Hacker News: tjakab

New comment by tjakab in "2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop"

tjakab — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 02:02:34 +0000

It's almost like the rush to ship new features year after year without ever pausing to fix and optimize things has taken its toll.

New comment by tjakab in "Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?"

tjakab — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 15:33:52 +0000

The same Apple that reset a large number of iCloud passwords last year with no warning or notice, and no public acknowledgement or explanation? It was determined after to only have affected legacy Apple IDs that predated iCloud, but there was never any confirmation from Apple.

New comment by tjakab in "Elon Musk to put his technical experts on the Signals leak"

tjakab — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 18:43:29 +0000

It was clearly an 1D-10T error.

New comment by tjakab in "David Lynch has died"

tjakab — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 21:47:29 +0000

Eraserhead is highly watchable, but the first time you see it, it's best to just experience it without trying to process it too much. The nuance comes through on repeat viewings.

New comment by tjakab in "LLM based agents as Dungeon Masters"

tjakab — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 18:14:35 +0000

I largely see it as the digital next step up from something like the Mythic Game Master Emulator, which is popular for solo play and things like trying out new systems.

And there's quite a lot of us that like to play but because of life commitments, getting together with a group on a regular schedule is difficult.

New comment by tjakab in "Why did Borland ignore the Macintosh market?"

tjakab — Fri, 16 Aug 2024 18:02:13 +0000

My suspicion from early in my career is it was people that came from IT who just assumed that 'MAC' was an acronym for something, like pretty much everything else they dealt with, as opposed to the shortening of the proper noun 'Macintosh.'

New comment by tjakab in "Apple Delays Work on Next Year's iPhone, Mac Software to Fix Bugs"

tjakab — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 18:42:00 +0000

Tiger was Spring of 2005, Leopard was Fall of 2007. That one was delayed several months because Apple had to divert resources to ship the first iPhone. Snow Leopard was Fall 2009, then Apple basically moved onto the yearly release cycle in Summer 2011 with Lion and moved it to Fall of every year with Mavericks in 2013.

I believe Mavericks was also when Apple stopped charging for OS upgrades.

New comment by tjakab in "How the iMac Saved Apple"

tjakab — Wed, 16 Aug 2023 19:40:55 +0000

I suspect even if the Intel transition hadn't happened, assuming the Mac survived it probably still would have been destined for Apple Silicon once the ARM platform became powerful enough.

New comment by tjakab in "How the iMac Saved Apple"

tjakab — Wed, 16 Aug 2023 19:25:29 +0000

That was the secret expansion port that some third-parties made accessories for anyway. I recall it was gone by the Rev-B model.

New comment by tjakab in "NeXT Computers"

tjakab — Mon, 08 May 2023 22:07:07 +0000

Don't forget though that NeXTSTEP was also running on workstation-class hardware and priced accordingly (~$6500), vs. Windows running on late 80s commodity PCs (probably ~$1500-$2000) with lesser specs. For that kind of cost difference NeXTSTEP had better have looked and performed better.

New comment by tjakab in "Disney says it has more streaming customers than Netflix"

tjakab — Wed, 09 Nov 2022 01:01:58 +0000

Realistically the second season of Sandman and final season of Stranger Things probably won't materialize until 2024 given how long they take to produce.

New comment by tjakab in "How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports"

tjakab — Wed, 12 Oct 2022 17:06:28 +0000

I'll throw in the 'Ghosts' series by Nine Inch Nails. These land somewhere between Eno and Aphex Twin and were basically a precursor to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's soundtrack work (some of which may also be worth a listen).

New comment by tjakab in "Businesses should dump Windows for the Linux desktop"

tjakab — Fri, 12 Aug 2022 19:38:28 +0000

Most business systems are using Intel GPUs unless there's a specific need for workstations with Nvidia or AMD discrete graphics.

New comment by tjakab in "The Eldritch Roots of Dungeons and Dragons"

tjakab — Mon, 09 Aug 2021 22:37:07 +0000

Gygax/TSR went so far as to claim that Advanced D&D was a different game from D&D to not have to pay Dave Arneson royalties on any of the releases. Arneson sued TSR multiple times and they settled out of court, granting him royalties on AD&D: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Arneson#After_TSR

New comment by tjakab in "Playdate pre-orders begin in July"

tjakab — Tue, 08 Jun 2021 19:05:17 +0000

Most likely Lua. The developer page says the SDK supports Lua and C.

New comment by tjakab in "Ask HN: How do I learn drawing?"

tjakab — Fri, 05 Mar 2021 22:01:30 +0000

It's been decades since I used it in a practical way, but "How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way" - https://www.amazon.com/How-Draw-Comics-Marvel-Way/dp/0671530... is a surprisingly great tutorial for learning. You can ignore the bits on dynamic drawing that are more geared for comics, but it will give you a lot of foundational knowledge of composition and observing. The chapter on perspective is still one of the best writings on the subject I've ever seen. Pair it with a good life drawing book.

New comment by tjakab in "Dungeon Magazine"

tjakab — Thu, 14 Jan 2021 19:10:48 +0000

I never tried AD&D to 4th edition, but to 5th edition you can pretty much just do it on the fly. 5e characters are more powerful than their 1e/2e counterparts, so you'll want to increase HD and damage for monsters or just swap in the equivalent from the 5e Monster Manual. You also won't get direct indicators for skill checks or DCs, but those are usually simple enough to figure out.

New comment by tjakab in "DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use"

tjakab — Fri, 06 Mar 2020 15:54:54 +0000

I switched over from Google to DDG back in 2013 and never looked back. I use it heavily on a day to day basis ranging from obscure java error messages for my job to just general searches and once in a great while I have to throw a !g in front of the search, but that's really it.

New comment by tjakab in "Apple store workers should be paid for time waiting to be searched, court rules"

tjakab — Fri, 14 Feb 2020 03:04:52 +0000

Anything worth over $500 is going to automatically require a signature on delivery, so little chance it’ll just get tossed off the truck.

New comment by tjakab in "Dark Mode vs. Light Mode"

tjakab — Wed, 05 Feb 2020 15:32:25 +0000

There's the HN Special add-on for Firefox and Chrome. It lets you set a dark style or also use an alternate stylesheet for HN.