Cool! It would benefit from better physics though, maybe supersampling the position in time especially when moving fast. Each ball can't push to its edge fully, for instance.
Readit Newsdarkstarsys commented on Eternal Struggle yoavg.github.io/eternal/... · Posted by u/yurivish
darkstarsys commented on Cognitive load is what matters github.com/zakirullin/cog... · Posted by u/nromiun
Clearly they were missing Amanda, the engineer who's had to review others' terrible code (and her own) for 20 years, and has learned the hard way to keep it simple. She knows she's writing code mostly for people to read, not computers. Give me a small team of Amandas any day.
And as a manager/CTO, the way to do this is to give the devs time to think about what they're doing, and reward implementation clarity (though it's its own reward for Amandas).
darkstarsys commented on Cognitive load is what matters github.com/zakirullin/cog... · Posted by u/nromiun
This article reminds me of my early days at Microsoft. I spent 8 years in the Developer Division (DevDiv).
Microsoft had three personas for software engineers that were eventually retired for a much more complex persona framework called people in context (the irony in relation to this article isn’t lost on me).
But those original personas still stick with me and have been incredibly valuable in my career to understand and work effectively with other engineers.
Mort - the pragmatic engineer who cares most about the business outcome. If a “pile of if statements” gets the job done quickly and meets the requirements - Mort became a pejorative term at Microsoft unfortunately. VB developers were often Morts, Access developers were often Morts.
Elvis - the rockstar engineer who cares most about doing something new and exciting. Being the first to use the latest framework or technology. Getting visibility and accolades for innovation. The code might be a little unstable - but move fast and break things right? Elvis also cares a lot about the perceived brilliance of their code - 4 layers of abstraction? That must take a genius to understand and Elvis understands it because they wrote it, now everyone will know they are a genius. For many engineers at Microsoft (especially early in career) the assumption was (and still is largely) that Elvis gets promoted because Elvis gets visibility and is always innovating.
Einstein - the engineer who cares about the algorithm. Einstein wants to write the most performant, the most elegant, the most technically correct code possible. Einstein cares more if they are writing “pythonic” code than if the output actually solves the business problem. Einstein will refactor 200 lines of code to add a single new conditional to keep the codebase consistent. Einsteins love love love functional languages.
None of these personas represent a real engineer - every engineer is a mix, and a human with complex motivations and perspectives - but I can usually pin one of these 3 as the primary within a few days of PRs and a single design review.
Clearly they were missing Amanda, the engineer who's had to review others' terrible code (and her own) for 20 years, and has learned the hard way to keep it simple. She knows she's writing code mostly for people to read, not computers. Give me a small team of Amandas any day.
darkstarsys commented on Why agents are bad pair programmers justin.searls.co/posts/wh... · Posted by u/sh_tomer
Aider does everything right. Stop using Cursor or any other agentic environments. Try Aider, it works exactly as suggested here.
I prefer Claude Code (the `claude` cmd line version, with Sonnet 4) because it's more like an actual pair-programming session. It uses my claude acct rather than costing extra per token. It also hooks into all my MCP tools (shell (restricted), filesystem, ripgrep, test runners, etc. etc.) which makes it pretty amazing.
After turning off its annoying auto-commit-for-everything behavior, aider does work OK but it's harder to really get it to understand what I want during planning. Its new `--watch-files` thing is pretty darn cool though.
darkstarsys commented on Show HN: Deep Timeline log-scale world history timeline deep-timeline.oberbrunner... · Posted by u/darkstarsys
Update: I refactored it to remove d3 and use solidjs for fully reactive SVG generation. I'm happy with how that came out. Panning and zooming are smoother now on all platforms.
darkstarsys commented on Cottagecore Programmers tjmorley.com/blogposts/co... · Posted by u/morleytj
Be a craft programmer. Create or join a small lifestyle tech company that understands the beauty of software, the importance of keeping your tools sharp and your technique polished. Avoid the giant soul-sucking companies where you're just a cog in a giant machine.
darkstarsys commented on Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer tibinotes.com/p/practical... · Posted by u/tb8424
Or, just hire a good UX designer. Seriously, nobody would think about "practical coding for startups surviving without a programmer."
(
) Well, with AI coding... who knows...darkstarsys commented on Hyperworlds – Web Replacement Projects hyperworlds.org/... · Posted by u/vitalnodo
Ah, good old Ted Nelson. His "Computer Lib/Dream Machines" captivated and inspired me as a counterculture kid in the '70s, and played a big part in me becoming a graphics nerd today. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Lib/Dream_Machines)
"Everything is deeply intertwingled."
darkstarsys commented on Fuzzy Finding with Emacs Instead of Fzf masteringemacs.org/articl... · Posted by u/signa11
To go big here; I did Emacs for a year or two then gave it up because -- despite being probably the most theoretically powerful -- there's just too much friction.
I don't know if it's been given a name, but this new wave of (usually Rust) shell tools that are great and seem obvious in retrospect (fzf, rg, etc) strongly feel like they're doing exactly right what Emacs has "failed badly" at.
edit: And now that I think about it, the "failure of Emacs" thing feels a lot not going the old "Unix way, do one thing and speak text" ideals?
No argument here, and I've been using emacs since around 1983. It's a hobby and a way of life. But like any way of life, it's for those who like that sort of thing.