There is another old site ("since September 23, 1996"), my second favorite maze site, that has some articles about things like that. Like on the page below ("Tips on how to create difficult and fun Mazes, and how to solve and analyze them").
I think there is a difference if you want to make it only expensive to solve using popular maze solver algorithms, vs to make it difficult for a human to solve. Many of the recommendations on that page are for how to do things that can make a maze more difficult for humans to solve, but will not always matter to an algorithm that just mechanically tries solutions in some order.
It is common in traditional roguelikes to support vi keys as an alternative to arrow keys. I use that all the time when playing Brogue. Have a great vi keys muscle memory now thanks to that, but I use Emacs and only rarely vi, so it's not doing me much good.
There are still many smaller publishers, and individual self-publishers, keeping small niches of miniatures gaming alive and well completely outside of the reach of GW or other big companies. I follow many old blogs and some forums where people discuss miniatures games and the mentions of GW or Warhammer are so rare I can forget they exist. Depends on what internet bubble you happen to live in of course.
They also aggressively went after fan-made variants and other content posted online, unlike almost any other miniatures/boardgame publisher. Lot of (ex-)fans upset about that.
I think that has in particular bothered older players, as traditionally, pre-GW, miniatures gaming was all very DIY, dominated by amateurs. GW turning it into big business and throwing lawyers around did not make many friends from that hobby old guard. There are still niches of the hobby where GW are not very popular, or just never talked about.
I thought about this a lot recently and decided that the small, mostly complete, project I work on now, if I release it (I probably will), I will just post an archive somewhere with the source code, like in old days.
I kind of do that already with my most recent project, developing it in my local fossil repo and each release I have a script that copies it to a local git-repo, tags it, and pushes it to GitHub. So the GitHub history just has a series of release commits.
But the project is still open for issues and PRs. Can only be disabled on paid accounts, right? Never had anyone try yet. I had feedback through other channels, just not on GitHub, so maybe explicitly keeping all development offline has had the intended effect? I get a trickle of issues and PRs for my other repos where development is out in the open with every commit pushed to GitHub.
But if it was discovered by drive-by LLM contributors I would still have annoying extra work, for no obvious benefit compared to just sharing archives. I do not think anyone (out of at least dozens) discovering any of my repos do that on GitHub, but from seeing my posts elsewhere.
It's not like no one can fork a source code archive, even if it is like 3-4 git-commands to run instead of just a button to click.
The problem is building (operating) systems that are orders of magnitude more complex than what are possible to fully understand or reason about. I don't think the top developers in the world could avoid catastrophic errors to sometimes creep into systems of that size and complexity.
Not defending Microsoft specifically, as I moved on from their operating systems to Linux 30 years ago, but I just do not see what they could hope to do. Amount of interactions to worry about will grow at least quadratic with the size of a system and there is just no way to expect human (or LLM) developers to keep up with that beyond some (very small) upper limit of system size. No matter how good the developers are and what programming languages or tools they use the result will be a house of cards of flaky components interacting in ways no one can fully predict.
While obviously very difficult, making Windows into a much more cohesive and bug free experience isn't impossible. Windows used to be a lot more cohesive, and I have no doubt it's possible to go back to that while also keeping the stuff that's good. The problem with that is that it requires walking back a lot of decisions which were made by people higher up the chain than those actually making the changes, and it's hard to walk back bad decisions by people high up the chain.
Microsoft also at least used to be capable of fixing bugs in Windows pretty well. XP Service Pack 2 consisted of mostly just that, in order to make a much more stable OS. And it worked quite well. But that was back in the day when Microsoft had a proper QA department and actually gave a shit about the user experience.
> but I just do not see what they could hope to do.
Cut scope. Would you rather have a laptop that sleeps when you close the lid, or one that occasionally does for a bit but not if a thousand different types of events occur, some valid some random? Because right now sleep may as well not exist for a huge number of users.
Show context-based ads instead of spying on people would be a good start. That should be the only form of legal advertising. It is for sure the only form of potentially ethical advertising.
I also pay to get past paywalls when a site has content I want to read, rather than try to sneak past using some dodgy mirror.
I guess chat-ability would require some chat-like data, so would that mean first coming up with a way to extract chat-like dialogue from the era and then use that to fine-tune the model?
I would not want to use fossil at work and I do not know if it could handle projects of that size. Would require manyears of rewriting tools that would not be realistic.
For my hobby projects I have used fossil for several years. It works great and I do not miss anything from git. It's simpler and just nicer to use.
If nothing else I felt like using the same version control system for over 10 years was getting boring. Needed something new to play with. See things from a new perspective. Like playing with a new programming language now and then, even when it is something I do not expect to get much real use out of.
https://www.bttr-software.de/products/vp386/
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