Before figuring out how to tackle this project, I needed to know whether it would even be possible. According to a 2021 Reddit comment:
There is a zero percent chance of this ever happening.
Feeling encouraged, I started with the basics: what hardware is in the Wii, and how does it compare to the hardware used in real Macs from the era.
I almost think such projects are worth it just to immortalize comments like these. There's a whole psychology of wrongness that centers on declaring that not-quite-impossible things will definitely never happen, because it feels like principled skepticism.
That used to be my thing: wherever our ops manager declared something was impossible, I’d put my mind to proving her wrong. Even though we both knew she might declare something impossible prematurely to motivate me.
My favorite was “it’s impossible to know which DB is failing from a stack trace”. I created STAIN (stack traces and instance names): a ruby library that would wrap an object in a viral proxy (all returns from all methods are themselves proxies) that would intercept all exceptions and annotate the call stack with the “stain”ed tag.
I've seen more than one half-joke-half-serious chunk of code that would "encode" arbitrary info into stack traces simply by recursively calling `fn_a`, then `fn_s`, `fn_d`, and `fn_f` before continuing with the actual intended call, giving you a stack trace with (effectively) "asdf" in it.
They've also been useful more than once, e.g. you can do that to know what iteration of a loop failed. There are of course other ways to do this, but it's hard to beat "stupid, simple, and works everywhere" when normal options (e.g. logs) stop working.
Well you're doing gods work as far as I'm concerned. Conflating difficulty in practice with impossibility in principle is, to my mind, a source of so much unnecessary cognitive error.
Similarly, one of the great things about Python (less so JS with the ecosystem's habit of shipping minified bundles) is that you can just edit source files in your site_packages once you know where they are. I've done things like add print statements around obscure Django errors as a poor imitation of instrumentation. Gets the job done!
I'm remindded of my favorite immortalized comment, "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." Rob Malda of Slashdot, 2001, dunking on the iPod when it debuted.
Funny enough about the Dropbox comment, it caught so much flak that it’s gone full circle and I’ve often found people defending it saying what the guy said made sense at the time etc
They're kinda like high-effort shitposts. Which are my absolute favorite kind. The worse the effort/reward payoff, and the more it makes you ask "WHY??!!?", the better.
Wasn't the old Linux joke, don't ask "how do I do X with Linux" (because you'd get ridiculed for not reading the docs) but instead, just state "X isn't possible with Linux" and then someone would show you how it's done?
Its a great motivator, happened with me too, I once asked a question about getting the original camera on custom rom and got this as a response [1].
This lead to 2 year long project [2] and an awesome time full of learnings and collaboration
I got the idea of writing an emulator in JavaScript in the pre-Chrome era, circa 2007. I remember searching around trying to find whether somebody had done it before. It seemed not, and somebody on a forum declared “that’s not possible”.
To me, it was obviously possible, and I was determined to prove them wrong.
Plus the internet basically equates cynicism with intelligence
This is a generally known phenomenon in psychology. If you leave a book review saying that you liked a book, people are biased to believe you are stupid. If you criticize a book negatively people are biased to believe you are smart.
This is dope af. I love concrete (was just gifted a book about concrete buildings for my birthday last week). I see things like this and remind myself that I have free will.
I assumed ProcessWire was some crusty olde CMS and am pleasantly surprised to see that it is NOT. It looks damn good and the sites created with it look great too. Adding this to my toolkit, thanks!
I also thought about this but decided to go with Simple Machines Forum and I'm glad I did. Just looking at the dearth of options in the admin area is enough to make my head spin.
That being said, I probably will embark on a custom form just because I'm highly opinionated and capable.
I think it’s human written but there are details of the story that are self-contradicting, like receiving an email explaining why all of the accounts have been banned after all of their email accounts were banned. Including recovery accounts.
reply