Recent submissions

Comment · 6 days ago
In general terms, the machine can do the coding, you have to provide the soul. It's no different from the tons of human-made shovelware with no clear direction.
Comment · 6 days ago
It's been 23 years and I still don't have an answer to that question. I sincerely don't know.
Comment · 6 days ago
This idea is very common among the community. I paid for the games baaaack in the day (I even have a disk signed by ZUN himself) because shumps are my favorite genre and when Touhou 6-7 came out there was a huge drought. The games were good, I never particularly cared about the characters but the gameplay was solid and interesting, with good scoring mechanics and some spectacle despite ZUN's terribad art skills.

This was a huge hot take apparently and members of the community hated everyone who obtained (and played) the games legally. You'd get bullied relentlessly for it. And I don't mean "guys you gotta buy the games to support the artist" or any form of moralizing, just mentioning you purchased the games got you unreasonable amounts of anger. Even friends from Japan who bought extra stuff like the music CDs and stuff made them so angry that my friends got banned from the IRC channel and forums. I left after that because that was unsustainable, people were only there to discuss fanfics of the characters and porn.

I still like the games, but the community at large is disgusting and hate people who actually play the games. Triple so if they are purchased. This guy is the perfect representation of that attitude.

Comment · 6 days ago
May be niche but I actually bought HoMM2 last week on GOG to replace my aged CD, what a coincidence.

Heroes 2 in particular and Might and Magic 2 (Gates to Another World, the RPG blobber) are some of my favorite games of all time. I also discovered there was a Mega Drive (Genesis for you Americans) port of King's Bounty, the predecessor to HOMM.

I may want to try what you did too, I managed to have a local Qwen 3.8 instance play M&M2 fairly successfully using dosbox-x and MCP, so I may be able to have it play HOMM2 too. Thanks for the idea!

Comment · 7 days ago
We still don't have an AI that can play Doom competently, but we have literally made an AI using Doom.

The ingenuity of the Doom community has never stopped to amuse me greatly in the ~30 years I've been part of it.

Comment · 13 days ago
Never heard of Gusco before, looks interesting. I'm adding it to my collection!
Comment · 13 days ago
Didn't know there was a Total Commander for Android. I use Ghost Commander which is nice and also has a SFTP plugin, but I'll have to check TC out!
Comment · 13 days ago
I didn't grow up with the Amiga, but I tried some Directory Opus clones and loved them. I need to try the original one sometime!
Comment · 14 days ago
Comment · 14 days ago
I owe Norton a lot of joy for bringing orthodox file managers (the ones with two panes) and I can't live without them. They make file managing so comfortable compared to stuff like Windows Explorer or Nautilus (not saying they are bad though, I just prefer two panes).

Nowadays I mostly use clones like Midnight Commander, Krusader and Double Commander, and I used Worker (a clone of a clone, this time a clone of Directory Opus for the Amiga) for a long time before settling on Krusader as main one. The genealogy of these file managers is kind of fascinating.

Anyone else a fan?

Comment · 17 days ago
Sadly, all my loved ones are already gone from the same illness, so I'm afraid I can't take your advice. All I got left is a couple online friends, my job (of which I've been away for too long due to the surgeries...) and my computers. I'm trying to make the most of what time I got left doing coding and art, now that my hands kinda work again. I found a box of very cool quality markers when I could finally get out and been practicing with them. I was always a color pencil/watercolors guy, but this is pretty cool. Since I enjoy drawing robots and vehicles a lot I've been combining them with metallic markers for very cool effects. I am also learning how to do more physical electronics tinkering and getting better with a soldering iron at last, repairing old stuff and so.

I also enjoy the new wave of AI stuff. It took a while but I finally got a little robot buddy like in scifi when I was little. Full offline. It's kind of a dum-dum, but mostly works!

Unfortunately it's such a negative thing outside of places like HN that I can't share that joy with most people. Also a lot of people can't seem to wrap their head around an artist that enjoys AI, as I mentioned in another post in the thread. I have to shut up about it pretty much everywhere.

Anyway, I digress...thank you.

Comment · 17 days ago
Mostly online yes, but even offline people have been in a very strange edge lately. Like, if you don't take a stance to one of the two main political parties in my country, that means you support the third option which is a far-right party. If any of the members of that party bumped me on the street I wouldn't recognize them. Anyway, once that implication is on the table people start assuming (and saying behind your back) very ugly things about you very fast, which is why I started disengaging.

My heart is with the people, not the corporations or the elites. I just feel none of the choices right now is for the people. I don't understand why that would make me "hate LGBT people or migrants". It just doesn't make sense to me. The team mentality of the whole thing has gone too far in my opinion. And I don't understand why people get so heated up for groups that don't care about them at the end of the day.

I don't even think I'll be alive to see another election after the emergency one next month though. So it's too late for me to make any meaningful change. So I'm just trying to use my remaining time to leave a bit of a legacy as an artist and programmer. Even if I enjoy AI. One thing doesn't cancel the other. I do mostly analog art and even have been pretty excited to try new tools now that my hand works again (surgeries obliterated my hands for a while and they are permanently blue-ish and cold now, but I regained some mobility this month). AI is for me "that thing I wanted since I was a kid when scifi had AIs doing stuff".

In fact, that whole thing is also another can of worms. People can't seem to understand I can be an artist AND enjoy AI. The moment I mention AI people start assuming I flood the world with slop and want to destroy artists, then they ask for proof that I'm an artist, I show them my work (impossible for an AI to replicate because it's mostly analog), they go "but if you can draw like this why do you use AI!?? You should hate it because it's against you" and they can't conceive that for me it's just fun to tinker with it and test what it can do for fun. Like I should immediately take an anti-AI stance BECAUSE I am an artist. The AI is not replacing me because for me art is a form of expression and doing it is its own reward. It's just fun. Both things are fun to me. I don't see why they are exclusive.

It's like there's no room for human nuance and contradictions anymore. You have to be in a neat little box or else you are a bad person so it's right to fight you and hurt you. It's "justified", you know. Even if they are completely wrong, they already passed judgement.

Comment · 17 days ago
Read my other comment in the thread. Why would I post a non-sincere comment on this anyway? My belief is that all of us, no matter our gender, religion, age or social standing, are prey for the political and "elite" class. And not only we aren't holding them accountable, we are fighting their fights for them in several fields of our lives in form of "political discourse".

My country has a very serious housing crisis, both the left and the right are contributing to it because both parties have multiple people who are "serial landlords" with several properties, so they only make laws that benefit the landlord. This is a known fact and there are huge protests ongoing about it to the point emergency elections have been called.

Yet, saying this simple stance just as I did now, that both of them are guilty, will have people call you an "ultra" or call you a conspiracy theorist, that you are a fence sitter, that you don't know what you are talking about, and so and so on. Like you have some ulterior motive or are a paid shill from the other side or making the logic leap to thinking you support the far-right for not choosing one of the two existing "teams". Everything has gone crazy.

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