It was inspired by tamagotchis of yesteryear (and my two cats). It uses a small common monochrome SSD1306 display with 128x64 pixels of resolution.

All of the pixel art is my own. And the cat features a bunch of different animated poses and behaviors, as well as different environments. And there are minigames (a chrome dino clone - but with a cat!, a breakout clone, a random maze generator, a tic-tac-toe game, and I plan to add more.)

I'm currently working on tweaking the stats so that they go up and down over time in a realistic way and encourage the player to feed and interact with the pet to keep stats from going too low. Then I plan on adding some wireless features, like having the pet scan WiFi names to determine if its home or traveling, or using ESP-NOW to let pets communicate with each other when they're nearby.

I made a reddit post with a video of it a few weeks ago [1] and have various prototypes of artwork for these little screens on my blog [2].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/arduino/comments/1r8i1vx/progress_o...

[2] https://moonbench.xyz/projects/tags/SSD1306/

It has a preview area that updates when you save your character. It can support fixed-width and variable-width fonts. And when you're done you can export the font in a few different formats.

It comes with a bunch of example fonts built-in. Also it's fully client-side code so you can save the webpage to use it offline.

If you want some inspiration for fonts, I made a bunch of really small fonts a few years ago: https://www.moonbench.xyz/projects/tiny-pixel-art-fonts/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45501942

Points: 6

# Comments: 1

Awful idea.

This gives the government the power to deny you access to mass communication by deciding that you're no longer allowed to verify with these platforms.

"Been protesting the wrong things? Been talking about the wrong war crimes? Been advocating for the wrong LGBT policies? Failed to pay child support? Failed to pay back-taxes? Sorry you're no longer eligible for authenticating with social media services. You're too dangerous."

That is not beyond the pale for the Australian government.

You're also at the mercy of them to actually adhere to the "no logging" part, with absolutely no mechanism to verify that. And it can be changed at any time, in targeted ways, again with no way for you to know.

A better idea would be to sell anonymous age verification cards at adult stores, liquor stores, tobacco stores, etc. Paid in cash. An even better idea is to not do any of this and spend the money on a campaign to educate parents and institutions on how to use existing parental controls.

Ostensibly these laws are to protect kids from porn, but that isn't really the case. They instantly expand to everything else "adult", and it's very easy to argue that talking about politics, or discussing evidence of war crimes or genocide, or apparently showing a real and current protest, are "adult" conversations.

And with laws like this, people, adults, everyone, lose the ability to participate in those conversations without doxxing themselves. Some of these things are difficult to discuss when you fear retribution.

It's not about the porn. It was never actually about the porn. The porn is just the difficult-to-defend-without-looking-like-a-pervert smokescreen. It's designed to curtail the free flow of information and expression in far more areas. The people behind these laws are liars.

You're 100% right that it's happening today.

If a user can only make one then they'll have to use that identity with that service forever. That's a nightmare for privacy. Sometimes people need another account, unknown to their employer/family/friends. People should be able to make multiple accounts without those being tied together through a common "age check" identifier. But, of course, there is no way to prevent those from being distributed.

At some level I believe that's the purpose behind some of this. If someone can only have one proof, then someone can only have one account to speak with. They'll be easier to monitor, easier to identify, easier to silence. That's why I think these types of laws and behaviors should be resisted and protested.

I've mentioned in a previous comment that it's telling that big tech isn't resisting these totally-just-coincidental ID laws coming from western countries. It supercharges their surveillance and tracking abilities, and widens their moats.

Also, porn is a smokescreen. The definition of "adult" content will rapidly expand, and these put the ID issuers in censorious a position of control over people and services. Nothing stops a government attestation server from rejecting a request because someone is blacklisted from "mass communication services" because they're a felon, protestor, LGBT activist, etc... or because a service has fallen out of favor.

It's also telling that Google and Microsoft aren't in opposition to this new burden, they're giving quiet yet full support. This will *necessarily* entrench the big players through the burden to implement, make it easier to track individuals across different accounts and services, and endanger the privacy and anonymity of all adults in Australia. And I think that's all the goal.

If they cared about protecting kids they'd focus on resources and campaigns to educate parents on using parental controls. Then parents could decide if they care to block these things in their homes. It should be up to them.

The "you can just log out" loophole, that's just boiling the frog slowly. It would be foolish to think that will stay around.

> Large-scale simulation: So far, we have only focused on systems with a few objects. What about large-scale systems with thousands or millions of objects? Turns out it is not so easy because the computation of gravity scales as . Have a look at Barnes-Hut algorithm to see how to speed up the simulation. In fact, we have documentations about it on this website as well. You may try to implement it in some low-level language like C or C++.

Interestingly, since I didn't have the internet to participate in the MMO elements of the game, my views of it are entirely rooted in the storyline and campaigns. The community is something I haven't experienced. And none of these netcode or pvp bugs or phantom players showed up there.

I love the game. In the single player modes, you can play as the NSDF (US) forces, USSR, (and later as the Chinese forces too) in a sci-fi retelling of the space race where you discover alien relics throughout our solar system and try to piece together where they came from, and more importantly, where they went. And it did this while combining a first-person vehicle combat mode with a top-down RTS system that, in my opinion, worked really well together. And I still take inspiration from it in hobby game projects I work on.

Now that I've grown up as a software developer I've thrown so many hours into writing Lua scripts to build my own missions and AI, and creating custom maps!

"How long should this take? It's JUST calling an API."

"Why did it take so long to fix that bug? It was JUST a one line change."

"Stripe handles payment stuff, we JUST need to add it in!"

What a devious little word. It just papers over all the complexity!

The slippery slope comes from someone then asking the question: "Well, we already require an ID to allow someone to access porn... so can we require it for other things online where people have less desire for privacy? Why shouldn't we require an ID to post to social media, or participate in online video games (especially those violent ones!)"

The slope I see, is once you set up a system for ID verification and require it for a primary thing people want to keep private, it becomes easier to mandate it in other areas where privacy is less demanded.

Concern about that slope would be a nonissue if the laws mandated adult sites tag themselves as "adult content" for trivial filtering at the household network level, instead of establishing and normalizing the ID verification regime.

For gamers, this seem to indicate that all games developed with Unity phone home back to Unity HQ at the very least during the initial install (possibly on every launch?) with information about my machine. I'm not sure how they could conceivably be enforcing this otherwise. It makes me inclined to avoid installing games developed with Unity to avoid sending information about my machine and my gaming habits back to Unity and IronSource. Sorry guys but I don't want my "profile" to be part of your "ad tech" just because I decided to install games I purchased.

I use a reverse SSH tunnel to access my home network when traveling.

Ex:

- [Machine-A (on my LAN, behind NAT, with a dynamic IP address)] maintains a long lived SSH connection to [Machine-B (a VPS with a public IP)] with a reverse tunnel configuration.

- I can then SSH into Machine-B and follow the tunnel back into Machine-A, and from there access the rest of my home network.

It works pretty well. I can access files on my NAS and check on my Raspberry Pi cameras without needing to put either on "the cloud". Although I have to admit I always have to pull up a resource like the one in OP whenever I want to setup something like this, I've never learned it by heart and always need a refresher.

> I read on a post somewhere that if you replace "the economy" with "rich people yatch money" a lot of headlines make more sense.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25507123

Plumbing installed in people's homes should scan for illegally consumed narcotics or prescription medications and check them against pharmacy records. Your home's electrical wiring should make sure it's not being used to illegally grow drugs. Cellphone cameras should make sure they never record a naked body without a signed consent waiver. Guitar amplifiers should verify that you're not playing an owned piece of music without a license.

How could we ever survive in a world where we relied upon targeted investigations and probable cause? How could we ever live in a world where pipes just moved things from A to B without inspecting them.

/s

Will there be apologies given to the people banned, isolated from participating in socialization during a pandemic where online communication was a vital tool for human connection?