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cat mario.nes | nc play-nes.org 4444

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Re: cat mario.nes | nc play-nes.org 4444

#31
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be because GNOME Terminal doesn't support sixel graphics. https://www.arewesixelyet.com/#gnome-terminal Looks like if you build the latest libvte from master and make sure to explicitly enable sixel support via the appropriate build time flag, you can then build GNOME Terminal against that and you'll have sixel support: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/-/issues/253

Ah, thanks. I made the mistake of assuming any modern terminal would/should by default.

Give any sixel-less terminal the sixel-tmux googles and you'll see an ascii rendition of the sixel images: https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-tmux

It's not ideal unless you use a very small font, but it's better than nothing.

BTW some people recompile libvte to get proper sixel support in their favorite terminal: https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-terminal/issues/410 and then get results like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLQbAYJGZMA

Re: cat mario.nes | nc play-nes.org 4444

#32
post #16

Save you a couple characters of typing

I was sincerely hoping I wouldn't be the first person to notice the useless use of cat. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_(Unix)#Useless_use_of_ca...

Hopefully this[0] should be the last word on "useless" uses of cat

> When I offer a pipeline as a solution I expect it to be reusable. It is quite likely that a pipeline would be added at the end of or spliced into another pipeline. In that case having a file argument to grep screws up reusability, and quite possibly do so silently without an error message if the file argument exists. I. e. `grep foo xyz | grep bar xyz | wc` will give you how many lines in xyz contain bar while you are expecting the number of lines that contain both foo and bar. Having to change arguments to a command in a pipeline before using it is prone to errors. Add to it the possibility of silent failures and it becomes a particularly insidious practice.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/a/16619430/1040915

Re: cat mario.nes | nc play-nes.org 4444

#33
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, thanks. I made the mistake of assuming any modern terminal would/should by default.

Yep! It's surprising to me, too, how recently (within the past 4 years, by my estimation) there has been an intense, renewed interest in sixel. It has coincided with the creation of a lot of new terminal emulators (some of the youngest have the most support for sixel and similar features), and with the trend of using GPU acceleration in terminal emulators. I couldn't exactly say 'why now', but one guess is that macOS…

> I couldn't exactly say 'why now', but one guess is that macOS' explosion in popularity among developers and the relatively high popularity of desktop Linux within the developer community in particular have produced a generation of developers who appreciate the power and flexibility of the Unix command line but have also grown up with rich graphics on their computers from the start

This so much!

I mostly have 2 apps running: Edge and a terminal. On windows, this terminal is mintty (wonderful!) or Windows Terminal (no sixel support yet).

On wayland, I use foot or wezterm. I need plots, and it's much faster to use gnuplot without leaving the terminal

When I need more, I open excel or rstudio. Excel cells are very text centric, and likewise for Rstudio chunks.

> Maybe some day we'll escape from the 80s, but for now it seems that we are still returning to them to find 'new' material, for various practical reasons.

I use notebooks for literate programming. It seems new? (as in, I don't think it was done in the 80s)

I wouldn't say embedding graphical content is a return to the 80s, but more like making a new mashup taking the best of the old (command line interface= minimalist yet powerful) and the recent (graphics= high information density) to go beyond the limitations of each.

Re: cat mario.nes | nc play-nes.org 4444

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a funny joke, but imo Stadia shutting down has very little to do with the viability of cloud gaming as a business and a lot more to do with how google (mis)managed it.

Isn't this the regular story of Google though? "Let me give a half effort on X product. Oh, see, nobody likes it. Well, guess I'll go ahead and shutter it." It's a shame that products with so much potential have all the resources put into them wasted with their behavior.

I've seen it mentioned on here a lot that promotions/career stability inside google are heavily based around launching new products, and maintaining existing ones is kind of a dead end. Seems like the outcome reflects the incentives.

Re: cat mario.nes | nc play-nes.org 4444

#35
post #33
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep! It's surprising to me, too, how recently (within the past 4 years, by my estimation) there has been an intense, renewed interest in sixel. It has coincided with the creation of a lot of new terminal emulators (some of the youngest have the most support for sixel and similar features), and with the trend of using GPU acceleration in terminal emulators. I couldn't exactly say 'why now', but one guess is that macOS…

> I couldn't exactly say 'why now', but one guess is that macOS' explosion in popularity among developers and the relatively high popularity of desktop Linux within the developer community in particular have produced a generation of developers who appreciate the power and flexibility of the Unix command line but have also grown up with rich graphics on their computers from the start This so much! I mostly have 2 apps…

> I use notebooks for literate programming. It seems new? (as in, I don't think it was done in the 80s)

I've done a bit of the same with Emacs via Org-mode and Babel, and I want to do more! Literate programming (and even literate DevOps!) is great.

If it's picking up these days, I think that's wonderful. But the idea is indeed from 1984 (via Knuth)! So in that way, the resurgence of literate programming is the result of mining the ancient computing past for great ideas we've not yet done enough justice as an industry/practice/science. :)

> I wouldn't say embedding graphical content is a return to the 80s, but more like making a new mashup taking the best of the old (command line interface= minimalist yet powerful) and the recent (graphics= high information density) to go beyond the limitations of each.

I wrote what I wrote without any real pessimism. I think there's a lot that's still great about old technology, like Unix or Lisp.

In terms of really 'escaping from the 80s' I had something narrower in mind, like the actual implementation details of retaining compatibility with old terminals and implementing new features via escape sequences and stuff like that. I think some day more of a clean slate could be more flexible or easier to hack on. (Which is, for me, just a hunch— I've never worked on a terminal emulator myself.) But even then, I think that 'escape' would still be as much about doing justice to old ideas as being able to let go of old implementation details.

Re: cat mario.nes | nc play-nes.org 4444

#36
post #25

I can't seem to select a render mode. It never gives me a chance to enter a number, I see the prompt ">" and then it immediately tells me I gave invalid input.

Adding the dash fixed it for me: cat mario.nes - | nc play-nes.org 4444 However, while i got the game to render, I couldn't get the game to respond to controls after that, so YMMV

Thanks, that did fix it! (Controls working fine too!)

Re: cat mario.nes | nc play-nes.org 4444

#37
post #16

Save you a couple characters of typing

I was sincerely hoping I wouldn't be the first person to notice the useless use of cat. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_(Unix)#Useless_use_of_ca...

I’ve run across comments regarding useless use of cat twice today. However, after reading the linked Wikipedia entry, it feels more like a way to give someone an ego trip than a truly more useful alternative.

The Wikipedia article even concedes that cat might be better:

> A cat written with UUOC might still be preferred for readability reasons, as reading a piped stream left-to-right might be easier to conceptualize.[10] Also, one wrong use of the redirection symbol ">" instead of "I‘ll happily continue to “abuse cat” going forward and sleep perfectly well.

Re: cat mario.nes | nc play-nes.org 4444

#38
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a basic shell feature that every terminal user should know from day 1. Hardly a "trick".

There is room for other interpretations, but I'd say if it's super common for people to not know something, which appears to describe this, it doesn't meet the definition of basic. I'd say "basic" shell knowledge is that commands or programs produce output which is where many stop and why it's common to use cat this way. In general I tend to err less on the side of "you're holding it wrong" gatekeeping in tech and wh…

> In general I tend to err less on the side of "you're holding it wrong" gatekeeping in tech

That's not gatekeeping. I'm pretty sure anyone that points out `> There is room for other interpretations, but I'd say if it's super common for people to not know something, which appears to describe this, it doesn't meet the definition of basic. I'd say "basic" shell knowledge is that commands or programs produce output which is where many stop and why it's common to use cat this way.

I feel that's the same bar as saying that knowing how to use a keyboard and mouse is not basic because most people just learn to use their phone's touch interface, given how there's now a lot of people that have a smartphone but not a computer. I don't mean in our circles, but in general.

What's probably going on is that the boundary between basic and intermediate probably moves depending on increased adoption with different proportions of motivations. That is, most learners of the shell before were probably motivated to use it as their main interface, later one of their main interfaces, and now maybe there's a lot of people that need to run a command or 2 but don't really want to use it as an interface at all, so they never bother to learn beyond the most absolute minimum they need to.

> Maybe the way shell handles input, output, and redirection isn't intuitive and poorly designed.

I don't think being intuitive is always the most important criteria to something being well designed. Many things imply trade-offs, and for example if the average potential user values versatility over intuitiveness, and there's a tradeoff to be made between the 2, it's ok to not go for the intuitive option.

That said, the redirection operators seem as intuitive as they can be. Arrow from file to command for input, arrow from command to file for output. What's a better alternative? To just remove file redirection features and leave piping?

Processes will have inheritable file descriptors. Right now, the easiest and quickest way to make ad-hoc arbitrary arrangements of file descriptors is with the shell's file redirection features. Doing it on anything else (Python, C, whatever) requires more code. That seems like successful design to me.

Re: cat mario.nes | nc play-nes.org 4444

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a funny joke, but imo Stadia shutting down has very little to do with the viability of cloud gaming as a business and a lot more to do with how google (mis)managed it.

Isn't this the regular story of Google though? "Let me give a half effort on X product. Oh, see, nobody likes it. Well, guess I'll go ahead and shutter it." It's a shame that products with so much potential have all the resources put into them wasted with their behavior.

I don't think it's because they're not putting enough effort into it.

Like most large organisation they tend to approximate a small government and they're inherently incapable of using their resources efficiently. Every once and then they will acquire a start-up that works to give new blood to the behemot.

Re: cat mario.nes | nc play-nes.org 4444

#40
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is room for other interpretations, but I'd say if it's super common for people to not know something, which appears to describe this, it doesn't meet the definition of basic. I'd say "basic" shell knowledge is that commands or programs produce output which is where many stop and why it's common to use cat this way. In general I tend to err less on the side of "you're holding it wrong" gatekeeping in tech and wh…

> In general I tend to err less on the side of "you're holding it wrong" gatekeeping in tech That's not gatekeeping. I'm pretty sure anyone that points out ` > There is room for other interpretations, but I'd say if it's super common for people to not know something, which appears to describe this, it doesn't meet the definition of basic. I'd say "basic" shell knowledge is that commands or programs produce output whi…

> It's a basic shell feature that every terminal user should know from day 1. Hardly a "trick".

> That's not gatekeeping. I'm pretty sure anyone that points out `Can't see it being pointed out here. No snark intended.

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