OK I don't often post Carrie, who is not here for content. But also I got home a while ago and she just wants to prevent laptop access.

This weekend in the code mines, slipped and wrote some GPU lodding with OpenGL 4.6 I sat down to fix a 6502 pixel error, but ended up knee deep in RTX shaders. Now I have a kinematic hierarchy with mesh shaders so I've got that going for me which is nice. I like writing code by hand.

This week in #EliteDangerous It ain't half hot mum.

This week in #elitedangerous ... The Lynx Liner! I joined FDev 5 or 6 years ago becoming a custodian of the massive space adventure sandbox I loved. It's been hard work, I'm proud of my team and the Lynx has become a symbol of the shared journey we have been on together as a team and community. o7

Lords of cobol, hear our prayer.

Modern GPUs are faster than you think. I've now written a tumbling cobra at every tech level from 6502 assembly to compute raytracing. Holy smokes when did hardware get so good? 200μs render is... five thousand frames per second? Yeah no. I'm thinking I need more evil plans and stuff. Any ideas?

kicking ass is back in town. This week in mad code plans... writing a barycentric approximator! You know triangles? What if you were bad at drawing them but it was faster. Sure they are a bit blobby but those blobs are a couple of pixels and the GPU isn't fill rate bound. Yes I have gone wrong.

My 2020s AI journey has come to an end. As a long term professional game developer who cares about the human experience more than anything, I've come to a dead end with the technology. I'll get back to writing about games now :) The full goodbye is here. substack.com/home/post/p-...

Well, my AI coding adventurers have been fun but are coming to a close, and I'm working on the final write-up. An 80b qwen with 256k context is woefully insufficient to help with simple tasks in code ~1% the size of a real game. I've still been unable to find anything it can help with.

Gonna make a hookup app for geeks called "pull request" #geekjoke

You and me baby ain't nothing but yaml, So let's do it like they do it on the properties panel.

If you like languages where whitespace matters please reach out. We can help you. If you design a language where whitespace matters you are going to hell. Straight to Hell. To the boiler room of Hell. All the way down. Python and yaml I'm looking at you.

My AI coding "assistant" just gave me a inappropriate singleton that I'm going to have to remove. And uses strings where it should very obviously use integers. If it makes bad decisions like this, whose code was it trained on? I can identify and reject these, but would an inexperienced developer?

This AI agent has suggested that perhaps we should try again later when I have more patience or try something else. An alternative would be that its less wrong all the time. There are only so many times I can call out a liar who responds with "You're absolutely right!" before I give up.

Bluesky doesn't really allow for essay answers, so I put this weeks AI thoughts onto substack where I try, once again, to find value in this new technology. It was an interesting journey, if anybody can tell me what the destination is I'd appreciate it. rogerbennett1.substack.com/p/2020s-ai-a...

I'm on a train so no AI programming adventurers this week, but I am able to sit and develop some human made code. I did encounter the phrase "Slop jockey" as a pejorative for AI programmers. This week I'm trying to pull every trick to not allocate memory, and reduce, reuse, recycle my footprint.

I can't always tell what gizmo has been up to. But IDK. This lil ginger boy has it all going on.

This weeks AI coding hasn't gone as well as the previous two failures. All was going well until my quota ran out and IDK what it was in the middle of but doing half of it was bad news bears for my CMake file and who knows where its mucky paws were. Anyway I guess this is what revert all is for.

This weekend saw my second attempt at using an AI tool to help develop software and you'll be pleased to know that humanity are winning 2-0 There were a few brief moments of "oh that's neat" in a mire of "why is what" and the results I got were no better than last time.

Tried today to write down the unwritten rules of programming so that a mindless AI assistant can follow them. These implicit rules that a human intuits from context. Seperate your design time data from local data and from live/replicated data.

Just tried an AI assisted programming tool for the first time. I work in a specialist field where there are few or zero examples online that these models have trained on. Opinions are forming.

Spent the morning moving code to a non-allocating branchless cache coherent model so I can send it to worker threads and sometimes I wonder about myself. It's going to be like ten microseconds faster. It'll scale like crazy and will never need looking at again, but I think I'm hyperfixating. :(

Whether you watched the Muppets Christmas Carol or Die Hard this year, I'd like to wish you a lovely Christmas. I hope you've had a good year on balance, even after everything, and the warmth of the season fills your heart. Second star to the right, light speed until morning, engage.

Programmers brunch! Sat around all morning, discussing problems that programmers have. I wrote good code, turning a difficult problem into an easy problem and solved it well. Then sipping coffee staring at "C4706 - assignment used as a condition" - a bad habit I picked up and I guess should stop.

Congratulations to #RocketWerkz and #KittenSpaceAgency for their progress, and making one small step for kittenkind in their public build. Space games in custom engines are my jam! Great work gang, wishing you the very best in the next leg of the journey, and I am looking forward to seeing more.

Just discovered, via a brief power outage, that parts of my house only work because of a polluted DNS cache and rebooting the system correctly resulted in broken things not working. Now I have to fix things.

This week in #EliteDangerous . Vanguards is live! Join the ranks, discover squadrons to join, fight side-by-side, pool resources, and explore the galaxy together. Play your way. Thanks to all the members of the team that made this come together.

Ask not mow much you can break your fast, but how much the fast can break you. Feeling hungry this morning. Our cats have weird breakfast habits. But they don't get coffee with theirs. :)

UNLIMITED TRIANGLES

This week in #elitedangerous. I'd only just found enough triangles for my Type-8! now I really have to up my game. Those of you who already know me as a Lakon pilot will have no surprise at my excitement over the new T11. Work starts on porting the new ship soooon.

Wait how fast does light go in a leap year?

It seems embarrassingly self serving to talk about #elitedangerous on social media these days. I soak up the good - and the bad - from the community and let the voices of many in to my own piloting experience. I've never stopped being a fan, and many thanks to the community of players I'm a part of.

Spent a grand moment with twitch open watching a few #elitedangerous streams today. I always catch a mix of partner and non partner channels. Launch day is always exciting, but this was something else. From humble origins to the beast it is today, it's a pleasure to say the Panther has landed. O7

Three different chicken, smoked salmon, bread, babaganoosh.

Someone stole my seat! This cutie is enjoying the night air with us. It's been a hella week. So proud of our little space game, and the rewarding efforts of a dedicated team pulling together. A comfortable seat, a pleasant tipple, and living my best life. Looking forward to brunch and bbq tomorrow!

We adopted lil Xena and her orange brother Gizmo at the end of last year after a litter of seven was found in a shed near here. They still use the original carrier as a bed, although they used to both fit in there with room to spare! I just need to explain that breakfast isn't served until eight...

Reflecting back on the past year of #EliteDangerous, enjoying coffee and croissant in a cafe with some great people. A little moment of calm, proud of the road we have taken and optimistic about the journey we have yet to take.

They say to study history or find yourself repeating it. Amy has knocked it out of the park and into orbit with this incredible documentary about the history of spaceflight. Look to the future by understanding the past. Enjoy!

Coffees and Croissants Ahoy! chilling out at programming brunch while my brain ties itself in knots with dynamic multicast delegate bindings. I have never advocated lambdas over a garbage collected command pattern so hard. Maybe I should have gone for mimosas instead of coffee after all!

Lil Xena just had her first nom of #sushi and this #cat is now hooked!

I'd forgot just how much I really love this. It hits me spot on. youtube.com/watch?v=NYD3...

After much experimentation, and in the name of science, I've managed to exactly replicate office coffee using a home setup. And can use my data to recalibrate the office machine to produce a passable drink. Grind size was the linchpin, but mass and ratio also have to be exactly wrong.

The triangle count on this minimal Lakon Forklift is budget breaking and there is so much detail missing. At least the blue-white supergiant looks passable. #Elite #Retrocomputing #EliteDangerous This 2Mhz 6502 is backed by an enhanced maths co-processor to calculate filled geometry.

Back in black! #6502 #retrocomputing #elitedangerous Yea. I can do binary systems. Eight colours allows pretty much all main sequence stars. My circles are bad because the Mode2 pixel aspect and my maths is lazy. And I don't have sunspots and ejections yet. But this is a good proof of concept.

Angry rant time. This week the Windows 24h2 update broke my laptop activation. Microsoft technical support is insufficient, so best option is to manually reinstall. Microsoft broke it, couldn't fix it. I'd get a better user experience from a pirated copy with an activation hack. Oh the conundrum.

Caught the calm of the early morning and warmth of the sunrise on this spectacular spring Sunday. Enjoy the little things.

Why are printers such garbage now. Its a single-serving technology with one job. I want to push a button and have the thing on the screen be a thing on some paper. And yet. This is how the robot uprising starts. And they will know that it was me that started it.

I don't mean to cat shame, but lil gizmo ate all the food. I'm mostly worried and a tiny bit proud.

Yeap. This happened. Beeb Master 6502-Emulator, stock instruction set. 2Mhz. Raspberry Pi Tube-Coprocessor. Full screen Mode-2, no vsync interrupt. Filled and shaded, around 16fps. This is the tumbling Cobra title screen, no flight model. You can achieve the impossible if you code hard enough.