AndrewStephens

Game design is filled with simple ideas that interact in fun ways. Every time I have tried to come up with complex AIs I ended up scrapping them in favor of "stupid" solutions that turned out to be more enjoyable and easier to tune.

Great question, I could answer with many stories but here are two:

The (deliberately) very limited analytics software I wrote for my personal website[0] could have used database but I didn't want to add a dependency to what was a very simple project so I hacked up an in-memory datastructure that periodically dumps itself to disk as a json file. This gives persistence across reboots and at a pinch I can just edit the file with a text editor.

Game design is filled with "stupid" ideas that work well. I wrote a text-based game[1] that includes Trek-style starship combat. I played around with a bunch of different ideas for enemy AI before just reverting to a simple action drawn off the top of a small deck. It's a very easy system to balance and expand, and just as fun for the player.

[0] https://sheep.horse/visitor_statistics.html

[1] https://sheep.horse/voyage_of_the_marigold/

The world needs more idiosyncratic and opinionated hand crafted websites like this.

Great essay! I have never played WH40k but have been quite into Magic the Gathering at times.

Before I started playing I asked a friend what was to stop me just printing or photocopying cards (even in the 90s this would have been possible)

I understood how silly that question was when I felt the pleasure of actually owning a high quality product. Sure, I could spend the time to make my own cards but playing the game is only part of the fun.

Warhammer and MtG get mocked for being expensive but in reality they are comparable to cars, sports, fashion, and all the other things humans spend their disposable income on.

He wasn’t in a coma, he was only 18 years old. He states up front that he has only been reporting for 40 years, so he started long after the CMC.

I started by finding my own blog and scrolling north, south, east, and west to see my neighbours. I’ve already found several interesting sites and a new person to follow on mastodon.

It’s a shame there doesn’t seem to be any way to link to a particular position on the map but great stuff nevertheless.

Cassettes were never the best for audio fidelity but I always really liked the physicality of pushing the play button to move the heads into position. In some ways the inability to easily skip around a recording made listening a different experience than a CD or streaming.

Which is why I wrote a web component[0] that wraps an html audio element in an interface that mimics a (cheap) tape player.

[0] https://sheep.horse/2025/3/a_cassette_audio_control_for_the_...

Wikipedia tells me that Merced shipped in May 2001, which matches my recollection of not actually seeing a manufacturer’s sample until about then. That box was the largest computer I had ever seen and had so many fans it sounded like an engine. It was also significantly slower than the cheap x86 clones we had on own desks at running general purpose software.

JIT compilation was available before but became the default in Java1.3, released a year earlier to incredible hype.

Source: I was there, man.

By the time IA-64 actually got close to shipping Intel was certainly talking about JIT being a factor in its success. At least that was mentioned in the marketing guff they were putting out.

I remember when IA-64 was going to be the next big thing and being utterly baffled when the instruction set was made public. Even if you could somehow ship code that efficiently used the weird instruction bundles, there was no indication that future IA-64 CPUs would have the same limits for instruction grouping.

It did make a tiny bit of sense at the time. Java was ascendant and I think Intel assumed that JIT compiled languages were going to dominate the new century and that a really good compiler could unlock performance. It was not to be.

This is the only "advantage" I can see with space-based datacenters. Crypto will remain a joke but putting devices beyond the reach of ground-based jurisdictions is a libertarian dream. It will probably fail - you still need plenty of ground infrastructure.

If there is one thing I have learned in my years in the internet it’s that there is no minimum reward below which people won’t bother to be dicks.

Farming karma on HN to boost stories seems the most likeliest reason for this - an enterprise which would maybe net 3 figures in advertising dollars. But also it could just be someone wasting everyone’s time for fun - who knows?

I strongly agree.

The actual plots of Space1999 were pretty laughable but I don’t think the production design has ever been beaten, even it today’s shows. The sets and vehicles look fully functional, even the clothes look perfectly wearable despite being very 70s. Contrast this with Star Trek, with weird consoles and uniforms that look uncomfortable.

The theme is, of course, beyond reproach. I like to imagine the producers couldn’t decide between epic sci-fi chords, funk, and jangly surf guitar so the composer just said screw it and did all three.

Thank you for your lengthy reply but I still disagree. Both the technical problems and non-technical problems seem intractable to me. If cryptocurrency was going to fix this it would have done so by now.

> I think you mention in your blogpost that no one would want to support micropayments because of piracy. I consider this a massive advantage of the micropayment system. It's pro-piracy by default

If I am selling my content at 5 cents a page, what stops somebody cloning my page and selling it for 4 cents? What stops Google from summarizing my content, discouraging people from clicking through to my site? Is Google even allowed to spider my site if I charge for it, and what stops them if not?

That is the type of piracy I was talking about and I think it is just one of the many serious fundamental problems micropayments have.

> If you could integrate payment channels on top of private cryptocurrencies that would be enough.

That “if” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

But my point is that even if a magical technical solution existed tomorrow then the same sites that collect data for ads would continue to do so for the much more valuable data on paying users.

I wrote about this exact problem last year. To anyone who disagrees, would you pay me 5 cents to click on the following link?

https://sheep.horse/2024/11/on_micropayments.html

Sadly, I think you are wrong. Micropayments seem attractive but the idea falls apart quickly - there are just too many intractable non-technical problems. It has been tried more than once and each effort has failed.

I wrote a longer post on this[0] but to save you the click I will state the biggest problem from a privacy point of view - if you think privacy is bad now with ads imagine how much worse it would be with a payment processor knowing your every click.

Yes, I know about certain cryptocurrencies that maintain privacy, they are a non-starter for micropayments for different reasons.

Even if a magically technical solution to privacy were to emerge there is nothing more valuable than information about paying customers and sites would use browser fingerprinting anyway.

[0] https://sheep.horse/2024/11/on_micropayments.html

I haven’t noticed a huge upswing in traffic on my personal blog but efforts like mastodon have led to some nice interactions. I think there is more sense of community and people realizing that blogs need to be encouraged than there was a few years ago. Whether this is sustainable remains to be seen.

If you like this sort of thing, find a blog you like and contact the author to tell them you enjoy their work.

I am in the same boat, although I never managed 3k a day. At some point Google just stopped indexing most of my old posts.

I also love getting real feedback from readers and make a point of emailing owners of blogs I enjoy.

This was invaluable when I was tasked with writing a stay-resident boot loader just after the turn of the century. Even then, such information was considered arcane and Ralf Browns Interrupt List was much better than any official documentation I could find.

This is still not that common but I used to work on a commercial web proxy that did exactly this. The only way it works is if the company pushes out a new root certificate via group policy (or something similar) so that the proxy can re-encrypt the data. Users can tell that this is being done by examining the certificate.

But this is mostly a waste of time, these days companies just install agents on each laptop to monitor activity. If you do not own the machine/network you are using then don’t visit sites hat you don’t want them to see.

That’s cool.

It is surprisingly difficult to get really crisp dithering on modern displays, you have to do it on the client to match 1-1 the user’s display. Notice that the pre-rendered examples on this page actually look a little blurry if you magnify them. This is not really a problem unless you really want the crispness of the original Mac screen.

A few years ago I got annoyed with this and made a little web-component that attempts to make really sharp 1-bit dithered images by rendering the image on the client to match whatever display device the user has.

https://sheep.horse/2023/1/improved_web_component_for_pixel-...

Well it’s not demineralised anymore since someone fell into it. I wonder if they have to replace the water now.

I completed my degree in computer science at age 22 - at that time Shor had just published his famous algorithm and the industry press was filled with articles on how quantum computing was just a few years away with just a few technical hurdles yet to be solved.

I turned 50 years old this year, forgive an old man a few chuckles.

> "These results ... indicate a viable path to practical quantum advantage"

I'll add this to my list of useful phrases.

Q: Hey AndrewStephens, you promised that task would be completed two days ago. Can you finish it today?

A: Results indicate a viable path to success.

I love how everyone seems to agree that the BBC is horribly biased but there is fierce debate as to whether it is run by the ghost of Joseph Goebbels or if the staff start each day singing The Red Flag.

Perhaps the real bias was inside us the whole time.

As a site owner, the best thing you can do for your users is to serve all your resources from a server you control. Serving javascript (or any resource) from a CDN was never a great idea and is pointless these days with browser domain isolation, you might as well just copy any third party .js in your build process.

I wrote a coincidently related rant post last week that didn't set the front page of HN on fire so I won't bother linking to it but the TL/DR is that a whole range of supply chain attacks just go away if you host the files yourself. Each third party you force your users to request from is an attack vector you don't control.

I get what this proposal is trying to achieve but it seems over complex. I would hate to have to integrate this into my build process.

> The new promise of crypto is helping organized crime or sanctioned individuals/countries with payments, and it's delivering!

It's not even new - Bitcoin right from the start was explicitly created to replace a centralized system used by criminals to evade currency controls. Bitcoin's creator(s?) saw that the various governments were eventually able to shut that down and set up Bitcoin as a decentralized system to avoid that problem.

It's not a flaw in crypto that criminals flock to it - it is built into the very design. This story shows that it is not perfect but to criminals it is the best that they have.