Viewing profile — kgm

I have used id() in production code, but the circumstances were extremely specific: It was in some monitoring-related code that was trying to dig down into the guts of the interpre…

When it comes to profiling in Python, never underestimate the power of the standard library's profiler. You can supply it with a custom timing function when instantiating the Profi…

My own experience was with the 3D-enhanced version of Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries, specifically. It is possible that the equivalent version for Mechwarrior 2 was more stable. It's a…

Part of the issue there is that the 3D-acceleration-enabled versions of Mechwarrior 2 (and Mercenaries) were buggy as heck even at the time. (Mercenaries was even pretty buggy befo…

There's a whole generation of games from the mid to late 90s (and perhaps into the early 00s) that's remarkably annoying to play these days because of this issue. The game I've per…

I am taken a little aback by the name. There is, of course, already the D programming language, which has even had a major version number of 2 for quite some time. It also brings t…

All right, behold my idiotic story about the time I got a job for one of the major tech companies. It's the late 00's. I am in my early 20s. I have an associate's degree from the l…

For another breakdown of the details of floating-point precision, I recommend qntm's "0.1 + 0.2 returns 0.30000000000000004": https://qntm.org/notpointthree

"Mars was empty before we came." Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson

I would also recommend https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute-minim...

I once wrote a popular browser-based tool for a popular game. Other tools existed in the space at the time I started the project, but I felt the need to go at the problem my own wa…

There is no sense in which English pronunciation can be described as "consistent." As supporting evidence, may I introduce the poem "The Chaos": https://ncf.idallen.com/english.htm…

I just finished a re-read of the "Commonweal" series by Graydon Saunders, which begins with The March North : https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=MoIOAwAAQBAJ I've never…

One thing to note, in the gritty details of Python's actual implementation of the list type, is that there's a little more to say about how list resizing works than is immediately …

The standard array module was more relevant in the distant past, before version 2.6 added the bytearray type. Otherwise, numpy arrays are considerably more useful in virtually ever…

Yeah, but we're not talking about pure mathematics. We're talking about floats, and I find that it's very important to be clear about the limitations. It's easy to get some nasty b…

This is a neat article, but it does have some errors. One subtle point that the post gets wrong: > So where does that come from? The answer is that Python stores everything inside …

The podcast Behind the Bastards has a two-part episode on the history of the US border patrol titled "The U.S. Border Patrol Is A Nightmare That Never Ends," which I listened to ju…

You joke, but Factorio is a sufficiently "crunchy" logistics game that it has prompted me to study a number of serious topics, from learning linear programming to determine optimal…

I taught myself linear programming because of Factorio. It is easily the single game in which I have spent the most time, probably close to 4,000 hours. It is delightful to see tha…