Named CODEX_HOME profiles and ChatGPT Desktop windows with separate local state, without copying tokens - Ducksss/codex-profiles

Four billion phones ask one text file what time it is. One lecturer keeps it in his spare time. We counted the rest.

191 animated ascii pieces for web pages, in TypeScript with no dependencies: for React, Next.js, Astro, or one HTML tag. MIT licensed.

###### There was an article on GameTyrant that was cobbled together from anecdotes out of an Ars Technica video that Richard Garriott did, which gave some somewhat erroneous explanations for how some things in UO went down, particularly why the dynamic ecology resource system didn’t work out. I posted this to Hacker News to correct the record. I was the original lead designer on Ultima Online and the key designer of this system. A few notes, because this article has MANY inaccuracies. 1. Ultima Online wasn’t even in development for three years total. An early prototype was February to September 1995, done by Rick Delashmit. Starting late August and early September 1995, the core team showed up. We showed the game at E3 in spring of 1996 in alpha form. We showed it in beta form at E3 in the spring of 1997. And we launched on Sept 26th, 1997. The ecology was in the alpha test, and was removed during the beta after being rewritten by an engineer who didn’t really like or understand it. 2. “Not many players know about” this is false. The strategy guide published simultaneously with the game even lists all the resource values for how much meat, hide, feathers, whatever, each creature represented. All of those statistics remained in the game and still are there to this day twenty years later. What was disabled was the AI. The values are still used by crafting, harvesting, and lots of other systems in the game. 3. Said AI is exhaustively documented on my website here: https://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/03/uos-resource-system/ (first article, there is a sidebar with links to the follow-ons) and also collected in my recent book POSTMORTEMS, which has a huge pile of historical info on Ultima Online as well as Star Wars Galaxies and other games I’ve worked on. 4. The reason the AI was disabled had nothing to do with why the ecology collapsed. The AI was disabled because of the cost of doing radial searches followed by pathfinding. “The way players fit into this equation was that the they would embark on quests to kill the carnivorous animals and the pelts that they gained from those quests would be worth more than those gained from the herbivores” doesn’t make any sense. 🙂 5. The ecology collapsed for a different reason: we had a closed economy loop at first, where everything was spawned from a fixed resource pool. It fell victim to player hoarding: when players killed sheep, they then made zillions of shirts from the wool to grind crafting advancement. Then they hoarded them or sold them very slowly. The result was the central bank ran out of wool, and then couldn’t spawn more sheep. This is documented in one of the earliest detailed analyses of MMO economies, Zach Simpson’s “In-Game Economics of Ultima Online,” a very influential piece which led to the widespread use of the term “faucet-drain economy” in online game design. See https://web.archive.org/web/20020730225856/https://www.mine-… 6. “This problem is also what spawned multiple instances of servers (or as they called them, “shards”) that people know and recognize from most MMOs today.” This is not why we ended up with shards, either. UO was originally designed for a concurrency around 250, much like Meridian 59 and other MUD heirs of the day. Its original lifetime forecast was only 30000 or so units, but we knew from early on we’d need multiple servers, even at that population count. Meridian 59 launched with a whole bunch of them, for example. After we got 50000 tester sign-ups, we were asked to hugely increase server size, which led to Rick inventing a server boundary mirroring technology we called “multiserver,” which allowed the map load to be shared across clusters of machines. The entire game was then rearchitected for that in between 1996 and 1997. The term shards came from the fiction of earlier Ultimas. 7. “At the time when 3D graphics cards were new” — they were nonexistent when we started. 8. The source for the article is a more accurate video at Ars Technica, which has war stories from Richard Garriott. But Richard’s memory is, alas, faulty on some of these finer details. 9. There are some great Quora answers on the tech stack for the game and whatnot which have been on HN before, but if you’re interested, you may want to check them out. I will say, it’s awesome and flattering and super cool that so many people still harbor so much affection and so many memories from this game. I was around 25 when I was leading design on it, and the early days when we were doing the impossible are still some of the fondest memories of my career. For lots more war stories, do check out either the book, my site, or this postmortem presented at GDC for the game’s 20th anniversary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnnsDi7Sxq0 ### Share this post: * Share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook * Share on Bluesky (Opens in new window) Bluesky * Share on X (Opens in new window) X * Share on Mastodon (Opens in new window) Mastodon * Share on Threads (Opens in new window) Threads * Share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit * Share on Tumblr (Opens in new window) Tumblr * Share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn * Share on Pinterest (Opens in new window) Pinterest * Share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window) WhatsApp * Print (Opens in new window) Print * Email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email *

Reaching mastery has no clearly defined finish line, and in software crafting in particular, it is a ‘wicked’ environment because the rules and tools change under you all the time while everyone disagrees about what the goal is.

Native Mac Markdown viewer with Mermaid, QuickLook in Finder, and live reload. Built for AI agent output (Claude, Cursor). $19.99 one-time.

Blog and portfolio of Christian Tietze: developer of macOS and iOS apps, writer of programming books, and consultant of amazing devs.

Let’s Encrypt, the world’s largest free SSL/TLS certificate issuer and one of the key services behind today’s HTTPS web, has updated its Subscriber Agreement with new language requiring certificate applicants to confirm that they are not covered by comprehensive U.S. sanctions, export-control restrictions, or related prohibited-party rules. This update is included in version 1.7 of the Let’s Encrypt Subscriber Agreement, dated June 4, 2026. The agreement sets the terms for requesting, accepting, and using SSL/TLS certificates issued by the Internet Security Research Group, the nonprofit behind Let’s Encrypt. The key change is in Section 3.1, which outlines subscriber warranties. Subscribers must now confirm they are not located in, organized under the laws of, or ordinarily resident in a country or territory subject to comprehensive U.S. sanctions. > _“You are not a person or entity that is: (a) located in, organized under the laws of, or ordinarily resident in any country or territory that is the target of comprehensive U.S. sanctions; (b) a prohibited or restricted party under U.S. or other applicable sanctions and export control laws and regulations; or (c) owned or controlled by or acting on behalf of anyone described in (a) or (b). You agree to use Let’s Encrypt Certificates and any services provided by or on behalf of ISRG in compliance with applicable U.S. export control and sanctions laws and regulations.”_ The clause also applies to prohibited or restricted parties under U.S. or other applicable sanctions and export-control laws. It further extends to individuals or entities owned, controlled by, or acting on behalf of such parties. Practically, this update ties Let’s Encrypt certificate eligibility more directly to U.S. sanctions compliance. It covers both geographic restrictions for sanctioned jurisdictions and list-based restrictions for specific sanctioned parties. OFAC, the U.S. Treasury office that administers sanctions, classifies programs as comprehensive or selective, using measures such as asset blocking and trade restrictions. Its public search tool checks names against U.S. sanctions lists, including the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List. Importantly, for Let’s Encrypt users, this change does not introduce a new technical certificate-validation process. The updated language is a legal warranty by the subscriber, not a public statement that Let’s Encrypt is automatically blocking all domains from certain country-code top-level domains. The updated agreement also impacts certificate lifecycle responsibilities. If any warranties in Section 3.1 become untrue for an existing certificate, the subscriber must immediately request revocation. ISRG may also refuse certificate requests at its sole discretion, for any lawful reason. For most users, this update will likely have no practical impact. For those connected to comprehensively sanctioned jurisdictions or listed parties, the new language makes the compliance requirement explicit in the agreement. **Update, July 22, 2026:** On July 6, 2026, Let’s Encrypt replaced Subscriber Agreement version 1.7 with version 1.8. The new version removes the previous wording discussed in this article and adds a wider section on compliance with applicable laws, including U.S. export control and sanctions regulations. Let’s Encrypt states that this revision clarifies its existing policy and does not affect where or to whom it issues certificates. The organization continues to serve permitted non-governmental users in sanctioned countries and territories where exemptions and authorizations apply.