Viewing profile — AndrewStephens

Very nice results, I really like the way it looks like a printed page. Image processing is addictive - once you start playing around it is hard to stop.

Alternative allocators could make a huge difference to the runtime performance. When multithreading on real multiprocessor systems started to become a thing it was common that all …

When I look back on the really helpful blog posts I have read, they have all been really basic. Whether they described a programming technique or a recipe for a new meal, it was a …

I think what you are looking for is something like Mastodon or related activity-pub service. You can run your own instance and nobody can take that away from you. No need to drag a…

What is the incentive for an individual to participate in a non-financial blockchain? Bitcoin-style blockchains “work” because everyone gets the possibility of a little reward for …

> I'd probably skip WebP, and go straight to AVIF now. That is my assessment as well. The compression ratios with AVIF are ridiculous compared to older formats.

This is pretty neat if all you need is to ping a local server but please use curl (or something equivalent) for contacting remote services. HTTP1.1 seems like such a simple protoco…

Exif is great but here is your obligatory reminder that if you are publishing images you should strip out some of the identifying information that cameras and image editing softwar…

My static site generator strips out exif data from images and I would expect all sensible sites would do the same. There is a lot of personal information jammed in there - if you p…

These were some of the most influential books of my youth, teaching a generation of young kids quite advanced topics. I still picture cartoon robots putting numbers in boxes whenev…

PG remains one of the best things on the internet. The amount of fascinating material almost beggers belief.

IBM was legendarily over-managed. This is second-hand but a guy I used to work with told a story of when he interned for a summer at IBM in London during the mid-90s doing what wou…

> gate fidelity and other parameters are above certain threshold A threshold that might be beyond what the physical properties of our universe allow. It is still unclear.

Aaronson know his stuff but I am not sure he hasn’t considered the fact that, in this current hype cycle, the quantum researchers breathlessly reporting to him on a breakthrough ju…

A lot of the original 8bit games that pixel art tries to invoke have quite terrible art, even by the standards of the day.

Well, probably. And if not there is always good old fashioned email. Almost nobody actually contacts me but it is technically possible.

I have been trying for years to get good at 3D modeling with Blender and have also failed. But I didn’t let that stop me using Blender to produce illustrations for my sci-if epic i…

I haven’t had comments on my blog for over a decade now and I don’t miss them. For every useful and informative comment I got several spammy or rude reply. Anyone who wants to let …

I love this (and submitted my blog) - people bemoan the death of the Old Web™ but in reality there is still heaps of great content being created.

A well written piece on a sad state of affairs.

You are not alone. I got criticism on my blog for using a serif font but those people are just … wrong. Serif fonts are just better for reading at all font sizes.

> I was put through the mill of getting higher level security clearances so I could be assigned to classified projects. Fortunately, I never was. Sure was lucky you didn’t work on …

> As I have described earlier, the race to the bottom is a feature, not a bug. It encourages other sites to mirror your content. The problem is that bottom in this case is “free, w…

I get the sentiment but micropayments just don’t work - the main problems are not technical but social. Even in the gaming sector, nobody really charges less than about a dollar fo…

I just disable SSH passwords and force using a certificate, which should be immune to bots barring some horrible unknown flaw in the ssh daemon. Running over a VPN service would ha…