Viewing profile — DamnInteresting

The original Shadow Warrior used the same engine as Duke3D, and when 3DRealms hired a company to build an add-on campaign for Shadow Warrior, that company reached out to me to desi…

I have a short list of web-based games I play daily (mostly word games), and I'm looking to add a few more that scratch that particular itch for me. Does anyone have any recommenda…

> Those were the for real LAN party days which I'll never get back I still remember hours-long marathons of Doom2 deathmatch at my cousin's Novell cubicle farm after office hours, …

Common citizens aren't the only ones who prefer not to live near these unsightly noise-and-pollution centers. Look at the satellite views around tech oligarchs' homes, and you won'…

> I suspect llms are too cheap right now but will raise their prices to a point where only big companies will be able to afford subscriptions to use them. "A.I." == "Artificially I…

Hey thanks! I hope the world still has an appetite for original human-generated writing, I'd love to be able to keep doing it. I have hundreds of fascinating true stories still in …

Almost 20 years ago I did some calculations for a theoretical spacecraft traveling away from Earth with an Arecibo-sized receiver pointed toward home[1]. I found that omnidirection…

Agreed. As someone who frequently rearranges the structure and order of sentences as I go, I don't even know how to attempt writing by hand. It would be a complete mess. I expect t…

Almost. The intended use is for Ctrl-F to initiate an on-page search, and Ctrl-G to highlight the next match during a search-in-progress. If you press Ctrl-G when there isn't a sea…

I did a similar thing a few years ago, I deleted reddit, social media, and other time-wasters from my phone, and now I keep a queue of books in an e-reader app. When I have a few i…

I don't like generative AI/LLMs. They strip the enjoyable parts out of the work and leave only the tedium, and they cannot be relied upon. Never mind that they're essentially large…

Well, our unwillingness to be beholden to sponsors is just part of the reason we avoid advertising, but it's not an empty concern. We've done stories that big brands wouldn't like …

> DI basically predates blog spam doesn’t it? Blog spam origins are murky at best, but I don't recall it being a prevalent thing until nearer to 2010. But of course recollection is…

It's true that some kind of monetization change was inevitable, but I wished at the time they had executed differently. I just wanted fans who wished to see our posts to see our po…

There are a few considerations. One is that the 'Give a Damn' system only aims to collect about $1,800/month, an approximation of our monthly expenses (not just hosting, but author…

Ah, you must mean the one embedded in this article: https://www.damninteresting.com/the-martian-express/ Originally, in 2008, it was 100% Javascript, but a few years later I update…

> I think moving to Substack (retain domain) would be a much stronger way to build in the long term Hmm, the danger there is that one is putting a lot of one's eggs into a fickle b…

> I thought you were recycling other folks / were blogspam. It's understandable that you thought so, though the opposite is usually the case. There are a lot of creators who poach …

> 99PI, Stuff You Should Know, RadioLab It's funny you mention those three in particular. We've collaborated with Stuff You Should Know several times, and we almost worked with bot…

Heavens to Betsy. My server alerted me that traffic was far exceeding a median Thursday. For the record, I am a fairly active user on HN, but I was not responsible for sharing this…

One thing you can do is store a word profile in your database, which is a string of all of the letters in the word in alphabetical order. So the word profile for 'apple' is 'aelpp'…

I've built a some word games over the years (e.g., wordwhile.com, omiword.com), and one thing I've discovered is that players find it very unsatisfying when they enter a real, vali…

As a non-fiction author, I find myself reading a lot of non-leisure material for research--books, old newspapers, and that sort of thing. A few years ago I noticed that my leisure …