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A history of emergent intelligence
As you all know, the simulation of universe 2813/9301 is now coming to a close. This simulation is notable for being the first simulated universe suitable for hosting intelligent life, but yesterday the simulation reached a state where we believe no additional intelligences will emerge. It seems the final state of this set of physical laws is a dark and empty universe of slowly evaporating black holes. Though, given the historical significance of this simulation, it’s unlikely we we’ll be turning it off any time soon!
Note: This document was translated to a language and format suitable for human understanding. Locations within your observable universe are referred to by...On taking good care of your phone
I just finished replacing the micro-USB daughterboard on my Samsung Galaxy S5, which involved taking the phone most of the way apart, doing the replacement, and putting it back together. This inspired me to write about my approach to maintaining my cell phone. I’ve had this phone for a while and I have no plans to upgrade - I backed the upcoming Purism phone, but I expect to spend months/years on the software before I’ll be using that as my daily driver.
I don’t want to be buying a new phone every year. That’s a lot of money! Though the technophile in me finds the latest and greatest...
Portability matters
There are many kinds of “portability” in software. Portability refers to the relative ease of “porting” a piece of software to another system. That platform might be another operating system, another CPU architecture, another web browser, another filesystem… and so on. More portable software uses the limited subset of interfaces that are common between systems, and less portable software leverages interfaces specific to a particular system.
Some people think that portability isn’t very important, or don’t understand the degree to which it’s important. Some people might call their software portable if it works on Windows and macOS - they’re wrong. They might call their software portable if it works...
Nvidia sucks and I'm sick of it
There’s something I need to make clear about Nvidia. Sway 1.0, which is the release after next, is not going to support the Nvidia proprietary driver, EGLStreams, or any other proprietary graphics APIs. The only supported driver for Nvidia cards will be the open source nouveau driver. I will explain why.
Today, Sway is able to run on the Nvidia proprietary driver. This is not and has never been an officially supported feature - we’ve added a few things to try and make it easier but my stance has always been that Nvidia users are on their own for support. In fact, Nvidia support was added to...
The future of Wayland, and sway's role in it
Today I’ve released sway 0.15-rc1, the first release candidate for the final 0.x release of sway. That’s right - after sway 0.15 will be sway 1.0. After today, no new features are being added to sway until we complete the migration to our new plumbing library, wlroots. This has been a long time coming, and I would love to introduce you to wlroots and tell you what to expect from sway 1.0.
Sway is a tiling Wayland compositor, if you didn’t know.
Before you can understand what wlroots is, you have to understand its predecessor: wlc. The role of wlc is to manage a number of low-level plumbing components of a Wayland...
Analyzing HN moderation & censorship
Hacker News is a popular “hacker” news board. One thing I love about HN is that the moderation generally does an excellent job. The site is free of spam and the conversations are usually respectful and meaningful (if pessimistic at times). However, there is always room for improvement, and moderation on Hacker News is no exception.
Notice: on 2017-10-19 this article was updated to incorporate feedback the Hacker News moderators sent to me to clarify some of the points herein. You may view a diff of these changes here.
For some time now, I’ve been scraping the HN API and website to learn how the moderators work, and to gather some...
Killing ants with nuclear weapons
Complexity is quickly becoming an epidemic. In this developer’s opinion, complexity is the ultimate enemy - the final boss - of good software design. Complicated software generally has complicated bugs. Simple software generally has simple bugs. It’s as easy as that.
It’s for this reason that I strongly dislike many of the tools and architectures that have been proliferating over the past few years, particularly in web development. When I look at a tool like Gulp, I wonder if its success is largely attributable to people not bothering to learn how Makefiles work. Tools like Docker make me wonder if they’re an excuse to avoid learning how to...
Game Engine Black Book Postmortem
I am pleased to announce that the Game Engine Black Book about Wolfenstein 3D has shipped. It is 316 pages, full color and made of three parts describing the hardware of the 1991, id Software tools, and the game engine internals. You can read a preview on Google Books and buy it here:
Amazon.com (.fr, .de, .co.uk, .ca,...).
Google Play Books for web browsers, Android devices, and iOS devices.
It took me three years to complete this project. It had its fair share of heavy winds and bumpy roads. I thought it could benefit some writers in the making to give...