rmckayfleming

Joined 14 years ago

Karma
282
Submissions
104
Member since
Mar 20
Co-Founder and CTO of Chalk.com.
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Recent submissions

Comment · 9 months ago
It was ridiculous. He got it less than a year into his presidency.
Comment · 10 months ago
Oh neat, I've been working with claude on an NES emulator in Racket using an SDL3 wrapper also written mostly by Claude.
Comment · 2 years ago
"I feel uneasy about design patterns. On the one hand, my university class on design patterns revived my interest in programming. On the other hand, I find most patterns in the Gang of Four book to be irrelevant to my daily work; they solve problems that a choice of programming language or paradigm creates."

My relationship with design patterns changed when I stopped viewing them as prescriptive and started viewing them as descriptive.

Comment · 2 years ago
Not just dirt cheap, the turn around time to manufacture was significantly lower. Sony had an existing CD manufacturing business and could produce runs of discs in the span of a week or so, whereas cartridges typically took months. That was already a huge plus to publishers since it meant they could respond more quickly if a game happened to be a runaway success. With cartridges they could end up undershooting, and losing sales, or overshooting and end up with expensive, excess inventory.

Then to top it all off, Sony had much lower licensing fees! So publishers got “free” margin to boot. The Playstation was a sweet deal for publishers.

Comment · 2 years ago
Yea, people generally don't think about these things. People were genuinely surprised to find out that 70% of our expenses as a software business were... salaries. The next largest category? Rent. Everything else was effectively a rounding error.
Comment · 2 years ago
I just bought a house this year, the previous owners lived in it for about 2 years from brand new. Thankfully it has an ethernet drop to every room upstairs, and in reasonable places on the main floor. Far better than the situation at the last place I lived in.

But annoyingly, it's all Cat5e! Sure, it's fine for gigabit, but now that I have proper networking equipment, I wish they'd have spent the extra few bucks and put in Cat6A or Cat7 so that I could get 10Gbps to my office from the rack in the basement...

Comment · 2 years ago
Have you used the 7900XT with LLMs at all?
Comment · 2 years ago
I do wonder how much of an impact the PS5 and Xbox Series have on this though since they both have RDNA2 GPUs. Consoles tend to face higher optimization pressure, especially as the generation wears on. It might be why AMD has kept so competitive in gaming as of late.
Comment · 2 years ago
Like, SBCL compiles and assembles directly to machine code, that's very much the Lisp way. But SBCL has a lot of C that's involved in getting the SBCL image running and interacting with the host.
Comment · 2 years ago
It's more that it's easier to use C for two reasons. The first is that C is really popular and therefore pretty portable. It's a lingua franca. The other is that because the hosts are largely defined in C, it's easier to interact with. Of course, the host doesn't actually "speak C", it follows some form of ABI. But the reality is that implementing each ABI is non-trivial and you can avoid a lot of pain by just using the host's C compiler/linker/etc. that implements it for you.
Comment · 3 years ago
CL is the x86 of the Lisps. Successful because of backwards compatibility, but also ugly because of it.
Comment · 3 years ago
I know. I've been spending a lot of time with CL, Scheme, and Clojure the past few years, and the ideal Lisp is some combination of them all. There are aspects of each that I miss in the others. CL has the nicest environment and development story (generally speaking). Scheme feels more refined in the small. And although they can be divisive, I really appreciate Clojure's data structure literals.
Comment · 3 years ago
What do you mean "factorial in recursive style"? Like recursive with an accumulator?
Comment · 3 years ago
Nope. Nothing. I’ve been waiting since they released it. Part of me thinks it might be because I responded yes to “Outside of the US”.
Comment · 3 years ago
My understanding is that that's a non-trivial problem. You'd likely need some sort of AI system to do it, since the perception of colour isn't something that can be simply modelled.

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