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Firehawke

563 karma · joined March 31, 2020

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Firehawke··on Interview with Amit Patel, Creator of “Solar Realms Elite” (2013)
Definitely TradeWars 2002. That's probably the most popular door of all time.
Firehawke··on AGI-64 Brings Sierra Adventures to the Commodore 64
If I recall correctly, the art is done with a form of early vector drawing so that they can use one set of assets on all platforms. They're designed to 16 colors but get downsampled for 4-color CGA mode or monochrome mode.
Firehawke··on The hardest working font in Manhattan (2025)
I started reading the article with a feeling of "I don't recognize this at all" from the first few images that slowly loaded.

Then we got to the metal plates in elevators and the other uses, and my brain immediately turned around and said "Of course you know this; you've seen this a hundred thousand times.. you absolutely know it even if you don't consciously think about it."

A font forked at least a dozen times over the decades, with forks upon forks upon forks, full of nostalgia for times past.

Firehawke··on Cursor 0day: When Full Disclosure Becomes the Only Protection Left
Not with bash. If your distro is putting ./ into the path then that's absolutely a high severity CVE with your distro's config.
Firehawke··on Dark mode with web standards
As someone who has moderate to fairly heavy lighht sensitivity when I'm not dealing with migraines and extremely heavy light sensitvity with headaches, I'm just going to say that you're absolutely wrong here.

Not every user has the same physiology. Dark mode is an accessibility option for a fair number of us.

Firehawke··on OS9Map
Missed opportunity to call it OpenStreetMac or OpenStreetMac9.
Firehawke··on How I play video games with spinal muscular atrophy
It occurs to me that some of this could be really useful to implement into SteamInput for players with disabilities. Someone really needs to show this article to Valve.
Firehawke··on Casio S100X Japanese Lacquer Edition (JP Page Only)
Yeah, try the water in most of Arizona, where it's so hard you could cut diamond with it. Only half-joking. You'll get an appreciation for places where you can't really taste what's in the water.
Firehawke··on Hollywood Enters Oscars Weekend in Existential Crisis
Yep. I'd just about kill for a decade where we go back to 80s flicks. Some of the best quantity and quality we've ever had for mass-appeal movies, and they didn't cost anywhere near what the average cost is today.

And I'd have at least 2-3 movies a year I'd really WANT to go see, probably more.

Back to the Future, Lethal Weapon, Arnie's action flicks, Ghostbusters-- I could go on for quite awhile, maybe the last decade where we had that kind of movie output.

Firehawke··on Hollywood Enters Oscars Weekend in Existential Crisis
I was already complaining about the price when it was only $30 for two tickets, two drinks, and popcorn. To think it's more than double that now!

Add in the fact most anyone can have access to a pretty good quality 60" display. It's not as large as the theater, but it's pretty good-sized, has better color reproduction than a lot of older (read: less-maintained) theaters' gear, and you don't have to deal with people using their phones or talking over the movie.

Lastly, let's just consider that for most people the number of movies you'd actually want to watch on a yearly basis has probably decreased in general while the cost of actually producing those movies has skyrocketed-- it's the same problem with AAA gaming. Your costs are so high that if a movie/game isn't an immediate massive hit, you're doomed.

Yeah, the bottom has dropped out of that market entirely. Gaming will be saved by indie and AA games, but I'm not sure if there's anything like that for movies; sure, smaller films exist but distribution, etc. doesn't really have anything like Steam.

Firehawke··on Mother of All Grease Fires (1994)
Yep. "Mother of all X" memes weren't even remotely uncommon for a handful of years during and after Operation Desert Storm. The Iraqi Minister of Information, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, also gave rise to "There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!" and the like.

Almost none of those memes are remembered outside of those who were alive and watching the nightly news at the time, but there were some pre-internet memes that were as spread as a modern internet one.

Firehawke··on Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite
Sure. The reimplementation of the IBM PC BIOS that gave birth to IBM Compatibles is the canonical example.
Firehawke··on Show HN: Mines.fyi – all the mines in the US in a leaflet visualization
Strong disagree. Zoom in and the clusters break up. Without the clustering, the map is a total mess when zoomed out.
Firehawke··on Discord Alternatives, Ranked
IRCv3 (and many clients are supporting fair chunks of IRCv3's feature set) supports offline state and message history.
Firehawke··on Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month
I'd call that a pretty major feature omission since it means splitting things across multiple apps.
Firehawke··on Cloudflare acquires Astro
So.. just because a tool can be potentially mishandled (e.g. put in the hands of a toddler, which is basically what vibe code ends up being) because it's easy to use, you never want to take a look at said tool?

That sounds like shooting yourself in the foot out of pure spite, but you do you.

Firehawke··on Scott Adams has died
I'm getting off-topic with this, but a quick aside:

In my teens I began to learn that most of the people on my father's side of the family were horrifically broken people with severe issues. There's at least one town in New Mexico where I wouldn't want to use my last name because an uncle of mine has run it deeply through the mud and 20' underground so to speak.

I've actively cut those people out of my life. I've decided that blood isn't the only thing that makes family, and that I can choose who I want to treat as family.

The infighting bastards who happen to share my last name are not my family.

Firehawke··on Scott Adams has died
I try to consider how I feel about this, and all I come back with is an emptiness, a follow feeling.

I'm not going to gloat, nor am I going to consider him even remotely a good person based on things he's said and done. I will never know him outside of his works and the things he's said and done, so I can only judge on those merits.

I guess all I can really do is shake my head and wonder what could have been had he not completely lost his way; his death by cancer was likely (not guaranteed, but there's always some hope if treated early and properly) preventable, but he made a choice.

I guess I'll just remember the early, funny, too-true-to-life material and try not to think too much about what happened after that.

Firehawke··on Dialtone – AOL 3.0 Server
Unlikely. MajorBBS had the ability to act as a SLIP/PPP connection back in 1993-1994 but most people would have still gone with a full ISP.
Firehawke··on Windows 2 for the Apricot PC/Xi
I wouldn't even call it a "race" to the bottom. It took until maybe 1995 for prices to drop enough for some of the clone manufacturers to start going out of business. Radio Shack caught on around 1991 and got out early, but Zeos didn't go out of business until 1995 for instance.
Firehawke··on Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
Ditto. Every time I get a "Hey, you should send your father a happy birthday message!" it's a stab to the heart over someone dead over 12 years now.
Firehawke··on Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop
That's been my experience. The Pi 3 was notorious for killing SD cards, for instance. I know one guy who eventually just moved all Pi 3 installations he made over to USB sticks because every Pi 3 he used would just kill SD cards at random but far faster than they should have. Not many write cycles at all, just surged the cards or something.
Firehawke··on Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros
We already know prices will go up considerably-- they always do after a merger, and you'll lose the option of subbing for one or the other only when they have something you want to watch. Most people are not keeping two subs going constantly and are just alternating when there's something worthwhile.
Firehawke··on It is ok to say "CSS variables" instead of "custom properties"
Or, for that matter, using GitHub Actions to do the final Hugo build and remote deployment when you do a git push.
Firehawke··on 1M Downloads of Zorin OS 18
No, they absolutely know. They've been very very slowly migrating stuff over to the new Settings panel bit by bit. If you look at what's in Control Panel now, it's maybe half as much as what used to be in there ten years ago.

That said, it's insanely ridiculous that it's taken 10 years to get it even halfway done.

Firehawke··on Real VT102 Emulation with MAME
CRT simulation didn't run well on Intel iGPUs for a very long time. While they could run the effects, they couldn't run them fast enough. There was longstanding advice in the emulation scene to not bother using shaders unless you had a dGPU; that only changed around Sandy Bridge, where the performance became sufficient.
Firehawke··on Real VT102 Emulation with MAME
Considering that MAME's shaders run fine on a 2011-era laptop with the positively primitive Intel iGPU of the Sandy Bridge era, I can only assume they're intending to run this on something extremely ancient that would end up being less power efficient for the task.

Even a Raspberry Pi can handle this stuff at low power consumption today.

Firehawke··on Games Preservation Is Hard and Sometimes Involves Private Detectives
GoG is packaging a large chunk of their library in an emulator already. DOSBox is what got them started, in fact.
Firehawke··on Drilling down on Uncle Sam's proposed TP-Link ban
A lot of the time, they lock the slot to only their officially supported modules. Dell is rather notorious for doing that.
Firehawke··on Reviving Classic Unix Games: A 20-Year Journey Through Software Archaeology
Something like what's done with https://www.hardfought.org/nethack/ maybe?
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