fleabitdev

6 ms·

31.
by fleabitdev 1y ago
Getting rid of subpixel AA would be a huge simplification, but quite a lot of desktop users are still on low-DPI monitors. The Firefox hardware survey [1] reports that 16% of users have a display resolution of 1366x768. This isn't just
32.
by fleabitdev 1y ago
Yes - I think it caught my attention because it was such a mystery. It was a welcome thing to hear from one of the most powerful people in the world, but it came like a bolt from the blue. As far as I know, he never revisited the topic.
33.
by fleabitdev 1y ago
Last year, an interviewer asked Francis how he envisages hell. His response stayed with me: “It’s difficult to imagine it. What I would say is not a dogma of faith, but my personal thought: I like to think hell is empty; I hope it is.”
34.
by fleabitdev 1y ago
Sorry, I wasn't very clear - I think that using an object pool in a GCed language is like writing code in a dialect of that language which has no allocator.
35.
by fleabitdev 1y ago
It's difficult to design a language which has good usability both with and without a GC. Can users create a reference which points to the interior of an object? Does the standard library allocate? Can the language implement useful feat
36.
by fleabitdev 2y ago
When half of a team are lone wolves because they see no other way to get things done, and the other half are rules lawyers who don't care whether things get done, I think that's a clear sign of management failure. Both of these pe
37.
by fleabitdev 2y ago
To provide fonts for N different scripts would multiply the file size by roughly N, and there are a lot of scripts in common use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_writing_systems#/media... Variable fonts woul
38.
by fleabitdev 2y ago
It's a nice thought, but internationalisation would make that difficult. On my system, the Noto international font weighs about 170 MiB compressed (gzip-compressed TTF, sans and serif styles, all weights, including symbols and colour e
39.
by fleabitdev 2y ago
One day, I'd love to dive into stylised 3D graphics as an R&D project. There's been decent progress recently, but I think there's a lot of low-hanging fruit left to pick. Some open questions: - How do you reduce the detai
40.
by fleabitdev 2y ago
https://longwelwind.net/blog/networking-turn-based-game/
41.
by fleabitdev 2y ago
boardgame.io only runs game logic on the server, and it censors the State just before sending it to each client. This strategy makes the UI feel less responsive, but it keeps things simple. The Swords and Ravens blog post recommends resolvi
42.
by fleabitdev 2y ago
That's the exact approach I'm considering for the new engine I mentioned! Although that strategy enables you to store and recover the state of a game, it doesn't give you the ability to inspect a snapshot of that state. How c
43.
by fleabitdev 2y ago
This engine uses a Redux-like architecture. You have a State type (containing data like "the position of the black kingside rook") and a stream of in-game actions (like "knight to F3"). Each action is handled by a pure f
44.
by fleabitdev 2y ago
The problem described by antris is that, if a developer were to naively tear down and rebuild the entire DOM tree on each state change, the browser would discard some important state which belongs to the old DOM nodes. This state includes t
45.
by fleabitdev 2y ago
You're completely right, but I think it's worth adding that the O(n^2) to O(n) change isn't specific to React or UI. That same improvement is often seen when migrating other code from a mutating style to a pure-functional sty
46.
by fleabitdev 2y ago
I last read that story nearly a decade ago, I think. This time around, it feels more real. The engineers follow silly instructions from people with money, and then...
47.
by fleabitdev 2y ago
Sorry, the Wikipedia article isn't very helpful. Your example is the correct one. The killer feature is that you can shadow a dynamic variable, changing its value for the duration of a dynamic scope, in the same way that an inner `catc
48.
by fleabitdev 2y ago
The term is "dynamic scope": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_(computer_science)#Lexic... It isn't a very common language feature, but you could take a look at React's `Context` or Common Lisp&#x
49.
by fleabitdev 2y ago
In a language with algebraic effects, questions like "how should I make this `CancellationToken` available to these forty small functions?" simply go away :-) It's ambient state, just like a `catch` block, and so you can make
50.
by fleabitdev 2y ago
I've spent some time thinking about language design recently. Coloured functions have a surprising number of downsides: - They're sometimes much too explicit. When writing a complicated generator, I don't necessarily want to
51.
by fleabitdev 2y ago
You're right that reactive UI is a poor fit for most languages (especially JavaScript!), but I think the problem is more general than that. Good UI architecture needs some convenient and efficient way to propagate state changes between
52.
by fleabitdev 2y ago
Unlike Windows, Apple and Android have managed to publish modern UI libraries for their own platforms - but in both cases, this involved migrating the whole platform to a new programming language (Swift and Kotlin, respectively). If I remem
53.
by fleabitdev 2y ago
I also admire the simplicity of this approach, but it has several downsides: - Code-based UIs tend to work better with existing tooling, like comments and source control. You can freely customise your development environment, rather than be
54.
by fleabitdev 3y ago
I finally grokked `view = fn(state)` once I understood that the `state` argument encompasses all possible inputs. Your global store, each component's internal state, the text selection, the mouse cursor position, the user's cookie
55.
by fleabitdev 3y ago
The purpose of `view = fn(state)` is to protect you from O(n*m) complexity scaling if you handle each event in isolation. For any given part of your UI, you'll have n events to handle ("UI started up for the first time", &quo
56.
by fleabitdev 3y ago
Sensitivity and specificity [0] seem relevant here. Every interview stage which is designed to reject bad candidates (true negatives) will also accidentally reject some good candidates (false negatives). The more eagerly you filter out bad
57.
by fleabitdev 4y ago
Nearest-neighbour, low-resolution rotation produces unpleasant results when the sprite contains fine details with a thickness of one or two pixels, e.g. outlines: https://imgur.com/a/UiAZ49z Artistic preferences are su
58.
by fleabitdev 4y ago
Can you recommend any games in the first category? I surveyed the indie-game landscape a couple of years back, specifically looking for games in your first category, but struggled to find any recent examples. 2D transforms, alpha-blending a
59.
by fleabitdev 4y ago
I share your preferences, but it's a rock and a hard place. Performing any of the tasks you listed by hand is extremely labour-intensive. Doing without those features is a harsh creative limitation - in my experience, the result isn&#x
60.
by fleabitdev 5y ago
Careful difficulty tuning is essential for fun gameplay. If an open-world game provides traditional exponential power and difficulty curves, and the game fails to guide you to the right content at the right time, you'll end up facing c

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