lime!

it’s weird that. it’s obviously possible to have a flat-shaded skeuomorph, just look at basically all of windows 95, but for some reason we connect them to this particular graphical style. files and folders are both part of the old classic “desktop metaphor”, so they basically have to be skeuomorphs. but like, the application icons are basically just mosaic tiles of the normal icons.

a proper skeuomorph would indicate what the program is for. krita and whatever map software that is are both good, if a little flat. but the libreoffice suite just being squares with a letter on them? have them be like, a spreadsheet for calc, a stack of cards for impress, and a printed page for write.

remember all the icons for windows 95 network utilities that have people in them? those are also (attempts at) skeumorphs because they’re trying to communicate what the program does.

a skeuomorph (from greek, “tool/container-shape”) is something that retains the characteristics of another thing that it is based on, even though those characteristics are no longer useful. think lamps shaped like candles, or the floppy disk save icon, or media player programs with volume knobs.

skeuomorphic UX is a good way to get users comfortable with a system by using designs they are already familiar with, and the original iphone used this to great effect.

This is a good example of skeuomorphic UI:

all to say, I’m not entirely sure these icons are skeuomorphs. they’re just glossy.

The Incredible Machine! the original Rube Goldberg game. me and my friends played the shit out of it in the 90s. a few years ago i decided to give it a google and i found out that not only were there an expansion i hadn’t heard of, there were five other games in the series.

i don’t know about “cross” :P it’s a bit-for-bit reimplementation of Elite 2. i loved that game as a kid and pioneer is a great version of it.

i’m currently going through it! company is slowly collapsing around me and despite promises of transparency there is no official communication from the board. we get all our information from news articles and office gossip. people are quitting left and right and no acknowledgement of this is made from above. it’s a very odd situation.

it’s more than that Kola, it’s large.

me and three friends have been spending on average 80 hours each on a space age game together since the expansion released, and we’re currently in the process of getting the third planet (out of five) to produce evenly without getting stuck.

each planet has basically it’s own tech tree, and you need to re-learn how to build a factory every time because the conditions are so different.

where we are now, the only resource is “scrap”. building a factory here involves basically running the entire process to build something in reverse, disassembling broken machine parts to extract the components, sorting them, and reusing them in new things. we’re completely swamped in blue circuits, batteries and low density structures, which isn’t much help when you need pipes.

don’t know why nobody stated this but space age is basically five times larger than the base game. they’ve announced that even though the game is coming to switch, space age is not since it has much higher requirements.

it’s not a dlc, it’s a proper expansion.

yeah one thing we couldn’t fix before losing interest was eventual consistency and authority. files would sort of flicker in and out while state was being propagated. i dread to think what kind of bandwidth use that thing would have when sharing large files.

i don’t know of a single town here that has overhead power lines in populated areas. those are for long-distance transmission only.

or, okay, i know of one. but that’s because there’s a steel mill and a hydropower plant there, and you don’t wan to bury lines that carry that around of energy.

buildings with upward-facing spotlights, especially single-family homes with façade lights. it’s like nobody cares about light pollution.

it was nothing official, just a toy file sharing thing using the chord dht algorithm. it consisted of a single binary that you fed with a directory and the IP of an extant member, and it would sync everything on the network into that directory.

no edge cases handled, so the 90% remained.

i can chime in with some actual experience!

my current problems with KDE are

• the greeter only accepts my password on the secondary monitor
• the compositor shuts down whenever something uses the GPU even though the setting is off
• my primary desktop randomly shunts itself to the right, plopping on top of the desktop on the secondary display and leaving a big black void on half my primary until plasmashell is restarted
• my panels keep collapsing their content down to the width of a single pixel until i resize them
• Wayland just crashloops and is completely unusable (no, i don’t have an nvidia card)
• i still can’t get the acrylic transparency to work :(

and what’s fun about this is, the issues are so intermittent and random that i never know what i’m going to get on a given day!

in the health sector specifically, IT is a mess because you can’t stop people from working or there will be deaths. one thing you should take away from this is that their jobs are important and it is crucial that they can do them. it is your job to support them; anything that stops them doing their job or makes it take longer, even once, is dangerous. improving infra for its own sake is not a good idea because it comes at the risk of peoples lives. the details don’t matter in the face of that.

if this stresses you out, you can absolutely change jobs. i did.

if you think you can work within those parameters, and you think you can find ways to improve the system in-place while mitigating the risks, then you will be highly respected.

sure, do that. and good luck with this, i did something similar for a project once and as usual its those last 5% that are going to cost you 90% of the time.

your reaction makes me more confident that this may turn into something interesting :)

i take it then that files must have some ownership information associated with them, to distinguish the author from a relay node? or is that just a private key.

i’m interested in the dynamic linking, what mechanism is used to stop situations like left-pad or the pypi incident where a file is removed replaced with a malicious alternative?

if I’m reading this right, it’s a bit like ipfs+dht. is this a content-addressable system?

anyway, you should probably have demos of

• large files (like a Linux disk image), to demonstrate consistency in transfer.
• Video stream, to demonstrate performance and low latency.
• multiple files shared with many peers at once, to demonstrate scalability
• sharing with low bandwidth and high latency, to demonstrate possible mobile use cases.

thoughts:

• the logo is very close to wireguard’s.
• if the data is stored on peers, that means there must always be people with free storage online for it to work? how much storage is needed? is that data in plaintext? could a bad actor push illegal content to peers without them knowing?

also, please convert the whitepaper to a format that is actually readable. rtf? really?

sweden.

and I went back to check, it was imported by a costume shop in collaboration with hard rock cafe in the early 90s but the decision from the board of business to encourage people to spend for this holiday came in 97.

halloween was imported into this country by a costume shop in 1997. this is common knowledge and the shop itself is very proud of this fact. because of this it is an explicitly consumerist holiday, and it is younger than me by a good margin. i do not know anyone who celebrates.

oh did Klaus retire?