Viewing profile — russtrotter

That's certainly the pragmatic call, but while admittedly I'd never heard of Braid or his other games before he started showing up my YT feed, his takes on programming culture are …

Sometime in '85, my mom is an administrative assistant at the local University. She's an absolute wiz on her office's newly modernized setup with these "PC" things running Wordperf…

I always feel like NASA has mastered the basic "under promise, over deliver" philosophy that keeps the lights on and the next missions funded. I'd love to be a fly on the wall at w…

i'm thinking two themes here: the X in xcurl and the famous MS-ism "embrace, extend, extinguish"

I started uni in 1990 and went from a kid in his basement banging away on a PC clone with Turbo Pascal 5.x to a place with this thing called "usenet" on a "VAX" running "BSD" off o…

Agreed with this general notion however, I'd argue that unlike a standards body, a big driver for JSON's ascent to defacto standard were the legions of javascript developers workin…

Absolutely agreed. I've watched lots of his long-form videos on all those topics and initially I was always scratching my head as to why he'd want to reinvent all these wheels from…

agreed, Carmack's work ethic, opinions on work and opinions of how those around him work are legendary!

The first half of the article started to feel like the XKCD "15th standard" meme, but at the end, the more nuanced point was presented: If you're already using Rust, stick with Rus…

Technologies like WASI are coming on right now to do exactly this kind of access in the context of a sandbox. From what I can tell, they're going through a lot of the same progress…

Yours is a fair question. Theories: * Cheaper to invest in your tools than overhauling your people/codebases/etc * Sense of wanting to give back to your core tooling * The decision…

The old C bum in me says this should really be a bitwise AND with 1 but I'm sure modern compilers and JS JIT/V8 runtimes optimize MOD 2 to the same.

haha! glad somebody linked this! i love how the site presents itself just as any "framework" would :-) well-played vanilla-js

I used to often reach for xfig for a quick tech diagram (boxes, circles, lines, etc). The "fig" file format, being text, is easy to drop into source control. It's fast and gets the…

I was one of those people downloading 386BSD to floppy disks in my university computer lab in '91 or so. The prospect of running a "real" Unix on my PC hardware was really a way ou…

Reference to the movie quote in "Tropic Thunder" from Robert Downey Jr.s character.

To continue the Java bytecode prior comment, at one point, java was in all browsers of the time (i.e. Applets). However, it lost, and seemingly removed with extreme prejudice with …

The early Doom 1 and 2 being software renderers, used ray casting (386 protected mode FTW to boot!) The later versions though, were part of the first wave of games to leverage GPU …

In the context of the original article addressing Java 8, in the java.time.format package, there's a DateTimeFormatterBuilder that removes the sub-language element of the issue. Wi…

Fair point, but the software that eventually ends up in flying space hardware has usually been put to a similar test.

A few years back, I refactored a memory/time-intensive task of an application to leverage AWS lambdas. Once the code got into production, it ended up working out fine and we were a…

There's all kinds of non mission-critical software that gets made with little life/death consequence on how it gets made. There doesn't seem to be the same notion of the "bridge th…

Where you say "just leave your house in the morning..." really drives home the significance of what Lachlan's Alt Tour particularly means for French people. Wanna ride the whole da…

Ha, your comment is ironic since I still remember from back in the 70's/80's that "nobody got fired for buying an IBM". The quote might even be older than that, but I had first hea…

ha! glad i wasn't the only one who noticed the almost robot-like transcription: bites, NDN, PHAT, etc