whats that box supposed to be ?

so many dilemmas. hard to honor every principle

simplicity vs. realism

correctness vs. practicality

utility vs. correctness

generality vs. specialization

It's only ever been shown off on the festival circuit, but it did see hands on action with kids. Basically, it's an 8-bit fantasy console where you interact through direct memory manipulation. To play tic tac toe against the computer--for example--you literally write x's and o's (in EBCDIC of course) to an array and then either scan through the array to see how the CPU reacted or check out a magic location where the cpu puts the number of the square it last filled in. It was meant to be a kit to get kids soldering and learning about low level computing but never made it past a few prototypes. There's alot of its DNA in Ghost of the Witch though. At some point hobby computing platform prices are gonna be so low I may have to revisit it.

That's where the engineering happens!

I want to share this demo I found called "scrolll". It runs in a web browser. It's an animation made out of 32 actual scrollbars. https://files.blinry.org/scrolll/

This certainly isn't the first time someone has squeezed a demo into unexpected places.

Thank you for sharing. This gave me the same feeling as when I first saw "Bad Apple".

Maybe this thread should be pinned?

SDL 3 released. Amusingly, the very first release of version 3 is actually 3.2. It was also with this announcement that I learned that one of the head developers, Sam Lantinga, works at Valve. Apparently, Valve had already been using SDL 3 for over a year!

Super cool!

I'm reacquainting myself with Haxe and I came across this last night:

https://haxetink.github.io/tink_core/#/types/future

I try to call out beautiful design/code when I see it, and the way this whole system uses Haxe's abstract type system is absolutely gorgeous. I had to share it. I think I have only ever seen assembly that gives me the same goosebumps.

FOUND IT!!! randomly remembered it just now after searching for it for god knows how long many days ago.

In its full glory: In Defense of Optimization Work

Note that I'm not arguing against you. Sweet Christ do I feel your pain.

RANT MODE: ENGAGE

> how are any of those not an optimization?

It's as much an optimization as changing the damn oil in your car "optimizes" its performance.

I guess the main issue I take is with essentially the title of the article and what it implies:

In Defense of Optimization Work

Fucking please. I've never heard anyone argue in the context of "premature optimization" that we shouldn't put indexes on databases or learn how GROUP BY works and use it.

This is really basic shit. This isn't optimization work; this is basic maintenance. We're not tuning a turbo engine (or whatever car geeks do); we're changing the goddam oil.

Now, will your car run for a time without ever changing the oil? My first truck sure as hell did. Ran that fucker 'till the dipstick was dry -- like an idiot. Then it fucking died in the Fred Meyer parking lot. Should that have been surprising? lol no. Is it surprising that after a few months of running your database like a total fucking baboon your app falls over? lol no.

Does finally changing my oil make me a goddam mechanic? Does adding indexes make me a DBA?

Instead of this borderline strawman scenario where someone is shouting "PREMATURE OPTIMIZATION!!!" every time someone adds an index, here's what I actually have seen:

I've seen a bunch of developers arguing over asinine shit like !! vs Boolean() and running completely worthless and inaccurate micro-benchmarks to shave nanoseconds off their convoluted spaghetti while the rest of the tire fire gets ignored. I've seen devs fucking about arguing whether to use lodash, underscore, or even sneering about using either while their database is on fire and screaming for the sweet mercy of euthanasia because the data model itself is utter shit, not to mention the lack of indexes and the lazy queries that send thousands of hot garbage rows to be mangled on the fucking browser side holy shit people all while the project is on the verge of cancellation because we've managed to deliver fuck all (spoiler: we got cancelled).I've seen a database with literally no indexes unique or otherwise interface with a proprietary "language"/system that I shit you not takes two minutes to perform 100 no-ops in a loop oh. my. god. someone please bore this memory from my skull with a power drill H̷̩͇̲̦͔̫̀͜E̗͙̟͈̙͕͔̪͟ ̨̻C̴̢̟̫͎̺̞O̯͉͙M͏͎̦͞E̵͞҉͈̦͉̱̣̼̲S̨̞͓̼͙̰̲ while the consultants involved argue about whether the drag-and-drop "code" will run faster if we loop this way instead of that.

That's the premature optimization that gets argued against. People focus so fucking much on these kinds of optimizations in their code while ignoring the big picture. Some interviews are almost entirely based around it. Yet if you profile your startup's shitty web app backend, imma bet 95% of the time you're gonna see you spend almost all your time fucking around with the database. Half the instances where you're actually burning lots of CPU time it's because your query is so braindead that you're doing something in code that could've been done 10x quicker in the database, but you couldn't figure out how to do it using your dogshit ORM so fukkit (but thank God the frontend JavaScript that processed those 5 billions rows was optimized because you knew this would run faster if you traversed this data backwards you clever clever boy you!)

You have to be in a good spot to have any need to start doing those kind of micro-optimizations that make you feel clever and get you so hard you wanna jerk it under your desk (you know the ones don't lie I ain't gonna kink shame you). The reality is your situation is probably more like the Titanic except instead of an iceberg it ran in the to the fucking Hindenburg and now it's a race between drowning and immolation, luckily your deck chairs are arranged to perfection so at least you can be comfortable while your lungs fill with fire/water.

Because I'm not done beating the car metaphor to death, I'd like to request that the title of this blog post be renamed:

In Defense of Adding a Spoiler to your Honda Civic: You change your oil don't you?