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sehuggon Loreline – Tools for writing interactive fiction

It's in the uncanny valley, that's for sure. I never had much luck with it because you have to memorize a ton of specific English phrase templates and remember how they are injected into the game logic, and you often have to escape into regular old procedural logic.

But it's an ambitious experiment, and the docs are worth reading through. Every now and again I give it another try :^P

sehuggon Show HN: We built an 8-bit CPU as 2nd year EE students

The dual phase clocking is perhaps inspired by the 6502.

sehuggon Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity

FYI Berke Breathed (Bill's contemporary, occasional collaborator and pen-pal) is still posting new Bloom County comics on his Patreon.

sehuggon I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)

I tried to compile something and the Pi ran out of memory

I think your beef is not with Meshtastic, but with the distro/compiler, and I am going to bet you're compiling C++ with clang.

sehuggon Saying goodbye to asm.js

Hmmm, need a asm.js -> WASM transpiler maybe.

(compiling legacy code with legacy versions of Emscripten is quite frustrating, almost as bad as updating your JS code to be compatible with accumulated changes in the Emscripten ABI)

sehuggon Ada, its design, and the language that built the languages

I sometimes wonder what "Turbo Ada" would have looked like, but I think it would have probably looked like later versions of Borland Pascal. Things like generics and exceptions would have taken some of the "turbo" out of the compiler and runtime -- the code generator didn't even get a non-peephole optimizer until 32-bit Delphi, it would have been too slow.

It might be nice to have Ada's tasks driven by DOS interrupts, though. I think GNAT did this.

sehuggon Franklin's bad ads for Apple ][ clones and the beloved impersonator they depict

I'm guessing Apple had stopped putting board schematics and ROM listings in their reference manuals by the time the ACE came out, or perhaps soon afterwards.

sehuggon Oracle slashes 30k jobs

IIRC they also had the first native (100% Java) JDBC driver, so you could run from any platform and without weird JNI locking issues when using threads.

sehuggon OpenCiv1 – open-source rewrite of Civ1

I really prefer the 2D pixel graphics of the original Civ. But the middle game can be a slog due to micromanagement, e.g. loading units onto boats. I would love to see a few tweaks, fixing bugs like disappearing units, and a stronger AI that doesn't have to cheat :)

sehuggon What came after the 486?

I had one of those 133 MHz 486 chips, think it was AMD. Nice DOS gaming machine.

sehuggon Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

That's hilarious. I've been following Mario since his work on libGDX and RoboVM.

His blog post on pi is here: https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/

sehuggon The pleasures of poor product design

You can see some of these objects at Musée des Arts et Métiers: https://www.arts-et-metiers.net/musee/les-objets-inconfortab...

sehuggon RISC-V Is Sloooow

It's not the wrong design; RISC-V is designed around extensions, and they left room in the instruction encoding for them. They don't have a 800-lb gorilla like Intel shoving the ISA down customers' throats (Canonical is the closet thing) so there is some debate on which combination of extensions are needed for desktop apps.

sehuggon Reverse engineering a DOS game with no source code using Codex 5.4

From the docs, I couldn't tell if it had disassembled very much of the EXE. Looks like it extracted most of the assets, the presence of open-source modding tools for this game in training data likely helped a bit.

sehuggon Claude is an Electron App because we've lost native

Realize, though, that just grabbing a frame buffer is not a thing anymore. To render graphics you need GLES support through something like ANGLE, vectors and fonts via Skia, Unicode, etc. A web browser has those things. Any static binary bundling those things is also gonna be pretty large.

And JavaScript is very good at backwards compatibility when you remove the churn of frameworks (unfortunately Electron doesn't guarantee compatibility quite as far back)

sehuggon Jimi Hendrix was a systems engineer

That policy doesn't explicitly disallow writers from using LLMs as part of their process, nor does it mention reviewing submissions for content that could be LLM-generated.

I like some of the ideas in the article but there are some very "it wasn't just A, it was B" sentences in there. IEEE has a higher standard.

sehuggon DBASE on the Kaypro II

I note that Clarion is still being developed, version 12 was released last year. I remember fondly using its screen designer to create drop-shadowed dialogs.

sehuggon Building a TUI is easy now

Eh, the NES is better because you get two entire screen buffers. The C-64 gives you only one offscreen row or column to repaint every coarse scroll, and the colormap is fixed so you gotta move all of its bytes while racing the beam.

sehuggon How did Windows 95 get permission to put Weezer video 'Buddy Holly' on the CD?

IIRC there was also an Edie Brickell video.

sehuggon Reverse Engineering Raiders of the Lost Ark for the Atari 2600

One of the authors, Dennis Debro, has done a bunch more of these: https://github.com/DNSDEBRO/Disassemblies

sehuggon County pays $600k to pentesters it arrested for assessing courthouse security

They had written authorization from the state court and verbal confirmation from state court officials. They didn't know there would be a pissing match between the judicial branch and the sheriff.

sehuggon To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI

The best tech writers I've known have been more like anthropologists, bridging communication between product management, engineers, and users. With this perspective they often give feedback that makes the product better.

sehuggon Favorite Tech Museums

The System Source museum in Hunt Valley, Maryland is also worth a mention. I attended a demonstration of a revived Bendix G-15 there.

sehuggon Health care data breach affects over 600k patients, Illinois agency says

Several maps created to assist the agency with decisions — like where to open new offices and allocate certain resources — were made public through incorrect privacy settings between 2021 and 2025 ... the mapping website was unable to identify who viewed the maps ... implemented a secure map policy that prohibits uploading customer data to public mapping websites.

So a state employee/contractor (doesn't say) uploaded unaggregated customer records to a mapping website hosted on the public internet?

sehuggon Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere

iCloud sync is a nice feature too. I use the Mac app mostly for adding feeds and the iOS app for reading. Anytime I read an interesting web post, I pop its url into the app to see if it has a RSS feed.

sehuggon Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere

2011. This in my memory is the year of the industry-wide vibe shift from open APIs to walled gardens/cesspools.

sehuggon If you care about security you might want to move the iPhone Camera app

More annoying is that it's really difficult for me to unlock the phone with the side button without activating Siri. Seems like there's often a lag when waking the phone that causes a long press to be detected even with a short press.

sehuggon Joan Didion and Kurt Vonnegut had something to say. We have it on tape

Bluebeard is a good one too; it ruminates on the nature of art and how/why meaning is assigned to it.

sehuggon Pure Silicon Demo Coding: No CPU, No Memory, Just 4k Gates

Try https://8bitworkshop.com/verilog to get started with dabbling

sehuggon You can now play Grand Theft Auto Vice City in the browser

GTA Vice City was released for iOS devices in 2012, and IIRC it ran pretty well. Not surprising that it runs well with WASM/WebGPU, given the massive increase in GPU performance. I'd imagine that the CPU-bound paths are well-optimized for 2002 Pentiums.