Weekend Programmer

The 1 line quicksort challenge. Reconstruct the missing line! 😏 #technomage void qsort(int v[], int l, int r) { int i, p; if (l >= r) return; // One liner quicksort here... qsort(v, l, p - 1); qsort(v, p, r); }

@PythonPr BASIC ?"Hello World" Inform6 "Hello World"

Which language do you think is best?😍😍😍

@elonmusk Looks like a good size for an Arcology. Planning to make biosphere 3 anytime soon?

That will be one hell of a building!

A Walking Simulator Text Adventure is perfectly fine. Add some story and characters, though, then it becomes interactive fiction. You don't need much for Minimal Verb Set. Just these will do! #learntocode #codingforkids #technomage x.com/i/grok/share/c…

It's the age-old questions: What makes us human, and why does that matter? Should AI be used to create text adventure games? I say yes. Let us be creative, and AI be mundane! TL;DR: PDC Design is the time drain, instead of coding. #interactivefiction x.com/i/grok/share/e…

@teslaownersSV @elonmusk Breaking complicated problems into simpler ones, then building it back up is standard procedure, right? The problem is rapid iteration. That's where other people said my projects are impossible and canceled me! No team, no nothing. Sigh. AI > Stack Overflow. Sound familiar?

ELON MUSK’S CORE PHILOSOPHY: FIRST PRINCIPLES THINKING Most people reason by analogy — they look at what already exists and make small improvements. Elon Musk does the opposite. He breaks problems down to the most fundamental truths and rebuilds solutions from scratch. This single mental habit is why he keeps achieving things others called impossible. Elon explained it perfectly: “A first principles foundational approach would be to say, let’s look at the physics and economics of a rocket…” This is the exact mindset behind reusable rockets, affordable EVs, truth-seeking AI, and every major breakthrough at his companies.

@SandyofCthulhu This tells me DnD has 3 more stats than we need. I mean, why would a Barbarian need Charisma when a Barbarian carrying a Bastard sword can be just as persuasive?

It started out in 1974 with just three classes. Worked just fine.

@ScottApogee @SandyofCthulhu My observation is that AAA games today have unparalleled graphic quality, yet they lose money. Indie games may be mostly unknown, but the few that are known are so because of their gameplay instead of graphic fidelity.

I had over a dozen conversations with Crawford in the 90’s and 2000’s about graphics and narrative importance. He was super dug in on the idea that graphics was not the right rabbit hole to go down and that one day in the future gaming would finally come around to his way of thinking, and that character interactions and an interactive story would become the leading game direction. I was on the opposite side of the argument, though I told him characters and story were still important, but more so in the way we did with Max Payne, as an example.

I was at a Game Developer Conference in 1991. Wing Commander by Chris Roberts and Balance of Power by Chris Crawford had each come out about a year before. The two Chrises got in a shouting argument about video game graphics. Roberts’ argument was that graphics enhance and improve the game experience. Crawford took the rather extreme stance that graphics actually hurt gameplay.

@ainslec remote tokens have...power efficiency and intelligence per token that local tokens simply do not. The key here is that local tokens don't have to be as efficient. You're not trying to build the world in one day. Consistency is the key.

The most important section of the NVIDIA keynote was when Jensen said the quiet part out loud. The cost per token for non underclass users is going to go through the roof in the near future. In the keynote Jensen said that there will come a time when an employer may spend an extra 50% of an employees salary on buying tokens for them to be 10x more productive. Implication 1 - Assuming a low tech salary of $170K (in the US), annual token budget would be $85k per year (about $7k per month). This represents around a 20x price hike on what power users are currently paying. We know this is coming but it's going to be brutal when it does. Implication 2 - To pay that extra 50%, the company will be firing those employees that it views are wasting those now very expensive tokens. I'm not even sure if #buyagpu is the way out of this as remote tokens have economies of scale in terms of power efficiency and intelligence per token that local tokens simply do not. In my view the only way out of this is to either leverage these dying days of cheap compute to get rich before the drawbridge is pulled up (probably have 12-18 months) or to at least ship something of substance over the same time period so you can be one of the corporate 10% ers left standing. Doing nothing might land you on the universal basic income tier. And no matter what anyone says, you do NOT want to be there. We live in interesting times. youtube.com/watch?v=jw_o0x… #nvidia #gtc @TheAhmadOsman @Ominousind @0xSero @digitalix

@SandyofCthulhu Looks like a good project for an abandoned open mine. Preferably on a hill somewhere with subterranean tunnels so air ventilation won't be a problem.

This underground "skyscraper" is literally designed to be inescapable in case of a zombie outbreak. Doesn't anyone play Resident Evil?

@dmbkparker I've flown RC copter, and as long as I can translate that to real heli controls, I should be able to fly just fine. Hovering is actually the most difficult action, so landing will be a slow glide with hard bounce action.

Do you think if I put you in a helicopter you could successfully takeoff and land? No instruction. You can watch as many YouTube videos as you want before we go.

@pikuma There are many people who exclusively use HTML editor that claim they know HTML. But they don't. They only know the editor.

I worked in tech for many decades and I've never seen a job *require* people to know HTML. It's just something you know/work with, like adding values in a spreadsheet. This is like saying "remember when knowing how to operate the office coffee machine meant a 90k salary?"

@exQUIZitely Silent service. I basically just spin in place, sinking one destroyer after another, though, so I don't know if that's really enjoyable. I prefer Steel Diver: Sub Wars for 3DS.

If you were a fan of submarine sims in the 80s and 90s, these 10 games will hopefully evoke some fond memories. My all-time favourite from that list is Silent Service II, an absolute masterclass (naturally, by MicroProse). My very first contact with the genre came on the C64 with Up Periscope, which was actually pretty good for its time (1986). Which was your favourite?

An oceanic hunter is born! Look at it goes! #caturday

@lemire Then, the best language to learn is C because it branches to so many different directions, including C++, C#, Go, Java, JavaScript, Lua, BASIC, Forth, ASM->Machine language. Perl and other scripting languages are extras that can be self-taught. Pseudocode->C->The World!

Which programming language should you choose for teaching? Though many schools use Java, C#, C or C++, many others have adopted Python. The upside of Python is that it is somewhat easier to get going (helps motivation). The downside is that Python makes it harder to think about low-level issues such as data structures since everything is abstracted away. My own view on the matter, is that students should become polyglots. It is a strategic mistake to focus on a single programming language. But what about learning outcomes? Hott tells us that it does not matter. « there was no statistically significant difference in overall outcomes or struggle between students who complete their programming assignments solely in Python, solely in Java, or a combination thereof. Additionally, there was no statistically significant difference in overall scores on programming assignments, written problem sets, or quizzes from the course based on the language students chose when implementing their solutions. From these results, we conclude that providing students with a choice of programming language, including allowing students to program in a language they are more familiar with, does not appear to dramatically improve student outcomes. Additionally, the use of Python over Java (or consequently Java over Python) in an upper-level algorithms course does not improve performance overall, even though it may provide some benefit in isolated assignments. Therefore, educators need not worry about how the programming language chosen for their courses may impact student outcomes. » Hott, J. R. (2025, August). Student Outcomes When Provided Programming Language Choice in an Algorithms Course. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research V. 2 (pp. 26-26). Hott has interesting research... engineering.virginia.edu/faculty/john-r… Coming back to what kids should learn, I largely agree with @lzsthw and his essay « AI Didn't Kill Programming, You Did ». Instead of worrying about which programming language we should use, we should turn things around and tell kids how to start a business, how to become independent from tech trends, and so forth. The very idea that you should standardize on one programming language should be a red flag. You can learn programming with anything. Start with Logo, Ada... Do it all! Heck!!! Invent your own programming language. learncodethehardway.com/blog/39-ai-did…

@GaryD20Games Dork Tower: (Snik) (killed the NPC) Oooh, I gained one experience point!

Who does this? 🤔🤨

@SebAaltonen If the gameplay is good, you don't need that much of a texture map, right? How about having toon rendering/ cell shaded texture when the memory is tight?

My agenda is clear. I am promoting gaming and game development. When I see devices that would be perfect for gaming, except they have one critical flaw, I will be loud about it. Old MacBooks had slow Intel iGPU. Today MacBook Neo CPU and GPU is awesome, but there's only 8GB RAM.

I am vocal about 8GB RAM laptops because I am a game dev. We were also vocal about cut down 10GB RAM in Xbox Series S. Steam Deck is a 4 year old $399 gaming device with 16GB RAM. It's the modern min spec for gaming. I would love to see more games on Macs, but 8GB alienates devs.

@FlexibleDemeanr @elonmusk @DOGE @VivekGRamaswamy You want livable towns? Integrate farming! #periurban #farming #UrbanDevelopment #solarpunk A conversation with @grok x.com/i/grok/share/6…

1/5 @elonmusk @DOGE @VivekGRamaswamy The transition to abundance is coming fast, and that gives us a choice. We can let broken systems collapse painfully (bureaucracy, fraud, credentialism, neglect)… or we can take responsibility and rebuild them deliberately to make them efficient and resilient. What if we piloted a high-agency society here first? We can leapfrog tech outpacing societal change by modeling it small scale now. Atlas Nodes: places where we carry society forward and set ourselves up for success during this transition. Bonus points for modeling a future Mars society.

@bankertobuilder You can probably convert each mall stores as housing, just like you can convert each cabin in cruiseship as housing. I think distribution centers make more sense, though. Or maybe just abandoned ghost towns. x.com/i/grok/share/6…

Everyone wants a safe, nice neighborhood where kids can play in the streets We just bought an abandoned K-Mart and turned it into your new home Starting in the low $500,000s just 75 miles outside of Denver The dream of home ownership is still alive in America!

@davepl1968 That's old stuff. New stuff is to rehash the collision and do hash recursively on the collision. Memory is cheap.

When multiple keys point to the same hash slot, what you've got there is an O(n) linked list in that slot. Not to be snarky, but please tell me this stuff is still in Comp Sci 200. Or are CS graduates just loading numpy from Python these days?

@JasonBassler1 I predict a lot of false positives and exponential increase of motorcycle accidents.

Starting in 2027, all new passenger vehicles will be required to have Infrared cameras, eye‑tracking, head‑position monitoring, and behavioral impairment detection. A biometric babysitter in every car. No vote. No opt‑out. Just mandatory. It’s control tech, plain and simple.