ahefner

Interesting. I wonder if Harlan Ellison read Colossus before writing I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.

too.

(sorry)

Computers haven't presented an accurate model of how computers actually work for decades. Compare the surface ISA of anything mainstream since the mid 90s versus all of the superscalar and out-of-order execution happening under the hood.

Deliberate efforts to surface this deeper layer back to the programmer-facing ISA (VLIW, notably Itanium) failed spectacularly outside of niche applications. C and its contenders can't simply hop over the CPU abstraction presented to them without having to map backward from some lower-level model to the surface ISA it's forced to target then having the rug pulled every few years due to microarchitectural changes. It has managed to evolve surprisingly gracefully over decades from tiny 16 and 18-bit machines, sometimes segmented, to 32 and 64 bit machines, and even accommodating SIMD reasonably gracefully via intrinsics (which is about the best we can do at present, as CPUs continue to diverge wildly in this area, though I'm begrudgingly impressed by what modern compilers can do via autovectorization to optimize simple loops).

Do you really need a central directory? The tar and cpio file formats basically append files serially with a small header preceeding each one, and for most use cases this is sufficient.

3 MB is still pretty big... try a rewrite in C.

Seems to be a tradition rooted in the original Maniac Mansion. In Thimbleweed Park the multiple characters became tedious due to having to walk multiple people all over and pass items between them, though I enjoyed being able to see the world through the different lenses of how Ray and Reyes vs. Ransome vs. Delores react to things.

Day of the Tentacle (which coincidentally I've replayed in the past week) executed the multiple characters mechanic the best I've seen, since each character was confined to their own area (past/present/future) and you could instantly pass items between them.

But how much time per week does an SWE actually spend writing code?

Every government is an attacker.

This was really frustrating me. YT started recommending this channel and I could recognize the voice as an AI impersonation but had no way to know if it was at least reading something really written by Feynman. Eventually I concluded it wasn't, but there wasn't clear criteria under which I could report the channel. I'm not sure it's even against YT's TOS.

I think you're not technically wrong, but you're defining NAT differently than the majority of people you're arguing with (those who assume NAT also implies a firewall blocking inbound connections), and the remaining minority (the "on the WAN subnet" crowd) are dismissing outright the idea as a reasonable attack vector that an attacker close enough to be able to send packets destined for non-internet routable addresses to your router.

Is the latter something that was/is actively exploited?

It's there in the name - "Rust graphics community" as opposed to simply "the graphics community". Language fetishization above the end goal - or, rather, the language fetish is the real goal.

Apple is already sending spam notifications for stupid bullshit like that F1 movie.

If gRPC overhead is critical to your system, you've probably already lost the plot on performance in your overall architecture.

You make a fair point about smart pointers, and median "modern C++" practices with STL data structures are unimpressive performance-wise compared to tuned custom data structures, but I can't imagine that idiomatic Java with GC overhead on top is any better.

He definitely made games. Chris Crawford was one of the first known names in game design, a few years ahead of contemporaries like Sid Meier whom I expect you'd still recognize. Crawford seemed to alternate between computer war games, with reliable prospects for commercial success in the 80s, and more experimental fare about managing nuclear reactors, geopolitics, and such - difference being he seemed to get bored by the whole thing and completely disembarked in pursuit of whatever it was he intended to achieve via Erasmatron, Storytron, etc. It's fascinating to read his writings over that period. It seemed a sort of tragic paradox overshadowing all of it that, if he was so bored of mechanistic, algorithmic, and predictable computer game mechanics, maybe stop pursuing computer games as your chosen medium? It may have been a blind alley in the end, but someone had to explore it.

Nevertheless, it is quite sad - however, it's difficult for me to relate to the experiences of someone who lived through that first wave of personal computing and played a notable part in it - perhaps through that lens, anything was possible.