When reading, we finish the line and our eyes need to zip back to the beginning of the next line. There is an ideal line length so that our zip successfully finds the next line without hunting. This is why you see columns in news papers and magazines, for example.

HOLY FUCKING ERRATA Was: "...stored with the most-significant bit first, e.g., bits 1110 represent the value 14." Now: ".../stored with the least-significant bit first, e.g. bits 0111 represent the value 14."

I wonder if I would prefer C-style languages allowed nesting block comments, /* ... */.

Music nerds, When you have different timbres, what makes it a given note? Is it the average frequency? Is it the base harmonic?

Anyone know of some computer cases that are designed for water cooling? Specifically, multi-radiator. I would love if there was a good spot for a fill and drain port. But my main issue is normally you're stuck with 1x 360 radiator, normal thickness.

Yesterday, an AI bot posted to Reddit--the last sanctuary of genuine human wisdom. And I responded before realizing. Dead Internet Theory is hitting hard. I don't think young people realize how valuable and promising the internet was in the '90s.

Got Lempel-Ziv compression working. Now to combine it with the Huffman from before to get Deflate. This is how Lempel-Ziv compresses Green Eggs & Ham. The numbers inside the parentheses are the offset from the start and the length. (5, 3) is the "Sam" it saw before. (0, 4) is the "I am".

Calling all programmers! Khronos Group is hosting "3D on the Web" -- an evening of talks, demos & networking around #WebGL #WebGPU, #glTF & #Gaussian splats. March 11 · 5:30-9:30 PM PDT Easy 12 minute walk from GDC in San Francisco Learn more and register […] [Original post on fosstodon.org]

I feel like that might be a new one for me.

Finally getting around to writing my own compression implementations. Got a naive Huffman compression going. Had to take some notes while debugging. LZ77 next.

I love C++. But uh...the literal situation is a mess. 0xXXX for hex. 0bXXX for binary. Many similar prefixes. u8'X' for a unsigned char 8, another prefix. XXXll for long long. Suffix. Many more. XXXs for seconds. XXX_foo for user-defined literals. Gotta use a _. It could be XXXb for binary...

I'm sure they don't think about it at all, but it keeps crossing my mind... I explained to several managers that I was drastically under-leveled. I'm pretty sure they thought I was lying. Having quit and retired, have they since "huh."?

February is almost over. Sit rep: I added a state machine for the player and am feeding it input. So now there is a "running left" state, for example. I also cleaned up a bunch of animation code. But I didn't add frame timing yet. So the player's animations are way too fast.

There is a thing I wish C++ supported. Might be time to finally write a proposal? class Foo { auto bar_ = baz(); }; We have 'auto' return types for functions. It is a hard requirement if you're returning a templated type involving a lambda. It is also a hard requirement here.

Is there a standard name for combining state machines and stacks? Example in reply. But tl;dr most state transitions are effectively a JUMP. I want to also CALL & RET.

Theeere we go. Got a player sprite working.

FRIGGIN'... A triangle wasn't rendering. My default was to check winding order. Seemed the same as others? I changed the order just in case and it worked! Fair enough. But also, the triangle was upside-down. I forgot DX is -Y down. My winding order would have been correct in -Y up.

Remote code execution in NOTEPAD?!?!?!!!!! www.cve.org/CVERecord?id... Microsoft, PLEASE

Woooooow. I wonder how much Twitch got paid to put Roblox in its top level naviation. Back when I worked there, I was tasked with adding an in-nav ad to the Android app. I hated it. At least we would only show it if the user didn't have Twitch Turbo (no ads). This shows WITH Turbo. On the website.

Got animations & keyboard input working

*siiiiiigh* Microsoft made its docs open source, right? I can update it? This says D3D11_USAGE_STAGING is for GPU -> CPU. But it is either direction? And most typical usecae is CPU -> GPU, right?? learn.microsoft.com/en-us/window...

I'm learning 3d modelling (not creativity/art--just tooling). A lot of this seems to be knowing what steps you need in what order. If I prep this step, I can unlock the clean way of doing next step.

One of my 2026 resolutions is to finally make a game. The end of Jan is coming up. Here is my game so far. For 1 month, not too bad.

Roblox has more concurrent players than all of Steam games combined. I am struggling to fully internalize that. Being the platform is currently VERY useful for Roblox & Fortnite. That will fade. But it is still wild.

In Windows, UIs are now just textures (simplifying). So for performant UIs, you embrace and write a renderer. Which means part of the graphics driver is now in your memory space and you have 20 extra threads... I miss when the only program running on my computer were ones I actively chose.

Trying to get Omarchy to run in a VM seems...difficult.

FRIGGIN'... No wonder my OS project couldn't get into 32-bit mode. I have an off-by-1 error in the memory protection.

Yesterday, I pointed out to my friends that Intel beat earnings per share by 81.51%, which is crazy. Today, their stock is down 17.75%. Nothing makes sense.

It is both neat and annoying to watch my ISP fail over live. The yellow dotted line is latency to Microsoft, Google, and Cloudflare servers. It has consistently been around 18ms. Then at 10:10pm ET it jumped up to 27ms and has stayed there for about 2 hours.

Huh. Neat. Looking at my disassembly for an odd performance case, I see: movzx ebx, bx Easy way to clear out high bits.

JR East has a game where you drive a train?? Neat. Whoooaa each additional line is a $27 DLC?? I guess that makes sense. The graphics are insane and they seem to have modeled every building. WAIT! It's a video!! store.steampowered.com/app/2111630/...

Color experts, suppose I have an image in X color space that I'm displaying on a monitor with Y color space. I think scaling each component independently isn't quite correct. The triangle of the primaries might be "rotated". But maybe close enough?

I feel like some UI problems are well solved, buttons, scrolling... But others seem unsolved still. Like mode changes, for example. Suppose you are driving along and your engine develops a problem. A modal dialog covering your speed is no good. Designated notification area?

Every step of the way I thought "Yep, I do that."

Friggin'! My vertex shader had: pos = vector * matrix; The translation looked like a rotation. Because the order matters there and I needed: pos = matrix * vector;

Golang has for i, val := range values { ... } I want that so bad in C++. It's so simple and so useful. Please.

I finally got around to watching this video. www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fZT... Immediately, I thought "Wait, I know of him! He offered to help open source projects with their design." Watching him speak gave me some insight into his thought process and intentions. New role model. Thanks @jenson.org

So I knew in C++ you could spread a string across lines. "This is" " one string" " with no newlines in it" But I didn't know you could insert comments. Neato. "Hello " // Is "World" appropriate? "world"

Been learning Go through boot.dev . (I've wanted to do something like this so happy to see their implementation and support them.) I like several things Go does. The multiple named returns is nice.

HDR is difficult. I have a XB273U NV. It supports HDR 400. When I play PQ content on it, it seems fine. I also have a PA32U which is a MUCH better monitor for HDR. Better color accuracy, 1000 nits... PQ content is too dark on it unless I put it in HLG mode???

That was cool. I just matched up with Post Malone, Shroud, and xQc in a game. Got a headshot on PM :D

Remember a little while ago when China was buying GPUs and putting more RAM on them for AI servers? And now we have a massive RAM shortage. China is pretty good at seeing what they need and making it happen.

I friggin' love @tsoding.bsky.social . I've been a graphics programmer for years and didn't fully know what you taught--step by step--in your last video. Thanks, friendo. Also, somehow I only just noticed your i3status: Tea, Leaked IP.

Things like the NORAD Santa Tracker warm my heart. But uhhh any chance some of us graphics programmers and artists can contribute? Look at the way those reindeer animate. "Skinning" has been around since the late '90s.

This might be a spicy take, since everyone hates AI... but I'm okay with AI for iterating on ideas. Not for final production things. (Although, I could see it becoming good enough some day. And we'll have have to face what that means then.)

<me, a year ago> 1Gb networking is fine for me. 2.5Gb or 10Gb would just waste more CPU I think. <me, today> RDMA is making a lot of sense to me. And 10Gb just isn't enough.

That whole Amazon using keyboard lag thing... That means they basically have a keylogger on their worker machines. Which I guess is ...fiiiiine. But wouldn't traceroute have worked, too??

If you write to the AX register, the high bits of EAX are preserved. Same when you write to AL--the high bits of (E)AX are preserved. But when you write to RAX, the high bits of EAX are zeroed. TIL

Interesting Notepad feature I'm sure all us programmers will hate: I wanted to break up a line. I accidentally pressed backspace one too many times, turning the word "reason" into "reaso". Then I pressed enter. Notepad put the "n" back to complete the word.

Steam Replay time. 97%ile, 98%ile, and 95%ile. Ashamed but proud.