vanderZwan

I'm not really seeing it tbh. I mean, maybe they used a chatbot to help them write it but I don't immediately feel like I'm reading padded slop without actual content, it's fairly to the point. I just clicked around on the blog to see if anything else feels like it, but it's mainly just very "prefab". That did teach me that the author apparently also worked on DOTS previously for Unity, so they at least have actual hands-on experience with game engines.

If, like me, you have too much "P5 api" muscle memory to really get into LÖVE (not a criticism of that library, tbc), then L5 might be a nice alternative:

https://l5lua.org/l5-for-processingp5/

> he probably is best known for lighting a BBQ in under 5 seconds by use of liquid oxygen

Well, now I know what we should be pouring if anyone plans to use the expression "pour one out for…"

Sort-of unrelated (but very on-brand for people into BeOS I think), it's so satisfying when a webpage is so free of bloat that navigation and latency to clicking on things in general feels instant.

> i think i'll rest for a bit after this. i can only do 80-hour weeks for so long

Jesus Christ, 80 hours?! I really hope the author seriously takes a proper break! I mean, they seem to be riding that incredible high that comes from having a breakthrough in deeply understanding a really tough problem after thinking about it for too long, so I kind of get it, but that is also all the more reason to take good care the precious brain that now stores all that knowledge, before it burns out!

I have an 8 year old laptop that works fine except as long as I don't bother with sites like CNN.com. Heck, I even have a 13 year old laptop that works fine on most sites. Absurd ad-tech and tracking technology is not a motivation for me to upgrade but to avoid badly coded sites.

String is also a pretty damn fundamental object, and I'm sure trim() calls are extremely common too. I wouldn't be surprised if making sure that seemingly small optimizations like this are applied in the interpreter before the JIT kicks are not premature optimizations in that context.

There might be common scenarios where this had a real, significant performance impacts, E.G. use-cases where it's such a bottle-neck in the interpreter that it measurably affects warm-up time. Also, string manipulation seems like the kind of thing you see in small scripts that end before a JIT even kicks in but that are also called very often (although I don't know how many people would reach for Java in that case.

EDIT: also, if you're a commercial entity trying to get people to use your programming language, it's probably a good idea to make the language perform less bad with the most common terrible code. And accidentally quadratic or worse string manipulation involving excessive calls to trim() seems like a very likely scenario in that context.

This is a really great article, and I really appreciate how it explains the different parts of how JPEG works with so much clarity and interactive visualizations.

However, I do have to give one bit of critique: it also makes my laptop fans spin like crazy even when nothing is happening at all.

Now, this is not intended as a critique of the author. I'm assuming that she used some framework to get the results out quickly, and that there is a bug in how that framework handles events and reactivity. But it would still be nice if whatever causes this issue could be fixed. It would be sad if the website had the same issue on mobile and caused my phone battery to drain quickly when 90% of the time is spent reading text and watching graphics that don't change.

I half-agree, but in general I'm always a bit weary of saying "x is easy" for anything programming, because it might appear easy in isolation, but often that depends on also having decent understanding of all interconnected parts of the computer, OS, and so on that relate to it.

And in turn each of those may also appear simple in isolation, but as a whole it can still be an overwhelming amount of knowledge to learn, integrate and connect the dots between (and then once you reach that level of mastery, there's meta-problem of applying outdated rules of thumb from a few decades ago to modern hardware). That's where the advantage of having the kind of lifelong experience like a former demoscener gamedev comes in.

Anyway, my earlier post might have been a bit tongue-in-cheek but I'm rooting for you to surpass this guy one day! :)

> However, I misunderstood and came up with an even more extreme version: instead of tracing versions of normal instructions, I had only one instruction responsible for tracing, and all instructions in the second table point to that. Yes I know this part is confusing, I’ll hopefully try to explain better one day. This turned out to be a really really good choice. I found that the initial dual table approach was so much slower due to a doubling of the size of the interpreter, causing huge compiled code bloat, and naturally a slowdown.

> By using only a single instruction and two tables, we only increase the interpreter by a size of 1 instruction, and also keep the base interpreter ultra fast. I affectionally call this mechanism dual dispatch.

I really do hope they'll write that better explanation one day because this sounds pretty intriguing all on its own.

Did you check out the "about" section and the timeline of his career on the main page of the linked blog?

https://www.voxagon.se/

Because it looks like your opponent is a Swedish former demoscener who started programming at age 12 on the C64 and Amiga computers in 1990, quickly moving on to writing games and demos in assembly, then professionally developing physics engines since 2001, specializing in game performance profiling and squeezing performance out of optimized mobile games.

As far as game dev stereotypes go you basically picked a Final Boss fight. Good luck, you'll need it :p

Have seen that presentation, but that still does not give the full context. At least, I don't think it is obvious from the video alone whether this remark was a friendly jab between friends, or whether it was a stereotypical vicious academic back-and-forth between to big names in a field.

The quote makes much more sense as an in-joke between two like-minded people, because Alan Kay isn't exactly humble himself nor does he avoid provocative statements.

And speaking as a Dutch man, given the kind of humor we have I'm pretty certain Dijkstra appreciated a good roast like that too.

Perhaps we would have more of a chance if we make a collection of international differences in checkmark designs and propose that set of glyphs as a whole.

The other comment is correct, it was added as part of proposal adding a larger set of mathematical symbols[0]. The wikipedia page actually mentions the path through which it was added, which lets us make some educated guesses:

> From that apparent beginning, the Angzarr was swept up into the Monotype typeset catalog of arrow characters (...) It is unknown why Monotype added the character, or what purpose it was intended to serve

> In 1988, the International Organization for Standardization added the symbol to its Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) definition, apparently pulling it from the Monotype character set.

> In March 2000, the Angzarr symbol reached wide distribution when the Unicode Technical Committee, in collaboration with the STIX project, proposed adding it to ISO/IEC 10646, the ISO standard with which the Unicode Standard is synchronised. The Angzarr was proposed in the ISO working-group document Proposal for Encoding Additional Mathematical Symbols, although no specific purpose is listed for the symbol.

My guess is that the people proposing the addition of new maths symbols[1] weren't going to decide on inclusion or exclusion of a symbol on the basis of being familiar with it themselves or not, since that was likely true for many symbols that happened to only be used in fields of mathematics that they were not working in. Meaning they had to rely on some other kind of "authority" to infer that a symbol was used by the larger maths community. With that in mind "being part of the Monotype catalog and part of SGML" seems like a pretty sensible heuristic to go by.

Another consideration might have been that they simply wished to have complete coverage of the symbols that SGML encoded, regardless of familiarity with the symbols involved. And of course both could have been true.

[0] https://www.unicode.org/wg2/docs/n2191.pdf

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angzarr

> I'll bite

Tasteless joke, dude.

You're calling a direct quote of a testimony given by one of Epstein's victims "hearsay". ctrl+f "bit" in that PDF.

Pretending to be oblivious to the many complaints that the attacks in Iran are another attempted distraction from the Epstein files isn't fooling anyone either.

You may feel like it's "off-topic", but I don't see why people should be allowed to talk about and glorify military techology, but not voice their disgust at it, how it is used, or why.

The quote is from a slide of an FBI presentation of unclassified information regarding the Epstein files that is hosted on justice.gov itself. What about this is hearsay exactly?

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA01660...

There's something hilariously telling about calling yourself the "ultimate" dev while being completely oblivious about who Don Hopkins is, or what his views on this type of subject would be.

How customizeable is the programming of the thermal printers? Whenever I see the dot prints of these thermal print cameras I wonder if I could make it look better using more modern dithering algorithms, e.g. Ostromoukhov dithering:

https://observablehq.com/@jobleonard/variable-coefficient-di...

> But not against the state as they consider themselves above suspicion.

That's a statement that I expect to infuriate just about everyone who lived in Eastern Germany, how do they get away with that argument?

If you got a recent digital one it actually does print on the photography paper. I'm guessing it works like a line scanner but in reverse, using color LEDs to "print" light dots in high resolution on the paper.

This brand claims to be fully recyclable:

https://www.koehlerpaper.com/en/products/Thermal-paper/TH_Bl...

It supposedly works by using a layer of reflective bubbles that collapses when exposed to heat:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pc1mlCThevg&t=20s

Of course, I don't know how those bubbles are made or how they are made to collapse from heat, so for all I know that layer still uses chemicals that currently slip through regulations. But I can also imagine that it is doable to create such a "functional layer" with safe materials.

Very nice visualization!

I thought this was going to be like a Game of Life variation I came up with about 15 years ago where you stack multiple layers of 2D Cellular Automata, allow each layer to have their own rule set, do single steps of each and then define the interactions between the layer as applying Boolean operations before doing the next step (e.g. set layer 1 = 1 xor 2, layer 2 = 1 xnor 2).

I'm pretty sure that's effectively a subset of what you can encode with a multi-state CA (you can after all interpret each layer as a "bit", so e.g. with two layers each point can be in "four states", meaning any give combination of rulesets ber layer + masking operation should have an equivalent four-state CA, but I never bothered to figure out how one would map from one to the other, and then the hard drive where the code was stored crashed so I forgot about it.

> And no, I've never played LoL, I probably never will, and I haven't seen that series based on it (Arcana or something?) either.

Same, and I also still think that's a cool performance. Will check out the other names you mentioned, thanks for the recommendations!

It feels like a Nordic interpretation of a folk tale shared across Europe, meaning it has small differences and a local flavor. Which seems very appropriate for what Tolkien was trying to do in the first place.

Than you for explaining. And I have to say, the other comment also makes me skeptical of the claim that it doesn't go into the abyss since it seems to have at least twice as many eggs as a regular pancake would have

Is the "Dutch Baby" in the pancake group some alternative name for "flensjes" that I'm not familiar with? It's a thin dessert variation of Dutch pancakes that has relatively high egg and milk ratios compared to flour.

I was trying to be inclusive by treating anything that can produce music as an "instrument", but I suppose you're right.

> I guess the part people don't like hearing is the implication techno is somehow not expressive.

I think of it more like a painter's palette: every instrument and tool involved in creating music has a different set of colors to choose from, and can also filter some "colors" out if we think of things like audio processing filters.

The tools and techniques typically used to produce techno filter out "colors" that feel essential to me to connect with a song, and yeah, that "controlled" aspect of it is probably a large part of that. That doesn't mean it's not expressive, it's just expressive in a way that I struggle to connect with.

EDIT: funny enough I actually have protanomaly, so my choice of analogy is slightly ironic there. Some visual art and design out there objectively looks terrible from my subjective experience, since the colors look completely off. But that doesn't mean I'm saying the art is objectively bad.

Nice addition! First time I heard of them and I'm liking what I'm hearing so far.

And just to clarify: I don't dislike electronic instruments. I just think that on some subconscious level the human brain can detect other humans playing a live instrument. Like there's something "embodied" in the sound that is likely missing from a pure electronic instrument. And I needed that element to "unlock" access to techno.