One reason that RISC-V has so many optional extensions is that you can trust the core is very likely to be patent-free (because everything in it is documented to be older than 20 years) and just evaluate the extensions you need.

If you build your architecture on ideas that are documented to be older than twenty years, it greatly reduces the risk that a patent holder comes from nowhere: even if they did have the patent, it would have expired.

Man. It's kind of crazy to think that I, a Finnish 13-year-old, was reading these ASCII tutorials written by someone in South Africa in those pre-WWW days.

The good content just somehow spread across the globe. People copied these files on floppy disks and uploaded them to BBS's on 2400 bps modems, and after a few months they had been around the world.

The inefficient and expensive distribution was actually a powerful filter for content quality. Today any stupid disinformational shit goes viral around the world in two minutes.

Frank Mars founded the American company. His son Forrest invented Milky Way, but then eventually quarreled with his dad and was removed from the business. Forrest moved to England, founded his own company, and the Mars bar was his first product: a European version of Milky Way.

Later he inherited the original American business and merged the UK one into it.

In 1991 the market for high-end desktop software like engineering, video editing and 3D modeling tools was dominated by Unix and classic Mac. In 1999 all of those applications were on Windows NT.

Vendors like Autodesk and Avid were building for Windows first. New graphics acceleration hardware targeted PC add-on cards rather than being exclusive to a workstation vendor (SGI tried this approach with their NT box and it flopped).

In retrospect it was just commercial Unix that had lost the game, but it wasn’t obvious at the time that Linux could reclaim this market. And Mac OS X was considered by many a doomed project (after all Apple had been promising a new OS for the entire ‘90s, nobody knew how deeply the NeXT acquisition would transform the company).

So, you download a file, and it's something called an "image" which opens in Finder like you'd inserted an external thumb drive. Fine. You open the image, and inside is... Your own Applications folder? Wait, how can the file I downloaded contain all of my apps?

This kind of indirection is natural to developers and other advanced users: the file you got from the internet doesn't really know about your Applications, it's a link to a generic system location that gets resolved by Finder. But for less advanced users it's oddly circular: this virtual disk that came from the internet has my data in it. It's something that never happens with an actual thumb drive.

They kept calling themselves Romans, but they spoke, wrote, and governed in Greek.

And the Byzantine Empire shrunk greatly after the first few hundred years. Most of its life it was more like a Greek nation that sometimes managed to expand to control parts of the old empire.

Empires are pathological developments of nations. They don't tend to survive all that long.

It's weird to watch all those fans of patriarchy step right into their own trap. Didn't they get the memo that this stuff was set up to control women? Or is it just a reflection of how these self-proclaimed "alphas" secretly see their own proper place as subjugated by men higher up in the hierarchy?

The 6/6/6 dimensions seem to capture very little about what's actually important for the success of a long-term relationship. I guess that's fine, it's presumably a game for 20-year-olds.

The poem “First They Came” was written by a German pastor who enthusiastically supported Nazis at first, because after all they were fighting against communists and all the other foreign agents undermining the homeland.

America has yet to learn the same lesson, but has been on the road there for a decade now.

Action sequences are forgiving. There's lots of motion and shiny vfx to fudge things over. Rapid cuts mean each shot can be short enough that the inevitable accumulation of AI hallucinations from frame to frame doesn't get distracting. Sets can be generic: if you're generating robots attacking New York, the viewer isn't going to have time to track if the bodega on the corner is in every shot, or if the Chrysler Building switches place around town. Shots can be practically from different cities and nobody will notice.

Carrying over an actor's performance is the opposite. You want long shots and impeccable scene stability. You can't just throw some additive-blended particles on the actor's face to distract from its generation deficiencies, like you can do for the Marvel scenes.

Bytedance is a corporation looking for clout, not to help filmmakers. They're releasing a model that makes them look good, and action sequences do that.

It's a counterintuitive thing to viewers who have long been told that vfx is the most expensive kind of moviemaking. With gen AI, these somewhat convincing Marvel pastiches are trivial to produce, but a sitcom episode is utterly impossible.

It might be fun to revisit. The game was actually of Japanese origin.

The Digital Antiquarian just wrote about it the other week:

https://www.filfre.net/2026/07/the-life-and-times-of-maxis-p...

(Part of an ongoing multi-part Maxis article, SimTower is halfway down in this part 2.)

The origin story:

”As Yoot Saito would be the first to tell you, the rest of the game was really born out of his odd fascination with elevator systems.

> ’Late one night, I was waiting in my building’s lobby for an elevator. There are two cars in my building’s shaft. I pushed the button, but instead of the closest car coming to my floor, the farthest car arrived first. In my usual questioning way, I asked myself, “What happened here? How are these cars logically synchronized?” That was the beginning of SimTower.’

For the HN audience, the first part is trivially easy (getting a domain, publishing on it) but the second probably isn’t obvious.