My uncle has lost 4 Google accounts. Two to password loss, one to a fire, one to being banned for crimes against currency (having the audacity to live in several countries with different currencies)

The issue isn't the phone, it's that a __government__ is depending on an unregulated private enterprise.

You might enjoy croc and other implementations of the Magic Wormhole.

gemma4-31b-it-claude-opus-4-6-distilled-abliterated-heretic-GGUF-q4-k-m

Skim through B&H and you'll find commercial displays but also various other display formats that are sufficiently stupid.

The founder puts regular updates on his YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/RS2igvW3DIk

Shortly put, they're going through hardware startup woes but will probably make it out the other end just fine.

This is probably a niche topic on HN, but for those of us who play Visual Novels, VNDB is a massive resource for getting the setup right for older and obscure ones that require odd hardware or configurations. The early days of VNs were all on DOS/V and Sharpx68000 systems with quirky configurations. VNDB catalogs so many of them and things that are "Mostly" VNs for historical purposes.

Without it, we wouldn't have the modern wave of VNs that have become popular today (Hatoful Boyfriend, Doki Doki Literature Club, etc.) nor some of the offshoot genres that have become popular.

I must admit, this is one area I've found LLMs to be surprisingly strong. They're REALLY good at reverse engineering obscure platforms, languages, game engines; and quickly throwing together super hacky tooling.

I was able to reverse engineer the PS4 edition of "New Game!: The Challenge Stage", which was never released in English. I've now fully translated it, added proper text wrapping and additional text boxes where text would now overflow. Along the way I've fully decompiled (with byte exact recompilation) the Squirrel scripts for the entire game, built atop the game engine of a now largely defunct game studio. Prior to this I hadn't even heard of Squirrel scripting language. I had most of this done in under 24 hours.

I'm not in any way a part of the visual novel community. I just did this because I enjoyed the New Game! anime way more than a near(?) middle aged man probably ought to.

P.S. My condolences to Yorhel's friends and family.

Brings back memories of how I did much the same for the PSP spin-off VN of the GA Geijutsuka Art Design Class manga/anime (that, of course, also originated from Manga Time Kirara and also had a big focus on art), although those were pre-LLM times. It even used Squirrel scripts too!

I second the condolences, tremendous loss for the people who knew Yorhel, as well as for the VN and open source communities.

It is fascinating how some similar niche genres of games have managed to mostly ignore each other, from what I have seen.

Interactive fiction has https://ifdb.org/.

Gamebooks ("CYOA" to outsiders) have https://gamebooks.org/.

I think there is some community around branching browser text stories like (mostly) Twine games that have their own database somewhere?

And then there is always some overlap and discussions around what games to allow where, with each community gatekeeping to some degree what games are allowed in their database or not.

So, for example, I never heard about VNDB and never really crossed paths with VN players online, even if I have been around communities for IF and gamebooks since last century and the similarities are obvious.

>similar niche genres of games have managed to mostly ignore each other

That's only because they are only "similar" on the surface. It feels like saying "football, volleyball and basketball are similar" just because they are all team games played with a ball.

Isn't it the opposite, that they are mechanically the same, but differs on the surface (art style and type of stories)?

thank you for sharing this! I never heard the two website you mentioned while being very familiar with vndb. I guess there will be always another corner of the internet that you don't even know existed.

If you are curious, vndb has a guideline you can see about what can be added here: https://vndb.org/d2

I think IF games tend to be more puzzle games with some story segments. Gamebooks are much closer, but still often have proto-RPG mechanics. (I remember tracking inventory and HP for the ones I played/read through). VNs are much closer to pure story, with some tracking of earlier decision flags for callbacks later in the story.

VNs are not games. They're a kind of ebook.

But only people who are really into computers read them, so they like to use game terminology to talk about them.

(also, none of the creators of "VNs" call them "VNs".)

Some VNs have no real choices and could hardly be called games. Others are deeply branched.

By the 2010s many JRPGs such as the Hyperdimension Neptunia series and Danganronpa pretty much stole all the visual elements of visual novels and mashed them up with gameplay from other genres.

Danganronpa is a true "adventure game" (which is actually what Japanese VN developers call their VNs…). It's pretty faithful to its genre.

Phoenix Wright is the only one of those Westerners really know about.

By now the term "visual novel" got re-imported back into Japan so even Japanese creators have started using it for what they otherwise call "novel games" and VN-like "adventure games".

twine at least was reasonably popular among the interactive fiction crowd, you could view it as a bridge between the gamebook and IF genres.

This website is a remnant of something long gone: simple yet capable HTML websites that just work. I hope it will be preserved, or at least the database made public so it won’t get lost.

It is public, and more! There's even an interface allowing you to run your own queries directly against a synchronized copy: https://query.vndb.org/browse

There's a whole team behind it running, so VNDB isn't going anywhere fast.

It was directly a result of some of the choices made by Bell and plausibly Teletype.

Early switching computer systems that had user accounts at Bell also didn't echo back for passwords as some terminals were mixed-duplex, from what I've gleaned in the very odd corners of ESS systems. I suspect the idea is that the model they were working from were touchtone telephones and rotary phones, so numeric passcodes were the standard, and you heard & saw those already? Less noise on paper tapes? The possible list of options goes on and on.

Bell Labs was... Different than your average office or telco environment, I should add.

But that's a swag at best today, without knowing the people that worked on it.

> For example ReactOS won't let you contribute if you have ever seen Windows code. Because if you have never seen it, there can be no allegation that you copied it.

I've heard this called in some circles "The curse of knowledge." The same thing applies to emulator developers, especially N64 developers (and now Nintendo emulator developers in general) after the Oman Archive and later Gigaleaks. There's an informal "If you read this, you can NEVER directly contribute to the development of that emulator, ever."

This comes to a head when a relatively unknown developer starts contributing oddly specific patches to an emulator.

Ostensibly, a mix of VC funding and that they host an endpoint that lets them run the big (200+GB) models on their infrastructure rather than having to build machines with hundreds of gigs of llm-dedicated memory.

But on inference they have to compete with other inference provider that just has a homepage, a bunch of GPUs running vllm and none of the training cost. Their only real advantage are the performance optimizations that they might have implemented in their inference clusters and not made public

Qwen, at least, IIRC has some proprietary models, specifically the Max series. IIRC these have larger context windows.

Will be?

I've seen four startups make bank on precicely that.