bondolo

Yeah, just wait until you are not the target market.

Tomorrow (October 28th) is the 1 year anniversary of being laid off from the Amazon Devices team. Nearly all of the senior people on my team were laid off at the same time as part of the "pivot to AI" strategy. Hurray for "commitment to accessibility".

This outcome for their years of squandered effort honestly doesn't surprise me as, other than the Graviton/Trainium work, the Amazon efforts were scattershot, half-baked and underinvested. Only the Siri team is more pathetic than the Alexa team. Well maybe Co-pilot stands between those two somewhere.

The news that Bioware is being shut down hurts more than similar news for other studios. I knew Ray and Greg from university and played ADnD and various Avalon Hill war games with them in the 80s. Ah the days and nights spent on the 6th floor of the UofA Administrative Services building. They were passionate guys who built ground breaking games (Ok, so some of them were rough…) and created an amazing team.

I remember debating with Ray why dying in games like Paranoia and Call of Cthulhu could be "fun". As I recall he didn't see the point but to each their own.

Thanks private equity for dismembering the carcass of everything you acquire!

There are two projects working on Tribal Trouble, mine which is a pure technology modernization and refactoring of the original game, and a community supported version that is publishing the game for free on Steam. The community version is using my modern port as a base but has done major work to add lots of other features and value add as well as building an active community.

GLFW has had no active maintainers for a couple years and has poor support for Wayland, Windows ARM64 and current MacOS. It is my understanding that the former GLFW maintainers want to just wind it down and not allow any new maintainers even if volunteers were available.

The LWJGL team recommended a couple of months that projects not use GLFW or move to SDL3 when convenient.

I recently converted a game, Tribal Trouble (https://github.com/bondolo/tribaltrouble) from GLFW to SDL3. It was mostly a painless refactor though I did have some issues with full screen exclusive modes and desktop full screen but was eventually able to resolve those.

I ended writing a demo for screen mode handling to test and document the fiddly bits.

https://github.com/bondolo/SDL3-Fullscreen-Demo

The game is Java, like Minecraft, the demo is C because I wanted to keep it as simple as possible.

For several decades relatives of mine always swept out their trucks after transporting cattle salt blocks or alfalfa bales on the same quiet narrow S shaped section of roadway in the bush about a mile from the house at the back of the property. Amazing how almost every year someone managed to shoot a deer there in the fall.

Early in my career I read "Peopleware" by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. Between that book Brooks' "Mythical Man Month" and Humphrey's "Managing the Software Process" it seemed that there was hope for the software industry learning some necessary lessons and growing to become a true engineering discipline. Nope. Never happened. The industry standard, despite improvements in some areas, is still a farcical shitshow with little beyond lipservice to process, predictability or proper self-evaluation. I can only describe agile, as it is practised, more of a coping mechanism than an actual methodology. Indeed the methodology is embodied mostly in the infrastructure; issue tracking, version control, code review, continuous integration with as little methodology glue between them as required to produce output.

Modern first and second tier software management seems less professional, is contributing less and is generally worse than it was twenty years ago. The quality of the engineering and program managers, their training and commitment to their craft seems really low and is not generally valued. On average team level software management has gotten worse rather than better and, given what is expected and how it is valued, this shouldn't be much of a surprise. It is truly disappointing that what could have been a valuable and productivity enhancing role became so useless.

Things aren't going to change for the better though until the dust settles somewhat on the role of AI in software and systems development and we start again to consider how software should be developed in the 21st century. Maybe it is possible that with AI doing most of the low-level work that the focus will change to building and maintaining architecture and systems. Many programmers might become more like traditional engineers doing a lot more systems work than they do today and continuing to solve problems. Lord knows though it won't be today's software management doing this work; they have nothing in the way of skills to offer to the problem.

And yet, for some reason, it is impossible to stop spam calls and texts.

Just one more thing that is being destroyed. There are thousands more that you aren't hearing about. If it exists then it must be destroyed. The intention is nothing less than to make rebuilding impossible. If you still have illusions that the US government has not been taken over by a death cult yearning for the apocalypse then you need to put down your phone and look at the scale of what is happening. Legality means nothing; they are doing everything they can to ensure that there will be no institutions left to hold them accountable.

Negligent doesn't begin to describe their behaviour.

Oh, I am doing a lot more than just hacking code. I am also cooking, gardening, reading, writing, travelling, brewing and distilling, swimming, volunteering, …

I recently retired after 37 years of working in tech so of course I am working on open source.

My retirement treat was to spend three months learning OpenGL and 3D game programming by porting a classic Java RTS game, Tribal Trouble, to more modern OpenGL and Java. I learn much better working with real code and this was a great experience. It was certainly a different experience than it would have been without an LLM teacher, reviewer, helper, assistant. The app was beautifully designed and very cleanly implemented back in Java 1.4 days of 2004 so it has been a joy to modernize it while attempting to preserve the clean design. The OpenGL work and the necessary math was a lot different than what I have been doing for most of my career so it was a lot of fun. I will probably continue tinkering with Tribal Trouble occasionally as I still enjoy playing the game. I want to learn Blender to edit/improve the 3D models. (https://github.com/bondolo/tribaltrouble)

For now I have mostly moved on from gaming and am instead working on improving the accessibility (#a11y) of the Wireshark network protocol capture/analysis tool. There are a lot of blind and low vision IT folks for whom this tool is a job requirement. The current accessibility is unfortunately poor. I've submitted my first PR and am relearning the Wireshark source after last contributing 20 years ago. It's also been 15 years since the last time I did anything with Qt so that has been a refresher as well. I don't enjoy working in C++ but the goal matters so I will suffer through. (https://wireshark.org)

I plan to work on Wireshark for a couple of months at least and then look for something else to contribute to, probably also accessibility related. I have some ideas already about next apps. I'm currently tempted to build an NFC app for iOS in Swift but haven't decided yet. After having built in the last year both Kotlin Compose and TypeScript React apps, none of which I enjoyed very much, I am somewhat curious if Swift and SwiftUI will be more fun.

It was a mix of mystical philosophy and transhumanism and he does think that "the world is on the edge of a breakthrough" but he sees it as emergent. It is not something he is personal creating just something he believes is imminent and he is one of the first people to recognise it.

I had a conversation the other day at a birthday party with my friend's neighbour from the building. The fellow is a semi-retired (FIRE) single guy. We started with a basic conversation but then he started talking about what he interested in and it became almost unintelligible. I kept having to ask him to explain what he was talking about but was increasingly unsuccessful as he continued. Sure enough though, he described that he spent significant time talking with "AIs" as he called them. He spends many hours a day chatting with ChatGPT, Grok and Gemini (and I think at least one other LLM). I couldn't help thinking "Dude, you have fucked up your brain." His insular behaviour and the feedback loop he has been getting from excessive interaction with LLMs has isolated him and I can't help but think that will only get worse for him. I am glad he was at the party and getting some interaction with humans. I expect that this type of "hikikomori" isolation will become even more common as LLMs continue to improve and become more pervasive. We are are likely to see this become a significant social problem in the next decade.

I have similar issues over the years on various devices and it has always been frustrating to determine the cause. Power management in general is so inscrutable. I wish there was a tool which let me go back through recent history, even just since the last 100% charge, and tell me why my machine was not sleeping or idling and what was consuming power. Apple has added some energy tools over the years but has never offered tools to explain system behaviour.

Such a shame that PDF doesn’t just, like, include the semantic structure of the document by default. It is brilliant that we standardized on an archival document format that doesn’t include direct access to the document text or structure as a core intrinsic default feature.

I say this with great anger as someone who works in accessibility and has had PDF as a thorn in my side for 30 years.

While I worked at Apple in 2021-22 their issues seemed about the same as nearly every other company producing consumer apps and devices; bloated slow garbage with very mediocre quality. Their engineering culture is terrible, especially as it relates to transfer of the “Apple ethos” to the next generation of devs. Apple is going to be indistinguishable from the rest of the pack within the next decade.

But most of all it seems like it was designed by people who don’t even know what it is for. That combined with the superficial “implement my Figma masterpiece in code” development approach that includes little to no user testing. Tog weeps. Don Norman weeps. Observe how much breaks when you do something as trivial as bump the default font size by one notch. I am sure it is pixel perfect at default size though.

Enter a birth date in a contact entry without a year. Watch as it jumps to the next day when you save because you are editing the date after 0000 of the next day in utc time. That bug has now been in MacOS/iOS for at least 17 years.

Sorry, got in to rant mode. I really want “less but better” from things in my life. We as consumers aren’t rewarding companies that take this approach apparently.

It is not a new scam. My grandmother had all of her teeth removed at about age 45 in the early 1960s to get dentures. Not all of her teeth were bad but the dentist encouraged her that removing all of the teeth was best because she didn't want to have to buy a new partial plate every time she lost another tooth.

The same dentist was offering the same to adults of any age. My mom, about age 19 at the time, was also offered it as solution to having misaligned teeth. She asked a critical question of the dentist; "Do you have dentures or are those your own teeth?" When he replied that his teeth were not dentures she "noped" right out there and still has most of her teeth to this day.

Not just planes and fairly recently too. I was working at a Boeing subsidiary when the 737 Max MCAS happened. They dumped everyone they could on loathsome “$9000 USB cable” type time and materials defense work. I was a senior Java architect and they quickly “retrained” me to do HIL component testing in plain old C. It might have been seen as a move to improve cash flow but realistically it had the effect causing almost all of the software staff to leave in short order which I guess also improved cash flow. The subsidiary is still struggling several years later to rebuild their software team.

It is pat time to impose an excise tax on all packaging based on how long it takes to decay to base elements. Time until naturally “recycled” shouldn’t be a cost you can externalize. The tax owed can be reduced when recycling actually occurs, essentially passing on the difference to the recycler.

Time for an excise tax on packaging material based on how long it takes on average to decay to base elements.

The degree to which it is enforced, managers being required to enforce the policy, and to which compliance is used as a measure in performance reviews have all increased and, as you mention, some teams have gone to 4 days with pressure to exceed the minimum three days. At least one person I've spoken with indicated that their promotion was delayed until they could get their RTO compliance numbers up.

I have worked primarily from home for most of the last 25 years at several companies. I joined Apple during the pandemic and worked from home for the first 18 months but left Apple about 15 months ago for Amazon, in part, because of the increasing RTO pressure at Apple. The Apple RTO policy has only gotten stupider since I left.

Unfortunately about a year after I joined Amazon chose to adopt an RTO policy as well. It is not going well. Dissatisfaction is high, people are quitting, people are planning to quit, respect for upper management dwindles. There are many heartbreaking stories of productive long term employees being force out by RTO. WFH had also been opening new opportunities to people who were unable to commute either because of disability, location or other reasons. It has been sad to see those people shut out again.

The RTO policy has really soured the culture. Adrian highlights the issues very well. Amazon is a global company. We are expected to work with remote teams routinely. Many teams, like mine are also geographically distributed. Going in to the office doesn't make a damn bit of sense for most people.

What degree of criticism crosses the threshold of "hostile"? For some on the conservative side any criticism or comparison of the US by Americans or worse yet by foreigners unacceptable; the "love it or leave it" crowd. There have been repeated incidents of various politicians, journalists and authors being denied entry for little more (and sometimes less) than saying that the US "kinda sucks".

Obviously there's little good reason to admit someone who wants to overthrow the government (there are already enough of those locally) but literally anyone who says that the US is less than perfect?

I certainly don't want this decision to be in the hands of an unaccountable and capricious ICE officers. I've personally experienced just a taste of how petty they can be and have little reason to doubt that they are routinely spiteful assholes.

I used this compiler for years and eventually came to be able to “decompile” the 68k object code it produced back to C code in my head on the fly unless the function was too large. Using MacNosy I could rebuild the C source for an app in usually only a couple of hours. I had a script that converted a MacNosy file of an app into an assembler file and rsrc file and I could translate functions to C one at a time while having a buildable app equivalent to the original. I originally used the tools for hacking games but sometimes used it to fix bugs.

The MPW C compiler code generation was so predictable in part because of the symmetry of the 68k instruction set. They wrote a simple compiler and it worked. For the most part effort was spent elsewhere. Since you could reasonably predict what code would be generated if you were unhappy with the code generation you fixed the source. I like that the javac compiler has a similar ethos, With similar effect. Once you know the patterns to use you can generate fairly close to optimal byte code.

I'm a reddit moderator of subs both enormous and tiny. I've been frustrated for years by the core subs being taken over by various cabals of power users. Some like the power, some do it to push a particular agenda, and I am pretty sure some are doing it for financial gain.

Reddit has been hands off (which is why /r/trees is not about trees) and made things worse (which is why mods of top subs is so concentrated among a small group).

This is a turn for the much, much worse. I imagine that this will result in even tighter consolidation of moderation of the big subs in an even smaller set of people with a stronger devil's bargain between them. It is going to devolve in to reddit and "pro"-moderators simultaneously loathing, sabotaging and undermining each other and depending on each other at the same time.

If the credit reporting companies are all such sleazy incompetent dirtbags why is it still impossible to opt-out from most credit reporting data collection?

I like it and am interested to see how this evolves. I would love it to replace the simple clock on my iPhone screen.

For my own purposes I would like to see accurate day/night line that moves with the map.

Flexelint. The compilers have gotten better over the years but I wouldn’t consider doing C/C++ development without it.

It has saved me hundreds of hours of debugging since I first started using it in 1990. The very first day it found a ‘write past end of array’ in some code written by a Pascal programmer which was doing a[sizeof(a)] = ‘\0’; that would have stymied us for days.