AndrewStephens

6 ms·

1.
by AndrewStephens 8d ago
I knew this was going to happen when I purchased my AirPod3s a couple of weeks ago. The only feature I really miss is the touch volume control.
2.
by AndrewStephens 2mo ago
Very nice results, I really like the way it looks like a printed page. Image processing is addictive - once you start playing around it is hard to stop.
3.
by AndrewStephens 2mo ago
Alternative allocators could make a huge difference to the runtime performance. When multithreading on real multiprocessor systems started to become a thing it was common that all your carefully written threads ended up waiting on the alloc
4.
by AndrewStephens 3mo ago
When I look back on the really helpful blog posts I have read, they have all been really basic. Whether they described a programming technique or a recipe for a new meal, it was a clear description that was important - not how esoteric the
5.
by AndrewStephens 3mo ago
I think what you are looking for is something like Mastodon or related activity-pub service. You can run your own instance and nobody can take that away from you. No need to drag a blockchain into it - just host whatever services you need.
6.
by AndrewStephens 3mo ago
What is the incentive for an individual to participate in a non-financial blockchain? Bitcoin-style blockchains “work” because everyone gets the possibility of a little reward for all the hassle and non-negligible CPU time of being a node.
7.
by AndrewStephens 3mo ago
> I'd probably skip WebP, and go straight to AVIF now. That is my assessment as well. The compression ratios with AVIF are ridiculous compared to older formats.
8.
by AndrewStephens 3mo ago
This is pretty neat if all you need is to ping a local server but please use curl (or something equivalent) for contacting remote services. HTTP1.1 seems like such a simple protocol but in the real world you need to deal with proxies, diffe
9.
by AndrewStephens 3mo ago
Exif is great but here is your obligatory reminder that if you are publishing images you should strip out some of the identifying information that cameras and image editing software likes to embed. In particular, you probably don’t want the
10.
by AndrewStephens 3mo ago
My static site generator strips out exif data from images and I would expect all sensible sites would do the same. There is a lot of personal information jammed in there - if you post a picture of your dog making a funny face to social medi
11.
by AndrewStephens 4mo ago
These were some of the most influential books of my youth, teaching a generation of young kids quite advanced topics. I still picture cartoon robots putting numbers in boxes whenever I write code involving pointers. But my favourite[0] was
12.
by AndrewStephens 4mo ago
PG remains one of the best things on the internet. The amount of fascinating material almost beggers belief.
13.
by AndrewStephens 5mo ago
IBM was legendarily over-managed. This is second-hand but a guy I used to work with told a story of when he interned for a summer at IBM in London during the mid-90s doing what would now be called a QA engineering. At that time everyone wor
14.
by AndrewStephens 5mo ago
> gate fidelity and other parameters are above certain threshold A threshold that might be beyond what the physical properties of our universe allow. It is still unclear.
15.
by AndrewStephens 5mo ago
Aaronson know his stuff but I am not sure he hasn’t considered the fact that, in this current hype cycle, the quantum researchers breathlessly reporting to him on a breakthrough just around the corner are just lying to him and themselves. I
16.
by AndrewStephens 6mo ago
A lot of the original 8bit games that pixel art tries to invoke have quite terrible art, even by the standards of the day.
17.
by AndrewStephens 6mo ago
Well, probably. And if not there is always good old fashioned email. Almost nobody actually contacts me but it is technically possible.
18.
by AndrewStephens 6mo ago
I have been trying for years to get good at 3D modeling with Blender and have also failed. But I didn’t let that stop me using Blender to produce illustrations for my sci-if epic interactive fiction game that ended up being nominated for a
19.
by AndrewStephens 6mo ago
I haven’t had comments on my blog for over a decade now and I don’t miss them. For every useful and informative comment I got several spammy or rude reply. Anyone who wants to let me know something about my blog can message me on social med
20.
by AndrewStephens 6mo ago
I love this (and submitted my blog) - people bemoan the death of the Old Web™ but in reality there is still heaps of great content being created.
21.
by AndrewStephens 6mo ago
A well written piece on a sad state of affairs.
22.
by AndrewStephens 7mo ago
You are not alone. I got criticism on my blog for using a serif font but those people are just … wrong. Serif fonts are just better for reading at all font sizes.
23.
by AndrewStephens 7mo ago
> I was put through the mill of getting higher level security clearances so I could be assigned to classified projects. Fortunately, I never was. Sure was lucky you didn’t work on any of those classified projects - <wink>
24.
by AndrewStephens 7mo ago
> As I have described earlier, the race to the bottom is a feature, not a bug. It encourages other sites to mirror your content. The problem is that bottom in this case is “free, with ads.” As soon as you post your well researched expens
25.
by AndrewStephens 7mo ago
I get the sentiment but micropayments just don’t work - the main problems are not technical but social. Even in the gaming sector, nobody really charges less than about a dollar for items - that is the smallest unit of money where putting u
26.
by AndrewStephens 7mo ago
I just disable SSH passwords and force using a certificate, which should be immune to bots barring some horrible unknown flaw in the ssh daemon. Running over a VPN service would have the much the same effect.
27.
by AndrewStephens 7mo ago
This is great. I run a server for my blog and can confirm idiotic bots continually hammer port 22. Sometimes I check my SSH logs just to see what is going on but I’ve never detected anything cleverer than trying common username/pw comb
28.
by AndrewStephens 7mo ago
I find some parts of Liquid Glass to be an improvement over the previous flat style that lasted far too long. A lot of it seems really well thought out. On mobile that is. On larger screens with desktops and overlapping windows it looks kin
29.
by AndrewStephens 8mo ago
Normally I am not a fan of gimmicky page formats but this series really hits it out of the park with well-considered presentation. I can't wait until the next installment on error diffusion. I still think Atkinson dithering looks great
30.
by AndrewStephens 8mo ago
Game design is filled with simple ideas that interact in fun ways. Every time I have tried to come up with complex AIs I ended up scrapping them in favor of "stupid" solutions that turned out to be more enjoyable and easier to tun

More ›