Every time another nostalgia post comes along for MUDs people start replying with the name of a small MUD they enjoyed but I’m surprised how rare it is to see Iron Realms MUDs mentioned.
I’m almost certain they are the largest MUD development company to exist.
I played two of their MUDs — Achaea and Lusternia. The sheer imaginative scale of these worlds and engines are unmatched by even today’s standards. (And they still exist!)
PVP is a battle of engineering. The best PvPers build elaborate trigger systems that watch the terminal for specific maladies and conditions and counter them with herbs, potions, and skills.
The RP is similar to D&D but so much deeper. Where D&D is mostly storytelling by a DM, RP in huge commercial MUDs involve gods, physics, deeply entrenched politics, money, fame, and power spanning thousands of players.
Entirely player-driven economy. If you wanted a sword you could buy one from a player run market or commission a unique piece from a blacksmith. And boy it was truly unique. A blacksmith in Lusternia is really a wordsmith. A steel sword can be described as “honed to an obsidian finish”.
Peak human imagination, but sadly in a medium too many people can’t get into.
I just tried it with the prompt "Navigate to diffbot.com, find the careers page and link me to the first machine learning engineering listing." and it still works. Nothing on the web_fetch tool documentation mentions this patch either.
Not that we need more anecdotal evidence but I’ve long felt a certain restlessness and inability to think creatively somewhere in the early afternoon. I work from home with my wife. I’ve eliminated lunch, coffee, and a ton of other variables. The one variable that finally had a distinct effect to my mental state was opening a window.
I’ve had mine for months and I still use it far more than my kindle for the sole reason that it fits in my pocket. It’s still a conscious choice to pull it out over doomscrolling TikTok on my phone though.
Built an Apple Watch app that streams music from Plex. It’s more stable than Spotify and Apple Music and it’s been a blast running to my own music collection!
BMED2013 and it was still the same in my years. The culture has shifted a bit amongst professors though. After sophomore level classes I remember that professors will often just email you their textbook if you asked (a lot of times they’ll offer to “work it out”with you if you can’t afford the textbook).
Even if the clients go closed source and forked, there's still the very serious issue of closed app ecosystems on iOS and Android. It's one thing to self-host a Vaultwarden instance, it's another entirely to pay Google and Apple $100 a year to publish your own app.
You’re probably also looking for that tool to be available unauthed. And yeah agreed. We do this at Diffbot and the test drive is the 2nd highest visited page.
This is a fantastic resource. The author only briefly covers library databases, but there's so much more in structured querying that could be worth covering.
For example, you can use Sparql to perform structured queries on Wikidata (a structured database version of Wikipedia) to get well beyond unstructured documents.
> You knew. And you signed off anyway. Because the alternative was losing the job, and the job was the mortgage, and the school fees, and the visa, and the version of yourself who'd fix it later once things stabilized.
I felt the pang in my bones reading this. All of us peons are just wading through this brave new world trying to do what we know is right but ultimately having no choice but to give in to life's needs.
I think many developers worth their salt will argue the same. Cloud is and has always been a shortcut to buying your own hardware. Local models will get better and smaller. Qwen3-coder-next runs on a Spark and is as capable as Sonnet 4.5. Bonsai released a 1-bit model yesterday.
I also like the freedom of not having to ration a daily allowance of tokens.
I’m almost certain they are the largest MUD development company to exist.
I played two of their MUDs — Achaea and Lusternia. The sheer imaginative scale of these worlds and engines are unmatched by even today’s standards. (And they still exist!)
PVP is a battle of engineering. The best PvPers build elaborate trigger systems that watch the terminal for specific maladies and conditions and counter them with herbs, potions, and skills.
The RP is similar to D&D but so much deeper. Where D&D is mostly storytelling by a DM, RP in huge commercial MUDs involve gods, physics, deeply entrenched politics, money, fame, and power spanning thousands of players.
Entirely player-driven economy. If you wanted a sword you could buy one from a player run market or commission a unique piece from a blacksmith. And boy it was truly unique. A blacksmith in Lusternia is really a wordsmith. A steel sword can be described as “honed to an obsidian finish”.
Peak human imagination, but sadly in a medium too many people can’t get into.