Readit News logoReadit News
ggambetta commented on Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale   derwiki.medium.com/do-thi... · Posted by u/derwiki
ggambetta · 14 days ago
In my double life as an actor, I've written some software that greatly simplifies the main day to day task of running a talent agency. Its ~15 users love it to death, but that's it, it has a total of ~15 users. It's my happy little project.

Could it be useful to more people? Almost certainly, and at some point I considered running it as a service, and I even had a few trial users. But then I realized that dealing with GDPR compliance and the like wasn't going to be as fun, so in the end it remained an internal project.

ggambetta commented on Why are there no good dinosaur films?   briannazigler.substack.co... · Posted by u/fremden
wishfish · 2 months ago
To me, the sequels were worthwhile just for one solitary scene. In the third movie, Trinity is piloting the ship and has to gain higher than usual altitude for some reason that I've now forgotten. This takes her above the black clouds permanently enveloping the Earth. Sunlight pours into the cockpit. For the first and only time in her life, she sees the real sun with her own physical eyes. She's overwhelmed. It's just a brief golden moment before the black clouds swallow her again.

#3 was not a good movie. But that scene has stayed with me longer than many scenes in much better movies.

ggambetta · 2 months ago
Likewise, the highway chase in the first non-existent sequel is pretty epic.
ggambetta commented on MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System   worksonmymachine.substack... · Posted by u/Stwerner
alexpotato · 2 months ago
Reminds me of the days of Winsock.

For those that don't remember/don't know, everything network related in Windows used to use their own, proprietary setup.

Then one day, a bunch of vendors got together and decided to have a shared standard to the benefit of basically everyone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winsock

ggambetta · 2 months ago
Trumpet Winsock! Brings back memories :)
ggambetta commented on ZX Spectrum graphics magic   zxonline.net/zx-spectrum-... · Posted by u/ibobev
77pt77 · 2 months ago
It's still inconceivable to me how people developed for these platforms.

A good discussion about the setup for Manic Miner by the author is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LymCezUg7HI

ggambetta · 2 months ago
In retrospect, it was the limitations that made it so fun. The system was so simple that it was entirely knowable by a single brain, which has become enormously more challenging nowadays.

I recently ported my teaching raytracer to the Spectrum [0], not even using assembler, but the horribly slow native BASIC. It was a ton of fun! It's super slow especially when run on the original hardware, but even then I can't remember something like this from back in the day (and I'd bet something like Microhobby would have listed this as some kind of curiosity); makes me think the Spectrum's limitations weren't even fully explored. Raytracing people were probably working on beefier machines and more serious projects.

[0] https://gabrielgambetta.com/zx-raytracer.html

ggambetta commented on How to post when no one is reading   jeetmehta.com/posts/thriv... · Posted by u/j4mehta
ggambetta · 3 months ago
No one is reading until someone is... I published both Computer Graphics from Scratch[0] and the Fast-Paced Multiplayer series[1] for no concrete reason, they went unnoticed for a long time, and then both led to things I couldn't have planned.

I've also published stuff that gets little attention and leads nowhere, like Emulator-Backed Remakes[2] or ZX Spectrum Raytracer[3], and I'm totally fine with that. I make these things primarily for my own amusement ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I don't know how many people visit my website. I have analytics, but I rarely check them.

[0] https://gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from-scratch

[1] https://gabrielgambetta.com/client-server-game-architecture....

[2] https://gabrielgambetta.com/remakes.html

[3] https://gabrielgambetta.com/zx-raytracer.html

ggambetta commented on Why Tap a Wheel of Cheese?   cheeseprofessor.com/blog/... · Posted by u/speckx
verelo · 5 months ago
My 100% favourite part of this write up is the mention of "piano piano".

In 2018 i was renovating my house in Little Italy Toronto (Canada). There was this 91 year old Italian woman, Assunta, living alone in the house next to mine. She was always curious (or nosey?), but only spoke Italian, so we struggled to communicate. She would always say in broken English encouraging statements like "You make it nice", "lot of work, you do so good" to which I would say "thanks" and often talk about the amount of work ahead of me. She would always follow up with "eh, piano piano...".

I had no idea what she meant until one day I Googled this term and i learnt it essentially means "slowly slowly" or "take it slowly".

Assunta is gone now, but she was a lovable character. I think my dog misses her treats, and I miss the snacks she would bring me when I was working on the house.

ggambetta · 5 months ago
"Piano piano" does mean "slowly slowly" in a literal way, but I guess she meant it as a reference of the full saying "piano piano si va lontano", meaning "slowly slowly you get far". You were commenting on the amount of work ahead, and she was telling you "it's a marathon, not a sprint".
ggambetta commented on Excitable cells   jenevoldsen.com/posts/exc... · Posted by u/johannes_ne
eknkc · 5 months ago
I have frequent ectopic beats that I feel as a flutter / heavy beat on my chest. The doc says it won't kill me but it is extremely uncomfortable at times. This has been a great material to learn about the inner workings of heart cells.

BTW Here's an ECG from my Apple Watch showing 3 such beats (you can't miss them): https://link.ekin.dev/l1Vc3Gdf

If you happen to have these, just get checked out by a cardiologist. They are almost always benign but the frequency / daily amount are reasons for concern.

ggambetta · 5 months ago
I had some of those, verified by ECG. Cut down on coffee a bit, they went away.
ggambetta commented on Chimpanzees act as 'engineers', choosing materials to make tools   sciencedaily.com/releases... · Posted by u/docmechanic
ggambetta · 5 months ago
The original code monkeys!
ggambetta commented on Bigscreen Beyond 2   bigscreenvr.com/... · Posted by u/nipponese
crooked-v · 5 months ago
If the industry as a whole actually cared about motion sickness, we wouldn't be seeing every other game be an FPS with stick movement.
ggambetta · 5 months ago
I get zero motion sickness and I play exactly that, FPS with stick movement.

Very early on I realized that turning with the stick gives me nausea, but not moving back and forth. So I use the stick to move back and forth, and my own human body to rotate. Can play for hours with zero issues.

ggambetta commented on Recursion kills: The story behind CVE-2024-8176 in libexpat   blog.hartwork.org/posts/e... · Posted by u/spyc
DonHopkins · 6 months ago
I hope the term "deyodawgification" enters the pantheon of elegant code purification terms of art, alongside the classics like "degotofying", "deCOMtamination", and "outparamdelling".

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/xzibit-yo-dawg

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Gecko:DeCOMtamination_Algorithm

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455943

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22708241

Who knows (or can invent) any other good ones:

Deadlocksmithing, JSONcology, YAMLectomy, XMLimination, DeDTDification, DeXMLEntitification, ExCDATAration, AntiPOJOification, SOAPerfluousness Scrubbing, WSDLectomy, Delogorrhea, DeK8ification, HelmholtzianRechartification, DevOpsDevangelicalism, FactoryFactoryDefactoringDefactoring, Antiquasimonolithicmicrofragmentedmacrodecontainerizationarianism...

ggambetta · 6 months ago
DTDetox

u/ggambetta

KarmaCake day6779August 12, 2013
About
Software Engineer, ex-Google, ex-Improbable. Author of "Computer Graphics from Scratch" (http://gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from-scratch). Used to run a game development studio and teach Computer Graphics in university. Tech website: http://gabrielgambetta.com

Actor / filmmaker: http://gabrielgambetta.biz

View Original