As I've posted before, the Zelda series is my absolute favorite game series (console game only) and Breath of the Wild (BotW) is my favorite game of all time. I'm not saying the game was perfect, it definitely had it's share of issues, but overall, the amount of joy I got from that game surpassed any other game I've played. So, of course I was super excited when the next Zelda game came out. Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (TotK). Well… Sadly, so far, it's been a huge disappointment. I'm 60 hours into the game. Was going to wait until I finished because maybe by the end I'll have changed my mind ..read more

ChatGPT has been all over the tech news for the last couple of months. Well, imagine by surprise when I recently watched this 1957 movie that features ChatGPT In the movie Bunny Watson (Katherine Hepburn) runs the research department of some corporation. Other divisions call the research department anytime they need info like "Give me 5 interesting facts about Kenya?". Or "Who is the head of India and what is their title?". The research department gives you the answers or if they don't know, they will go research them and get back to you. Richard Sumner (Spencer Tracy) is a computer engineer ..read more

ChatGPT has been all over the tech news for the last couple of months. Well, imagine by surprise when I recently watched this 1957 movie that features ChatGPT In the movie Bunny Watson (Katherine Hepburn) runs the research department of some corporation. Other divisions call the research department anytime they need info like "Give me 5 interesting facts about Kenya?". Or "Who is the head of India and what is their title?". The research department gives you the answers or if they don't know, they will go research them and get back to you. Richard Sumner (Spencer Tracy) is a computer engineer ..read more

Maybe someone in the car rental industry can help clarify things here but... At some point in traveling I'd rent a car from Hertz. I'd get to the airport, ride the Hertz shuttle to the Hertz location. There, they'd announce something to the effect of If you're a gold member look up your car on the dash board and then go straight to your car. The rest of us had to go into the Hertz office and stand in line at the counter for 10-30 minutes depending on how crowded the counter is. I ended up joining the gold club which is free. Since then I've even been in locations where they say Just pick an ..read more

Related to this post on time wasted because of naming standards, I just ran into this 2018 talk about tree-sitter. A fast language parser for code colorization written by Max Brunsfeld at github. It seems pretty clear something like this had to be developed later than naming standards but its at least interesting to imagine what if it came first? Would we even need naming standards? In the talk they point out that most editors use a complex set of regular expressions to guess how to color things. Here's a pretty typical example: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 ..read more

In most (all?) western languages there's the concept of UPPER case and lower case. I'm only guessing this is one reason why we have different styles of naming convensions. Commonly we have things like ALL_UPPER_CASE_SNAKE_CASE_IS_A_CONSTANT CaptializedCamelCaseAreClassNames lower_case_snake_case_is_a_variable_or_member lowerCaseCamelCaseIsAVariableOrMember We often bake these into coding standards. Google's, Mozilla's, Apple's, Microsoft's Being a person that grew up with a native language that has the concept of UPPER/lower case some of this seems normal but several languages, off the top o ..read more

Over the last ~9 years I've spent way too much time answering questions on stack overflow. I don't know why. I want to say it's because I like helping people. It's certainly not for "internet points". In fact I despise the gamification on Stack Overflow so much I tried to hide it from myself. Here is what my view of Stack Overflow looks like Notice all the points are missing. I feel an unhealthy influence of points on all sites that have them so I turn them off. I'm convinced someday some scientific research will show they are detrimental to well being and will push to ban them or at least sh ..read more

I'm a fan (and a sponsor) of Dear ImGUI. I've written a couple of previous articles on it including this one and this one Lately I thought, I wonder what it would be like to try to make an HTML library that followed a similar style of API. NOTE: This is not Dear ImGUI running in JavaScript. For that see this repo. The difference is most ImGUI libraries render their own text and graphics. More specifically they generate arrays of vertex positions, texture coordinates, and vertex colors for the glyphs and other lines and rectangles for your UI. You draw each array of vertices using whatever meth ..read more

Okay, hyperbole aside, Unity mistakenly hardcoded checking the browser's userAgent for MacOS 10 in their "WebGL" game support. MacOS 11 shipped a few months ago and Chrome/Edge started reporting MacOS 11 when Chrome/Edge is run on MacOS 11. Result: Nearly all existing Unity games on itch.io, simmer.io, github.io, as well as Unity based visualizations on science sites, corporate training sites etc, stopped working for anyone running MacOS 11 using Chrome/Edge (and probably Brave, Vivaldi, etc...?) It's an interesting issue Unity shouldn't have hard coded checking for MacOS 10 and failing if it ..read more

The Zip file format is now 32 years old. You'd think being 32 years old the format would be well documented. Unfortunately it's not. I have a feeling this is like many file formats. They aren't designed, rather the developer just makes it up as they go. If it gets popular other people want to read and/or write them. They either try to reverse engineer the format OR they ask for specs. Even if the developer writes specs they often forget all the assumptions their original program makes. Those are not written down and hence the spec is incomplete. Zip is such a format. Zip claims its format is d ..read more