Squirrel Eiserloh

Fun with applying easing functions on polar Ɵ. (Ignore the polar graph changes beneath, that was from previous video on easing R instead of Ɵ.)

Totally. You always end up disabling auto-tick and replacing with with a minimum of “ticking things manually” or eventual total evolution toward “move this to a higher-level place that handles task X for the right things in the right order in bulk”. It’s not a philosophical pro- or anti- sentiment in terms of OO/DO or any other religion; it’s just the inevitable reality of managing large and performant projects while trying to keep them easy to understand and quick to change.

Once I saw a project where everything was entities with a .tick(), plus a gigantic priority table intended to orchestrate the mess. Because reasoning the flow was still too hard, developers had added yield() for_rand_number_of_frames everywhere, "to give other entities some time to run their tick()s". Naturally all actions took multiple frames to execute, and they still had flow/synch bugs everywhere anyways. I advised them to burn thing down and move on to just an app loop with { do_thing_A(); do_thing_B(); ... do_thing_Z(); }. But they didn't. The project failed a year after under the weight of its own spaghetti design. You could say the problem was that particular team of coders, not the design per-se. But, I mean, I've seen this story repeat with different teams repeat 3 or 4 times by now...

the more experienced I get programming games the more that I realize patterns like inheritance and components don't matter, the only thing that matters is functions and entities which run functions... entities might be the next thing to go

New blog post: A Decade of Slug This talks about the evolution of the Slug font rendering algorithm, and it includes an exciting announcement: The patent has been dedicated to the public domain. terathon.com/blog/decade-sl…

That’d be @erin_catto, who is indeed a great guy. Congrats on the reveal Erin, looks fantastic. And for such a small team – mad props!

10x technical debt

When you get the email: "We've decided to move forward with another candidate." USE THE GOLDEN RESPONSE:

I feel the same way. It totally confounds me. Part of me thinks this is our C roots bias showing, but I’ve logged time in these languages and I can’t fathom how type fluidity isn’t just a huge additional conceptual burden threatening you at every step. I would guess it’s similar existential terror as how they seem to feel about the ability to actually know about memory addresses.

@filpizlo I am not sure how you call that a "preference", I would not be able to complete the kind of projects I do without this "preference". Even "more productive" fails to describe the difference. I do not just have a "preference" for cars with brakes.

One of the most broken memes in programming languages is that types aid productivity. They don't. Types are a preference, at best

This is the AI that will be taking our jobs

The math on this project should mass-humble every AI lab on the planet. 1 cubic millimeter. One-millionth of a human brain. Harvard and Google spent 10 years mapping it. The imaging alone took 326 days. They sliced the tissue into 5,000 wafers each 30 nanometers thick, ran them through a $6 million electron microscope, then needed Google’s ML models to stitch the 3D reconstruction because no human team could process the output. The result: 57,000 cells, 150 million synapses, 230 millimeters of blood vessels, compressed into 1.4 petabytes of raw data. For context, 1.4 petabytes is roughly 1.4 million gigabytes. From a speck smaller than a grain of rice. Now scale that. The full human brain is one million times larger. Mapping the whole thing at this resolution would produce approximately 1.4 zettabytes of data. That’s roughly equal to all the data generated on Earth in a single year. The storage alone would cost an estimated $50 billion and require a 140-acre data center, which would make it the largest on the planet. And they found things textbooks don’t contain. One neuron had over 5,000 connection points. Some axons had coiled themselves into tight whorls for completely unknown reasons. Pairs of cell clusters grew in mirror images of each other. Jeff Lichtman, the Harvard lead, said there’s “a chasm between what we already know and what we need to know.” This is why the next step isn’t a human brain. It’s a mouse hippocampus, 10 cubic millimeters, over the next five years. Because even a mouse brain is 1,000x larger than what they just mapped, and the full mouse connectome is the proof of concept before anyone attempts the human one. We’re building AI systems that loosely mimic neural networks while still unable to fully read the wiring diagram of a single cubic millimeter of the thing we’re trying to imitate. The original is 1.4 petabytes per millionth of its volume. Every AI model on Earth fits in a fraction of that. The brain runs on 20 watts and fits in your skull. The data center required to merely describe one-millionth of it would span 140 acres.

1996#3 by Bjørn Staal @_nonfigurativ_

This is a reminder that every diagram from my book Projective Geometric Algebra Illuminated is available on Wikimedia Commons under the CC-BY-4.0 license. They can be freely used in slides, papers, books, Wikipedia articles, etc., with proper attribution. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Eric…

@JoeSiegler thoughts on this? bleedingcool.com/tv/blakes-7-re…

@girldrawsghosts Full vid

The largest and sharpest image ever taken of the Andromeda galaxy — otherwise known as M31. It is the biggest Hubble image ever released and shows over 100 million stars, thousands of star clusters in a section of the galaxy’s disc stretching across over 40 000 light-years.

Microsoft has set a goal to “eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030.” What are they going to try to replace that C & C++ code with? You guessed it. Rust. And they’re going to use AI to do the “Rust re-write” at an insane speed. “Our strategy is to combine AI *and* Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases. Our North Star is “1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code”. You read that right. One million lines of code, per engineer, per month. Pure insanity. This kind of decision making is common among those with a deeply held, delusional faith in the Cult of Rust. Take battle tested code, and re-write it (without a clear benefit to the end user) at a recklessly rapid rate. Then force others to adopt that rewritten code before it is ready or properly tested. All while holding a delusional belief that your new Rust code is superior in all ways, and is inherently bug free thanks to the divine nature of Rust. We learned this from a post by Galen Hunt, Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft Research. linkedin.com/posts/galenh_p…

The official White House account posted Trump’s vile Truth Social post about Rob Reiner. Absolutely disgusting.

So weird. And then awkwardly edited to cut out the extra moment of awkwardness making it even more awkward. How odd all of these choices are.

Is there a better example of a company doing the opposite of what its users want? Just check the replies.

@Jonathan_Blow Yeah. Super annoying. Would have thought this would have been fixed by now. Restarting VS usually fixes, but still.

Me these days, every time I try to use Visual Studio to debug.