avenius

Well yeah, it did - I don't remember quite what, but I think it showed the experience rate or something like that. (there was also a hidden feature that showed your login/password in the window title for a short while - I got access to the dll for TibiaGG, which taught me a bit about memory access. This was only done as a prank though, and never for any nefarious purposes)

The software was called Tomes of Knowledge, if that rings any bells :)

Which was also abused to kill players, dragging them back and forth fast enough to essentially make them incapable of moving :o

I'm amazed to see Tibia show up on HN of all places! And a whole 22 years after I first installed the game on one of our high school computers. This game was the catalyst to my career as an IT professional. I developed a tool back in 2003 or so that calculated experience and skill gains, as my first proper project in Visual Basic. It ended up as a mainstay in the playerbase for a long time, which meant I had to deal with release management and server capacity as a complete greenhorn. Later, when I quit the game, I simply released the codebase on the forums, hoping for some other idealistic soul to take over. Naturally, that went the exact way you'd expect: People embedded keyloggers and released their own version of it, demolishing all the trust I'd built over the years.

Another aspect of this game worth noting: The community, and how the gameplay has changed over the years. In the "olden times", the main focus of the game was the social aspect. There were limited hunting grounds, so people spent their time hanging around and talking, building houses out of boxes and parcels, coming up with games. I recently picked the game back up - now everything feels like it's hyper-optimized for grinding, and that old social aspect feels gone. I find it fascinating - though also a bit sad.

I believe it started out as an independent company, but was later taken over by the Dutch government.

IIRC incarceration was a method started by christian monks, and the intention was that the incarcerated would use the time to reflect and contemplate his crimes - a form of rehabilitation. As you say, that certainly isn't what's happening today. Instead it gives criminals a broader network, and my impression is that it works sort of like a "crime school". But the US method of privatizing and profiteering off of imprisonment surely must skew the incentives as well.

Truffles are less potent than mushrooms, so you need to more or less double the dosage. I would think that the 15 grams of truffles then would be equivalent to about 7-8 grams of dried mushrooms. Since it was ingested throughout the day, I would assume that's dosages equivalent to 1-3 grams spread out through the day.

But we do see the same problem in several European cities. For instance there's been some debate about how nurses can't really afford to live in Oslo anymore due to the discrepancy between income and rent.

Anecdata, but I'm a typical lurker. If I don't have something to contribute to a discussion, I stay silent. I think that goes for a lot of people. There's also the commitment angle - if you engage in a discussion, you're typically committed to follow up on the responses you get. That can be more of a time/attention commitment than people are interested in, and with the growing toxicity of online discourse a lot of people don't want to put themselves out there to begin with.

It still does occur though. A while ago I bought an Asus mini-pc to be used as a media server, only to be stumped by issues with the Realtek drivers. Apparently they're no longer available after kernel version 4.15.

From what you're saying, I guess those devices just aren't that common anymore?

It's about time this became a public discussion. Websites have become so horribly bloated, while most discussions seem to revolve around whether ads are acceptable or not.

Dan Carlin's Hardcore History - Carlin has an amazing way of telling stories, and he goes really in-depth.

Critical Role - A group of people playing Dungeons and Dragons, the episodes are long and always keep me chuckling most of the way through.

That's an interesting point - passion does fade over time. I spent 10 years of my life intensely devoted to music, but at some point it just evaporated. It's baffling, really.

As for software development, I found my passion as a kid when my father taught me some simple scripting on his old Dolphin. I was simply amazed by the vast landscape of possibilities.

It's fascinating how you can see hints of the city's history through these items. E.g. from the "golden age" (16-1700s) there are tons of items from the bustling cloth and textile trade. It's also interesting to see how the apparent quality of items has gone down over the centuries - even though there's probably some survivorship bias, most recent items are just paper and plastic, and probably wouldn't have lasted very long.

Same here - with a side of Slack.