TIL. And good to see you on HN!

Great story, thanks for sharing. RIP John.

I kind of miss the age of freeware and shareware. It was often created by passionate individuals who put in a lot of care into the end product, which made it a joy to use. Once you paid for the software, you not only got the full version, but you felt good supporting someone who genuinely deserves it. There are still some examples of this, perhaps more so in the Apple ecosystem where proprietary/commercial software is the norm, but high quality software worth paying for is still rare.

Nowadays most software on Linux is open source, which is great, but the average quality is low, a lot of it is produced with little care and effort, it's quickly abandoned, and now in the age of "AI", even more so.

Wonderful share, thanks

>a control panel

That control panel was really great! Particularly for scanning, it was nice to be able to adjust some of the color curves slightly to correct the scanned image.

However, one thing I REALLY used that control panel for was greyscale images, you could adjust the curve so that things that were barely legible in the image suddenly popped way out. Almost like that trick of rubbing a pencil across a blank page to reveal what someone wrote on the page above it. Or smaller adjustments just to make a greyscale more uniform.

That was really one of xv's superpowers.

The last time that I checked, XV was still in the OpenBSD ports collection. It fits well with fvwm.

I actually bought a license for XV, and I have the manual.

There's something so appealing about those fvwm window borders, aliased font, crisp graphics, and the simple and intuitive UI of xv. There's nothing jumping at you to get your attention, no ambiguous UI elements and dark patterns, just a well designed and functional GUI. We truly lost something along the way, as modern GUIs are rarely this user friendly.

> Perhaps some of you have other examples.

The entirety of the works of Fabrice Bellard. QEMU and FFmpeg are the most well-known ones, but there's also a full blown x86 emulator fully and exclusively written in native JavaScript, a greenfield image compression format, a JS engine and probably a dozen other things I only randomly stumble upon and think "oh, wtf, another Fabrice Bellard thing?".

Even though I hadn't thought about xv in decades, as soon as I read the headline, the image of those 3d buttons with the crisp outlines resurfaced from my memory.

saw a screenshot as I was reading this article, made me eager to try it, and it's indeed simple, slick and featured... elegant look and feel for a different age.

I am that man at the Usenix conference.

Eww. Too bad interesting news comes from such a vile source. (This is the message below that as I write this: https://gab.com/disco/posts/116293438874138531)

Originally I posted a link to a gab article that extensively discussed the software developer side of John as well as the musician side, but it has been decided to replace it with a link that only mentions the musician side.

Most people are more than one person.

So far only two linkable reports of his death have been found. The other is on a Twitter-like site that is so full of anti-semite, white nationalist, and similar content and has so little of anything else that it makes Twitter look like a far left hang out.

Bradley wrote xv a long time ago and appears to be better known for his later work, including his music. Here's how he described himself on Soundcloud [1]:

> Guitar player, music producer, graphic designer, and "that guy who wrote XV" a very long time ago.

Moderators replaced that link with one to voxday.com, where it was posted by someone who was a bandmate and friend of Bradley.

Looking at that site it also seems rather out there, but it isn't a social media site. It is the site of Theodore Beale, a rather controversial writer and former video game developer [2].

The crucial difference is at the original site, being a Twitter-like social media site, if you scroll down you get a bunch of other posts they are promoting.

At the current link, the page is just about John Bradley. There are links to other things on the site but they at most suggest that the site is probably quite a bit outside the mainstream.

Compare to the original site. After scrolling past the posting about Bradley and 3 comments on that posting you get to section showing recent postings from the paid version of the site that they have chosen to promote, presumably to convince you to upgrade to the paid option.

Here's what it gave me.

• Someone saying they drive 5 miles to get gas from a white owned station instead of the one down the street from them, because an Indian is behind the counter.

• One about how the US was founded 100% by white Europeans and was 80-90% white for 200 years, and it is the flood of third world trash that is tearing down America. (In the replies to this one we learn that the real problem is the Jews who are the ones enabling this).

• Someone who says his radicalizing moment was when a non-citizen ahead of him in line at urgent without insurance was treated for free. (He would have been treated for free too if he did not have insurance, BTW).

• Someone saying any shortages of a variety of things are being fabricated. The comments of course mention that it is the Jews and the "bitches" that are doing the fabrication. Also blacks (whose presence in white countries is facilitated by Jews). Also, there is no such thing as a fossil fuel--oil is abiotic and continuously replenished but this info is being buried.

• A picture of Charlie Kirk and a quote by him. Nothing wrong with this one. The comments on it however...Jews were the ones that killed Kirk, Kirk was actually a Mossad agent, Kirk is not dead, several hinting at dark thing about his wife (and one wondering how he could have married her since she is a Catholic).

• Another one that doesn't seem bad until you get to the comments. It says that we are not trillion in debt, we are trillions in fraud. The comments let is know that this is what happens when Jews take over your country. Also blames Democrats because they can't count on the base (blacks, illegals, gays) so they have to steal. There is one that says 30% of the debt is attributable to Trump and then in 5 years Trump added more to the debt than Obama in 8 but it is near the bottom when sorted by likes so does not appear to be a popular sentiment there.

• A picture of a sticker which it says is being placed on gas pumps around the country. The sticker shows a man dressed like on Orthodox Jew, with a grin on his face and the stereotypical "Jewish nose" [3] that has been used in anti-Jewish caricatures since the 13th century. He his pointing the side, which if you place the sticker co.rrectly would be pointing toward the price on the gas pump. The text on the sticker says "THE JEWS DID THIS!". Plenty of agreement in the comments, and people noting these stickers should be on a lot more than gas pumps.

• Another one about Jews trying to destroy western civilization. Mentions Jews supported Black Lives Matter and immigrant rights. Some new craziness in the comments, like Trump is a free mason in the synagogue of satan.

I'm only halfway down the page at this point, and it will automatically load more the farther I go so this is just the tip of the iceberg.

It is no wonder that the submission with that URL got user flagged.

[1] https://soundcloud.com/john-bradley-298288478

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vox_Day

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_nose

Yeah, we should not be linking to gab and its ilk here.

Link has since been replaced and I didn't catch the gab link, but yikes, the new site is also filled with conspiracy peddling [1] and, even worse, blatant Russia apologetism [2].

[1] https://voxday.net/tag/immigration/

[2] https://voxday.net/tag/russia/

We updated the link, thanks!

RIP.

This should be the main link, we should replace this link instead of the Gab one.