I'm amazed to see Tibia show up on HN of all places! And a whole 22 years after I first installed the game on one of our high school computers.
This game was the catalyst to my career as an IT professional. I developed a tool back in 2003 or so that calculated experience and skill gains, as my first proper project in Visual Basic. It ended up as a mainstay in the playerbase for a long time, which meant I had to deal with release management and server capacity as a complete greenhorn.
Later, when I quit the game, I simply released the codebase on the forums, hoping for some other idealistic soul to take over. Naturally, that went the exact way you'd expect: People embedded keyloggers and released their own version of it, demolishing all the trust I'd built over the years.
Another aspect of this game worth noting: The community, and how the gameplay has changed over the years.
In the "olden times", the main focus of the game was the social aspect. There were limited hunting grounds, so people spent their time hanging around and talking, building houses out of boxes and parcels, coming up with games.
I recently picked the game back up - now everything feels like it's hyper-optimized for grinding, and that old social aspect feels gone.
I find it fascinating - though also a bit sad.
> The community, and how the gameplay has changed over the years. In the "olden times", the main focus of the game was the social aspect. There were limited hunting grounds, so people spent their time hanging around and talking, building houses out of boxes and parcels, coming up with games. I recently picked the game back up - now everything feels like it's hyper-optimized for grinding, and that old social aspect feels gone. I find it fascinating - though also a bit sad.
Seems like a good analogy to human society and the results of late-stage-capitalism.
Well yeah, it did - I don't remember quite what, but I think it showed the experience rate or something like that.
(there was also a hidden feature that showed your login/password in the window title for a short while - I got access to the dll for TibiaGG, which taught me a bit about memory access. This was only done as a prank though, and never for any nefarious purposes)
The software was called Tomes of Knowledge, if that rings any bells :)
IIRC incarceration was a method started by christian monks, and the intention was that the incarcerated would use the time to reflect and contemplate his crimes - a form of rehabilitation.
As you say, that certainly isn't what's happening today. Instead it gives criminals a broader network, and my impression is that it works sort of like a "crime school".
But the US method of privatizing and profiteering off of imprisonment surely must skew the incentives as well.
Prison in the past wasn't very long term without any slavery - with agricultural scale having people not doing any work wasn't affordable. Hold until the judge gets there or they decide what to do with them unless they are say nobility elite wealthy or otherwise able to justify the expense (ransom or a hostage).
Egypt would be in a good situation for that given seasonality and nile flooding giving better yields.
> The Bible records Joseph as being put in prison in Egypt c.1500 BCE.
Newer evidence strongly suggests the exodus took place during Egypt’s Middle Kingdom (c. 1450), dating Joseph’s deportation and rise to power at roughly 1900 BCE.
Truffles are less potent than mushrooms, so you need to more or less double the dosage. I would think that the 15 grams of truffles then would be equivalent to about 7-8 grams of dried mushrooms. Since it was ingested throughout the day, I would assume that's dosages equivalent to 1-3 grams spread out through the day.
> I would think that the 15 grams of truffles then would be equivalent to about 7-8 grams of dried mushrooms
Spread throughout the day that would be reasonable for a facilitated retreat, yes. Also depends on the variety, some strains can be extremely powerful, to the point that 3.5 grams is more than enough.
But we do see the same problem in several European cities. For instance there's been some debate about how nurses can't really afford to live in Oslo anymore due to the discrepancy between income and rent.
And there I think lies the problem. Cities have an economy of scale that rural areas can't match. In my opinion, living in a city should be cheaper. But land is finite and poorly utilized at the benefit of landowners.
Europe as a whole has a large mitigating factor in that there is really good public infrastructure buses and trains there. Sure, an hour commute a day isn't preferable but if you can spend it reading or watching netflix it impacts your life a lot less negatively than having to drive a car the whole time.
So no, the baristas, janitors, etc of London can't live in London. But at least most of their commutes aren't as terrible as the majority of US workers driving individual cars over great distances every day to go to work.
Anecdata, but I'm a typical lurker. If I don't have something to contribute to a discussion, I stay silent. I think that goes for a lot of people.
There's also the commitment angle - if you engage in a discussion, you're typically committed to follow up on the responses you get. That can be more of a time/attention commitment than people are interested in, and with the growing toxicity of online discourse a lot of people don't want to put themselves out there to begin with.
There's also your attention surface. I typically read threads/posts from a variety of communities, but might prefer to reply only on some, and lurk on the others. I'm sure this is true for a lot of people, from anecdotes I've heard.
Yep. If it's about programming, game design, board games, video games, writing, I'll feel confident I have something to say and/or want to contribute. But I also read discussion about music composition, hiking, art, diy, history, philosophy, etc, and I would almost never post in those subjects (at least not at this point in time), as those aren't my focus, just other subjects I'm curious about.
"Commitment" to a discussion is optional. It's perfectly reasonable to give your point of view, and come back a few days later to see if there were any interesting replies.
Depends on the forum. HN emphasises that, by not notifying users that they had replies. Reddit on the other hand colours your mailbox in red so you're aware of replies without actively seeking them.
I don't know which foster the best quality discussions, but I feel the HN way is a bit impersonal.
A trick I finally hit on for Reddit a couple of years ago was that when I start feeling a discussion does not feel fun or interesting anymore, I look away while I click on the inbox icon.
When I don't see the replies, they're easy to ignore.
At some point (I have no idea when), Reddit also added a "disable inbox replies" button to comments, so that you can prevent notifications on a comment by comment basis.
I have no idea. Perhaps they want to avoid discussions form derailing? Reddit routinely has long sub-threads, but they're hidden behind a link by default.
It still does occur though. A while ago I bought an Asus mini-pc to be used as a media server, only to be stumped by issues with the Realtek drivers. Apparently they're no longer available after kernel version 4.15.
From what you're saying, I guess those devices just aren't that common anymore?
It's about time this became a public discussion. Websites have become so horribly bloated, while most discussions seem to revolve around whether ads are acceptable or not.
To be fair, ads are the reason websites are bloated. I don't mind websites loading 50 MB if I'm in awe of the amazing multimedia presentation it's giving me. 50 MB of ads just... isn't.
That's not always true. Check out the new GMail, my new corporate account has no ads but it still weighs in at 25MB (well 28MB now - still asyncing stuff!) for the inbox.
In this case, the largest resources are Javascript and CSS (yes 1.2MB CSS files!). The weird thing is that it appears to be making requests with different cache-busting strings and getting resources that are the same size.
(32MB now, I haven't done anything on it since starting this post)
There's been plenty of public discussion, albeit in the tech community [1]. It's a hard issue to sell to people outside because most people don't care if a website is downloading 1mb or 100mb.
