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rikthevikon Ogre Battle 64 Recompiled Project at 99.05%

My dude, you are in luck. Check out Unicorn Overlord!

It is absolutely a love letter to March of the Black Queen and Ogre Battle 64. As usual for their games, Vanillaware's art is outstanding.

rikthevikon Grok outage

Sure you can. It'll just take a little while to shake the rust off. It's like riding a bike.

Or maybe it's all gone forever and we're all brain damaged now. Spooky! I think there's a pretty low probability of that, and even if it was true, worrying doesn't help!

rikthevikon French musician Kavinsky found dead

Certainly we should celebrate Morodor here too...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpW3C_k0WMY

rikthevikon I replaced Spotify with a homemade FM radio station

https://cfcr.ca/

Lots of community radio still out there! I assume bigger cities would have a solid live music and radio community too.

rikthevikon Phantasy Star IV – 1993 Developer Interviews

For me the height of the 16-bit era was Final Fantasy VI, but wow was Phantasy Star IV great. The intro, the savage twang of those Genesis basslines, the aesthetics, it was really something special.

rikthevikon Claude.ai unavailable and elevated errors on the API

I think we all deserve a little break right now.

rikthevikon Afrika Bambaataa has died

I saw DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist's Afrika Bambaataa tribute and it was just outstanding. One of the best shows I've seen and some seriously talented people. Then I learned more about Afrika and how his misdeeds were mostly ignored.

When I open up a famous author / musician / athlete's wikipedia page, it feels like it's a coin flip over whether there's some horrible thing they've done and largely gotten away with it.

I'm still upset about Neil Gaiman. I connected deeply with a lot of his work in my youth and now I don't know what to think...

rikthevikon What's the difference between a "disc" and a "disk"? (2023)

A disc looks like a disc, and a disk doesn't look like a disc.

rikthevikon The appropriate amount of effort is zero

I think Aldous Huxley said it well:

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/614121-it-s-dark-because-yo...

rikthevikon Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_Orifice_2000 was pretty clear about what it did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitchX less so.

rikthevikon Kids who ran away to 1960s San Francisco

Frank Zappa made his (similar) feelings pretty clear.

https://genius.com/The-mothers-of-invention-who-needs-the-pe...

rikthevikon 'Calvin and Hobbes' at 40

I watched Home Alone last year and the characters call each other names constantly. It's funny for sure, but no wonder me and my friends had such filthy mouths as kids. You grow up on that and sitcoms where the characters just rip on each other. It's so strange to watch as an adult.

rikthevikon Valve is about to win the console generation

Very very cool! Every time I look at building a hot gaming PC I think to myself that I'm just going to play SNES games and Elden Ring, so what's the point? Something like this would be great.

rikthevikon The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody

I still have the 2600 issues before and after 9/11.

At the time it was pretty clear that the federal government was going make a large and permanent power grab.

rikthevikon The elegance of movement in Silksong

I might be overstating it, but here's what I see at my company. "Sell" is very different in all of these situations.

- Sell to the champion. - Sell to the rest of the org. - Sell to procurement. - Sell to the implementation project team. - Sell to the users and get adoption up.

Then constantly demonstrate that you're providing value in whatever terms that department / org thinks is valuable that year.

Easy!

rikthevikon The year of peak might and magic

Love to see some Might and Magic articles.

Earlier this year I found a boxed copy of Might and Magic IV: Clouds of Xeen on Marketplace. Everything is in the box and it's all pristine. It goes very nicely with my boxed copy of Might and Magic III that I bought (used!) to play on my first computer, my 386.

I think I'm going to get these maps framed.

rikthevikon Foreign Scammers Use U.S. Banks to Fleece Americans

The Beatles had it right with Eleanor Rigby.

"All the lonely people, where do they all come from? All the lonely people, where do they all belong?"

There are a lot of sad people out there. And some of them are at the nunchucks, bongs, and throwing stars store.

rikthevikon Pipelining might be my favorite programming language feature

Came here for the Uniform function call syntax link. This is one of the little choices that has a big impact on a language! I love it!

I wrote a little pipeline macro in https://nim-lang.org/ for Advent of Code years ago and as far as I know it worked okay.

``` import macros

  macro `|>`\* (left, right : expr): expr =
    result = newNimNode(nnkCall)

    case right.kind
    of nnkCall:
      result.add(right[0])
      result.add(left)
      for i in 1..<right.len:
        result.add(right[i])
    else:
      error("Unsupported node type")

```

Makes me want to go write more nim.

rikthevikon Christianity was always for the poor (2024)

Robert Heinlein really nailed it in the 50s with the Fosterite Church of the New Revelation in Stranger in a Strange Land. Totally prescient vision of what Christianity + America was going to produce.

https://www.realclearreligion.org/articles/2013/01/15/a_triu...

rikthevikon Cozy video games can quell stress and anxiety

Or play Wizardry and be so full of despair. :)

rikthevikon Garfield Minus Garfield

That was a thing! Boingboing had an article about it, but it looks like the original tumblr is no longer around.

https://boingboing.net/2014/03/09/garfield-without-garfields...

rikthevikon Garfield Minus Garfield

I'd like to submit Time is a Flat Circus as well

https://www.tumblr.com/timeisaflatcircus

rikthevikon Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?

I got a few months of free Kagi with a Pragmatic Engineer newsletter subscription and I'm enjoying it. It reminds me of old Google before it got polluted. Kagi can't do anything about the web itself being polluted, but the search experience is good. I use Gemini a lot as well.

I'm very disappointed in Apple that changing the default browser in Safari requires you to install a Safari extension. Super lame stuff.

rikthevikon Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room

Well, it is difficult and a lot of work.

Maybe _you_ can help.

rikthevikon How I accepted myself into Canada's largest AI hackathon

The box it came in probably tastes better.

rikthevikon Long division verified via Hoare logic

Sometimes I read a paper or see some code that makes me think that wizards are real and that they walk among us.

rikthevikon I helped fix sleep-wake hangs on Linux with AMD GPUs

After my (closed) gaming laptop started making annoying Windows noises earlier today, I'm led to believe that it doesn't work properly on Windows either.

It seems like it's basically hardware whack-a-mole at this point. The only reason Apple does it reasonably well is they control more of the stack and they support less hardware. The only reason Windows does it better than Linux is they have more eyes on it.

rikthevikon Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today

Big congratulations!

rikthevikon C stdlib isn't threadsafe and even safe Rust didn't save us

Great article about digging into a non-obvious bug. This one had it all! Intermittent bug, architecture-specific, hidden in a dependency, rust, the python GIL, gettext. Fantastic stuff.

These kinds of detailed troubleshooting reports are the closest thing you can get to having to do it yourself. Thanks to the authors. It's easy to say "don't use X duh" until a dependency relies on it, and how were you supposed to know?

rikthevikon Ruff: Python linter and code formatter written in Rust

I haven't dug into tach yet, but I'm very optimistic on this one.