The downsides of putting “TTD” in the name “OpenTTD” is a certain level of vulnerability to the original creator (or a rights inheritor) deciding it’s worth their time to care again someday. I suspect this will do more for the TTD community than it will harm it, though; any modern sale of TTD is targeted precisely at the folks who would take mortal offense at harm to OpenTTD, and $10 (which would have been merely $5 in 2000) is the opposite of egregious after 100% inflation pushed AAA games towards $90 these days. I paid $5 for a used copy of SimTower back then, I would happily pay the same today for TTD resources, so this is all fine.

I get that Atari isn’t perhaps as loved as, say, Bullfrog or Dynamix, but better that companies respect their properties and their fans with an outcome like this, than be another boringly-common community-destroying Nintendo Lawyer Takedown Club.

(It’s also now in line with the various WAD and Descent games over time that used this model, where the engine is maximum rewrite amazing but the game resources require a GOG purchase. The point of rewrites isn’t to deprive the games of revenue!)

Drop an email to the mods about both points! They can fix the dupe and may have an interest in the LLM point as well.

"seems to be causing" is also an excellent alternative to "it looks like" that doesn't hinge on visual-sensory primacy, and tends to translate slightly less ambiguously across language-familiarity boundaries due to 'seems' having more precise meaning re: uncertainty than 'looks', 'feels', 'sounds'. Or you could abbreviate to "could be" / "may be" / "might be" (non-high certainty), "is probably" (high certainty) if that sort of nuance is your thing. Noteworthy point: it is neurotypical to treat "is" as 100% certain rather than 99.9% certain when someone says it confidently, but as 80% certain rather than 99.9% certain when someone says it uncertainly, based solely on non-verbal nuance; this can be infuriating and I tend to recommend saying "I am certain" at 99.9% in combination with courteous handling of the slight but eternal possibility of being wrong.

"Let me know how I can help" should not be taken for granted as a thing to be offered, though. Some teams have very strict divisions of labor. Some workers (especially anyone whose duties are 'monitor and report' rather than 'creatively solve') are not overtime-exempt and cannot volunteer their time. Some workers (especially anyone who's reached a high-capability tech position from the ground up) are flooded with opportunities to do less of their own job and more of everyone else's and must not preemptively offer their time to an open-ended offer of 'help'. A more focused phrase such as "Let me know if you have questions, need more evidence, etc." provides a layer of defense against that without implicitly denying assistance for help if requested.

"Thanks!" is one of the most mocked request-terminators I've seen in twenty years of business. It is widely abused as "have fun storming the castle, i'm out micdrop" rather than as a sincere expression of gratitude that contains any actual statement of why you're grateful. "Thank you for doing the job the company paid you to do" sounds ridiculous when you say it out loud, even to neurotypicals. Tell people thank you with more than one word if you mean it, and tell them what you're thanking them for, and consider thanking them for what they did rather than lobbing it like a grenade strapped to a problem. If you hand them a problem and they say "got it, I'll look into it", saying "Thanks." to that is completely fine; it serves the exact purpose of courtesy described, and also doubles as a positive-handoff "your plane" reply concluding the problem handoff, so that you can safely mark it as delegated, they can safely assume you didn't miss their message and are continuing to work it, etc.

For example: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/re-enable-rig... is a Firefox extension that 'rewrites' webpages to remove 'disable right click' code, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-autop... 'rewrites' webpages to disable HTML5 video autoplay, etc. So you could, perhaps, rewrite the <source src=""> attribute within <video> elements to, if it doesn't already end with #t=x (x is in seconds), to end with #t=30. (Perhaps only the first one? This isn't something I desire, so my investment is limited.)

See also: https://www.w3.org/TR/media-frags/

Your comment declares your opinion without explanation, and so lacks substance and is unpersuasive as written. More information would help HN readers evaluate your claims fairly rather than dismiss you. In specific, I’d love to hear your views on these questions so I can give you serious consideration:

> This is a recipe for disaster.

What about Crocker’s Rules, and/or this post’s advice to follow them, do you consider a recipe for disaster?

> Please don’t follow Crocker’s Rules;

What outcome are you hoping will result from granting your request? Do you have personal experiences with Crocker’s Rules underpinning this advice? Do you tend to experience social discomfort typically, atypically, or infrequently / never?

> just get better at communicating than the person who wrote this

Other than the presumed adherence to Crocker’s Rules in writing this, which is addressed by the questions above, do you have other criticisms of their writing to present? What communication ideals do you consider as better models than Crocker’s Rules? Do you consider there to exist appropriate circumstances for Crocker’s Rules?