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This was my experience on a long Delta flight, I don't remember if I picked easy or not but it was laughably bad. I took its lunch money for a game and then turned the screen off. I was mostly irritated by the horrible touch interface, it felt so laggy among other issues. (I don't have a ranking, I barely play these days and usually just in person, but my memory says around 1400 back in the yahoo chess days as a teen but it's probably closer to 1000 now.)

I have a VPS with OVH, I put Tailscale on it and it's pretty cool to be able to install and access local (to the server) services like Prometheus and Grafana without having to expose them through the public net firewall or mess with more apache/nginx reverse proxies. (Same for individual services' /metrics endpoints that are served with a different port.)

Although I don't like the meta-commentary, since it's better that threads remain closer to the original topic (that is, for here, Street Fighter), I want to offer a tip on your writing style that may help cut down future meta-commentary. It's simple: be worse. Don't polish as much. If you can write a bit of English yourself, then try to leave in words or sentences that are your own even if they're incorrect in grammar or spelling. (You might ask the AI if the overall meaning is still likely to get through, but leave the errors if there are any.) Also, use "inferior" translation services like Google Translate (https://translate.google.com/) and DeepL (https://www.deepl.com/) sometimes, making sure to only give them the exact text you want translated, not any preceding context.

And as another note, it's also sort of a meme that a lot of westerners who don't really know much about Japan will take some noun from the language and make a big deal about it, like you did with 鍛錬 and 見立て, as if the concept doesn't exist in other languages, or twisting the usage into something bigger than it really is, or even just making it up. It tends to have the effect that the writer is taken less seriously. 生きがい is the most popular misused one, I think. Less misused but still kind of questionable in a lot of places is かんばん, which is quite popular with software developers who took it from Toyota's practices. A made-up nonsense example could be: "瓶 (bin), or bottle, is more than just a bottle, it also refers to the Japanese art of bottling up your feelings, and how this leads to a more harmonious society."


@Jach, thank you for very honest tips. "Be worse" — this is a shock for me! But I understand what you mean on HN. I will try to use my "broken English" more. (Actually, I think it might be more difficult for me... ^_^)

About Japanese nouns, that's very interesting. I didn't know words like "Tanren" (鍛錬) look like a "meme". For me, a local banker in Gunma, these are just daily words. But I see how they sound too "mysterious" or like a marketing trap here.

Your "Bin" (bottle) story is a very weird and funny analogy, even for a Japanese person like me. I will be careful not to make every word into a zen philosophy!

By the way, is this reply "worse" enough?

Next time you come to Japan, please come to my hometown, Gunma. I will teach you Japanese then ^_^. Thank you for helping me.


The way I'd phrase it is personality is stable, not fixed. But I would also be interested in a followup in a year or two. I also misread the bit at the end first: the partner tested and re-tested themselves and got pretty much the same thing, this is rather expected when you're not in the process of trying to "change" and also gaming the test to get results you want rather than what's true. I would have liked to see the partner take the test but fill in the answers for the author -- that way we have both the author's assessment of their own personality and the partner's assessment of the author's personality, before and after.

I enjoy the programming, and the problem solving, but only sometimes the typing. Advent of Code last month was fun to do in Common Lisp, I typed everything but two functions myself, and only consulted with the subreddit and/or the AI on a couple problems. (Those two functions were for my own idea of using A-star over Morton Numbers, I wrote about those numbers with some python code in 2011 and didn't feel like writing the conversion functions again. It didn't work out anyway, I had to get the hint of "linear programming" and a pointer to GLPK, which I hadn't used before, so I had the AI teach me how to use it for standard sorts of LP/MIP problems, and then I wrote my own Lisp code to create .lp files corresponding to the Advent problem and had GLPK execute and give the answers.)

If it's a language I don't particularly enjoy, though, so much the better that the AI types more of it than me. Today I decided to fix a dumb youtube behavior that has been bugging me for a while, I figured it would be a simple matter of making a Greasemonkey script that does a fetch() request formed from dynamic page data, grabs out some text from the response, and replaces some other text with that. After validating the fetch() part in the console, I told ChatGTP to code it up and also make sure to cache the results. Out comes a nice little 80 lines or so of JS similar to how I would have written it setting up the MutationObserver and handling the cache map and a promises map. It works except in one case where it just needs to wait longer before setting things up, so I have it write that setTimeout loop part too, another several lines, and now it's all working. I still feel a little bit of accomplishment because my problem has been solved (until youtube breaks things again anyway), the core code flow idea I had in mind worked (no need for API shenanigans), and I didn't have to type much JavaScript. It's almost like using a much higher level language. Life is too short to write much code in x86 assembly, or JavaScript for that matter, and I've already written enough of the latter that I feel like I'm good.


People didn't mind when IE was muscling in and adding useful new features. They abandoned Netscape because the features made the web better. It wasn't until they stopped adding features to the browser itself that it really started to become a problem. They would still add features, but too much relied on ActiveX -- which wasn't necessarily evil, there's a grand vision there of component re-use across the OS and varied applications, the same was done with Java Applets and even Shockwave/Flash, but it sucked more and they were all plagued with security problems. Then MS stopped innovating pretty much entirely, and wouldn't even play catch up for a long time, whether with their out-of-browser plugins (oh Silverlight...) or the browser itself. No support for tabs for a long time, or popup blocking (later ad blocking), they had terrible performance... And as various "web standards" advanced to make things nicer for the users and developers, and add capabilities that didn't require an external plugin, they drug their heels on that too.

Eventually, the hell that was IE was a combination of hostile user experience, security problems, performance problems, and developer pain in finding workarounds or other support because it was so far behind on everything. It had nothing to do with their power to dictate or experiment with new features. The extent of the hostile user experience that leaked outside the browser itself was the "only works on IE" problem that forced people to use IE for that site, on the whole it was comparable to the "only works with Flash or Java applets" problems and not as bad as the experience of the browser itself. For the most part these days, the two parts of that hell that remain relevant are the hostile user experience and the developer pains parts, and Mobile Safari is the successor to both for over a decade now. No one supports IE11 anymore (let alone older IEs) but they still have to support Mobile Safari. I have fonder memories of dealing with IE11 (and earlier) support/workarounds over Mobile Safari's crap. My view is more power to actual Chromium-based browsers on mobile even if I personally use Firefox on PC and android despite their user experience shortcomings (at least they're not very hostile). The only part of hell I'd be worried about is that of a hostile user experience, which can be worked around by individual users if they are allowed choices.


It wasn't until they stopped adding features to the browser itself that it really started to become a problem.

Only for those misguided "push the web forward" idiots who just wanted the latest shiny shit, aided by Google's plans to control the Internet itself. Plain HTML worked well enough for everything else.

Google's weapon is change. They have the resources to outcompete everyone else by churning the "standards" as much as they want. The less people think that constant change is necessary, the better the web will be.


This is silly IMO.

Technologies like HTTP and Wasm are truly excellent tools for cross platform software delivery and browsers are an ideal sandboxed execution environment.

This idea that the web should only be for straight up HTML documents is a broken mental model.

Apple have a multi-billion dollar income stream that is firmly premised on the fact that nobody could deliver software on their platform unless they could steal 30% of the companies profits and as such spent a huge amount of time and effort undermining the idea that the web could ever be an app platform but you’re not compelled to cheerlead for Apple’s profit margins and anti-consumer bullshit.


The problem isn't web apps; it's web apps where simple HTML would be sufficient.

> The problem isn't web apps

Then the problem isn't adding features to make web apps more capable, either.

Web apps replacing unsandboxed applications is a net win. We could argue about whether web apps replacing sandboxed applications is a net win as well, but most local applications on PCs are not sandboxed, and even mobile applications aren't sandboxed as strongly as web apps. (I would love to see an "allow network access" permission on a per-mobile-app basis.)


If your number is on the order of $10 million, I suspect that no, you wouldn't, because you haven't thought hard enough about retirement and how to achieve and keep it with a satisfying lifestyle to realize that you don't need nearly so much (or at least most people, maybe you have a need for very fancy things, I won't judge). And requiring $50 million at a younger age? What's the logic in that? The younger you are the lower you can set your number, because if you end up being wrong either about the feasibility or about your mental state from not having a job, you still have time to fix things or even pivot to a new career. (You also get more years of compound interest.) I quit my BigCo job 5 years ago just before my 30th birthday with ~$500k across VFIAX and VGT, I've been "retired" since and that amount has grown considerably. I'm still quite happy not working for someone, while still being reasonably confident I could get a programming job again if a need or desire arose, and there's always the possibility of going a bit crazy and burning through it all to self-fund hiring some employees of my own to make a go at a business.

It's not hard for me to understand why people keep working even if I'm not and don't want to be that way. There are so many reasons, I'll list a few, some work just as well even for people who are working despite having "enough", whatever that means. Some people just really like having a job, or think of it as a moral duty (and themselves as doing good by fulfilling that obligation), or some get their self-worth from having a job, or some like being occupied by work when they know that without it they'd just rot. Some like the social company. Many actually like their work a lot more than they dislike it and pay above some threshold is just "nice". If you're particularly good at your job, too, there's a lot of joy in doing things you're good at, no matter what kind of job it is. Some have expensive tastes or have made expensive compromises or have fallen on expensive bad luck that all can need ongoing funding. Some want to make or support things and need capital to do so. Some just see life as a game, and money going up is their source of happiness and sign of winning. There's all sorts of minds and preferences in this world.


We're well beyond benefit of the doubt these days. If it looks like a duck... For me there wasn't any doubt, the author's first top comment here was evidence enough, then seeing the readme + random code + random commit message, it's all obvious LLM-speak to me.

I don't particularly care, though, and I'm more positive about LLMs than negative even if I don't (yet?) use them very much. I think it's hilarious that a few people asked for Python bindings and then bam, done, and one person is like "..wha?" Yes, LLMs can do that sort of grunt work now! How cool, if kind of pointless. Couldn't the cycles have just been spent on trying to make muPDF better? Though I see they're in C and AGPL, I suppose either is motivation enough to do a rewrite instead. (This is MIT Licensed though it's still unclear to me how 100% or even large-% vibe-coded code deserves any copyright protection, I think all such should generally be under the Unlicense/public domain.)

If the intent of "benefit of the doubt" is to reduce people having a freak out over anyone who dares use these tools, I get that.


I have updated the licence to WTFPL.

I'll try my best to make it a really good one!


> I have updated the licence to WTFPL.

You still have no basis in claiming copyright protection hence you cannot set a license on that code.

Instead of the WTFPL you should just write a disclaimer that due to being machine generated and devoid of creating work, the work is not protected by copyright and free to be used without any license.


hasn't world moved on from these things already?


Has the world moved on from copyright? Or expecting other people to behave ethically and fairly?

No, and god I hope not.

But it's a real dick move to set up your CI the way you have. Zig explicitly requests using one of the many mirrors for CI instead of hammering the main ziglang.org site itself. Perhaps you've moved on from trying to be ethical?


That's good to know, I wasn't aware of it, I have updated to using a github action they recommend (https://github.com/marketplace/actions/setup-zig-compiler)

For the copyright thing, I understand that there's legit ongoing debate around all this AI-assisted coding and copyrightability.

In this case of zpdf, while Claude Code did a lot of the heavy lifting on implementation, there was a real effort in architecture decisions, iterative prompting/refinement, debugging, testing, benchmarking.

My intent is zero restrictions: use it, fork it, sell it, whatever. WTFPL captures that spirit perfectly for me. It's as permissive as legally possible while being upfront about not caring.

The goal is just to make a useful tool freely available.

Edit: I have changed it to CC0.


Besides being standard, it's also reasonable solely for game developers not having to worry about chargebacks and financial fraud at all. Let alone all the other stuff your game gets, and stuff your game has the option of making use of (like network infrastructure for multiplayer games).


I also have wondered about the Amazon/Twitch deal. I suspect it's all net-positive income for GOG but much like Google funding Firefox, if Amazon ever decides to take it away I wonder how much damage that would do to GOG. Certainly some damage of awareness. I think the only thing I've bought on GOG was the Yakuza 0-6 collection, the other hundred+ games were free. I've at least downloaded and played some of them, Lutris on Linux works fairly well. (Many were ones I already bought and played on steam, which is kind of annoying, but some of them were ones I was planning to buy if they went on sale, so whatever. I'm more mixed about how it, plus Epic's game giveaways, can damage the entire concept of paying for games. Gamepass factors in too, but Steam's routine sales also ruined me from the idea of paying "full price". I can't look at Switch or Oculus/Meta pricing and think it's worth it.)


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