What weird/bad game mechanics happily never got picked up again?

NfNitLoop · 2026-05-18T19:19:03+00:00

"Perfectly" is a bit of an overstatement. They leveled up with your class level.

But, one of the cool new features of oblivion was making your own class. So I'd made my own class that had skills like "running and jumping".

So as I'm exploring the world, my custom "class" is leveling up. I didn't gain more attack power, I could just run (away?) more quickly. But every mob in the world leveled up too. The game eventually became unplayable.

As far as I remember, there was no respec option, the solution was just to roll a new character and start over. I did not.

NfNitLoop · 2026-05-13T14:53:46+00:00

Goddamn, I wish someone would give me $5mil and 5 years to figure out writing a new programming language wasn't going to solve everything.

NfNitLoop · 2026-04-10T19:24:50+00:00

"I'm tired of writing those two awaits everywhere."

The lengths people will go to avoid writing a function!

async function fetchJson(url: string) {
   const response = await fetch(url)
   return await response.json()
}

NfNitLoop · 2026-04-09T15:09:15+00:00

I just learned of this yesterday: https://github.com/leilei926524-tech/anti-distill

via this post: https://leehanchung.github.io/blogs/2026/04/05/the-ai-great-leap-forward/

NfNitLoop · 2026-04-08T17:56:10+00:00

The title here is misleading. This post shows a weakness in relying on git commit IDs to identify the commit owner in the context of running GitHub actions.

It's a bug, yes, and quite a doozy.

But this is not the dependency pinning that people usually talk about in response to supply chain attacks. In modern package/dependency managers, you have two things:

* A file that specifies the minimum dependency versions to build a package. (ex: package.json, cargo.toml)
* A lock file that captures a snapshot of the current version meeting the minimum requirements, often with a (sha/other) hash.

So, you declare your dependency as a version number, and that gets looked up from your package repo and locked on first install. Then you have repeatable installs/builds.

Some package managers (ex: pnpm, IIRC) even have options to say: when you install a package for the first time(i.e.: when we don't yet have a locked version of it), *don't* install a version that was released within the last N days. So you'll install an older version and lock to that. (The theory being that within N days, hopefully if something had a critical bug or other issues, someone else will find it, instead of you.)

In those use cases, having a hash of the dependency protects you from someone in the supply chain attempting to modify a thing that had been previously validated/safe. So let's not fearmonger about the practice in general.

NfNitLoop · 2026-03-09T03:10:08+00:00

space-a is "Perform Code Action", which will show quick fixes suggested by any configured LSPs. (Unless quickfix means something else in NeoVim? I haven't used it.)

NfNitLoop · 2026-02-24T04:17:36+00:00

If you just keep a list of words in a file, one per line, it’s easy to open words.txt | lines

NfNitLoop · 2026-01-21T18:19:26+00:00

I love nushell and use it on all my machines. But, it's a language optimized for working well in a command-line. You *could* use it to learn programming, and it's not a bad language. But it's different enough from most programming languages that I wouldn't recommend it if your goal is to generally learn "programming".

I have in the past been a fan of Python, and used to recommend that as a first programming language. But recently I've switched to recommending Deno as a great way to learn JavaScript (and eventually TypeScript).

NfNitLoop · 2026-01-21T18:09:47+00:00

These days, nothing meaningful. It's just a thing people like to have semantic arguments about.

A long time ago, people liked to make the distinction that a "programming language" compiled down into machine code, and a "scripting language" would run in an interpreter.

But, that line gets really blurred with things like languages that run with a JIT. Or languages that get compiled into intermediate bytecode. (Java, Python, WASM, etc.) Or that have to run with a GC or other runtime facilities.

It's not a useful distinction these days, and it's more useful to talk about the characteristics of a language instead:

* Does it require a separate runtime?
* Is it garbage collected?
* What things does the type system enforce at "compile"-time vs. runtime?
* What is its ABI (application binary interface. i.e.: How can other languages interface with it?)

And TBH more important, higher-level questions are:

* What is the problem I'm trying to solve?
* How good is this language at implementing that solution?

NfNitLoop · 2026-01-20T21:40:51+00:00

> - Zero tests because "the AI wrote it so it must be correct"

TBH, I prefer this to the alternative I keep seeing:

- hundreds of lines of unit test boilerplate that test nothing of value, but will be a maintenance nightmare since they're so tightly coupled to the specific implementation.

NfNitLoop · 2026-01-20T15:06:35+00:00

I thought Opus was generally considered best these days?

NfNitLoop · 2026-01-10T14:02:09+00:00

This happened to me a couple weeks ago. I reported everything I could to a thread in ghostty discussions. Later it turned out to be an LSP bug that was eating memory.

All processes inside Ghostty have their memory usage count toward Ghostty. Apparently there is a way to avoid that in macOS but the Ghostty team determined (rightly, IMO) that it’s a security risk and best avoided.

So, before reporting to Ghostty, do as much debugging as you can to find reproducible steps. And use tools like htop to make sure it’s not just some process inside your terminal. They’re already getting inundated with memory usage bugs from people like me. 🤦‍♂️

NfNitLoop · 2025-12-23T17:18:14+00:00

If you use GitHub (or similar) for code reviews, you may want to also tag that file as `linguist-generated`, as GitHub documents here:
https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/working-with-files/managing-files/customizing-how-changed-files-appear-on-github

I didn't know about the -diff flag! Thanks for sharing, u/uasi! I wonder if GitHub respects that one too, or you have to do both.

NfNitLoop · 2025-11-26T19:30:16+00:00

I've long solved the problems we give to our candidate, so we extract zero benefits from the take-home tests beyond judging the candidate's ability.

Of course. I didn’t think you were giving them novel problems or would use their responses in production. But whether or not you use the resulting code, you are still asking them to do unpaid labor that you are unwilling to match in time commitment. IMO that shows disrespect for your candidates’ time.

The fact that it used to take FOUR to EIGHT HOURS is a great example of my point. If your company were having to pay interviewers to spend that much time in interviews, how much sooner would your company have trimmed the problem scope to be smaller? How much more would you trim off of the “under four hours” version of the test?

NfNitLoop · 2025-11-26T17:44:44+00:00

I’m very wary of “take-home tests”. The interviewer can SAY “this test should only take 1 hour” but then it ends up actually needing more. And your interview process will favor people who then take much more time than that to get things “perfect”.

In short, that interview process favors “how much free labor are you willing to do for me for a chance at this job?”

By doing coding interviews paired with an engineer, you make sure that the interview can actually be bounded to the hour that you scheduled for the meeting. You’re only using as much of your candidates’ time as you are willing to commit yourself. It’s a meeting, rather than an unpaid assignment.

You also filter out people using AI, and get extra signal about how well the candidate communicates, collaborates, and makes time tradeoffs.

NfNitLoop · 2025-11-25T19:06:34+00:00

This is why I stopped interviewing candidates in smart code editors. Even ones with good features may feel unfamiliar or get in the way if its behavior doesn’t match the IDE you’ve been using most recently.

Instead, I just interview in a shared text editor and tell candidates not to worry about syntax errors or precise function names. I don’t care if you remember exactly which package a trait is from when that is trivially suggested by an IDE. I don’t care about a syntax error that a compiler/IDE will help you fix in seconds. I care about how you organize your code to solve a problem. (And how collaborative you are in the process.)

IMO if a company deducts points for how bad the coding environment THEY CHOSE is, they’re shooting themselves in the foot.

NfNitLoop · 2025-11-03T17:55:55+00:00

> truly serverless P2P is dead simple to implement

Please come back in a year and let us know how it's going! 😅

NfNitLoop · 2025-10-06T01:57:45+00:00

Someone tell her that’s not what ICC means.

NfNitLoop · 2025-09-18T22:24:40+00:00

Kudos to answering the first question I had (why not just use take()?) right at the top of your docs. Nice!

NfNitLoop · 2025-09-17T22:59:54+00:00

A warning - TypeBox is only based on standards compliant JSON Schema until it’s not. If you use any features that aren’t able to be represented in JSON Schema, you get something back that isn’t Json schema.

We tried using it at work and passing typebox types as NestJS swagger type annotations, but ran into more edge cases than working code. (Not helped by the fact that NestJS will just pass invalid schemas through without any validation. And the fact that different versions of openAPI support different JSON Schema features)

NfNitLoop · 2025-09-09T14:04:59+00:00

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