Crazy... I actually hashed out a plan to begin bulding a successor to github earlier this week and this blog post describes EXACTLY what I was thinking about with atproto+git.
So you could theoretically either fork it and use it as a good starting point, or (even better) contribute the ideas you have straight into Tangled itself! :)
ZSNES was a core part of my childhood. I downloaded it back when it was still fresh back in the late nineties / early aughts and used to emulate all matter of favorite games and homebrew translation projects for Star Ocean and Tales of Phantasia.
I beat Chrono Trigger on a 486 with sound and transparencies disabled. There were parts where I had to manually switch off the top layer because transparent stuff (such as clouds) would completely block my view
When my parents weren't home I'd move to their pentium 166mhz with my savestates copied to a floppy and sneak some time playing the game with sound and transparencies.
I think I also got through most of super mario world and some of the final fantasy games as well
I gave up on my first play through of Chrono Trigger because I couldn't figure out how to progress in the future world. Didn't realize that the clouds in the dome were supposed to be transparent and not something that I need to trigger a different event to clear up.
The workaround for this was to assign all the buttons to the same key before chasing the rat (I had this exact problem with zsnes, though my first few playthroughs were on the original cartridge)
Yeah I'm not sure how I figured that trick out, probably just monkey mashing buttons at some point, then I figured out SNES graphics were layers and it was a lot of fun switching the various layers on+off. And hey that turned out to be useful!
Yeah, I want to say you could press the number keys or F keys or something like that to toggle layers on and off, and it was absolutely necessary in some misty forest/jungle/waterfall type areas.
> I beat Chrono Trigger on a 486 with sound and transparencies disabled. There were parts where I had to manually switch off the top layer because transparent stuff (such as clouds) would completely block my view
Also, you could get better performance running on DOS rather than on Windows
Wow, I remember specifically buying a sound card and CD-rom drive for my 486 so I could run the GB emulator. It wouldn't boot without a sound card and I really wanted to play the non-translated version of Pokemon Gold. People wouldn't believe me when I told them I had a newer Pokemon game than Red/Blue/Yellow.
>There were parts where I had to manually switch off the top layer because transparent stuff (such as clouds) would completely block my view
Yeah, that was my experience too; Dome 16 was a total annoyance. I did also use it to 'cheat' in sections of games where you had limited FOV, the alternative of having eyestrain and headaches wasn't really desirable.
I don't think I'd have gotten through a lot of my favourite RPGs without savestates, save points were always so ridiculously spread out while the random encounters were interminable. Still some of the best experiences I've had in the medium though.
Thanks for reminding about missing transparency. I think seeing those games in emulator with transparency support had almost same impression as running Need for Speed III with 3dfx card for the first time :)
Dude we were broke and my 486 was a hand-me-down from church. The first console I ever got was a Nintendo 64, and that was very late into its lifecycle. I can assure you that 486 was not contemporary, it was very much behind the times when I had it.
I’d be curious if you could squeeze out better performance with a newer emulator. Either way, SNES games on a 468 is not shameful, it’s the pinnacle of hacker ethos!
Also discovered the amazing Tales of Phantasia thanks to zsnes. The translation community did a bonker job bringing that from Japan, patching the game without even having the source code, like mad men. Without them, I would have never known such gems existed that were never sold on our market.
The translation does take some liberties, but honestly, just for the boat scene, I feel like it's worth it.
And being able to slow down or speed up the game at will, or quick save/reload at any second, thanks to zsnes, is just chef kiss.
Favorite ZSNES moment: I took a math class in a lecture hall equipped with laptops in a year when my university was experimenting with laptops as a pedagogical tool, but hadn't yet pulled the trigger on requiring them or offering them for sale (as compared to the standard dorm room desktop). While the lecture was being given, we were supposed to have our laptops open with the lecture material up. But of course this one kid had installed ZSNES on his and was playing Killer Instinct...
Same with my parents! It's the only one they use. I think the simple and stable web interface goes a long way; the ChatGPT site (for example) bombards you with popups, new buttons, and opaque daily limits, while DeepSeek's is pretty consistent and straightforward.
DeepSeek also tends to follow prompts more closely IME, plus the thinking is shown, so I think it's able to register as a 'tool' more easily for the non-tech-inclined for whom that appeals.
> In a good headspace now, right after the first year was feeling lost on where to go next.
Glad to hear. I had a similar experience, people act like "being in transition" where you are unsure what is next is solveable in a month, maybe three months. After that first year I still felt so unsure what I was supposed to do.
I'm in that phase somewhat right now. 30 months in, I'm still kinda unsure what I'd like to do. I know going back to a big enterprise software firm is bit of a last resort at this point, I just cannot convince myself that work is meaningful. Thankfully I'm financially secure (for now, who knows how the global trade shenanigans will actually affect my retirement funds), so there's no urgency to jump headfirst into another job. Yet, despite having plenty to do in terms of side projects, it would be a lie to say I don't feel that I need to do something more meaningful with my time.
DOGE will be an interesting case study in the years to come to say the least. A friend was contacted by them in an attempt to recruit him to help rebuild the nations aviation systems from the ground up as a 1099 contractor reporting directly to Sean Duffy. The recruiter advertised it as a side hustle on evenings and weekends paying an abmysal hourly wage. When my friend pointed out that the comp was far below what he makes, the recruiter countered with the prestige that will come with having worked for DOGE.
> prestige that will come with having worked for DOGE.
This seems like a highly fragile currency. If things continue to deteriorate a future administration may end up running its own reprisals trials against DOGE staff.
I mean I think it would be a fair assumption that there’s a very very real chance that havinng worked at DOGE will come with credible threats to your safety in the future. This is a team that is currently in the process of killing peoples grandparents by cutting them off from social security, building databases of immigrants and people with autism among a million other fuckups.
People aren’t going to just let that slide. I really don’t think they should expect to live in comfort and anonymity for the rest of their days if you look at how these kinds of things have played out historically with only a few counterexamples (I.e the East German Stasi come to mind as one)
> things have played out historically with only a few counterexamples
The first counter-example that comes to mind is the "Pact of Forgetting" that happened after Franco died, where basically people agreed to let spilled blood be spilled, without spilling more. Basically hard and difficult questions were avoided in order to facilitate "national reconciliation" when the transition to democracy began in 1970s.
Depending on the political aftermath when this (pointing everywhere) is done, it's not impossible something similar could happen, to try to let things cool down. Or, it goes the way of the Nuremberg Trials, also a possibility I suppose.
That's basically what Obama did with Bush, Iraq and the GFC. I remember him claiming that a bunch of investigations would bog down his agenda.
There was also this take from the "institutionalists" that a compact to not investigate your predecessor was an important part of our tradition of peaceful transition of power. Finally there was a feeling among Democrats that the Republican use of investigations against Clinton had been dirty politics.
I do think that generation of Democrats are being pushed out and I think we'll see a new generation with different ideas. In particular I think the base is finally repulsed by people like Chuck Schumer.
I can't speak for everyone, but as far as I'm concerned, I was willing to "forgive and forget" after the first Trump term.
But then January, 6 happened. And then Trump explicitly ran on the platform of rejecting the validity of the 2020 election and persecuting his political opposition, not to mention this whole DOGE thing and nuking the economy.
So, this time around, no. Anyone who stuck with him despite all that had their chance and they blew it. And this especially pertains to people who aren't just full-throated supporters, but actually facilitated this admin directly.
For the half of the country that's always hated Trump to forget, Trumpism has to go EXTINCT. Like, discredited the way that fascism was after WWII or segregation after the Civil Rights movement.
God willing, when Trump finally officially plunges the US into recession, he and his supporters will become pariahs, but my faith in my fellow citizens is so low that I'm not even sure they'd notice.
I don't think that there is much room for forgiveness in a country where 48% of folks are STILL in support of Trump. The one thing I am certain of is that democracy will not die in the US without a fight.
> discredited the way that fascism was after WWII or segregation after the Civil Rights movement
Got some bad news for you there: a large part of Trumpism is explicitly segregationist revival. Those people never went away, they were just under the surface, and they got mad again when action was taken to remove celebrations of segregationists (statues, building names etc) from public life.
Hiring a whole bunch of contractors is almost providing cover. "No, I didn't work on the gulag candidate selection tool, I was just a FAA navigation coder".
During the downfall of ISIS there was a funny quote from a commander in the Iraqi military along the lines of "if you listen to what the prisoners said, you'd think ISIS was entirely staffed by innocent drivers and cooks and never any jihadists"
Yeah, the less tongue in cheek (but even more tragic) version of this is just that they will be very employable by very ideological right wing organizations, and not very employable outside that bubble (unless they write or otherwise highlight a "learned lessons and turned things around" narrative of this period of time).
But most organizations don't, and won't, want to hire people who are willing to behave lawlessly.
It's a great case study of someone having no knowledge of something coming in and saying "we can save half the budget" then, oops - saying maybe they can do 5% of the original promise, lol.
I wonder how much DOGE is going to cost at the end of the day? I hope not literally billions of dollars, so maybe the $100b-200b they save will be net positive after the lawsuits, etc..
Rebuilding something as critical as the nations’ aviation system using underpaid 1099s working nights/weekends is certainly not the way to build a robust and fault-tolerant system. Idiots!
The false dichotomy! Nice. However you still make a good point. Farming out gov work to private industry is rarely a good answer. As you stated, they are normally even less efficient and cost more!
Would doing same work being contracted via big four consultant for 1/10th of the cost with 3x more meetings while moving 5x slower be more prestigious?
Oh wow this is a trip down memory lane. My parents bought me a computer advertised in the classified ad as “includes over 100 games” and that really meant it came with a book over 100+ games in basic. I’d stay up copying the book to play the games in it. Fun times.
I enjoy his technical and tech culture essays, ones like this are a waste of time and mental energy. I won’t read it because I know it provides zero value.
As a tourist, the cost was well worth it. Used buses and rail to get everywhere, booked one DB train from Berlin to Bamberg but otherwise travelled all over Germany during my time there.
Good validation imho.
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