Hacker News: Ariarule

I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

Ariarule — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 15:50:52 +0000

Article URL: https://www.experimental-history.com/p/i-like-em-thick

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49347543

Points: 846

# Comments: 335

France's Top Court Kills the Under-15 Social Media Ban

Ariarule — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 20:07:57 +0000

Article URL: https://reclaimthenet.org/frances-top-court-kills-the-under-15-social-media-ban

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49303930

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Technological Determinism and Human Freedom

Ariarule — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 18:47:01 +0000

Article URL: https://letter.palladiummag.com/p/technological-determinism-and-human

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49302985

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

Quantifying the honey bee dance floor

Ariarule — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 02:01:47 +0000

Article URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0341456

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49293983

Points: 23

# Comments: 1

New comment by Ariarule in "Northwest Indiana residents dealing with 'largest outage event on record'"

Ariarule — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 19:44:45 +0000

While I know "if they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic", I feel this is especially unusual due to the gap between the level of coverage (mostly regional at this point, like WGN) and the impact. Currently, poweroutage.us is showing 234459 customers out in Indiana, with elevated outages in Illinois and Ohio as well.

Northwest Indiana residents dealing with 'largest outage event on record'

Ariarule — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 19:31:58 +0000

Article URL: https://wgntv.com/northwest-indiana/northwest-indiana-residents-dealing-with-largest-outage-event-on-record-after-waves-of-storms-nipsco-says/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49290840

Points: 6

# Comments: 6

New comment by Ariarule in "Tracking down the 16-year-old WAL-reset SQLite bug"

Ariarule — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 16:52:18 +0000

How is "Fix the WAL-reset database corruption bug" downplaying this? https://www.sqlite.org/changes.html

New comment by Ariarule in "Steam Game Recommender, with a RAG System That Focuses on Explainability First"

Ariarule — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 06:06:53 +0000

Very cool. If I can point out an alternative use and audience for this: there are quite a few game marketing data websites for sussing out which games are similar to each other and how they've performed within their genre. This is, AFAIK, a unique approach to the first part.

New comment by Ariarule in "Rsync 3.5 Released as "Extraordinary" Update to Fix 33 Security Issues"

Ariarule — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 05:32:39 +0000

Release notes are at https://download.samba.org/pub/rsync/NEWS#3.5.0

New comment by Ariarule in "Unearthing a 31 year old Easter egg in Ecco the Dolphin"

Ariarule — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 20:06:53 +0000

Steam Achievements are trivially to cheat at for most games, especially single-player like Ecco, for example via SAM.

New comment by Ariarule in "We tracked down the 16-year-old WAL-reset SQLite bug"

Ariarule — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 15:46:27 +0000

Odd not to highlight the sentence where they answer the obvious question "Why Tailscale in particular?":

> They also explained why we were more likely to hit the bug than other SQLite users: we take manual control of the checkpointing process, and we checkpoint very aggressively. Even a bug triggered by a rare condition was bound to hit us eventually.

Winemaking Home Page (2018)

Ariarule — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 04:19:13 +0000

Article URL: https://web.archive.org/web/20200602092516/http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/index.asp

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49267771

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

The poverty of anti-tech thought

Ariarule — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 03:54:58 +0000

Article URL: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-poverty-of-anti-tech-thought

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49267663

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by Ariarule in "How AI is breaking the British State"

Ariarule — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 23:10:22 +0000

I'm guessing you meant to link https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/08/06/how-ai-is-break... ?

MacGregor the Bridge Builder

Ariarule — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 21:02:44 +0000

Article URL: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/macgregor-the-bridge-builder

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49225888

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by Ariarule in "No one can afford to make Myst games anymore"

Ariarule — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 20:34:06 +0000

Can you name three reasonable-quality games out there like this that were definitely made in such a way? It costs only $100 to publish a game on Steam, recoupable if you meet a fairly low revenue threshold. You can publish elsewhere with no money up front (e.g. Itch). If this were actually true, and even if 90% of players would just pass based on the AI disclosure (doubtful, and also doubtful that _all_ games made this way would actually disclose it), you'd expect there to be lots of Myst quality games out there; hundred to thousands already, at least a handful of which should _already_ be successful.

Not entirely a rhetorical question. I've found any images need serious review and touch-up at a minimum and usually multiple rounds of revision. The topology on any generated 3D models is generally atrocious. TTS is not tuned for voice acting to an extent it's absolutely no good for that purpose as far I can tell, and that would be a cornerstone of any serious modern "Myst-class" adventure game. I can't comment on music and SFX in particular and have heard secondhand that current models are "all right", but imagine it's probably the same situation: no care taken, you get uselessly mid results. If it's really that easy and that cheap, I'd like to see it.

New comment by Ariarule in "No one can afford to make Myst games anymore"

Ariarule — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 17:45:06 +0000

_Dimhaven_, released just a few months ago, looks fairly Myst-like from the videos I've seen. While I haven't played it, Zadbox, the developer, also made the very Myst-like _Quern_; released 2016 and which I have played.

I can't help but think the article is a story about _Cyan's_ woes conflated with industry woes. Which isn't to say that the industry doesn't have problems! But Cyan really underperformed with _Firmament_. Look at the Kickstarter comments:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyanworlds/firmament/co...

They did a rug pull on whether they would ship DVDs with the Firmament collector's boxes _after_ they had complaints about the quality of the equivalent Obduction backer reward. While they did ship a DVD for Obduction, from personal experience the box itself it came in was a bit underwhelming. I didn't care so much about packaging, but I could see how someone would, and the whole situation on this point with Firmament was a very eye-rolling "again?" scenario. The first time with Obduction that they weren't able to ship what they planned in this way was bad luck; the second time was, generously, bad planning about something that was entirely foreseeable on their part.

More details here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/754890/discussions/0/38264157...

They made a bad bet on how well VR would take off, with Firmament very obviously created with VR play in mind.

So many people were disappointed with Firmament itself. "18,420 backers pledged $1,433,161 to help bring this project to life" but they can't do that again specifically because they burned a huge amount of goodwill with the people most likely to support them that way. Keep in mind that's a 2019 number and CPI adjusting would bring it up to about 1.8 million, at the lower end but solidly within the 1 to 10 million amount Wired said they were trying to raise for Anglerfish from a publisher. And _Obduction_, while beautiful, was a bit short and had its own issues.

I would also note with all the discussion of the impact of AI art on games that Cyan was an early _target_ of the anti-AI crowd over their use of AI art in Firmament. IIRC, Steam did not have a dedicated disclosure section at the time Firmament, but they did disclose it responsibly and appropriately in the credits. A more detailed statement from Cyan can still be found at https://cyan.com/2023/06/08/regarding-ai-assisted-content-in... -- on this, I agree with Cyan's 2023 post, we ought to be able to distinguish "AI Assisted" from AI-generated, although it seems many are allergic to such nuance.

Universality and diversity in human song (2019)

Ariarule — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 03:22:25 +0000

Article URL: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aax0868

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49218629

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

The Moon is Down; I have not heard the clock (2021)

Ariarule — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 01:10:01 +0000

Article URL: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7nAvPLfidGG54XquJ/the-moon-is-down-i-have-not-heard-the-clock

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49204731

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by Ariarule in "My phone detects going on a run as “someone snatching my phone and running off”"

Ariarule — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 23:43:58 +0000

I find it incredible that "modify the chosen route as little as possible" is not really a thing in any major mapping app. Just because I turned left instead of right at an intersection and had to detour a little bit before getting to a highway shouldn't switch the way I'm going by hundreds of miles on a long trip just because it's supposedly 5 minutes or some other pithy amount faster, and I have seen scenarios like this happen in both Google Maps and Here.