Hacker News: McGlockenshire

New comment by McGlockenshire in "How Did Rogue Generate Its Random Dungeons?"

McGlockenshire — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 04:01:11 +0000

Literally the second line of the article addresses your questions by linking to the source code repo under discussion. Every single one of the sidebars about the topics being discussed links directly to the relevant code.

The article even tells you it's C. The copyright dates on the code are 1980ish. It's talking about rogue, not rogue.exe, so this is going to be on Unix, real Unix. So, it'll be using rand(), the bad one, surely, just by what it is and where it is. That completely answers all your questions.

All you had to do was click links.

edit2: lmao okay so I read the code myself and you'll never, ever guess what it does. It does NOT use rand().

New comment by McGlockenshire in "Man and the Computer by John G. Kemeny (1972 book by the co-creator of BASIC)"

McGlockenshire — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 03:58:58 +0000

The guy below downvoted for insulting SV and saying "read chapter 5" is correct: Read Chapter 5, the "Symbiote or Parasite" one you've partially quoted here. It's a real banger.

Read it both in the context of the time, the early 16-bit 70s when retail store what-we'd-call-ERPs were bleeding edge technology, and then in the context of today where the actualities are different but the realities are still there.

Don't let the computer take the blame.

New comment by McGlockenshire in "Multiple Mouse Cursors in Wayland"

McGlockenshire — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 02:39:42 +0000

The original title, "State of multi-player Wayland" is a much better summary of the article. This ain't just about the pointers! In fact, the author is very explicit about that:

> I think there could be a term that’s describing this concept even better – in the title of this post, I picked “multi-player”, to make clear that it’s mostly about multiple people who are collaborating. I’ve also seen “multi-cursor” or “multi-pointer” (which are missing the keyboard component).

New comment by McGlockenshire in "I showed an AI an image it couldn't see – then caught it lying about what it saw"

McGlockenshire — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 16:20:05 +0000

They can't even reliably answer questions about their own training!

New comment by McGlockenshire in "Why we built yet another Postgres connection pooler"

McGlockenshire — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 18:05:59 +0000

You'll see this kind of fun in other databases that support "persistent connections." When you start up, you have absolutely no idea what the state of the database is. If a previous process errored out, you might find yourself in the middle of a broken transaction for example. Did the last session do some weird SET magic to make things work? Did it create temporary tables? Well guess what, it's all still there!

New comment by McGlockenshire in "Fable turned reMarkable into Tom Riddle's diary from Harry Potter"

McGlockenshire — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:15:09 +0000

No, actually, an interactive textual conversation is a significantly different thing than a television show.

New comment by McGlockenshire in "Windows 10 quietly gets one more year of support and updates"

McGlockenshire — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 18:03:20 +0000

The reason for this is that there are still drivers for old hardware that hook into the old control panel elements to actually function.

If you get rid of the control panel applets, you break the drivers.

This is also an old and out-of-date complaint. Almost all of the settings are now inside the Settings application and only inside the Settings application, with the related control panel applets gone.

New comment by McGlockenshire in "Ford rehires 350 engineers after AI fails to preserve expertise or train juniors"

McGlockenshire — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 15:51:40 +0000

As a homeless person, do not wish homelessness on yourself.

New comment by McGlockenshire in "The time the x86 emulator team found code so bad they fixed it during emulation"

McGlockenshire — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 05:32:51 +0000

> offensive program

Agreed.

New comment by McGlockenshire in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

McGlockenshire — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 17:05:44 +0000

> Windows 11 machine with only 4 GB of RAM using Firefox with the network throttled to 3G speeds

And their mobile device should be the cheapest Android phone from a monthly cell provider you've never heard of. This is what the real world is for a lot of people, and a huge number of developers simply don't know or care.

New comment by McGlockenshire in "I tested every IP KVM in my Homelab"

McGlockenshire — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 03:46:11 +0000

Man, I wish that tool was available fifteen years ago. All of our machines in our half-Linux half-Windows manufacturing operation were Q chips with vPro motherboards, that we (I) chose on purpose, but we didn't have the IT bandwidth to ever sit down and learn how to use them properly.

New comment by McGlockenshire in "I tested every IP KVM in my Homelab"

McGlockenshire — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 21:25:44 +0000

I'm not surprised that nobody noticed it at all. That's because it's not a KVM that you can purchase and test, the subject to the article.

Instead, you're just talking about IMPIjr. These specific features are not in consumer grade CPUs, but in CPUs marked for workstations. Ain't no consumer buying fuckin vPro machines. These are enterprise IT management features, not user features. They're also subject to frequent insane rants by people obsessed with them as possible privacy issues.

New comment by McGlockenshire in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

McGlockenshire — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 23:54:30 +0000

Life. Being alive. I'm not going to get into a semantic debate with you so don't bother following up with some whining about conflating life and consciousness. It's autocomplete. It is not alive, it cannot think, it cannot sense, it cannot perceive, it is math. If you believe it is alive then you are out of your mind. Go learn how it works.

New comment by McGlockenshire in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

McGlockenshire — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 20:58:56 +0000

Consciousness excludes all current AI because all current AI is just autocomplete over the corpus of human text.

It's just a word machine. There are no thoughts. It cannot be conscious. How is this even up for debate in any way whatsoever? I do not understand how people can believe this. Is this not a site for software engineers?

New comment by McGlockenshire in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

McGlockenshire — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 20:55:45 +0000

Fancypants autocomplete cannot be conscious. It's just echoing previous human experiences, which make it sound like a person. It is not a person. It is an algorithm. There is no mechanism by which it can obtain consciousness.

People believing otherwise are fools. People debating this are idiots. I realize these words are harsh, but it's the truth.

New comment by McGlockenshire in "Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model"

McGlockenshire — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 20:45:59 +0000

> my consumer-grade card with 12G of VRAM and got 5t/s for output

Thank you for giving me hope!

New comment by McGlockenshire in "Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left"

McGlockenshire — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 21:31:01 +0000

The button renders itself after the user interface is complete.

It bumps over all the other buttons to the right.

The home or work button gets replaced with the AI button.

This is infuriating for muscle memory.

Whoever did this will need to beg my forgiveness if we ever meet.

New comment by McGlockenshire in "Time to talk about my writerdeck"

McGlockenshire — Sat, 23 May 2026 20:41:51 +0000

You seem to be missing the entire point of the exercise and perhaps you should go back and read the article again to understand what you're missing.

New comment by McGlockenshire in "PHP's Oddities"

McGlockenshire — Sat, 23 May 2026 20:34:31 +0000

That article is approaching 15 years old and no longer reflects reality.

New comment by McGlockenshire in "Court to DOGE: Asking ChatGPT 'Is This DEI?' Is Not Proper Legal Process"

McGlockenshire — Fri, 08 May 2026 18:56:00 +0000

You should read the article and gain understanding of the thing that you think you're criticizing. Then you will understand the parent comment.

Your argument is a non-sequitur.