glaebhoerl @glaebhoerl@schelling.pt

as a developer, when i'm working on a piece of software, the code is rarely quiescent. i'm often rewriting parts of it, rearranging it, adding new things to it. i'm breaking things on purpose in order to fix them again.

this aspect of programming, as a cyclical process, is mostly ignored in PL.

magic: the gathering arena uses a lisp dialect for its rules engine DSL 😍
https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/mtg-arena/on-whiteboards-naps-and-living-breakthrough
> When a game of Magic is in progress on MTG Arena, the program that is tracking the state of the game and enforcing all the rules-correct card interactions is called the Game Rules Engine (GRE). It's one of the two main programs that we work on. It's written in a combination of C++ and a language called CLIPS, which is a variant of LISP.

With some prodding I've finally recorded a version of my EGRAPHS keynote from last month. (The actual conference talk unfortunately wasn't recorded.) It's slightly longer than the original (extra bonus content? or just less coffee? you decide) but hopefully captures the essence.

Link: https://vimeo.com/843540328
Slides: https://cfallin.org/pubs/egraphs2023_aegraphs_slides.pdf

Enjoy! (Also look for the continuity blooper: headphones instantaneously appear at one cut. Oh well.)

It's beautiful! Several overdue improvements to keep x86 competitive with ARM. I love competition.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/technical/advanced-performance-extensions-apx.html

I’ve created a new C++ build system: g++ *

@regehr Back in the day, I got called to a professor’s office (I was IT support in the CS department) and the professor was complaining his Sparc4 was running slow. First thing I did was minimise a window and there was just this black square. Bit by bit roaches slowly moved. Like 0.5 fps. So many xroaches under his xterm that it was just a solid black square.

The roaches multiply if they’re left alone long enough. This professor NEVER moved windows. So roaches scurried under his windows and then sat there. Never disturbed by being exposed. Slowly multiplying at some rate. Some grad student had thought it would be funny to play a prank on the professor and run xroach on him. But the professor obviously never saw the roaches. So they hid under his windows slowly increasing until finally they soaked up so much RAM that it impaired performance.

The failure of the Internet to deliver its promise is particularly noticeable when you hunt for repair manuals for a product from the 90s. Used to be, the information would either be there or not there, finable or unfindable.

Now, there are hundreds of algorithmically generated sites claiming to have it just because it appeared in their search logs, generating potemkin village content traps with endless paging, broken-thumbnail named-like-the-file-you-want but actually-just-ebay-photos bullshit

executive dysfunction

I feel very bitter at Elon Musk honestly for fragmenting one of the most amazing online communities I had access to, so that now everyone I care about on the internet is just scattered across these different apps

me: do you sell ducks?

him: yes, but they're going quick

me: ok I'll take one

[later]

duck: quick

me: I see

the next unicode addition should be a combining character to make 🍆 and 🍑 refer to food

2008 v. 2023: I don’t think people realize the extent to which parked cars degrade public space.

If you are too mush to work, but not mush enough to read and understand random texts, here is a great recommendation of a series of blog post trying to bridge CPU and GPU programming models:

https://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/04/18/ispc-origins

It goes into auto vectorization, but also explains why it's a fallacy to people generally not well aware of how you write code for GPUs and all that.

It's a great read and I keep recommending it to people.