This is true. Personally I always try to get my work published with a third-party first, and then I talk with the editors to clarify policies. Most smaller magazines and publishers are pretty flexible, they’ll often have some provisions in place to allow you to re-publish original works on your own website after a certain period of time, if that’s the route you want to take.
It’s the approach I’ve used in the past with places like Paged Out and 2600 Hacker Quarterly.
Nice job. Quantizing to a given scale/signature controlled through touch or gestures to glide and create ambient textured soundscapes is actually a pretty well-explored space. I've seen some neat MPE-style ones that let you emulate aftertouch through haptic pressure and vibrato by wiggling your finger back and forth.
It’s a very popular genre of music apps on the iPad, since the larger screen lends itself well to this kind of musical performance. You should definitely check out apps like MorphWiz, GeoShred, etc. if you’re interested in this kind of thing.
> If only we could train a model to just use Photoshop directly, but we can't.
They're obviously more general purpose but LLMs can also be used to drive external graphics programs. A relatively popular one is Blender MCP [1], which lets an LLM control Blender to build and scaffold out 3D models.
There have been quite a few of them over the years in varying degrees of complexity. I think the most well-known one is probably HN Replies. A simple Github search returns the following results.
I (and probably a lot of other HN users) built my own bespoke HN suite that notifies me on replies, stories that I might be interested in, etc. It just sits quietly on a VPS and sends messages to me over Signal. Never open-sourced it because the code is a dire abomination.
Yours is probably the first Chrome side-panel variation that I've seen though.
Very cool. I'd never heard of OHRRPGCE (Official Hamster Republic Role Playing Game Construction Engine) before. I was going to say it feels like an early predecessor to something like RPG Maker but I think RPG Maker originally came out in the early ’90s for the Japanese PC-98 computers.
From the wikipedia entry [1] for OHRRPGCE
> It runs at an 8-bit color depth, by default creates games that run at a 320 × 200 resolution.
It's funny but I bet anyone else in here who also grew up with the QBASIC interpreter as a kid instantly thinks SCREEN 13 when they read something like this.
:) SCREEN 13 (VGA Mode 13h) is almost correct, but actually it originally used a 320x200 VGA Mode X assembly graphics library. I believe 320x200 instead of 320x240 to be compatible with earlier pure-QB code for SCREEN 13 reused in the engine. (Mode X isn't a single mode, it has some adjustable parameters.)
NB doesn't support direct editing of an image. But you can open the image in something like Krita or Photoshop, highlight the part you want to change with a red marker, and then ask Nano Banana to modify that highlighted section. It usually does a really good job.
In many cases you can just prompt “change this source text into this target text,” and it works in most cases.
Nice. Back when I lived in Taiwan, several of my students regularly played Magic: The Gathering (魔法風雲會). I’d been playing since 4th edition so I was already very familiar with it. Combined with the fact that I was studying traditional Chinese at the time, it turned out to be quite helpful.
Incidental language exposure through gaming is an awesome way to learn.
If it were 1999, most people would still be browsing the web on their US Robotics 56k modem (at best). This page is about 1 MB of assets (500kb gzip compressed if your browser supported it) , so it would have taken at least a minute just to finish loading.
No tabbed browsing and if IE crashed it locked up Windows 95/98 with it. No 2fa, no comment spam, and Java applets that froze the browser for 10-30 seconds. No content creator bs just people making fan pages just for the heck of it before Wikipedia gobbled all that information
I was a lot more careful about clicking things when it took a full minute to load. Now I know that it'll be open in less than a second and I can leave immediately if I need to, so there's WAY less thinking beforehand.
It's funny to think back, as I've just recently installed a browser extension to do the opposite (i.e. to prevent "open in new tab" tabs from doing any work until I foreground them.)
Today, my computer's memory is far more constrained than its network bandwidth. I find it very easy to accidentally open tons of tabs very quickly (esp. from the HN front page!) until suddenly the browser is swapping and everything's slowing to a crawl trying to process all those new page DOMs.
And yet, even when it doesn't choke the computer, I find no real benefit to preloading pages in the background any more. At least on my connection, the page load time after I focus a tab is almost imperceptible.
Also, tabbed browsing was still a couple years off for most people, although some browsers got there earlier than others:
> In 1994, BookLink Technologies featured tabbed windows in its InternetWorks browser.[citation needed] That same year, the text editor UltraEdit also appeared with a modern multi-row tabbed interface. The tabbed interface approach was then followed by the Internet Explorer shell NetCaptor in 1997. These were followed by several others like IBrowse in 1999, and Opera in 2000 (with the release of version 4 - although an MDI interface was supported before then), MultiViews October 2000, which changed its name into MultiZilla on April 1st, 2001 (an extension for the Mozilla Application Suite[11]), Galeon in early 2001, Mozilla 0.9.5 in October 2001, Phoenix 0.1 (now Mozilla Firefox) in October 2002, Konqueror 3.1 in January 2003, and Safari in 2003. With the release of Internet Explorer 7 in 2006, all major web browsers featured a tabbed interface.
Also, Opera had a Multiple-Document Interface from the start, so 1995 or so. That's not "tabs" per se but multiple mini-windows inside the main window; much the same "Hey, I can have multiple things open!" deal
I just opened multiple copies of the browser; I'd have 5 or 10 running most of the time on my 98se box. It's where I got my habit which I still use today, of opening outlinks as I read the page, so they can load in the background, then once I finish the content of this page, I'll go skim those to fill in context.
It meant I cared _less_ about page load time, even on dialup, because they were happening in other windows. I could happily tolerate a 2-minute load time as long as the first page took more than 2 minutes to read.
Still pretty prevalent at that time, definitely, but DSL was definitely a thing by the time 1999 rolled around. I even had pretty fast DSL for the time -- 640 kbps.
But otherwise totally agree with the critique. Modern connection speeds have enabled a huge amount of bloat. I grew up when 1200 baud modems were the latest rage, and patience when downloading was a hard requirement.
I had a friend who had dial-up I think until at least 2007 because his house was apparently right on the border of our town and the next and for whatever reason all of the ISPs other than AOL considered his address outside their coverage. This was in a suburb within 10 miles of Boston.
I lived on a suburban street a mile from the Stanford campus that didn't get broadband until 2003. I would go to the local copy center to rent an hour of computer time to edit my blog.
Ok.. so broadband in 1996, route-able (unique) IPv4 broadband in 1997 (177.1..), route-able satellite internet in Nigeria in 2002 (it sucked when it rained). Your Stanford proximity apparently didn't help.
I was raised by cheap boomers that would never pay more than the absolute minimum for anything, no matter how shitty the option, and most of my friends lived way out in the country. Paying $40/month for DSL or cable internet was off the table, because the library ran a free dialup ISP, so thats what we used even though their line was almost always busy. The cheap ass modem wouldn't reset the line correctly either, requiring someone to physically pull the phone cord out and back in the modem, otherwise the line wouldn't hang up, so redialling on a busy signal required physical intervention. (At some point, I recall my mom's friend/neighbor convincing her to pay $99/year for a dialup ISP that connected the first time.) I moved off dialup when I got a fast food job in 2005.
Luckily, we had web accelerating proxies like OnSpeed[1] back in the day that would compress web pages (including lossy image compression) so if you were one of the poor sods still on dialup (like I was), it was a lot more bearable.
Oh neat, I'd never heard of them. Almost feels like a spiritual predecessor of CDNs, serving optimized assets from existing websites via their servers.
Nice! We were one of the first families on the block to have a 33.6 kbps modem, and were the envy of every filthy peasant who still had a 28.8 back in the day.
My first dialup modem was 1200 baud, back in 1987! I remember it taking an hour to download a game from a local warez BBS. My first modem to establish an Internet connection (SLIP) was 9600, sometime around 1993! Time flies...
And if the sysop had upgraded to 28.8 while you were still on 2400, you were probably persona non grata for tying up the line for so long!
Some of the most popular boards had minimum connect speeds; if you couldn't connect at at least 9600 or 14.4k, it would immediately hang up on you, for this reason.
This comment reminded me of the early days of Ultima Online. I was on a high speed campus connection with a ping time of ~5ms to my server. Given most players were on a 28.8/56k modem with ping times ~300ms, it was an amazing speed difference. I could walk, not run, faster than other people riding horses at full speed.
Needless to say, I got accused of cheating quite a bit.
We used dialup until 1996, when we got a 10mbps cable internet connection, newly available in our 20k population town. We have never had a slower service plan than that since.
Questioning this, because I worked with a sysadmin who was in an @Home/CableLabs DOCSIS beta region at about that same time, and we all envied him of course. That was in San Jose, CA.
So what's the real story behind your piddlly little town getting bleeding edge cable internet service? (Or was it somewhere like Los Gatos?)
No shade! I went and checked out of curiosity, since it looks like we’re both using Astro as a static site generator.
Most of my articles are pretty media rich and weigh in between 1-2 megs. I do try to be pretty conscientious about asset compression (mozjpeg, h264 for video, etc.). I'd love to switch over to AV1 but I've heard compatibility on older devices is spotty.
Not for me it isn't. Still rocking a LTSC copy of Windows 10 IoT on an older desktop. It's on the fixed lifecycle policy - no new features (to me that's a bonus) but still gets security patches until 2032.
It’s the approach I’ve used in the past with places like Paged Out and 2600 Hacker Quarterly.
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