Very proud of my son's Copyright Infringement skills
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I want to like Kotlin, and a well-written Kotlin codebase can be a beautiful thing, but ugh, do I hate its kitchen sink approach to syntax. You end up with some super odd looking code that reads "natural" under specific expectations, but which is completely inconsistent with anything else you could write, and very undiscoverable.
I'm looking at Mockk's things like
verify { mock wasNot Called }And it grinds my gears, somehow.
The result is worse than C++ macro madness IMO.
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Searched online for "meditation for sore throat" when I meant to search for "medication for sore throat" and discovered a whole new category of magical thinking delusions
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If you're in the mood for some Assembly porn, this rewrite of the NES Ghosts'n Goblins sprite routine to make it more performant is all you need: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmHpMRtgU3I
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For several reasons I never got the time to dedicate to fixing that. The partners who built the machine also added a system where it would boot every once in a while (to prevent other issues) so any problem with the UI's lifetime turned out to be low priority.
But I'm proud of the work I did there, and am always reminded of how unstable things are today.
Website and apps break often, and we're expected to reload/restart when that happens - "turn it off and on again". It's no big deal.
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So the problem becomes apparent: the maximum value of a 32 bit signed int is 2,147,483,647 (2^31-1), or roughly 24 days if counting ms. After that, things just break apart because times are negative in relation to when some of the animations started.
Eventually I tried wrapping getTimer() to transform the overflow of an int32 and make it work as an uint32, so it could last for ~49 days.
Unfortunately I never got to test it. I had to rely on the real system time, so I had to wait 24+ days.
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But, it turned out that after 24 days or so everything sorta went haywire. Animations slowed down to a crawl (and the interface was always animating). I didn't quite understand.
Eventually I figured it out: to control animation (and a bunch of other things), I used ActionScript's getTimer(), which is "the number of milliseconds that have elapsed since the Flash runtime virtual machine (..) started".
And that's an integer.
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I spent a lot of time debugging it. Even ran into a severe Flash bug with string interning that I had to circumvent (made me appreciate languages who do strings well!).
Eventually I got to the point where the interface ran perfectly for many days, with no leaks or increases in memory use. In fact, it basically allocated all the GPU/CPU memory it needed right at the start - made me appreciate the meaning behind "unused memory is wasted memory". Then it just recycled and reused some stuff.
But.
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Anyway, I came up with this "test" interface that would just let the application run and press around the interface (injecting mouse events, basically), to simulate operation. Like a webdriver kind of thing. All in real time. So I could monitor memory usage over time.
Luckily I had a separate unit so I'd just deploy the interface there and let it running permanently to make sure it didn't crash. It was also a nice conversation piece - I had a fountain machine UI self-operating at my desk 24h.
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So this was a soda dispenser interface ("Pepsi Spire", still in use).
It used Flash for the animation; it was my last work in Flash.
The machine was a very low power NUC.
I spent a TON of time profiling it, and optimizing the hell out of it. Everything was GPU driven. I made sure draw calls were kept to a minimum, that there were NO memory leaks of any kind, used tricks like spritesheets and polls, etc.
This was a consumer facing UI for 24h restaurants. It needed to be resilient.
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I once built an application that crashed after about ~24 days of continuous use.
Testing it was... interesting.
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Amazing, information-packed article on DeepSeek and the implications for AI ventures now and in the future: https://centreforaileadership.org/resources/deepseeks_narrative_attack/
TL;DR: VCs scrambling, open source is an unmovable force
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Anyway, it just feels weird for a place I've been visiting for over 25 years to just sorta fizzle and die.
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Yet I don't feel bad about it. The comments section is a bit of a relic, detached from what the website actually is (gaming posts/news), and has been dying for a while, with the same people just echoing each other. I don't personally know anyone there, and no one knows me. And I've had my own grievances about moderation there in the past.
Still, it's symbolic of how you can't have small communities anymore. The modern alternative is stuff like Reddit where you have a million anonymous people.
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After ~30 years, it seems Shacknews.com's community has finally (mostly) died. The "chatty" (the comment section) is a bit of a dead zone, after a bunch of weird conflicts between moderators, the site's owner, some prominent posters who since left, etc.
I've been visiting this site daily since ~1998 for various reasons. It has always been my "window" into US culture, and with some gaming discussion on top (it was part of the websites I'd visit from the PlanetQuake days!).
(...)
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LinkedIn was already fast becoming hot garbage, but the recent AI developments have made the descent to hell come 10x faster. So much crap being posted - not just about AI, but using AI.
Today I saw someone replying to random posts with comments that are visibly AI generated, with some random question at the end, to generate engagement of some sort.
I just find it all so embarrassing.
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Getting into a rabbit hole of #running documentaries recently. The recent "Road to Houston" series (which just started) is the latest one, and it's pretty awesome if you can get past the narration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72gthn-veaw
It covers the Houston Half Marathon in which (spoiler alert) Conner Mantz got 2nd place to break the American HM record set by Ryan Hall.
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On a slightly different note, I have to admit I've been using Reddit more than ever in the past few months. I didn't want to, but some communities are only there, and very strongly so (in my case, running and Power Metal stuff). Fediverse alternatives like Lemmy are not even close.
When the main goal of a social network is debate/discussion/news, more so than self-expression, the network effect of the established leaders is much stronger.
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Anyway like I said before, I used the Mastodon API for something simple recently and it was a breath of fresh air.
And I think lots of people don't realize what we lost when the wild west of the APIs died.
Mainstream social media networks like to pretend they're the only world that exists. To keep things contained inside them. In some cases you can't even link to outside URLs, let alone integrate with them.
They want us to forget it didn't use to be like that.
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Personally I expect to see
To some extent most or all of these already exist, but I expect to see more.
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