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rmckayfleming

282 karma · joined March 20, 2012

Co-Founder and CTO of Chalk.com.
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rmckayfleming··on The Nobel Prize and the Laureate Are Inseparable
It was ridiculous. He got it less than a year into his presidency.
rmckayfleming··on Claude wrote a functional NES emulator using my engine's API
Oh neat, I've been working with claude on an NES emulator in Racket using an SDL3 wrapper also written mostly by Claude.
rmckayfleming··on The plan-execute pattern
"I feel uneasy about design patterns. On the one hand, my university class on design patterns revived my interest in programming. On the other hand, I find most patterns in the Gang of Four book to be irrelevant to my daily work; they solve problems that a choice of programming language or paradigm creates."

My relationship with design patterns changed when I stopped viewing them as prescriptive and started viewing them as descriptive.

rmckayfleming··on Sega Saturn Architecture – A practical analysis (2021)
Not just dirt cheap, the turn around time to manufacture was significantly lower. Sony had an existing CD manufacturing business and could produce runs of discs in the span of a week or so, whereas cartridges typically took months. That was already a huge plus to publishers since it meant they could respond more quickly if a game happened to be a runaway success. With cartridges they could end up undershooting, and losing sales, or overshooting and end up with expensive, excess inventory.

Then to top it all off, Sony had much lower licensing fees! So publishers got “free” margin to boot. The Playstation was a sweet deal for publishers.

rmckayfleming··on Intel puts 1nm process (10A) on the roadmap for 2027
Yea, people generally don't think about these things. People were genuinely surprised to find out that 70% of our expenses as a software business were... salaries. The next largest category? Rent. Everything else was effectively a rounding error.
rmckayfleming··on Homes need to be built for better internet
I just bought a house this year, the previous owners lived in it for about 2 years from brand new. Thankfully it has an ethernet drop to every room upstairs, and in reasonable places on the main floor. Far better than the situation at the last place I lived in.

But annoyingly, it's all Cat5e! Sure, it's fine for gigabit, but now that I have proper networking equipment, I wish they'd have spent the extra few bucks and put in Cat6A or Cat7 so that I could get 10Gbps to my office from the rack in the basement...

rmckayfleming··on Stable Diffusion:Real time prompting with SDXL Turbo and ComfyUI running locally
Have you used the 7900XT with LLMs at all?
rmckayfleming··on Nvidia's earnings are up 206% from last year as it continues riding the AI wave
I do wonder how much of an impact the PS5 and Xbox Series have on this though since they both have RDNA2 GPUs. Consoles tend to face higher optimization pressure, especially as the generation wears on. It might be why AMD has kept so competitive in gaming as of late.
rmckayfleming··on The Revival of Medley/Interlisp
Like, SBCL compiles and assembles directly to machine code, that's very much the Lisp way. But SBCL has a lot of C that's involved in getting the SBCL image running and interacting with the host.
rmckayfleming··on The Revival of Medley/Interlisp
It's more that it's easier to use C for two reasons. The first is that C is really popular and therefore pretty portable. It's a lingua franca. The other is that because the hosts are largely defined in C, it's easier to interact with. Of course, the host doesn't actually "speak C", it follows some form of ABI. But the reality is that implementing each ABI is non-trivial and you can avoid a lot of pain by just using the host's C compiler/linker/etc. that implements it for you.
rmckayfleming··on It's 2023, so of course I'm learning Common Lisp
CL is the x86 of the Lisps. Successful because of backwards compatibility, but also ugly because of it.
rmckayfleming··on It's 2023, so of course I'm learning Common Lisp
I know. I've been spending a lot of time with CL, Scheme, and Clojure the past few years, and the ideal Lisp is some combination of them all. There are aspects of each that I miss in the others. CL has the nicest environment and development story (generally speaking). Scheme feels more refined in the small. And although they can be divisive, I really appreciate Clojure's data structure literals.
rmckayfleming··on The Absurdity Of Stacks
What do you mean "factorial in recursive style"? Like recursive with an accumulator?
rmckayfleming··on Anthropic's 100k context is now available in the web UI
Nope. Nothing. I’ve been waiting since they released it. Part of me thinks it might be because I responded yes to “Outside of the US”.
rmckayfleming··on Tailwind CSS v3.3
My understanding is that that's a non-trivial problem. You'd likely need some sort of AI system to do it, since the perception of colour isn't something that can be simply modelled.
rmckayfleming··on GPT-4 and professional benchmarks: the wrong answer to the wrong question
Yep, it's saved me a lot of time on data transformation tasks. For instance, I wanted to convert the colors in Tailwind to CSS variables. I had the JSON listing all of the names and hex colors, I just needed to rewrite the names and convert the hex to base 10. A rather straightforward mapping, but I'd need to write the function for it. I just asked ChatGPT to give me the function. I read the function, it looked good. Boom, done in less than a minute. What's funny is that ChatGPT started spitting out the expected output of the function. And it was right! Perhaps surprising on the face of it, but really it's a simple pattern mapping.
rmckayfleming··on Van Gogh, AMD’s Steam Deck APU
I’ve been very happy with mine playing games of all vintages and development budgets. Just this weekend I was playing Far Cry 4 and The Division 2 quite smoothly.
rmckayfleming··on GOTOphobia considered harmful in C
This is one of those problems that Tail Call Elimination cleanly addresses. The "obvious" approach to writing an FSM does exactly what you'd expect.
rmckayfleming··on Don’t watch ‘Star Trek: Picard’ season three, it’ll only encourage them
Yea. The last half of season 1 it starts to become more just Star Trek. Season 2 and 3 are straight Star Trek. I really enjoyed them.
rmckayfleming··on Don’t watch ‘Star Trek: Picard’ season three, it’ll only encourage them
My impression was more that he just wanted to do Star Trek but the studios were like "it'll be funny right???". And so he went along with it at first, but dropped it as time went on.

On a related note, I've been rewatching Enterprise and I didn't know Seth MacFarlane made 2 cameo appearances in the series! (In two different seasons too.)

rmckayfleming··on Cample.js: Reactivity without virtual DOM
It's easy to forget nearly 10 years on, but React came out when Backbone.js with mustache templates was rather common, and React was a LOT easier to manage. The other popular frameworks at the time were Ember and Angular 1, which were quite a bit larger/heavier. By comparison, React could be adopted in a much more incremental fashion. React was super easy to adopt (and it still is, but there's a lot more of an ecosystem around it now which makes it feel much more like a framework).
rmckayfleming··on AI Joins Hunt for ET: Study Finds 8 Potential Alien Signals
With the caveat that you don't literally follow Lisp by having a #. reader macro.
rmckayfleming··on Why Steam Deck Is One of the Most Significant PC Gaming Moments in Years
Yea, I was playing Wolfenstein New Order on it and was shocked at how well it ran. Easily made 60fps with battery life projected at well over 3hrs.

Setting the refresh rate to 40hz helps a lot too.

rmckayfleming··on macOS CLI tool to configure multi-display resolutions and arrangements
I used to have two otherwise identical displays, but it still does it for me now that all of my displays are different. Notably, I think this stuff happens more when you have 3+ monitors. I don't remember having as many issues with just two displays.
rmckayfleming··on Setting the bozo bit on Apple
Interesting you say that about the Airpods. In my experience I've found that Airpods work extremely well so long as they're only paired with your Apple devices. Once I paired them to my PC I started having issues where they'd drop from my iPhone randomly in the middle of playback. After unpairing them from the PC altogether the problems went away.
rmckayfleming··on Don't use Tailwind for a design system (2021)
Pretty much every thread on Tailwind will devolve into debates on CSS development/maintenance practices. My take is that Tailwind enables a style of CSS development more akin to using a dynamically typed language. It's really great for whipping things up and for one offs. And for so many tasks, that's all you need!

But of course, there are situations where it becomes unwieldy. I'd wager that a lot of the problems people have with Tailwind are more social in nature. Which are valid problems! It just means that you need some other solution for that. Analogously, many of the benefits of static typing are social in nature; notably in enforcing interfaces between teams. I suspect people are looking for a similar thing for CSS. But that doesn't invalidate the use cases where Tailwind is particularly handy.

rmckayfleming··on What happens when a CPU starts
A recurring question I have is: how many microcontrollers/CPUs are in a modern personal computer? There are clearly a lot, but just how many?
rmckayfleming··on Life Is Short (2016)
It’s definitely context dependent. But I spent the last few years of my dad’s life not really speaking to him much, and when he died - suddenly at the age of 53 - I realized it had been for really petty reasons. The things I disagreed with him on blinded me to what really mattered: he was still my dad.

This year I sold my company, and as exciting as that has been, I wish I could have told him about it. :(

rmckayfleming··on AI Art Panic
People appreciate art for the story. It’s why originals sell for more than prints.
rmckayfleming··on Common Lisp Object System (CLOS)
This is why I find prototype-based object systems so much more natural. Inevitably any dynamic object system ends up having to represent classes as objects, but that retroactively opens up a lot of mind-bending complexity. Prototypes on the other hand make far more sense in a dynamic context. You just create objects that you can clone and extend. Classes just become a design pattern. It also highlights that the interfaces of an object are more important than the class.
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