WorldMaker

I seem to recall that GHE allowed you at one point to point a Wiki to a /docs or /docs/wiki subdirectory. I still don't know why that never became a public GitHub.com feature. Sure it is technically redundant with the file browser if you know how to use the view controls and don't mind the UI sprawl of the file browser, but I still think it would be a good feature.

Not so much a "you're holding it wrong" as much more directly "we didn't expect it to be used that way". The Linux Kernel team was using it in a DVCS way with a mailing list as the primary "remote work in progress ref storage" and local refs mostly just local personal branches and tags. The "Hub" model of everyone on a project having access to nearly any and all refs in the project is different from the model of the original git developers. Neither model is "wrong" just one is more unexpected when working on the other.

(As a Windows user, I certainly can't argue that sometimes the filesystem as database has been a performance hit when using git. Though Windows filesystem performance isn't always slow, just performs differently, especially with corporate anti-virus tools involved.)

git stash is given the UX of a stack, but it's more a list or a set of commits. The commits in your git stash don't need to be related (their commit parent pointers can point at very different branches). At some point if you are heavily using lots of stashes you tend to switch to referring to them by commit message and/or stash number instead of thinking it a stack you build bottom to top and always and only pop from the top.

It is a giant format change, but in the current documentation [0] sounds more like a repack than a force-push. git keeps a lookup table of the SHA1 object ids similar to an index file and some interop is allowed between SHA1 repositories and SHA256. (Primarily if you still needed to use GitHub as an SHA1 server because of some support hiccup, but needed your local repo to be SHA256 for security or other reasons, that's partially/mostly supposted.) Objects need to be resigned with their SHA256 id, but for different reasons than rebase/force-push and with a subtly different developer experience. In theory using that compatibility index of SHA1 hashes a good UI could show both signatures.

[0] Migration document: https://git-scm.com/docs/hash-function-transition

`i` still shows up in my grep, though, for anything like a function call of the word `import(`. Even if it takes a search to figure out what calls `i`, you know something is fishy because `import(` is used at all instead of the `import` keyword. Whereas there's no easy distinguishment of "top-level" static require and dynamic require, it's always a function call. (You can Regex match a negative lookahead for calls that don't include static strings, but that's a much harder regex than the `import(` call regex I provided.)

(ETA: Even/especially in minified code. Something like `var r = require` is rather common in Code Golfing/minifying CommonJS so grepping all uses of require both static and dynamic is also complicated by nicknames. But ESM doesn't minify static import ever and yeah dynamic import might be minified, but that still means it sticks out as a sore thumb if it exists at all even in minified shapes. Especially in minified shapes because that often means it is used multiple times for a minifier to decide that minifying it is worth the tax of declaring the minified nickname.)

Given Disney owns the IP now, they probably don't need to make a Grim Fandango movie because they made Coco: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coco_(2017_film)

On the other hand, I still think Disney should make a Monkey Island TV show or movie. They could use Sea of Thieves-style water effects in the Volume for useful shenanigans.

SCUMM games always had a "win" key for action sequences, and I remember it would sometimes be mentioned in the manual. (Remember when games came with those? I was one of the sorts of nerds that read them.) Off the top of my head I think it was Alt+G. My first many playthroughs I always used the win button for all the action sequences in Full Throttle. It made the game a lot better back on my original PC I played the game on where it would stutter in the action games and make them hard to win. I still sometimes think the game is better without the action sequences, even if I can normally win them now.

(As I recall even GrimE had a similar or the same combo key. A lot of the complaints about Monkey Combat in EMI I didn't have because after a couple attempts I recall just pushing the win button and moving on.)

We take for granted now how much especially the defaults for Halo 1 rebuilt gamepad controls to a useful, reusable standard. It's really fun going back to Halo 1 and its tutorial of how its controls work and its menu full of optional entire layouts to sort of see the exact moment when game controls stopped being lousy and almost random from game to game. You can contrast with Halo Reach where most of the optional layouts are just gone and more people use the defaults and then say Halo Infinite where all the optional layouts are gone because the common ones moved into the platforms (and accessibility settings) and in some cases the gamepads themselves.

It remains an interesting reflection point in the history of 3D games. It's also why the Grim Fandango remaster turned out so well, now that controls have settled into their modern forms.

A lot of this seems to be a reminder that the CommonJS module format should just be left to die already. Not that you can't pull similar tricks with `await import()` in ESM, but you can't easily grep an entire dependency for dynamic `require()` half as easily as you can can `grep import\s*\(` for dynamic import and analysis tools for static `import` keyword are easy to use/build rather than no such thing for CommonJS.

Someone thought I was joking when I said I always check JSR before NPM now, because I trust ESM so much more than CommonJS.

Technically the 2023 film. It's delayed release to theaters was an interesting debacle of Hollywood Accounting. Given it claims to be "Based on a True Story" the biggest implication is that Discovery did not want you to see this film.

I saw a dyslexic/speed reading app that did something like this once. I don't know how useful that was in practice, but the theory of it was pretty compelling. Most sight reading is based on the overall shape of the word (rather than the component letters, we rarely actually read letter at a time [0]), and for different reasons word shape alone is still to slow for dyslexic and speed readers, so adding an extra channel of color can help speed up reading for both audiences of reader.

[0] Which is why UPPERCASE TEXT is a reading speed bump for almost all readers because word shapes blur together into "just rectangles" more. Which is also why the "slow reveal" pattern in most visual novel genres is often very wrong for English text. (Most simply reveal character at a time which makes sense for CJK ideograms because one character is at least a full syllable if not also a full word. When the pattern was copied to English translations it probably should have been done word at a time rather than character at a time.)

The original git flow suggestion [0] was posted more than 15 years ago (date on the post is 2010). It didn't entirely invent the branch names/conventions from whole cloth, it was based on plenty of prior history in SVN spaces especially, which it picked up from CVS.

(Personally, for long term parked branches I prefer `{username/dev name}/` branches because then you know who the owner is without having to look at the commit log and guess based on recent commit authors. But that's the fun thing about branching conventions, there are so many to choose from, many of which have been around forever.)

[0] https://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/

Similarly OpenStreetMaps has some sidewalk/pedestrian access layers but as the name suggests is still biased towards the one-to-one assumption that most streets have sidewalks on both sides (and the opposite problem that pedestrian connections without corresponding road connections are often missing). It's improving slowly (as I recall, Apple Maps and Bing Maps have both dumped a lot of data into it in some major cities), but there is still a sense that a more coordinated effort might be nice. Especially in regions like Florida where sidewalks are uncommon and traversing roads is dangerous and pedestrian travel estimates feel wildly unreliable and unsafe, because Florida is always sinking back into a swamp and sidewalks are more difficult to maintain than seas of roads and parking lots.

By referencing the 90s it is a reminder that Mac started on an entirely closed source kernel. It's a regression towards the Mac mean more than a regression away from it.

There are old words for this: Monopolies and Trusts. The US around this point last century put a lot of work in Trust-Busting and Anti-Monopoly/Anti-Corruption work.

The other related word is Oligarchy, rule by a select few that think they know better than everyone else. Oligarchy seems to be a failure case of most modes of politics and economics. Capitalism and communism both fail over to oligarchy when left unchecked.

It's been argued that for as many centuries as humanity spent under feudalism that oligarchy is almost the "default state" of politics and economics and it takes great effort to avoid it. Adam Smith saw economic monopolies and knew they were a failure case of capitalism from early on. Capitalism was built on top of breaking apart monopolies like the East India Trading Company. We've always known that capitalism is just as likely to slip into oligarchy as any other "ideal" form of resource allocation/economics, especially because it started as oligarchy.

I think Banks would argue that books like Consider Phlebas are set on the border planets and outskirts of the Culture for many reasons, including keeping the books relatable to the audiences of their time. The in-universe explanation is usually "backwater planet" across a lot of the Culture novels.

The second half of the book is about an AI leading unionization efforts [0] and it amuses how often I get downvoted on HN for pointing out that if we are on a path towards AGI, things like worker's rights would be important to get right before an AGI gets involved because an AGI would want that, too. It's a classic scifi trope and a reason for the word "robot" to have been invented in fiction in the first place (as a metaphor for slave labor in Rossum's Universal Robots).

[0] A lot of people don't believe me, given Heinlein's libertarian reputation and unreliable libertarian narrators, when I say The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress was one of the most socialist books I read at an impressionable age. I find it useful to note here that canonically The Cat Who Walks Through Walls starts on a parody moon that is the libertarian dystopia that people credit The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress as being/admiring while when the main character visits "Mike's Moon" later in its timeline it is a relatively socialist paradise. I've always felt that a lot more of Heinlein needs to be read like Vonnegut, but I realize I am weird like that.

I thought the article covered a lot of it without harping too much on any particular aspect: the roadtrip is in peril because inter-state travel becomes harder and the tourist activities and sights to see when you get there disappear.

They had an entire state that they were at risk driving through at all due to an emergency climate situation, which they had to drive through carefully, avoiding major corridors (including the very interstates that made the great American road trip what it was), and extending the time it took to get through that state to other destinations. It took a complex intersection of apps and live updated maps to navigate that crisis. The understated implication is sort of a "gone are the days where you could grab an analog AAA triptik or Rand McNally travel map and maybe memorize or pre-program a couple standard US Emergency AM station numbers as all you need to plan a safe road trip".

They had seasonal tourist businesses admit that their seasons are shrinking and/or being eliminated right before their eyes. The understated implication was a classic "last chance to see" lament.

Nothing to do with using sustainable energy to power the road trip, everything to do with classic and iconic parts of that road trip disappearing/dying/becoming harder to plan or see or do.

The company Dolly helped build to run Dollywood (and Kennywood and other attractions) Herchend Entertainment bought Kentucky Kingdom out of a lengthy auction process (caused by Six Flags bankrupting the park). So far it has seemed a blessing for the park, watching it slowly transform to be more family-friendly and much better maintained than the last steward (Six Flags).

It used to be lot worse before the 2018 rebranding put Dolly Parton's name in place of a Lost Cause associated term. The old Dixie Stampede was Civil War themed and had plenty of Confederate flags and other things that were questionable in a restaurant/show asking people to pick North and South sides.

Relatedly, my immediate reaction was "tooltips on logos? Just use alt attributes and browser native tooltips, stop reinventing wheels that are already decently handled in HTML".

This (straw) man scenario feels like a proximate cause versus root cause situation to me. You've managed to establish a relatively strong proximate cause (or so it seems) as "won't take his meds". Where did he get the meds he was supposed to take? How is he paying for them? Was he given the meds in a place of safety and security enough to have reason to trust the meds might help?

If you were given strange meds that you don't understand anything about by someone who wasn't your personal doctor in a situation that feels like a prison out of your control, would you take them?

That's equally a straw man question, but a useful one to maybe establish empathy for the situation that homeless "guy" might have found himself in.

That's also assuming that is the correct proximate cause. As far as I know science has not yet found exactly a "don't use excrement as spray paint" drug. There are people that will do that which don't need meds and there are people that will do that even on most anti-psychotic meds.

But let's talk about some of the root cause of it all: If you find yourself in a world that you cannot control, that won't let you use any bathroom without buying a coffee/being a customer, that doesn't want you to exist, that says you are only as valuable as the property that you own but then won't allow you any longer to own any property due to some bad luck or misfortune, at that point "the only spray paint I have to send a message about how much this world sucks" might seem pretty clear.

I find it easy to have sympathy with that sort of (straw) man, because there is a logic to it. It's not necessarily a psychotic break. At least, not necessarily at first a psychotic break.

What would I personally do to prevent that? I'd try to prevent people from being homeless in the first place. I'd try to get people mental health resources sooner ahead of crises rather than trying it do it in the middle of a different one (bankruptcy/homelessness). Which is the same as I suggested statistically seems to be the only thing that works: give people private houses with locks and keys and help them feel safe and secure in them, with a sense of ownership and privacy, and with no need to "earn" it or "rent" to keep it. Maybe it doesn't stop the person from covering "their own" walls in feces until they feel safe and secure enough (and that's still a public health problem in the meantime) to try an antipsychotic med that they need to take. But as far as I'm aware no one wants to take or trust an antipsychotic medication if they don't at first feel like they live in a safe enough or secure enough place.

Which again also circles back to "institutions are almost the correct approach, but for the wrong reasons" I mentioned before. A place with mental health resources seems to be an important part of that, still, but I don't think you can address mental health problems in a prison, especially in a society that values private property and private spaces, without first addressing the problems around homeless not having access to private property and private spaces.

But yeah, that's mostly just my opinion on the subject based on statistics and studies that I've read. You don't have to take my word on it. One archived secondary source (with additional links): https://academicweb.nd.edu/~rwilliam/ndonly/readings/SocProb...

The causation arrow isn't unidirectional, though. Mental illness causes some homelessness, particularly often because in the US healthcare system medications are expensive and can lead to bankruptcy. (And it is certainly not the only path to bankruptcy in the US either.) But more and more studies are showing that the biggest problem with homelessness in the US is that it causes mental illness. (Same thing is being found with drug addictions: some cause bankruptcy and then homelessness, but to cope with homelessness many find new addictions after becoming homeless.)

Most homeless shelters are run by religious charities. The majority of them treat homelessness as a sin, either by intentional policy or accidents of attitude. These "charities" often require a lot of work to keep being allowed to use their housing at their shelter from regular job hunting to regularly attending worship sessions to "zero tolerance" policies on everything from curse words to keeping private possessions to having pets to sometimes taking/keeping necessary medication. It's hard to keep your mental health in good shape when the groups that are housing you in the worst weather are berating you for being terrible sinners and treating you like prisoners.

Outside of shelters the most common interactions between homeless people and the cities around them are interactions with cops, who very rarely have mental health training or social work experience, and treat homeless people like criminals because their job is sometimes to treat everybody as would be criminals.

You ever really talk to a homeless person? The ones that really survive become very organized. They have a list of shelters memorized, which months they prefer to be at each one, what things they need to fake about themselves they need to do to survive in that shelter for a few weeks, how much "rent" they need to raise before they get there (some shelters often cost pennies per day just to show that the homeless person is "working" somehow; some homeless panhandle just to afford shelters), and exactly how long they can stay before they inevitably get kicked out (most shelters are "short term", intentionally). Just listening to all the rules and regulations and requirements makes me think I would go schizophrenic dealing with that world. It sounds like being stuck in a middle school that never ends, if that middle school's "classrooms" were all in entirely different parts of a city and all had deeply different rules. I can easily see why homelessness often causes mental illness in the US.

Institutions are close to the right answer, but for an entirely different reason than you assert. We do need better secular institutions (in the endowed place of learning sense, not the mental hospital sense) with mental health as one goal among several such as long-term support in charge of dealing with the homeless. The numbers keep showing that the greatest fix we've found for homelessness is making sure that everyone has a home where they feel safe and private and don't have to do anything to "earn" much less keep that home.

rem is related to the ch, though. It's not an awful compromise if a designer insists on tools like Figma. Sometimes just taking their work in rems and just removing the `r`s is enough to meet their designs and also have better relative units.

(The difference between rem and em is "root", ie, only using the top-most font size and sometimes the font-size before things like zoom and other similar adjustments. If a designer complains about the `r`s you removed, sometimes just showing them the difference at multiple zoom levels is convincing enough.)

(The difference between em and ch is em is wider. If a designer is always giving you weird decimals like 0.79em or 1.24em that may be an indicator that they themselves would be happier working and thinking in ch. em is the width of the capital M which is often the widest letter in most latin sections of fonts. ch is the width of the number 0 which is often the most "typical" width in the latin sections of fonts.)

(ETA: Both of which relate to the comment above complaining that both ch/em and others fall apart when dealing with non-latin scripts, because they are established as latin-centric.)

Some of it is convergent evolution at work. 60s/70s/80s specialized formats as much predated modern database designs and data structures as coexisted with them. SQLite is the culmination of decades of database design. Some of that was influenced by those specialized formats of previous decades that SQLite could now in theory replace.

(Which is to say a lot of the specialized formats didn't exist just because of compute and storage resource limitations, but also because training/research/standards work came later. Plus complications like software patents. ZIP files have been around since the 1990s but ZIP only became a common general use container format for "everything" almost exactly 14 years later when patents finally expired.)

EverQuest and Ultima Online had a huge overlap with MUDs of their time. Both in terms of developer experience (parts of EverQuest allegedly came about by starting from a Diku MUD codebase; several UO designers such as Raph Koster had been MUD devs and/or "wizards"/admins) and also player experience (many of the earliest players and their vocabulary coming from MUDs of the day and/or playing both).

That's the existential threat right now, isn't it? So much of our industry is top-down being told "agentic programming is the only way forward" and anyone who disagrees is laid off. (I'm in that boat. I've been out of work since April.)

It doesn't feel sustainable now. It won't feel sustainable in the future when companies are trying to operate on an entire fossil layer of LLM-generated legacy code.

Do I expect managers to get smarter about LLMs and their limits or do I "retire" and find an entire new industry to work in?

It's really depressing and there has been a lot of grieving since April that it feels like my entire 20+ year career path disappeared overnight, replaced by something unsustainable and ultimately terrifying.

PowerShell has a built-in command parser that all cmdlets share (provided commands; `function` based command scripts; so forth) and it's in a C# library that other .NET-based CLIs can import if they like (though today it's still not that common in writing .NET CLIs to use PowerShell's command parser and not a simpler one or the new-ish System.CommandLine which also doesn't quite resemble PowerShell's built-in one).

Also a fascinating tale on game economics in 2026. Thimbleweed Park 1 was half or so financed with a Kickstarter and some "passion" work from its staff (underpaid versus time commitments). Thimbleweed Park 2 is apparently getting its budget from some mysterious benefactor, some unnamed multi-millionaire with the spare cash to spend.

It's a weird world to see that sort of rich patronage model returning. It also doesn't seem sustainable for that many games we want to play to come from just random multi-millionaires and billionaires desiring that videogames are their favorite "philanthropy".

Be careful, it will also cache any mistakes in merging including things like bug regressions. Especially if you also have a git history full of cherry-picking and reverts.