201–210 of 220 posts
Huge loss to the community. She was, by all accounts, an amazing programmer. I remember when she uploaded the source code of her Doom 3DO port she indicated that she had to write her own string lib because the base one sucked: > I had to write my own string.h ANSI C library because the one 3DO supplied with their compiler had bugs! string.h??? How can you screw that up!?!?! They did! I spent a day writing all of the…
Very sad news. This one hit pretty hard for me as not only was she so awesome and contributed so much to so many great games, but the short timeline between "oh dang I have cancer and we're fighting it" to, well, today... was just way too short :(
You are not alone being hit hard by the pace of the cancer's progression. Dr Makis talks about his shocks lately as an oncologist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gIYQCjB_NU
https://cpsa.ca/news/statement-william-viliam-makis-not-lice...
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The games industry is not traditionally well paid, unfortunately.
It's such an erractic industry in terms of compensation. You can found a studio, make some acclaimed darlings, and still end up shuttering and being no better off than your average joe. Then there's being a "software engineer in games" where you're a cog in a wheel fixing bugs in the yearly Sportball game that gets compensated 200k and you live very well despite never truly "impacting" the industry the same way. 200k…
Huge loss to the community. She was, by all accounts, an amazing programmer. I remember when she uploaded the source code of her Doom 3DO port she indicated that she had to write her own string lib because the base one sucked: > I had to write my own string.h ANSI C library because the one 3DO supplied with their compiler had bugs! string.h??? How can you screw that up!?!?! They did! I spent a day writing all of the…
Not just "write my own string lib", but "write my own string lib in assembly"! Wow.
plenty of people have implemented strcpy(), strlen(), etc for embedded-like platforms.
Rebecca was well known in emulation circles for her high quality work on various games of the era, often pushing the hardware in unusual ways. This article is one of my favorites, detailing the wacky tricks she used to get Another World's 3D rendering system running acceptably on a Super Nintendo https://fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons_SNES/ Rest in piece, you absolute legend.
Today I learned... "Super Fami-Com ("FAMIly COMputer")" Doh!
Compare Nintendo 64 = Roku-Yon (Six-Four) and PlayStation = Pure-Sute
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> This… is a think that people believe, but it’s not as simple as that. This is a thing people believe because pharmaceutical companies keep repeating it. And to be fair, they're not entirely wrong in that getting a drug/treatment from the lab to the pharmacy is incredibly expensive because most drugs don't work and clinical trials are super expensive. It does seem to me that a better system would be to split out the…
Which the US had a situation exactly like that until very recently: development labs, often at Universities, with scientists paid for by grants (some private, but the majority being public, government grants), with clinical trials overseen by government agencies like the National Institute for Health (NIH), and winning research eventually being tech transferred for cheap to Pharmaceutical companies to manufacture, di…
Yeah, this isn't a particularly new idea. Like, most of the risk in pharma is on testing, and there's so much waste in spinning up plants for drugs that may not even succeed in Phase III. So I'd like to split that out.
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> This… is a think that people believe, but it’s not as simple as that. This is a thing people believe because pharmaceutical companies keep repeating it. And to be fair, they're not entirely wrong in that getting a drug/treatment from the lab to the pharmacy is incredibly expensive because most drugs don't work and clinical trials are super expensive. It does seem to me that a better system would be to split out the…
> It does seem to me that a better system would be to split out the research/development and manufacturing of pharmaceuticals into the lab development (scientists), the clinical trials (should be government funded) and the manufacturing (this could easily be done via contract). The market is there to risk money in the world of imperfect information trying to predict what would be good to pursue. That is one of the ha…
Fundamentally, the incentives of society and private companies are misaligned with respect to healthcare. Society wants a cheap, simple treatment that basically works forever (like sterilising vaccines). However, because of how the patent system works, companies want a treatment that is recurring, and can easily be patented multiple times.
Because of this, so much money goes into lifestyle treatments for the rich world, and not enough into re-using things that can't be patented. I think this is a giant waste of resources, hence my suggestions above.
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This… is a think that people believe, but it’s not as simple as that. Most basic research is universities, all over the place. Many drugs are developed in Europe. A lot of medical machinery is developed and made in Europe (Siemens, Philips and Roche are huge in this space). Like most things, med tech is fairly globalised.
And let's not forget that a substantial amount of medical research performed in the USA is not market-based but rather publicly funded through the NIH.