@etscrivner That's a good book! I would also recommend Racing the Beam (about the Atari) which in that family of platform studies books from the MIT Press.
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XDF
941 posts
XDF
@xdfdev
Owner of https://t.co/LndgLEpXqN Reaching you through a blinding one megabyte connection from my secret, mountaintop fortress.
The End of History Katılım Ekim 2024
48 Takip Edilen64 Takipçiler
New explanation for Microsoft code-smells just dropped:
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@rfleury @vkrajacic "Don't reinvent the wheel!" - "You won't be able to do it better than a library some smart people wrote!" - "It's not worth it!" - etc. It's drilled into people by others with zero imagination or curiosity.
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@vkrajacic I have zero idea why people think they cannot make their own better string APIs in C.
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I've been saying this for some time now. But most people in the C world don't even consider it. Maybe because of the legacy code they have to deal with, maybe because of the standard library, who knows. But length based strings are far superior in every respect.
x.com/vkrajacic/stat…
Dmitriy Kovalenko@neogoose_btw
One of the biggest problems of C are strings. Better to say no out of the box strings. *const u8 is absolutely the worst way to represent strings because every time you need to compare the strings you have to loop over the bytes instead of starting with length comparison
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It's crazy how many people, including C programmers, don't know where does the star go.
Give your option, solution is in reply
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XDF retweetledi
NARRATOR: Claude Code was not, in fact, close to a small game engine.
Thariq@trq212
Most people's mental model of Claude Code is that "it's just a TUI" but it should really be closer to "a small game engine". For each frame our pipeline constructs a scene graph with React then -> layouts elements -> rasterizes them to a 2d screen -> diffs that against the previous screen -> finally uses the diff to generate ANSI sequences to draw We have a ~16ms frame budget so we have roughly ~5ms to go from the React scene graph to ANSI written.
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I’m just going to keep reposting this every time a new prediction comes out
ₕₐₘₚₜₒₙ@hamptonism
Anthropic CEO: "Software Engineering Will Be Automatable in 12 Months". yea, we’re cooked.
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XDF retweetledi
"Recently, senior executives at Salesforce have admitted, both internally and publicly, that they massively overestimated AI’s capabilities. They have found that AI simply can’t cope with the complex nature of customer service and totally fails at nuanced issues, escalations, and
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When I attended GDC for the first (and only) time in 2016, it's not that I expected it to look like what BSC would eventually be… but I thought it'd be more like that than… whatever it was.
Even if I never get invited (likely!), I'm overjoyed that BSC exists. You should be too.
Ryan Fleury@rfleury
The Magic of the Better Software Conference Why BSC worked; why other conferences don’t.
Rapid City, SD 🇺🇸 English
I attended GDC in 2018, as a student and indie game developer, looking for internships. There were many cool people and companies, but beyond GDC’s absurd nickel and diming, the conference focus & content was a huge letdown. As one example, I went to a talk with “optimization” in the title, only to find that they meant optimizing user attention and monetization, in frankly exploitative ways. Disgusting.
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"we are building a perfect archive of a life no one attended"
🕊️@lichthauch
I watched a man film his daughter's first steps and he watched it through the screen. she walked toward him and he was not there he was in the rectangle and she reached for a ghost. that is the whole thing now. we are building a perfect archive of a life no one attended
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@xdfdev For the time being, I can highly recommend the articles by Bruce Dawson on the topic of floating point. He has many of them.
randomascii.wordpress.com/category/float…
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I've finally begun to understand how to both read and write IEEE-754 floating point numbers algorithmically, without the use of dependencies even such as the C standard library, which required some knowledge of the extants and intervals of the format, the underlying mathematic representation, conversion between binary and decimal (integral and fractional) by hand, and implementation details of extended-precision arithmetic.
I've built up links to dozens of articles and archived several copies of research papers on the subject. I hope to make a place to put all of this one day with some light commentary for anyone interested.
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XDF retweetledi
If you put the Apple icons in reverse it looks like the portfolio of someone getting really really good at icon design
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I'll never forget my friend who just needed a few more elective credits to complete his degree and chose to take a class called Oriental History because he "just wanted something light and stress-free to get it over with."
You'll never guess what happened... 😅
Phield Martiall Jambavan@SirJambavan
A math student who speaks English can pick up an English book and read it, understand it. Flip that scenario and ask a English student to read college level math.
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XDF retweetledi
Pretty wild that LLMs seem to have trained on my 2019 article of "The product-minded engineer" and I now find blog posts published in 2025 that are an exact rehash of my post.
Because if you ask an LLM "write a blog about a product-minded engineer" they spit out mine!!
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@cmuratori Yes, totally agreed. I meant it would be by far the best default behavior given the existing instruction sets.
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@xdfdev But passthrough is a superset, and since divide is never a single-cycle instruction anyway, it's unlikely that taking an additional parameter is a performance issue.
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It was a mistake to make an exception the default for divide-by-zero on x86 instead of an optional debug MSR you enable only during development. I'd have made DIV take two operands (instead of one) and produce the second operand when the divisor was zero.
Jason, ex Inferis@benedictsred
Just divide by zero who gives a shit anymore
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Although I don't really program on ARM, my understanding is that it's better about this. You can disable div-by-zero exceptions and it will produce 0 instead, which is useful (you can make a lot of computations "just work" knowing this).
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