/y style graphs of the 5D objects.  http://www.polytope.net/hedrondude/podiverts5.htm

     

    In 6D it gets more confusing because you have to get rid of 3 axes, and with 7D and above you end up "collapsing" more dimensions than you started with to get any kind of image.  Wikipedia has this projection of a 9D cube to give an example of how silly things get.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine-dimensional_space#/media/File:9-cube_t0.svg

     

    I'd have to read a bunch of math that wasn't in my field to understand how he might be finding these, and honestly my head is filled with enough abstract algebra that only sees real use in bizarre cryptography or reading more math papers to dive in that deep.  ?

     

     

     

  12. I knew about the leak but wasn't following in any detail really, so this was the first time I noticed the name.

     

    As far as the good riddance goes...  I don't really know or care what both sides of politics are claiming about this, but reading more about it I can imagine ways this may have fucked up either some US agents abroad or the internal investigation going on,  aside from any obvious consequences or the part where she signed up for a job where the main requirement was not leaking information.      She was in a better position than anybody to know she was going to get in trouble over this.  I can't feel any sympathy on this one. 

     

     

    • Truth 1
  13. topper4.thumb.png.7b0594d1e9137a8ec48d470489a4dc99.png

     

    http://www.polytope.net/hedrondude/polychora.htm

     

    I can't tell if this is art or math or both, which means probably both.  This guy has been working on finding certain sets of 4D / 5D objects since the 90s with what appears to be the obsession of a total madman (aka great artist / mad scientist, whatever).  He has the following to say:

     

    Quote

    My polychoron search began back in 1990, when I searched for them using vertex figures (verfs), faceting techniques, and a "digging-in-the-verf" technique. I used a blue note book and filled it with verf drawings, long names (many have changed since then), and cell lists. I carried that blue note book with me nearly every day to college, either to show people or to write more info into it. By 1993 there were over 1000 polychora in that book, although many of them were fissary or exotic-celled. That year also brought the discovery of the first (and presently only) non-prismattic uniform polychoron known to contain a snub polyhedron - Rapsady - rapsady contains 120 sirsids (also known as yog-sothoths), 120 sesides, and 1440 paps (pentagonal antiprisms). Later I started to hand draw sections of some of the more simpler polychora, mainly pentachorics and tessics, and wound up with approximately 100 polychora in hand drawn sections. Also during that time, I invented my short names (which have lately been called Bowers Style Acronyms by Richard Klitzing). These short names were the result of writing the polyhedra in an abbreviated form, where I later mentally pronounced the abbreviation, this lead me to change the long name abbreviation into a pronouncible short name. An example is the quasitruncated small stellated dodecahedron - abbreviated to QTSSD, mentally pronounced as quit SIS sid, later spelled as quit sissid. I now have short names for all of the 1849 known uniform as well as the additional scaliform polychora with the exception of many idcossids and dircospids. Also all uniform polyhedra and many of the uniform polytera (5 dimensional) have short names.

     

    It wasn't until 1997, that I contacted other polyhedronist, starting with the legendary Magnus Wenninger, after that contact, I got a letter from another polyhedronist Vincent Matsko who got wind of my discoveries, this letter came immediately after I discovered the massive idcossid and dircospid regiments (as well as their lesser counter parts, the sidtaps and gidtaps) which is one of the biggest discoveries so far. Not long after that, I searched the web for 4-D polytopes and found George Olshevsky's web site and later contacted him. He also got wind of my discoveries before hand, so we compared info and teamed up to search for more polychora. In 1998 I discovered the blends (also known as the sabbadipady regiment), George later found Sto and Gotto, two members of the rit (rectified tesseract) regiment that have demitessic symmetry. George and I later allowed for coinciding cases which brought the polychoron count into the 8000s. In 1999 George found the most unusual polychora to date, the swirlprisms and later I started to investigate another unusual type of 4-D figure which I call polytwisters which are related to Hopf fibration, there are now 27 known regular polytwister plus an infinite group of regular dyadic twisters (also called "dysters"). Not long after this I created my first website. Also during this time I began my polychoron sectioning with POV-Ray, and eventually rendered sections of over 1000 polychora. John Cranmer has volunteered to make scores of polychoron section movies using my POV code, which he has placed on CDs, these were spectacular - however each file is several megabytes, so I can't fit them on my site.

    Anyway aside from the objects themselves being very cool looking if you enjoy geometric patterning, what's equally impressive is that part where he developed what is basically a human-pronounceable language to describe the features of objects that don't exist as far as anyone can tell, and is apparently known in whatever esoteric field of mathematics this is for that along with all of these shapes.  The names of the objects are bizarre, but how exactly do you describe a dimension you can only view slices of?

     

    Quote

    The name "dircospid" came from the first one I named, "dircospid pidsiddip piscax", short for diretrocuboctisnub prismatodiprismatodouble snub diakis prismatopseudosnub chiro600 which is an exotic celled one.

    Anyway, I found the weird geometry pretty cool.  It would be fun to build one of these 3D slices as a sculpture (or multiple slices of the same 4D shape as a progression of sculptures) if I had that much motivation.  ? 

  14. On 8/20/2018 at 12:41 PM, misteraven said:

    Freakin yellow jackers have been insane this year. Super freakin aggressive. Literally come at you from nowhere and bounce off you a couple times before finally stinging.

     

    Didn't realize that yellow jackets are by far the most aggressive our of all wasps and bees. They also happen to both sting and bite. There's a more aggressive subspecies to an already aggressive main family that sort of like an africanized version.

     

    Been really nuts though.

    They were the only thing that would pollinate trinidad moruga scorpions when I grew them.  They had two nests like 5 feet away on one side of a fence that I regularly walked past and accidentally grabbed a couple of times when I put my hand on the fence and they never stung me.  Actually they ignored me, and I was out there enough.   Since those things will chase me all over the damn place normally I concluded that there was something in the ultra hot pepper plants getting them higher than fuck. 

  15. Well, looks like we're not the only ones officially sick of this shit.   The originators of the Internet bring you...

     

    The Brandeis program

    https://www.darpa.mil/program/brandeis

    Quote

    The collection and analysis of information on massive scales has clear benefits for society: it can help businesses optimize online commerce, medical workers address public health issues and governments interrupt terrorist activities. Yet at the same time, respect for privacy is a cornerstone principle of our democracy. The right to privacy, as Louis Brandeis first expounded in 1890, is a consequence of modernity because we better understand that harm comes in more ways than just the physical.

     

    Quote

    The vision of the Brandeis program is to break the tension between: (a) maintaining privacy and (b) being able to tap into the huge value of data. Rather than having to balance between them, Brandeis aims to build a third option – enabling safe and predictable sharing of data in which privacy is preserved.

     

    It's not perfect, but something that could be standardized on would be better than nothing. 

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