Recent content in Blogs on Erik McClure
Years ago, I realized that trying to become a “programming expert” was both an ill-defined goal and did not actually correlate to being paid well. Throughout my career, I noticed that things software developers considered “amazing feats of engineering” often amounted to dealing with a shitty tool nobody else wanted to deal with, being able to contort a shitty tool into…
Three months ago, the idea of using AIs to help debug code sounded like complete nonsense to me, given that they couldn’t even write code well. In my experience, the AI models I’ve tried still can’t write code very well, but it turns out this is a completely different skill from finding bugs. In reality, AIs are already superhumanly good at finding logic errors, and while…
My relationship with AI is getting increasingly strange. Generalist AIs are still mostly useless, but narrow AIs continue to produce very impressive results. We have plenty of AIs that are better than any human at specific tasks like spotting cancer, but no AIs that can exercise common sense. We can synthesize terrifyingly realistic recreations of almost anyone’s voice, but they must be…
It seems almost impossible to describe this very simple concept to an increasingly large percentage of leftists: If you disagree with someone’s opinion on [Political Position A] , but agree with them on [Political Position B] , you can still work with them to make [Political Position B] happen, without compromising your stance on [Political Position A] . This is called forming a political…
The new discord overlay no longer uses DLL injection, and is instead a permanent HWND_TOPMOST window glued to whatever window it happens to think is a game. Ignoring the fact that discord seems to think FL Studio, the minecraft launcher, and SteamVR’s desktop widget are “video games”, the real problem is that this breaks the Borderless Windowed Optimizations , which has the most…
Something that is very common is for people pushing the boundaries of technology (or pretending to, anyway) to hold weirdly conservative social views. This is why “techbro” is now a thing, and it’s not really surprising - there are plenty of engineers that are only good at engineering, not participating in a society, or even understanding how human social interactions work. It is…
I started learning Rust about 3 or 4 years ago. I am now knee-deep in several very complex Rust projects that keep slamming into the limitations of the Rust compiler. One of the most common and obnoxious problems is hitting a situation the borrow-checker can’t deal with and realizing that I need to completely re-architect how my program works, because lifetimes are “contagious”…
One of the most fundamental problems with Rust is the design of Result . It is a lightweight, standardized error return value, similar to C-style error codes but implemented at a type system level that can contain arbitrary information. They are easy to use and very useful, and the ecosystem encourages you to use them over panic! whenever possible. Unfortunately, this ends up creating a problem.…
*shaking voice* "so, here's the thing — you're not gonna force all of us to learn rust" the way this is said... you'd think they were being deported or something. incredibly childish people at the helm there. https://t.co/fcgA6m9fvq — fasterthanlime (@fasterthanlime) August 30, 2024 Recently, Rust people have been getting frustrated with C developers who seem to base their entire personal…
Sturgeon’s law states that 90% of everything is crap. Combined with Hanlon’s Razor , we arrive at the inescapable conclusion that most problems are caused by incompetence. What’s particularly interesting is that the number of incompetent people in a system tends to increase the higher up you go. Part of this is due to the Peter Principle , where organizations promote employees…
[programmers frantically pulling cables out of the wall] AI: "Nuclear power. Double teachers' salaries. Build more houses. Distribute food more fairly. TRAINS—" — qntmyrrh (@qntm) November 24, 2023 I remember growing up with that same old adage of how you could be the next scientist to invent a cure for cancer, or a solution to climate change, or whatever. What they don’t tell you is…
I originally posted an even more snarky response to this, but later deleted it when I realized they were just a teenager. Kids do not have decades of experience with buggy drivers, infuriating edge-cases, and broken promises necessary to understand and contribute to the underlying debate here (nor do they have the social context to know that Xe and I were just joking with each other). Of course,…
Discord’s Recent Announcement made a lot of people mad, mostly because of Hyrum’s Law - users were relying on unintended observable behavior in the original username system, and are mad that their use-cases are being broken despite very good evidence that the current system is problematic. I think the major issue here is that Discord didn’t go far enough, and as a result,…
Death : No. Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape. Susan : With tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Death : Yes. As practice, you have to start out learning to believe the little lies. Susan : So we can believe the big ones? Death : Yes. Justice, mercy, duty. That sort of thing. I want to start this by saying that I am in favor of a wealth tax. We…
You can’t have a 4-slot GPU. You just can’t. We have finally left sanity behind, with nvidia’s 4000 series cards yielding a “clown car” of absurd GPU designs, as GamersNexus put it . These cards are so huge they need “GPU Support Sticks”, which are an actual real thing now . The fact that we insist on relegating the GPU to interfacing with the system while…
What exactly happens when you write Foo* foo = new Foo(); ? A lot is packed into this one statement, so lets try to break it down. First, this example is allocating new memory on the heap, but in order to understand everything that’s going on, we’re going to have to explain what it means to declare a variable on the stack . If you already have a good understanding of how the stack…
There’s been a lot of hand-wringing over The Technical Interview lately. Many people realize that inverting a binary tree on a whiteboard has basically zero correlation to whether or not someone is actually a good software developer. The most effective programming test anyone’s come up with is still Fizzbuzz . One consequence of this has been an increased emphasis on Open Source…
C++17 introduced an alignment argument to ::operator new() . It’s important to note that if you allocate something using aligned new, you absolutely must deallocate it using aligned delete , or the behavior is undefined. LLVM 10.x takes advantage of this alignment parameter, if the compiler supports it. That means if you are compiling on Windows with MSVC set to C++14, __cpp_aligned_new is…
Back when Discord was a wee little chat platform with no rate limiting whatsoever, it’s API had already been reverse-engineered by a bunch of bot developers who then went around spamming random servers with so many messages it would crash the client. My friends and I were determined to keep our discord server public, so I went about creating the first anti-spam bot for Discord. I am no…
I recently discovered that in Rust, this is a relatively common operation: let foo = String::from('foo'); // stuff that needs ownership let foo = &foo; Or this: let mut vec = Vec::new(); vec.push('a'); vec.push('b'); let vec = vec; /* vec is immutable now */ This is a particularly permissive form of name-shadowing , which allows you to re-declare a variable in an inner scope that shadows the name…
Metaprogramming, or the ability to inspect, modify and generate code at compile-time (as opposed to reflection, which is runtime introspection of code), has slowly been gaining momentum. Programmers are finally admitting that, after accidentally inventing turing complete template systems , maybe we should just have proper first-class support for generating code. Rust has macros , Zig has built-in…
Today, there was an announcement about a new RISC-V chip , which has got a lot of people excited. I wish I could also be excited, but to me, this is just a reminder that RISC architectures are fundamentally unscalable, and inevitably stop being RISC as soon as they need to be fast. People still call ARM a “RISC” architecture despite ARMv8.3-A adding a FJCVTZS instruction , which is…
I’ve finished constructing a new personal website for myself using hugo , and I’m moving my blog over there so I have more control over what gets loaded, and more importantly, so the page doesn’t attempt to load Blogger’s 5 MB worth of bloated javascript nonsense just to read some text. It also fixes math and code highlighting while reading on mobile. If you reached this…
I was recently told that my niece was trying to memorize her times tables. As an applied mathematician whose coding involves plenty of multiplication, I was not happy to hear this. Nobody who does math actually memorizes times tables, and furthermore, forcing a child to memorize anything is probably the worst possible thing you can do in modern society. No one should memorize their times tables,…
Have you built an algorithm that mostly works? Does it account for almost everyone’s needs, save for a few weird outliers that you ignore because they make up 0.0001% of the population? Congratulations, your algorithm is racist! To illustrate how this happens, let’s take a recent example from Facebook. My friend’s message was removed for “violating community…
A long time ago I thought Google was this magical company that truly cared about engineering and solving problems instead of maximizing shareholder value. Then Larry Page became CEO and I realized they were not a magical unicorn and lamented the fact that they had been transformed into “just another large company”. Several important things happened between that post and now: Microsoft…
Lua is a popular scripting language due to its tight integration with C. LuaJIT is an extremely fast JIT compiler for Lua that can be integrated into your game, which also provides an FFI Library that directly interfaces with C functions, eliminating most overhead. However, the FFI library only accepts a subset of the C standard. Specifically, “C declarations are not passed through a C…
The most surreal experience I ever had on discord was when someone PMed me to complain that my anti-spam bot wasn’t working against a 200+ bot raid. I pointed out that it was never designed for large-scale attacks, and that discord’s own rate-limiting would likely make it useless. He revealed he was selling spambot accounts at a rate of about $1 for 100 unique accounts and that he was…
One of the most common things I hear from people is that companies should be “apolitical”. The most formal way this concept is expressed is that a company should make decisions based on what maximizes profits and not political opinions. Unfortunately, the statement “companies should only care about maximizing profits” is, itself, a political statement (and one I happen to…
UPDATE: I have confirmed all the results presented here by taking the low frequency test with someone standing physically next to me. They heard a tone beginning at 30 Hz, and by the time I could hear a very faint tone around 70 Hz, they described the tone as "conversation volume level", which is about 60 dB. I did not reach this perceived volume level until about 120 Hz, which strongly correlates…
It’s been known for a while that windows has a bad habit of eating your exceptions if you’re inside a WinProc callback function. This behavior can cause all sorts of mayhem, like your program just vanishing into thin air without any error messages due to a stack overflow that terminated the program without actually throwing an exception. What I didn’t realize is that it also eats…
About two months ago, I got a new laptop and proceeded to load all my projects on it. Despite compiling everything fine, my graphics engine that used DirectX mysteriously crashed upon running. I immediately suspected either a configuration issue or a driver issue, but this seemed weird because my laptop had a newer graphics card than my desktop. Why was it crashing on newer hardware? Things got…
Did you know that CSS3 does all its linear gradients and color interpolation completely wrong? All color values in CSS3 are in the sRGB color space, because that’s the color space that gets displayed on our monitor. However, the problem is that the sRGB color space looks like this: Trying to do a linear interpolation along a nonlinear curve doesn’t work very well. Instead, you’re…
Today, a friend asked me for help figuring out how to calculate the standard deviation over a discrete probability distribution. I pulled up my notes from college and was able to correctly calculate the standard deviation they had been unable to derive after hours upon hours of searching the internet and trying to piece together poor explanations from questionable sources. The crux of the problem…
I am going to tell you a story. This story began with me getting pissed off at Windows for reasons that don’t really need to be articulated. Just, pick your favorite reason to hate Windows, and let’s pretend that was the tipping point. I had some spare space on my secondary drive, so I decided to give Linux another whirl. After all, it had been three or four years since I last…
"I have the solution, but it only works in the case of a spherical cow in a vacuum." - *[old physics proverb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow)* Whenever I am designing something, be it an API or a user interface, I try to remember that I am not designing this for a perfectly rational agent. Instead, I am designing software for a bunch of highly emotional, irrational creatures called…
*The only thing more addicting than heroine are numbers that keep getting larger.* Incrementer and idle games are seemingly simplistic games where you wait or click to increase a counter, then use that counter to buy things to make the counter go up faster. Because of the compounding effects involved, these types of games inevitably turn into a study of growth rates and how different functions…
Are there any programmers left that actually care about writing good software? As far as I can tell, the software development industry has turned into a series of echo chambers where managers scream about new features and shipping software and analyzing feedback from customers. Then they ignore all the feedback and implement whatever new things are supposed to be cool, like flat design, or cloud…
It’s that time of the year again, when everyone and their pony puts on a sale, except now it seems to have started much earlier than the traditional Black Friday. Needless to say, this is the only time of year I go around buying expensive sample libraries. One of these libraries was recommended by a friend: LA Scoring Strings - First Chair 2, a cheaper version of LA Scoring Strings.…
One of the most bizarre arguments I have ever heard in ethics is whether or not people can choose to be gay or not. The idea is, if being gay is genetically predetermined, it’s not their fault, therefore you can’t prosecute them for something they have no control over. Since when did anyone get to choose what makes them happy? Can you choose to like strawberries? Can you choose to…
Frustrated with C profilers that are either so minimal as to be useless, or giant behemoths that require you to install device drivers, I started writing a lightweight profiler for my utility library . I already had a high precision timer class, so it was just a matter of using a radix trie that didn’t blow up the cache. I was very careful about minimizing the impact the profiler had on the…
Many people assume that modern graphics technology is now capable of rendering photorealistic video games. If you define photorealistic as any still frame is indistinguishable from a real photo , then we can get pretty close. Unfortunately, the problem with video games is that they are not still frames - they move . What people don’t realize is that modern games rely on faking a lot of…
Google is going down the drain. That isn’t to say they aren’t fantastically successful. They are. I still use their products, mostly because I don’t put things on the internet I don’t want other people to find, and I’m not female, so I don’t have to worry about misogynists stalking me. They still make stupendous amounts of money and pump out some genuinely good…
**im·bro·glio** *noun* 1. an extremely confused, complicated, or embarrassing situation. Across the country, there is a heated debate over our educational system. Unfortunately, it's a lot like watching members of the flat earth society argue about whose theory is right - there is no right answer, because *everyone is wrong*. The most recent and perhaps egregious example of this is a…
*"Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler."* - Albert Einstein ([paraphrased](http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/05/13/einstein-simple/#more-2363)) The burgeoning complexity of software is perhaps one of the most persistent problems plaguing computer science. We have tried many, many ways of managing this complexity: inventing new languages, creating management systems, and…
*Premature optimization is the root of all evil* - Donald Knuth Ever since I started putting words on the internet, I have complained about the misinterpretation and overgeneralization of this Donald Knuth quote. Developers essentially use it as an excuse to never optimize anything, because they can always say they “aren’t done yet” and then permanently render all optimizations…
**Pros:** For the most part, does what it claims it does, and gives you extremely precise, fast tracking of fingers. Cons: Really hates thumbs for some reason. Has a lot of trouble with pens or other implements. Fingers must be separated. Fairly easy to get positions that break the camera because it can’t see the fingers. No one has any idea how to write software for it. I just got my Leap…
Aurora Theory has been released! Buy it on bandcamp for $9, or $10 on iTunes , Amazon , and Google Play . The album is also available on Spotify, last.fm, other online radios, and can be previewed on YouTube . Aurora Theory has been 4 years in the making, a compilation of all the songs I managed to make in the middle of attending university. The earlier songs have been extensively improved, and…
*"In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists."* ― Eric Hoffer Yesterday, the University of Washington finally mailed me my diploma. A Bachelor of Science in Applied Computational Math and Science: Discrete Math and Algorithms . I learned a lot of things in college. I learned how to take tests and…
It's standard procedure at the University of Washington to allow a single sheet of handwritten notes during a Mathematics exam. I started collecting these sheets after I realized how useful it was to have a reference that basically summarized all the useful parts of the course on a single sheet of paper. Now that I've graduated, it's easy for me to quickly forget all the things I'm not using. The…