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Putting spell check in 64k of RAM

Putting spell check in 64k of RAM

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Abhinav Upadhyay walks us through a wonderful bit of computer history. He talks about how Steve Johnson at AT&T wrote one of the first spell checkers. His method could encode a word in just 14 bits of memory; so a dictionary with 30,000 entries would take up a fraction under 52 kB. This is even better compression than gzip – and it can perform fast lookups.

Once the dictionary grew to 30,000 words, the Bloom filter approach became impractical. Douglas McIlroy’s solution was to store differences between sorted hash codes , after discovering these differences followed a geometric distribution. These followed a distribution that could be easily run length encoded with something called Golomb’s code.

It’s a fantastic examination of applied computer science. Definitely worth a read

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Fascinating gaming UI

Fascinating gaming UI

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Danish indie studio Ultra Ultra released their sci-fi stealth horror game Echo back in 2017. It never got the acclaim of Dead Space, but it had some unique visual feedback elements.

The first is it’s use of flashing and cycling lighting in beautiful white marble world. The lights cycle and turn on/off in flows and waves through the environment to help you find your way along in the game.

The more interesting dynamic is it’s “hudsphere”. The player has a color-coded radar-like interface that hovers around her body like a ball.

During combat, a blue fractalized shimmer along the surface of the sphere indicates the presence of another humanoid entity. A yellow shimmer indicates the player is about to be noticed. A red fractal shimmer means the player is being targeted by an attacker. When attacked, a quick-time prompt appears so she can break free. Red spikes will appear inside the sphere, signaling that character is vulnerable to death.

The sphere can emit an area scan that sends out a pulse that tags all the elements in your vicinity. The sphere becomes the guns reticle and you can tag enemies by hovering over an enemy.

Give it a look (skip to 49:49 for example of the hud):

https://www.polygon.com/gaming/541810/echo-sci-fi-horror-dead-space-ui

Why your game is canceled

Why your game is canceled

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Former Playstation president Shuhei Yoshida now runs his own consulting firm and makes it clear why games get canceled.

“In the worst case, we kind of calculate how much more money we have to spend to finish this game,” in an interview with Game File. “If the revenue seems lower than the money we need to spend to finish, we cancel the project. We cancelled lots of projects after the prototype level and no one knows in public. And that’s fine. That’s just a process, right?”

“Sometimes the game is in deep production,” Yoshida says. “The largest I canceled were two games, after we spent $25 million. At that time, that was lots of money. Now, not as much. I felt really bad about how we couldn’t see this.”

2025 Portland Adult Soapbox Derby Highlights

2025 Portland Adult Soapbox Derby Highlights

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Some great entries this year – the Trojan Bunny from Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy Grail, a great corn on the cob entry, an expansion of the Cars animated series including Toe-mater, and a wonderful hunk of cheese driven by some mice, and a nice corn dog.

Here’s a nice walk through the pits

Speaking Latin in the Vatican

Speaking Latin in the Vatican

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polýMATHY tries to speak Latin to a bunch of random religious at the Vatican. He said that out of 12 people he talked with, only 3 were able to speak it.

I think that’s correct. As someone that went to Catholic seminary, he is correct in saying Latin was not required. I took it as an elective since it’s such a good idea to be able to read the original documents in their original language. Latin is such a beautifully poetic and nuanced language, you lose a lot in translation to more simplistic languages like English.

We are getting dumber

We are getting dumber

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The connection between technology and cognitive decline is not limited to attention span issues. Research has shown that the digital age may be rewiring the brain in ways that make it more difficult to perform tasks that require deep thinking and sustained focus.

Troubling trends are suggesting that human cognitive abilities are in decline. Across age groups, attention spans are shortening, problem-solving skills are weakening, and reasoning abilities are deteriorating. Only 37.6 percent of Americans read a novel or short story in the past year, a noticeable drop from 41.5 percent in 2017 and 45.2 percent in 2012. Younger people are reporting a marked increase in an inability to think, concentrate and learn new things.

Studies suggest that excessive screen time, particularly on social media, can negatively impact both verbal and cognitive skills.

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Once your data is collected – it lives forever

Once your data is collected – it lives forever

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You don’t just need to worry about who is collecting your data today – but who might have that data at ANY time in the future. Just because you trust your government today doesn’t mean it won’t be overthrown and that data used against you. People have used collected data to round up kill opponents and ethnic groups by rival governments when they get control. Today, this is true for all data corporations have on you. Medical data, credit data, purchase history, reading and watching history, biometric data such as face capture/finger prints, etc. Data breaches and digital hijacking means almost any entity in the world can soon have all your personal information to use as they wish from discrimination to blackmail.

23andMe was a noble idea that has, in fact, turned into the very nightmare every security and medical records expert predicted. A commercial company that promised to keep people’s sensitive genetic data safe finds itself facing bankruptcy and is now going to sell all your data for pennies on the dollar to the highest bidder.

Once your data is recorded and out of your hands – it pretty much exists forever. Even with the best intentions – companies go bankrupt, governments see major shift in who controls them, copies are found on discarded hardware, workers have laptops with your data stolen, hackers break in and steal data to be posted and sold on the dark web.

Tips?

  1. Don’t give any website any optional information not absolutely required.
  2. Do not use your real name/birthday/info except on sites like banks/taxes/etc that absolutely require it. Make up fake names/birthdays and use a junk email account for sites that don’t absolutely require your real information.
  3. If you wouldn’t want all your friends, family, everyone you work with, a lawyer/police, loan officer, or anyone else to know something – don’t put record it or put it on the internet.
  4. The default answer to using one of those new financing/medical sites should be NO. There’s been lots of startup financing, banking, and investing companies popping up – and going belly up just as fast. When bankruptcy hits one of these companies (and most do fail) – most restrictions against selling your data can go out the door.

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