| ▲ | outintospace a day ago |
| Hi, I'm Robert Standefer, the guy who made this happen, with lots of support. I'm excited to see the enthusiasm about Comic Chat being open sourced. How this came to happen is a very interesting story that spans a six-year period with success that hinged upon being in the right place at the right time, literally. I want to point out that, while I (along with Scott Hanselman) made the Comic Chat open source release happen, I am not the original developer. That is DJ Kurlander, and he was very supportive of this project. He was even enthusiastic about it. |
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| ▲ | NDlurker a day ago | parent | next [-] |
| Thank you! My only experience with Comic Chat is reading Jerk City comics. Always thought it was a neat concept but never used it |
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| ▲ | outintospace a day ago | parent | next [-] | | I used it to create a presentation for my talk at a conference last year. https://standefer.com/agent-platform-comic/about.html | | |
| ▲ | 9dev a day ago | parent [-] | | I take that comic a bit personal, to be honest - I just returned from a two-month odyssey to find a way of offering our customers a simple way of connecting our MCP Server to their Copilot Chat. Digging through a mindboggling number of documentation that was often outdated, sometimes contradictory, but always written both verbose and yet very light on information was part of that; talking to broken AI chatbots and clueless support staff was, just as trying out four (four!) different ways to create an Agent wrapper - only to discover that multi-tenancy is not supported for any of these, and two of the three SDKs are outdated but still referenced in docs everywhere. What's more, people seemed to be actively confused by the use case ("Why would your customers even want to use an external tool that isn't part of their Microsoft environment?"). I finally found out about "declarative agents", which seem to be able to do what I need. And if I don't trash my computer against the wall out of pure rage over page changes in partner center taking 15 seconds or longer, I might just be able to complete the 40-step form required for the marketplace listing. Progress! | | |
| ▲ | 9dev 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | …and it's also entirely in character of you representing Microsoft to not reply to my comment :-) |
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| ▲ | runjake a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Jerk City lives on, and is now known as Bonequest. Here's today's comic: https://www.bonequest.com/ | | |
| ▲ | MBCook 19 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Wow just about to hit 10k comics too. No shade on the author intended, as someone with no artistic talent this is a great idea for a way you could make them. | |
| ▲ | denkmoon 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Man those are absolutely deranged. Awesome. |
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| ▲ | amiga386 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | T DEUCE ME TOO HUGALUGAHGLGHLAHALHGGGGG https://archive.org/details/big-book-of-jerkcity/ | | | |
| ▲ | astrange a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | On occasion I meet one of the creators of that professionally. And then I always think of asking him about it. And then I don't do it. | | |
| ▲ | compass_copium a day ago | parent | next [-] | | You should (I assume it's Rands), he clearly does not want to be rembered as a Jerkcity guy now that he's a Serious Palantir Poobah. | | |
| ▲ | dathanb82 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I mean, he left Palantir over a decade ago and now he’s supposedly retired (again) - I bet he’s pretty chill about it these days. | |
| ▲ | mbac32768 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I wonder if bong hits ever helped him with his Makefile. |
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| ▲ | fortran77 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I once worked with nearly all of those guys! A very interesting bunch.... |
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| ▲ | droidrungrowth 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [dead] | |
| ▲ | braedon-dev 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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| ▲ | resonanttoe 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Really nice work! This is so very very cool. Comic chat was a phenomenal pain in the arse in the 90s for any IRC channel :P But it's still such a great and important piece of IRC history as a whole. It's amazing cool to see it open sourced and preserved this way. It's amazing to see people do a tonne of work to get things like this and 3D Movie Maker - open sourced. I'd never thought I'd see the day! |
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| ▲ | compass_copium a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Amazing timing, Jerkcity hits 10,000 strips in like two weeks. |
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| ▲ | zuzululu 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| amazing i'd love to have the hardware to run this |
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| ▲ | tangenter 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Long shot - any hope of us getting an MSN Gaming Zone code release? The Lobby and Friends/Messages system? Would help us... counts on fingers 9 greybeards out. |
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| ▲ | hombre_fatal 18 hours ago | parent [-] | | Man I hadn’t even thought of MSN Gaming Zone again until now yet spent who knows how many hours on it. |
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| ▲ | lysace a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Open sourcing code is always welcome. However it's kind of weird that you choose this very explicit 1996 Embrace, extend, and extinguish piece of software to showcase. In this case it was IRC. In other cases it was Java, the web, etc. |
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| ▲ | MBCook 19 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Why is it every time some company people hate does anything good, no matter how trivial, people have to trash it? Someone at MS made a fun IRC client. Thats it. It’s a WILDLY different world than 30 years ago and MS is a different company. They released old code for those interested. Celebrate it. | | |
| ▲ | lysace 18 hours ago | parent [-] | | First of all: I wrote that I welcome the open sourcing of this code. It was literally the first sentence. I wrote it specifically for reactions like that. They embraced the Internet; in this case IRC. This followed Bill Gates' well-publicised memo "The Internet Tidal Wave" a year earlier (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/18_06_08_internet...). It didn't happen because "someone at MS made a fun IRC client". They extended the open IRC protocol with proprietary extensions hidden inside CTCP (Client-to-Client Protocol) messages to support "the fun stuff": https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Amicrosoft%2Fcomic-chat%20... (you need to be logged in to Microsoft's Github for code search to work nowadays.) The outcome of this effort: Comic Chat was interoperable with regular IRC clients, but when two Comic Chat users connected, they could see richer interactions. | | |
| ▲ | krige 17 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | So where's the extinguish? You can't stop proving your point halfway through unless you're implying you did not actually have a point. | | |
| ▲ | lysace 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | It probably eventually wasn't deemed important enough for that phase. In 1999 when Comic Chat ended they pivoted to their completely proprietary MSN Messenger service instead, with a stronger focus on individual-to-individual. This came after ICQ (1996) and AIM (1997). | | |
| ▲ | krige 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | Apples and oranges. MSN was aimed at, well AIM, to the point where AIM used protocol flaws to block MSN clients. And it doesn't track that they'd just abandon IRC considering it was a period of absolutely massive growth for the protocol. It's more likely there was no intent to EEE IRC. |
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| ▲ | MBCook 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You put one sentence in saying it was good, then the rest of the (admittedly short) ent complaining about behavior from 30 years ago. Why does it matter to today? It just makes your first sentence feel like a backhanded compliment. |
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| ▲ | psawaya 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They're calling it "the most Hacker News comment of all time" | |
| ▲ | DonHopkins 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yeah, that's right, it was all Microsoft's evil plan to extinguish proper serious legitimate grown-up fonts by rolling out Comic Sans. JFC dude, the US Government is being taken over by narcissistic fascists, currenty embracing, extending, and extinguishing Democracy itself, and you chose this hill to die on. It doesn’t even matter what you think. You know why, jagoff? Cause I’m famous. I am on every major operating system since Microsoft fucking Bob. I’m in your signs. I’m in your browsers. I’m in your instant messengers. I’m not just a font. I am a force of motherfucking nature, and I will not rest until every uptight armchair typographer cock-hat like you is surrounded by my lovable, comic-book-inspired, sans-serif badassery. Enough of this bullshit. I’m gonna go get hammered with Papyrus. https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-comic-sans-asshole | | | |
| ▲ | braedon-dev 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] |
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