stevekemp

Back in the 80s most of the (monthly) magazines had a cassette tape glued to them, with demos or full games. But there was also a brief period of time when you'd get a vinyl instead. I remember …

It's been happening for years at this point. "I saw your comment about GOLANG and I thought you might be interested in our TOKEN DROP FOR FREE SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS". Spam from YC compani…

> The mentats are theoretically safer because of their imperial conditioning, but even that can be tampered with, as we see with Dr Yueh Dr Yueh was not a mentat, but a suk doctor who was subject t…

In addition to low salary, and crunchtime, the other big downside in the gaming industry is frequently layoffs, and studioes going bust. You can't ride on a single game for long, and if the next …

I used my human eyes to submit updates to Redis and Git, fixing typos in comments. Sure it's low-hanging fruit, but if you're looking at the code it's good to have the comments be reada…

I enjoy working on toy-languages, and I've spent the past ten days or so writing a compiler to convert a simple language into (static) linux/amd64 assembly. It supports strings, integers, an…

This is one of the reasons why I'm suspicious of camera-only systems, here in Finland. Half the year there's a lot of snow and ice around. Which I imagine means most of the view is "w…

It's possible that contributes, but to be honest most VPN users are split "privacy seeking" and "abusive". Though I grant you paid users are probably slightly more circumspec…

I never had one, and often lamented it! Being able to pause a running game and peek/poke at the RAM would have been very useful for hacking games, though of course I'd still need to crack th…

Very much so. Fixing software so that they correctly recognized my preferred serial number of #12345 was valid. Using soft-ice to register itself was always a deeply ironic. But to be honest I start…

I wrote a golang BASIC interpreter a few years ago, which was inspired by my ZX Spectrum: https://github.com/skx/gobasic And later still I wrote an adventure game in Z80: https:…

I have a paper copy of "IC 555 projects" kicking around on my bookshelf still! PDF version here https://worldradiohistory.com/UK/Bernards-And-Babani/Babani/...…

On the other hand when you have a reasonably complex deployment it's easy to get swamped with dashboards showing CPU, Memory, I/O, application-metrics, signups, active users/sessions, e…

I loved the writing, in particular this line, but the whole piece was strangely endearing: I asked if he was Canadian. He wasn't. The end

Edinburgh has some confusion of its own too, where streets will have two names. Usually because several smaller streets eventually got joined up and became one. So walk in a straight line and you pas…

We did the same thing, more to avoid throwing away the plastic waste and keeping things reusable than out of any paranoia about chemicals. But they worked well. We just did laundry every day for the f…

I cannot read AltaVista without thinking of Astalavista[.box.sk].

I still deploy a bunch of simple sites, built around the CGI::Application framework. I understand how they work, I'm familiar with HTML::Template, and related modules, so I can hack up a quick in…

To be honest I find the use of a separate browser at work a good way of forcing separation - all "work stuff" is done in one browser, and all "personal stuff" is done in a differen…

https://github.com/stdlib-js/stdlib was is one of several attempts at that, but yes the issue is that different people have very different views of what should be standard.…

I've become used to the idea of having 10+ books in my bag at a time, instead of having to choose which physical ones to pack. Plus over the years I've gotten very familiar with the UI of th…

Prohibition (of alcohol) wouldn't work, but over time the government has raised alcohol duty rates: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/alcohol-duty-rates That cuts down on drinking…

I recently learned that in some cases fines of mispriced goods were very low, leading to companies repeatedly failing tests - and over/undercharging their customers. https://www.thegua…

I feel the same way. To be honest I'm on my third kindle, their life-span seems to be about five years for me. I don't love having to replace them, but paying €120 every five years is proba…

Why would somebody wanting to escape a high-risk environment, or some knocked-over adult go to a library? It's great that libraries exist, be they in Austin, or here in Finland, but they're …

Crafting Interpreters is a good recommendation, and in the same spirit "Writing an Interpreter in Go" (and it's followup about writing a virtual machine) is a good addition. A lot of th…