This cube is the "inverse table" used to map colors to a palette. The animated regions are tints and shades of pure red, green, and blue. Ideally, this cube would be a voronoi diagram, but that would be prohibitively expensive for Macs of the late eighties. Instead, they mapped the palette colors to indices into the table, and expanded the regions assigned to those colors via a simultaneous flood fill, like if you clicked the Paint Bucket tool with multiple colors in multiple places at the same time. Except in 3D.
Oh man, that was about 3 lifetimes ago. I'm on linkedin (every couple months hah) if you ever want to chat.
It was a fun project, but we released it just in time for the Dot Bomb to wipe us out. Our last month, my partner and I got about $600 each from shareware game sales ($1200 with inflation today), enough to pay rent and my student loans for the first time. After the pop, the next month we got one sale. $12. The fun was over and never came back in the same way.
The powers that be conspired to end the 90s climb towards FU money and UBI, and there was no tech investment for about 6-7 years until 2007 when the iPhone and Facebook came out, which started the mobile bubble. Lots of people made $100k those first years, but mostly not established players, who had too much time, effort and money sunk into the old desktop platforms.
Then Google and Facebook took the lion's share of ad money, which removed the avenues to scale a business. Everyone moved into other models like in-game ads, in-app purchases and going viral through influencers, but none of those worked for the vast majority. To leave us where we are today, where long tail effects ensure a winner-take-all sales distribution.
Now that AI is here, even apps will begin disappearing. I predict that within 3 years, nobody will be using the web or buying software anymore. We'll just ask the AI to do everything, and it will make it so. Thus ends the mobile bubble too.
I basically missed every bubble due to unfortunate life choices. So let this be a cautionary tale to any young people who read this. You need to do the opposite of what people say. Nobody gets rich pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, they get rich by borrowing someone else's money and investing it in sure things like Bitcoin 15 years ago. If you feel yourself clinging to a project or situation because you have a lot invested in it or don't want to let someone down, that's the time to explore other options. You won't make yourself poor - your empathy will. That's why the rich demonize it. But empathy is where the true meaning in life is found. You can choose to skim money off other people's backs through investment, or "earn" it yourself, but there is a karmic cost no matter how you obtain it. So just have fun and do your best and at least pay your taxes so that society can progress forward, or we'll never stop repeating these systems of control and suffering IMHO.
When I was making Retro, I was trying to capture the feeling of the golden age of arcade video games, even if I maybe missed the mark. But I didn't realize that I was in a golden age at the time. I believe that we're in one of those now, maybe the last one. But also the first one, from a certain perspective.
Maybe it's time to dust off the old compiler and make a game..
I think of bone conducting headphones as the most realistic foundation for augmented reality on the market. Hearing things without plugging your ears up, weighing you down or taking you out of your surroundings is underrated and underutilized. To match the weight of an Oculus Quest 3 on my head, I'd have to wear seventeen pairs of Shockz OpenMove. Compare the dread of a video ad over your eyes to the dread of an audio ad in your ears.
We really should have a broader conversation about the practical applications of this stuff.
I'm not especially familiar with this, but I believe making the SVG element larger can increase its filter effects' resolution, and then using CSS transforms to scale the element's parent will return it to its original size, but with a higher resolution result. From there, additional changes to the filter effect (to incorporate a subtle blur for instance) may help it over the finish line.
Regardless, this is a great writeup for changes I wish to never see in ordinary UI.
The other day I realized that holding down the Option key in the System 7 Desktop Patterns control panel changes the button text from "Set Desktop Pattern" to "Set Utilities Pattern". Does anyone here happen to know what that means?
edit: holy crap, I just figured it out: "Set Utilities Pattern" replaces the background pattern of every desk accessory, such as the Calculator and Scrapbook apps, Find File, Key Caps, Puzzle— with the pattern you chose. What a different time that was!
Senior software engineer specializing in game dev and graphics programming. 7 years of browser game dev, 6 years of mobile game dev, 2 years of professional web dev.
I want to build things that empower people; creative tools, data visualizations, whatever expands people's capacity to succeed. I'm curious about developer advocacy roles, and positions where my enthusiasm and communication skills close gaps. Beyond all that, I still like making games.
> To make something really different, and not get drawn into the gravity well of existing solutions, you practically need an isolated monastic order of computer engineers. Which was sort of Plan 9…
At first glance, I thought this was some new TC39 JavaScript syntax proposal.
This is a cool site. I thought I'd look for a page about my favorite syntactic phenomenon, "what all", and not only did I find it, but also they changed the "Who says this?" section header to "Who all says this?"
In practice you can move the displayResult(x / 0) outside the try catch. It’s hard to think of a counterexample that comes up in practice.
There might be something to this idea, because I’ve often been in situations where a try catch catches an error that originates a dozen frames down the call stack, which is sometimes (but not always) unrelated to the original point of the try catch block. People try and deal with this by adding more try catches around the code deeper in the call stack, but maybe there’s a better way.
They seem to be missing the incipient disappearance of the -en form of verbs, with people saying things like "I should have went" instead of "I should have gone".
It isn't clear why they feature the constructions they do. They are titled "Yale Grammatical Diversity Project", but the constructions are not necessarily examples of grammatical diversity:
> Have yet to is a construction that appears in most, if not all, varieties of English.
> this construction appears to be distributed across speakers in all regions and demographic groups.
> Repetition clefts are quite widespread in English and can be observed as early as the mid-17th century
> They are robustly attested in contemporary North American English and are also used in the UK. Related constructions have been observed in Australian English (McConvell 2004) and in a corpus of New Zealand English speech as well
> the usage of repetition clefts does not apparently correlate with any sociodemographic features.
Anecdotally I think I have heard "what all" most commonly spoken by Indian English speakers - though that's probably quite far outside the scope of this site.
I've been researching the way classic Macs quantize colors to limited palettes:
https://rezmason.net/retrospectrum/color-cube
This cube is the "inverse table" used to map colors to a palette. The animated regions are tints and shades of pure red, green, and blue. Ideally, this cube would be a voronoi diagram, but that would be prohibitively expensive for Macs of the late eighties. Instead, they mapped the palette colors to indices into the table, and expanded the regions assigned to those colors via a simultaneous flood fill, like if you clicked the Paint Bucket tool with multiple colors in multiple places at the same time. Except in 3D.
reply