_jackdk_

So did consumer advocacy sites; this one is slop.

Perhaps coincidentally, it was also around the same brief beautiful moment in time where one could talk with all of one's friends using a single messaging client, possibly even over federated XMPP.

How much do we trust those guarantees? Apple currently alleges that OpenAI employees have been stealing Apple's trade secrets: https://9to5mac.com/2026/07/10/apple-sues-openai-trade-secre...

[Mr. Tan] has directed job candidates still working for Apple to bring “Actual parts” from Apple to their interviews for “show and tell” sessions in which he and his team at OpenAI can elicit still more Apple confidential information.

As part of its investigation, Apple found a “pattern by employees who depart for OpenAI of taking steps to evade the security processes intended to protect Apple’s confidential information.”

Apple also claims former engineer Liu exploited a security bug to download confidential engineering files after leaving the company. Rather than report the exploit, Liu allegedly joked about it in messages (“LOL,” “so funny”). Liu also failed to return an Apple-issued laptop after his departure.

This seems pretty close to "they trust me, dumb fucks" behaviour.

USB-C maximalism is great for travel. I personally recommend travelling with a USB-C desktop charger, but use one that accepts a IEC C7 ("figure-8") cable. Then, travel with only the cable corresponding to your destination (or buy one when you get there). That avoids having a wall wart that might not fit in narrow spaces, or whose weight might make it fall out of older sockets.

I wrote about it a few years ago; the post does not have affiliate links: http://jackkelly.name/blog/archives/2024/10/06/travel_tip_us...

This is also something to be aware of when teaching people, too. I've seen advice for designing Anki-style flashcard decks that reminds people to create flashcards for both A->B and B->A.

That'd be https://www.costarastrology.com/why-haskell, if I remember the job ad correctly.

It's such a shame because back then even Windows was motivated by actual human user research and had thorough guidelines. https://ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/Micro... (HN discussion from a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22475521 .)

https://movq.de/blog/postings/2026-06-16/0/POSTING-en.html was an interesting look at Win2K's UI controls and how much clearer they are compared to modern UIs.

Qantas gave its final 747s a nice send-off too, back in July 2020, flying its final commercial 747 flight as QF7474.

https://www.qantas747.com/

They also had QF7474 trace the Qantas logo in its track along the way, which is so cool and I am surprised I couldn't find it in the official site:

https://www.escape.com.au/destinations/australia/how-qantas-...

The problem is that Wayland just isn't a compelling alternative for many people, so they don't move. For me, I see no benefit because I got used to avoiding HiDPI and don't have a mixed-DPI workspace. For some bizarre reason they made each compositor implement input-handling separately, so for example artists might have to switch compositor just to use their tablet of choice. And worse yet, some people with input accessibility needs are just going to get straight up locked out of libre computing. See https://nocoffei.com/?p=451 for one example.

Not in my experience, because the self-checkouts have to be designed for untrusted users instead of trusted employees. So I spend more time reacting to "please scan item" -> "place item in bagging area" -> "unexpected item in bagging area" -> wait for employee to notice that my checkout needs an override.

Whereas a manned checkout lane gives me a proper belt to put my items on and someone who can usually operate a terminal fairly quickly.

I used to get paid to scan groceries. I have no intention of doing it for the same companies for free.

Speculation, as someone who grew up with some of those games:

We could use Heretic/Hexen as the most direct contemporary example of a "Doom++ engine": it had keyboard look up/down, inventory, and the ability to fly up/down. Wiki reckons Heretic sold 500k units and Doom 2 sold 1.2M. Hard to say in hindsight if that was caused by less enthusiasm for a fantasy aesthetic or the decline in enthusiasm for Doom-level tech.

We can also look at how far BUILD-style engines were able to push environments in 2.5d engines of the day. Duke3D had sloping floors and wildly changing terrain that was revolutionary for the time. (Remember the second level in the shareware version, where you basically blew up a building halfway through the level?) Other contemporary BUILD-style titles like Eradicator were able to add crude room-over-room by declaring floating platforms and other special entities without having to build them into truly 3D world geometry.

A third point on the triangle might be Rise of the Triad, which pushed the Wolf3D engine well beyond anything a normal person would expect. Apogee were able to add keyboard look up/down and flight up/down, more verticality in levels by adding floating discs and floors (again outside of the standard level geometry).

And to stretch the triangle metaphor to a tetrahedron, there's also a lot stuff from the Doom source port universe that might have been invented if Carmack & Co. had to push the Doom engine as far as it could go. When you can add new things and linedef/sector actions, that allows a lot of flexibility when you don't have to build the engine from scratch.

All that makes me think that 1994 iD could probably have had a commercially successful game on a Doom++, especially if Carmack kept learning all the portability and networking stuff that made Quakeworld work during the shift to Windows 95. What's much less clear to me is whether they'd be able to catch and/or drive the wave of 3D accelerator development, and whether Epic MegaGames would have just leapfrogged them completely with Unreal. I think the Quake-on-Doom++ timeline might end with Unreal becoming the engine more people built on through the 2000s (instead of all the Q3/idTech3-based games). The talent retention could mean that iD stays competitive on worldbuilding and feel (the Doom Bible shows they had some of those ideas, but the tech wasn't ready for them), and Carmack+Abrash+... could probably catch up with Sweeney+.... We probably don't get American McGee's Alice in that timeline though.

EDIT: The other thing to consider is that Descent was also bringing 6DOF (degrees of freedom) to PC gaming. While it was a portal-based engine like BUILD, it had 3D-modelled polygonal enemies etc. It was a beloved but niche title because it was so challenging to play, but it shows that there's a bunch of technical innovation around at the time, and maybe it gets a larger market share and the technical innovation happens with or without iD?

Communities for these old games do an incredible job securing the four freedoms for their favourite titles, and it's truly inspiring. Great work.

I think it's a really cool homage, but that the site could be a little clearer that it's not Fabien's work. When I first clicked through and saw a different name, I was hopeful that someone had started a publishing house dedicated to high-quality dissections of classic games.

Didn't this go through a few years ago?

https://www.ato.gov.au/businesses-and-organisations/internat...

If you are a non-resident business and you sell goods into Australia with a customs value of A$1,000 or less, GST applies and you will have to collect this from your customer and send the GST to us.

Yeah you would, that's true.

I am not very familiar with Go and especially not its generics support. Can you implement the "join" version instead of the "bind" version, where you turn a T[T[a]] into a T[a]?

My experience has been the exact opposite. Python seems to churn its packaging and tooling at an astonishing rate, whereas Rails forced a centralisation of its ecosystem.

I'm so glad it works. If you handwave at the generalisation to quadratics and higher polynomials, do the students follow it well? I assume you don't get into the finite field stuff, but it seems like it'd be cool to handwave at "there's actually other structures where most of this polynomial stuff works, even in somewhat weird ways".

This is such a cool technique, and you could even teach it in secondary schools as a neat thing computer scientists can do with polynomials.

I did originally, when it collected a bunch of obscure knowledge and made it searchable and useful. It was fun and rewarding to put things you knew into the common knowledge pool, and everyone celebrated a successful competitor to Experts Exchange. The SO model had a few major flaws that became impossible to ignore after it was entrenched. First, the reward scheme rewards the exact opposite of what it should incentivise: common questions are hit by many users and therefore attract lots of upvotes while answering the really hard stuff often meant you didn't even get your answer marked as "accepted" (because the OP had given up and stopped checking the site). Second, the site deliberately cultivated an "editor caste" in the Wikipedia style before the failure modes of that model were well-known: well-intentioned newbies get shut down by miserable yet untouchable people who play (and sometimes help write) the site's rules. Third, the stated desire to identify canonical answers to questions had no clear way to handle the evolution of the software people were talking about. So you'd have highly upvoted answers that might have been referencing deprecated libraries, and it was very hard for the newer answer to gain traction via either internal or external search.

It was also unfortunately before the retro boom of the 2020s, so questions about older arcana were often vulnerable to being closed instead of answered.

GNU Taler[1] is an interesting middle-ground in the payments space: privacy-preserving for consumers, non-blockchain digital cash, and keeps merchant activity taxable.

I do worry about their whitepaper recommending it for a CBDC[2] (linked from [3]) which points out the state can implement negative interest rates, and that its architecture requires the issuer to get involved even in "spot your friend a $20"-level use cases. Since the issuer would presumably be required to KYC everyone, that also creates a big surveillance problem.

[1] https://www.taler.net/en/index.html

[2] https://www.snb.ch/public/asset/de/www-snb-ch/publications/r...

[3] https://www.taler-systems.com/en/digital-currency.html

The "open source movement" has proven reasonably effective over the past few decades.

I am pretty certain that the credit card fees (that is passed on to the merchant) does not come close to the value that I gain for my credit card loyalty.

Generally it's the interchange fees that fund reward programs (charged between banks), not the merchant fee.

https://stripe.com/au/resources/more/interchange-fees-101-wh...

I didn't realise. That's good news. Whether it's enough, I don't know the UI space well enough to say.

I would have loved to read the version of the article that dove deeper and was not touched by LLM, even if it meant less clear English from the (presumably Korean) author.

What a fascinating modern age we live in.

The diagnosis for GNU/Linux is better than I expected but I think is still incomplete. Yes, you have two major toolkits (GTK+ and Qt) and many minor ones (most of which wrap one of the majors). Qt is proprietary but also available under a free software licence, but what if you don't want that that complexity? It feels like modern GTK+ is less of a cross-platform toolkit and more of a runtime layer for libaidwaita and the GNOME stack. So if you don't want to conform to GNOME's UI conventions, it's not clear where else to go.

Also, the explosion of new languages in recent years means having to write a new set of FFI wrappers around existing libraries, and it's easier to make an idiomatic library for TUI development than wrap all of GTK+ or Qt.

I don't think that's true, because it appears to me that the upswing in new TUI programs predates Claude Code's takeoff.

That's what I did, and you're right that it was catching the rat on ZSNES.