wandering cartographer


Maruposting
@Maruposting

this is still my greatest post
I bring it everywhere with me like a picture in my wallet



mrhands
@mrhands

ysaie
@ysaie

see the Tweezer Attack

The Tweezer Attack was an exploit that involved the use of a pair of tweezers to bridge areas of memory, allowing homebrew code running in Gamecube mode to have access to limited sections of Wii memory (MEM2) [...]

oh and most(all?) "portable gamcube" hardware mods are made by sawing a wii motherboard in half


srxl
@srxl

the tweezer attack was fucking incredible. restricted from accessing certain areas of memory? fuck you. my hands are the mmu now. i move your cards to my side of the field and end my turn.



cainoct
@cainoct

A little preamble - my brother and I were long time macOS users since the late 00's, eventually moving to Hackintoshes before giving up and moving to Windows in 2020, just in time before Apple Silicon started rolling out. Neither of us have been particularly satisfied with Windows as a desktop computing ecosystem/platform as they lack coherent, neat and smartly designed GUI apps that Macs have been graced with for a long time (Let alone the bugs in Explorer, the uselessness of Search, and so on). He's also had an iPad Pro for a long time, and has been constantly bewildered by how Apple doesn't know what to do with it and can't make it a holistic computing platform instead of a series of disconnected applications.

As the Enshittification wave keeps crushing tech, my brother has recently been working out how to make Linux work. This wouldn't have been possible for him without GNOME and it's fairly wonderful ecosystem of 1st and 3rd party native applications, which feel reminiscent of the best examples in the Mac ecosystem - applications that have small, focused use cases that are designed to work seamlessly in the OS itself.

It's not perfect - he says Fedora is about as janky as Windows, but at least he can fix things when they go wrong. He's still working on compatibility with certain critical Windows applications.

Yesterday, he made a really interesting point about GNOME and Mac (at least before Apple started locking up the platform more, I have no idea what it's like today), and what it takes to make a healthy, diverse and interoperable ecosystem. He does not do social media much and said I could just copy this quote and share it, so here it is:

I think GNOME has helped me contextualize the failures of iOS in a way I hadnt thought before.

Both macOS and GNOME have developer ecosystems where people release holistic software, because you can afford to do so in an open computing platform.

  • On an open computing platform the costs of developing and releasing software is lower.
  • This means the burden to recapture the time you sacrificed is lower.
  • Holistic app design requires offering the value of the app as freely as possible, because to be a holistic app is to offer seamless and frictionless functionality with the rest of the operating system, to require to user to engage with it only as long as they need to, and to forego a brand or identity that you otherwise might use to capture value.
  • When people do this, I think it also creates a virtuous cycle where others are more inclined to offer value freely when they in turn have received that value.

NONE OF THIS IS TRUE ON iOS, you have to pay yearly developer fees, the developer rules are burdensome and kafka-esque, Apple will take 30% of anything you make even if it's a donation and most apps are subscription or ad-based.

In that world you have no incentive to be holistic in spite of what Apple encourages developers to do, and why even if Apple had good developer relations their requests for developers to integrate with their APIs like App Intents and Shortcuts will fall on deaf ears, because that requires sacrificing value in an environment where the incentive for doing so is very low.

This observation reminded me about a great article that talks about the Internet as ecology, and how it's breaking down because it's been taken over by controlling and extractive forces. I think we can see the same forces on computing platforms themselves.