Who fucking said my "book flopped financially" -- please, point that out. Oh, wait, you can't, because you just made that up. Fucking hell. This place sucks.
If it didn't, then what exactly is the problem?
Readit Newsskeaker commented on Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team annas-archive.org/blog/an... · Posted by u/jerheinze
skeaker commented on FFmpeg Assembly Language Lessons github.com/FFmpeg/asm-les... · Posted by u/flykespice
ffmpeg has competition. For the longest time it wasn't the best audio encoder for any codec[0], and it wasn't the fastest H.264 decoder when everyone wanted that because a closed-source codec named CoreAVC was better[1].
ffmpeg was however, always the best open-source project, basically because it had all the smart developers who were capable of collaborating on anything. Its competition either wasn't smart enough and got lost in useless architecture-astronauting[2], or were too contrarian and refused to believe their encoder quality could get better because they designed it based on artificial PSNR benchmarks instead of actually watching the output.
[0] For complicated reasons I don't fully understand myself, audio encoders don't get quality improvements by sharing code or developers the way decoders do. Basically because they use something called "psychoacoustic models" which are always designed for the specific codec instead of generalized. It might just be that noone's invented a way to do it yet.
[1] I eventually fixed this by writing a new multithreading system, but it took me ~2 years of working off summer of code grants, because this was before there was much commercial interest in it.
[2] This seems to happen whenever I see anyone try to write anything in C++. They just spend all day figuring out how to connect things to other things and never write the part that does anything?
That's a fun term for [2]. Our team always called it bikeshedding.
skeaker commented on FFmpeg Assembly Language Lessons github.com/FFmpeg/asm-les... · Posted by u/flykespice
Another datapoint that supports your argument is the Grand Theft Auto Online (GTAO) thing a few months ago.[0] GTAO took 5-15 minutes to start up. Like you click the icon and 5-15 minutes later you're in the main menu. Everyone was complaining about it for years. Years. Eventually some enterprising hacker disassembled the binary and profiled it. 95% of the runtime was in `strlen()` calls. Not only was that where all the time was spent, but it was all spent `strlen()`ing the exact same ~10MB resource string. They knew exactly how large the string was because they allocated memory for it, and then read the file off the disk into that memory. Then they were tokenizing it in a loop. But their tokenization routine didn't track how big the string was, or where the end of it was, so for each token it popped off the beginning, it had to `strlen()` the entire resource file.
The enterprising hacker then wrote a simple binary patch that reduced the startup time from 5-10 minutes to like 15 seconds or something.
To me that's profound. It implies that not only was management not concerned about the start up time, but none of the developers of the project ever used a profiler. You could just glance at a flamegraph of it, see that it was a single enormous plateau of a function that should honestly be pretty fast, and anyone with an ounce of curiousity would be like, ".........wait a minute, that's weird." And then the bug would be fixed in less time than it would take to convince management that it was worth prioritizing.
It disturbs me to think that this is the kind of world we live in. Where people lack such basic curiosity. The problem wasn't that optimization was hard, (optimization can be extremely hard) it was just because nobody gave a shit and nobody was even remotely curious about bad performance. They just accepted bad performance as if that's just the way the world is.
[0] Oh god it was 4 years ago: https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...
iirc this bug existed from release but didn't impact the game until years later after a sizable number of DLCs were added to the online mode, since the function only got slower with each one added. Not that it's fine that the bug stayed in that long, but you can see how it would be missed given that when they had actual programmers running profilers at development time it wouldn't have raised any red flags after completing in ten seconds or whatever.
skeaker commented on What My Daughter Told ChatGPT Before She Took Her Life nytimes.com/2025/08/18/op... · Posted by u/someothherguyy
135 Americans commit suicide daily, 6 per hour, so 6 since this aricle was posted an hour ago. Most likely 1 or 2 of them were using ChatGPT.
What is the point? That suicides should drop now that we are using LLMs?
NYTimes is amplifying a FUD campaign as part of an ongoing lawsuit. Someone's daughter or son is going to kill themselves every 10 minutes today and that is not OpenAIs fault no matter what editorial amplification tricks the NYTimes uses to distort the reality field.
I don't think it's helpful to assume that rate is an unshakable baseline. There's value in investigating the causes of these tragedies so that we might be able to find ways to prevent them in the future.
skeaker commented on Counter-Strike: A billion-dollar game built in a dorm room nytimes.com/2025/08/18/ar... · Posted by u/asnyder
Counter-strike is a industry nightmare. Endless fun, with almost no need for upgrades, hat-sales etc. A game like that eats int a whole industries subsections revenue for years and years.
I can't really agree. If you mean specifically the tac FPS industry, similar games have since broken through and do plenty well, such as Valorant. If you mean the games industry in general, CS isn't really relevant to its current state in the grand scheme.
skeaker commented on Counter-Strike: A billion-dollar game built in a dorm room nytimes.com/2025/08/18/ar... · Posted by u/asnyder
skeaker commented on Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team annas-archive.org/blog/an... · Posted by u/jerheinze
Fuck that site. Offers people links to free PDF downloads of my book that I worked on for 32 years and finally got published by Pantheon Books in 2017. I didn't work all that fucking time for criminals like these to just break copyright law and make the book available for free. Fuck Anna's Archive, and I hope they go down in legal flames ASAP.
I can promise you that the site isn't the reason your book flopped financially. That is just what the vast majority of books do, especially ones on such niche topics.
skeaker commented on Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team annas-archive.org/blog/an... · Posted by u/jerheinze
The default is to not buy something. People don't like loosing money. If you can get something without loosing money, it's super easy to rationalize why you you're skipping the loose money part. People tend to make decisions which are in their financial interest.
> The default is to not buy something.
But if this is already true by default, then we're back to square one where the important financial decision was already made. Again, if it was already decided by default that there is no sale to be made, then whatever the end user does after that is irrelevant.
But beside that, in my last response I gave you three very common reasons that people do buy things against their own financial interests, and you've ignored that part. How do you fit that into your argument?
skeaker commented on Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team annas-archive.org/blog/an... · Posted by u/jerheinze
Academics get their income from their university positions, and don't get any royalties from sales of their articles. Instead, the benefit they get from publishing is to their reputation, and for that it's better for their work to be as available as possible.
It's completely different for a writer who gets their income from sales of their work, obviously
Yep. And not that you asked, but my own opinion (not theirs) is that even writers who get income from sales will be fine either way. Reading a book for free and then buying it to support the author if you want to has been a practice for longer than the internet has existed. It's exactly how libraries have always worked!
skeaker commented on Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team annas-archive.org/blog/an... · Posted by u/jerheinze
No, I've absolutely seen that argument made online as justification for music and movie piracy, many times, for many years.
People rationalizing aren't mental giants. Piracy is generally by people who want free stuff. Not by philosophers who arrived at piracy through some line of reasoning other than wanting free stuff.
The dialogue in the space is what you'd expect.
Link it.