Talk:Near (programmer)

Contributed to software used by Stephen Hawking?

I just happened to be looking at the older version of Stephen Hawking's website, and on the page about his accessibility equipment it mentions a software emulation of his speech synthesis (which was originally a DECtalk unit) running on a RasPi 3, and Byuu is one of the credited people involved (probably on the software end?). If they were indeed involved, this would be a neat thing to add to the page if some better coverage can be found. Here's the page I was looking at. MrAureliusR_{Yell at me!} 21:22, 18 September 2025 (UTC)

Aha, did some more digging, and the software emulation of his speech synthesizer used part of higan to emulate a strange, old NEC DSP chip, hence why Byuu was credited. I think this could definitely be mentioned, though this is a primary source Hawking's Voice MrAureliusR_{Yell at me!} 21:58, 18 September 2025 (UTC)

At the time they had posted an article about how it worked, but like most of the stuff in various iterations of their site it's probably long lost. Salvadorp2001 (talk) 22:04, 22 September 2025 (UTC)

Also mentioned here which is not (I think) a primary source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/The-Silicon-Valley-quest-to-preserve-Stephen-12759775.php Salvadorp2001 (talk) 22:06, 22 September 2025 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 20 October 2025

Im pretty sure "doxed" is spelt "doxxed" Hyperdogsandjuices (talk) 02:59, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

 Not done: It can be spelled either way. Day Creature (talk) 04:31, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

Citations for pseudonyms contains a phishing page

The second citation for Near's pseudonyms, "About BSNES/Higan Emulators | the byuu/near Story", is a phishing page for the bsnes emulator. It is not linked back to by the official bsnes GitHub repository, and links to other phishing pages for emulators like VisualBoyAdvance, as well as another unofficial repository containing (potentially compromised?) builds of bsnes. The official site for bsnes used to be bsnes.dev(archived), but it is currently down.

I'd remove the citation on my own, but I didn't have an account prior to noticing this. perplexativekhat (talk) 20:51, 28 April 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for noticing this, I have removed the reference. Everything it supports seems to also be in the USA Today article, so I don't think it needs replacement.

For reference, here is a bsnes developer confirming this is an impostor site: https://github.com/bsnes-emu/bsnes/issues/340#issuecomment-2567748620 EvenTwist41 (talk) 23:15, 28 April 2026 (UTC)

I looked into this more and I'm fairly confident these sites have the same operator:

• bsnes[.]org
• citra-emulator[.]com
• r36sgameconsole[.]com
• ryujinx-emulator[.]com
• visualboyadvance[.]org
• xenia-emulator[.]com

There are links between them including identical banner ads for r36sgameconsole[.]com, they all use the same domain registrar and all except r36sgameconsole[.]com use the same Cloudflare name servers. Two users with no other edits tried to insert links to some of these sites on Wikipedia, which was reverted: Special:Contributions/Vbaemulator, Special:Contributions/Citraemulator (the latter was also blocked for spam). In addition to impersonating projects and being self-published sources, some of the content is plagiarized from Wikipedia, e.g. https://visualboyadvance[.]org/gba-roms/its-mr-pants/ which copies from It's Mr. Pants without attribution.

These sites are linked in a handful of articles on different Wikimedia projects. I don't think there is any value in including these links so I'm going through and removing them. EvenTwist41 (talk) 02:13, 29 April 2026 (UTC)

The USA today article seems to be an insufficient citation for Near's legal name, at least. The freedom of information request in the references does contain it but isn't actually ever used as a citation in the current iteration of the article.

On a personal level though, it does feel... disrespectful to publish their legal name like that, even if it's now public knowledge. All of the coverage I could find only refers to them under one of their two pseudonyms, it's clear that they wanted to maintain that. perplexativekhat (talk) 13:14, 4 May 2026 (UTC)