That's is, since only recently, no longer strictly true: the age-old libfossil recently got client sync support, so is now (aside from _serving_ repos) essentially a standalone impl (its own developer still uses fossil(1) stash, patch, and diff -tk features, but otherwise uses libfossil's counterparts).

Also, Dan Mestas has <https://github.com/danmestas/go-libfossil>, a Go library for working and fossil, and he is also working on <https://zeitforge.app/>, a clean-room impl. of fossil (whereas libfossil is largely ported directly from fossil(1)) which even goes so far as to _not_ use an sqlite database for its file storage.

Dan Mestas and Dan Shearer are working on finalizing RFCs for fossil's sync protocol and artifact format, and zeitforge is created by carefully managing LLMs which are reading that draft (but not the source code of libfossil or fossil).

Then you have proven that you are human.

> Fossil has no way to fix it, by design,

As an 18-year-long contributor to fossil i can assure you that this is absolutely not true. Fossil can amend any checkin and it can move checkins to other branches. Go to sqlite.org/src/timeline?r=mistake to see many examples of where human failing has been both demonstrated and accounted for without breaking anything.

Funnily enough, that's collectively fossil's developers' least-favorite part. We make no secret about not liking the ticket system, and we only use it when we need to record a certain ticket for posterity's sake. Aside from that, we use the forum for all ticket-like traffic.

> Since the whole tracker is just a thin front on sqlite ...

Except that it's not: <https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/fossil-is-not-rela...>

Emacs. Uninterrupted since the 1990s.

That _is_ the refactoring tool in my IDE (emacs). i demonstrated replacing _all_of them at once, not replacing them each by hand.

> ... because it’s the right thing to do and doing it without the tool confers no benefit and is prone to error.

There was nothing in my post done "without the tool." Shell/find/perl _is_ the tool for C refactoring, and has been for decades.

It's long been my experience that that only works with high-level languages (specifically, those with bytecode), not C (especially once symbols are generated from macros). (OTOH, i've not touched an IDE in well more than 10 years.)

Also, it's long been my experience that any half-decent IDE is still a pale shadow of Emacs.

:-?

My "10+ years" was not referring to any specific milestone. It was referring to the general flow of time. It's been 10 years since 2016, twenty since 2006, and more than 40 since writing my first program. Lots has changed every 10 years in that period, both in my skills and the environments i program in, but shell/emacs/makefile remains a staple of that process.

Similar here: CDs and DVDs burned from 2000-2006 or so were, without exception, illegible by 2015. It's sickening.

If you mean using a text editor, a shell, and a makefile, then you're not alone by any stretch of the imagination.

If you mean your skills stagnated 10+ years ago and have not advanced since then, then... yeah, you might be the only one ;).

   $ find . -name '*.c' -exec perl -i -pe 's/\btheOldName\b/theNewName/g' \{} \;

FWIW, it's long been my experience that floppies (like CDs and DVDs) have a half-life and they degrade quickly upon reaching it. You'd have been lucky to be able to recover those in 2001. Now? If at all, only high-end forensic tools could recover them.

And then google whether the domain is associated with phishing attempts. i've been targeted several times recently by folks with "official" email addresses but whose domains are (per google) strongly associated with phishing.

Its UI is intended specifically for mobile devices, especially phones - it looks pretty wonky on a full-sized desktop window (and that's okay because that's not where it's intended to be used).

This app was specifically written for use with Paperback but it should be usable with just about any English-language word-spelling/solving game. It supports wildcards and Paperback's multi-letter-cards.

It's fast. Had i not seen with my own eyes that it can scan 150k English words in about 2ms in JS, i'd have been hesitant to believe it. Speaking of...

This app was hand-written. The underlying dictionary structures and algorithms (in both C and JS) were heavily LLM-assisted but have overwhelmingly more human-written code than LLM code. The underlying algorithms, well-documented anagram-solving solutions, were unknown to me until an LLM suggested them for this purpose. The LLM sketched them out and the human filled them in. A separate LLM context created the "typewriter button" CSS styling upon request. What remains was hand-coded in emacs.

The dictionary supports German[^2], but my current German dictionary is just so huge (685k words, 38MB) that i cannot in good conscience host it on my web server or feed it to a JS engine. Once i've got a better-curated list there will be an option to load it in German. (My German copy of Paperback arrived a few days ago, providing the motivation for that support.)

Happy Spelling!

[^1]: <https://wanderinghorse.net/gaming/paperback/>

[^2]: In principle it supports any language which can fit into ISO-8859-1/Latin-1 encoding and which requires only 6 or fewer letters beyond A..Z, but i've no motivation to add any beyond English and German. The 26+6 limit comes from what makes this dictionary performant: it builds masks of which letters a word contains in order to very quickly rule out definite negatives, and we've only got 32 bits in that mask.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49272369

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

My C89 CSS minifier was recently broken down into a separate JavaScript/JSON minifier. It's trivial to embed in C, "should" build fine in WASM (that's untested, though), and is pretty small: the whole combined library is about 67kb, or about 34kb for just the JS parts (much of which is docs).

It minifies only spaces, not symbols, and does not offer any options for _not_ minifying (e.g. adding newlines every so often for the sake of tools which treat extremely-long-lined files as binaries) except that by default it retains the first comment in the input if it's the first non-whitespace content (those are typically license/attribution blocks) but it can be told to optionally strip those too.

LLM disclaimer: the 100% hand-written CSS minifier was given to an LLM which, tasked with creating a JS minifier with the same interface, created the new variant in about 20 seconds. That code was later hand-refactored to consolidate parts common to the two minifiers (all of which were hand-written) but the JS-specific pieces are otherwise 100% LLM-generated.

Happy minifying!

[^1]: To clarify: at least a few projects' source code has been rejected by Linux package maintainers because the "do no evil" clause is considered antithetical to those distributions' ideals of freedom. Fair enough.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49067477

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Tim Fowers, creator and publisher of the game, has given me permission to post my homemade electronic copy of the game (initially built so that i could print-and-play a copy with "US-Mini" size cards), and recently sent me (much to my surprise) the publisher's official graphical assets and an invitation to use them in this little side-project(!!!).

The version housed at that link has a known bug or two (there's one too many 7-cent W's, for one thing) but it's otherwise believed to be usable for its intended purpose: allowing an experienced Paperback player to sit and play solo mode without the app interfering rules- or dictionary-wise. (My only real fuss about their official app is the locked dictionary. It does not allow the word "pawn", nor a wide range of other perfectly viable words. Secondarily, i'd like to be able to customize the game more and remove all of those annoying "Q" cards (who buys "Q" cards?!?!?).)

Currently resetting the game requires reloading the page, which generates a ready-to-run game setup. See the top of that page for URL arguments which change various options (if you want huge "US Standard"-sized cards on a 32-inch 4k screen, pass the "big" URL option). UI widgets for doing that are on the near-term TODO list. It does not currently support saving/loading, but that's underway (and very closely tied to the game state reset).

It's in active development and i'm particularly interested in squeezing the UI down to fit more comfortably on a 10-inch table (where it's usable but a tiny bit fidgety due to scrolling). It's way, way too big for phones, though.

This is part of a larger project consolidating 6 or 8 years' worth of disparate card-generation tools for tabletop games, and this app is the first "end user" app (as opposed to maintainer apps) written for that toolkit. It may well be the only app i've written, in 30-odd years, which is not entirely dog-ugly.

Happy Spelling!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48878745

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

> "Late last night, a trespasser breached airport security at Denver Int’l Airport, deliberately scaled a perimeter fence, and ran out onto a runway," Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a statement

That it should in some way affect my mental health has never once occurred to me. If anything, i assume that living on one's body's own natural schedule would be optimal in terms of related effects on mental health.

> How do you deal with times day and night are flipped?

When there's not something pressing me into a schedule, e.g. a job, i kind of "circle around" to a conventional schedule every few weeks. All things considered, i prefer the "swapped" times because it's quieter at night. e.g. less traffic driving by, fewer neighbors making various noises, and no DHL/UPS/DPD deliveries for the neighbors being dropped off here because the neighbors aren't home (whereas i am almost always at home and both the neighbors and the local delivery folks know it).

i'm a retiree so, with the exception of shopping and rare appointments, the night/day or weekend/weekend[^1] are not generally distinctions which affect me, and it's never bothered me in the slightest to not have a fixed schedule. On the contrary, a fixed schedule somewhat bums me out long-term, presumably because it does not match my biological clock.

> How does it affect your social life?

My social life is (by preference and choice) comprised solely of (A) my FOSS work, and there's no clock associated with any of that, and (B) my wife. Both my and my wife's biological families are all on another continent, so we've no family obligations which require physical presence. When i'm not FOSS'ing, we play a lot of board games.

[^1]: stores are closed on Sundays and all public holidays in Germany. More than once i've gone to the store, only to discover it's closed due to a holiday i've overlooked (like, most recently, May 1st).

Not everybody has a schedule. Mine is essentially "eat when hungry, sleep when tired", and my sleep patterns more closely follow a 26-hour day than a 24-hour day.

- "mobile app" means "its web interface"

- "backed up" means to wherever you upload/sync your backups to

- No automagic table calculation support.