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jdwithit · 2026-01-07T04:58:22 1767761902

There's also the tactic where the layout of the page/app reflows after a second or two, changing where the ads are. It drives me up the wall. Go to tap on a button, SURPRISE, an ad popped in where the button used to be 10ms before you touched the screen and now you're forced into some company's site whether you wanted to see it or not.

csr86 · 2026-01-07T11:30:41 1767785441

This is my biggest frustration with ads. It will surely cause fake statistics for ad campaigns too: 99% of time when I click ad, it is by mistake.

jdwithit · 2026-01-07T04:48:21 1767761301

I "love" the ones that randomly decide to reactivate literally years after unsubscribing and never interacting with the business again. The other day I randomly got an email from a yoga studio I once bought my wife a gift card from. We moved and neither of us has been there since 2021. Why on earth am I suddenly getting spam 5 years later. I get similar messages from hotels many years later too. Sometimes ones I didn't even end up staying at, just browsed. You can sense the desperation through the monitor.

hylaride · 2026-01-07T09:37:36 1767778656

I now militantly use apple’s “hide my email” function for this reason, though it doesn’t really work when you “need” to give your email address in person (I have a “junk” email address that’s normally turned off on my devices for those people)

jdwithit · 2025-11-19T18:13:26 1763576006

The "ancillary" materials like manuals and maps were crucial for old games. Even simple ones. The other day I was going through some of the old SNES games in the Switch online catalog. I found F-Zero, a racing game I played the heck out of as a kid. I started telling my son some info about the different cars and drivers and he was like how the heck do you know that? At no point is that info presented in game. You just pick a car and start driving. There's no tutorial or opening cinematic. If you want to know what's going on, RTFM as they say. Except you can't because it's 2025, nothing comes with paper manuals anymore.

Not saying one style is good or bad. But it's definitely changed since the 80s and 90s, when every game came with a printed 50 page manual full of crucial information. Which often doubled as copy protection. I remember firing up King's Quest 6 and having it challenge me to type the 15th word in the second paragraph on page 26 or whatever.

thaumasiotes · 2025-11-19T20:28:21 1763584101

> If you want to know what's going on, RTFM as they say. Except you can't because it's 2025, nothing comes with paper manuals anymore.

The SNES classic comes with no paper manuals, but it includes copies of every manual in the software. You're free to read them all. (And you may have to, if for example you want to know what the controls are.)

GOG also provides the manuals for games as "extra" content.

int_19h · 2025-11-19T21:44:32 1763588672

They were crucial in more than one way! Quite a few games used manuals as a simple form of copy protection: you had to answer some question at start that required the manual to answer. Sometimes explicitly so, like asking for the first word on some page.

Sometimes it was more creative. E.g. people who remember F-19 / F-117 flight sims might also remember how on startup you had to pass an "aircraft identification exam" - given an image, guess what it is. And if you got that wrong, you could only fly training missions. Of course, this one didn't strictly require the manual - you could learn from playing the game itself, or you could get that info elsewhere. I wonder how many people still remember that kind of arcane knowledge just because that was the game they played a lot as a kid and eventually just memorized all the answers.

hakfoo · 2025-11-21T00:40:33 1763685633

Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon did that, and the thing about railway enthusiasts is that they go encyclopedic on that.

They could identify any of the locomotives and probably tell you every pixel of them that was wrong.

aidenn0 · 2025-11-20T23:25:07 1763681107

I can probably still answer most of the copy-protection questions from Wing Commander. e.g. Maniac is 23 years old.

jdwithit · 2025-10-21T17:30:56 1761067856

I wish society still used AIM Away Messages so I could make mine this, forever.

jdwithit · 2025-08-06T04:18:08 1754453888

Eyy, I'm authin' here!

jdwithit · 2025-07-21T05:35:09 1753076109

It's only showing connections directly initiated by your computer. Not anything "upstream" of you like the FIOS router. It would also show any connections TO your computer, but being behind NAT on a normal home network, that would likely be nothing unless you've intentionally punched holes.

jdwithit · 2025-07-21T05:28:40 1753075720

Yeah from an extremely quick read of the code, I agree with atworkc. It's showing any IP address you have an established network connection to.

  void refreshConnections() {
    ssOutput =
        popen("ss -atun4 | grep ESTAB | awk '{print $6}' | cut -f1 -d\":\"", "r");

    if (ssOutput == NULL) {
      printf("Failed to run ss command\n");
      exit(1);
    }
  }

edit: ssOutput is a global variable which is read elsewhere.

jdwithit · 2025-07-11T04:47:58 1752209278

Was going to post this, the Mozilla content is great.

jdwithit · 2025-07-11T01:58:47 1752199127

YAML is so ubiquitous I have to wonder what corner of tech you work in that you aren't encountering it in the wild. Kubernetes really brought it to center stage going on 10 years ago, but it's the config file format for many many applications these days.

That's not meant as an endorsement, just saying it's not "making a comeback" any more than Taylor Swift is in music. It's The Thing right now and has been for a while.

alwillis · 2025-07-11T14:11:50 1752243110

YAML is so ubiquitous I have to wonder what corner of tech you work in that you aren't encountering it in the wild.

Ansible is another tool for devops that uses YAML extensively; it shipped in 2012.

jdwithit · 2025-07-04T23:48:29 1751672909

I was a freshman in high school when UO came out. I distinctly remember getting accepted into the beta test and frantically checking the mailbox every day until the CD finally showed up. I had played Gemstone III (a text MUD on AOL) and Sierra's The Realm so I wasn't totally new to the concept, but the vision and scale of UO had my excited out of my mind.

I did have fun with it but ultimately I think I was too young and innocent to appreciate the game. Every time I felt like I was getting my feet under me, someone would murder me and steal all my shit. I think at one point I even got my own house... until someone murdered me and stole the key, leaving me penniless. It was a very griefer friendly game, and if you weren't one of the griefers, look out.

Eventually I got involved in the UO emulation scene and became the maintainer of a popular emulator for a year or two, and ran a private server with some Canadian tech bro (not that we had that term in the 90s) who had a bunch of money and hardware to spare. That was some of the most fun I've ever had in gaming.

guitarsteve · 2025-07-05T15:54:41 1751730881

The Realm consumed a lot of my life as a child.