Alex Eisenhart, inspired by Seth Bling who released MarI/O in 2015, he has started web series that shows how to make your own AI powered Mario game player. He is only up to the second part right now, but seems to be making decent progress.
A 2026 report by Wired shared that Amazon supposedly has developed a new kind of flat network architecture. It’s kind of a holy grail idea that people have tried before, but never been able to pull off well. This new architecture supposedly allows them to use 69% fewer routers and switches, and 40% less power at the massive Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers. Yet provide 33% better throughput.
The core of the breakthrough is called resilient network graphs, or RNG. It’s a way to use random cable connections to make a network more efficient. It’s counter-intuitive, but researchers have long thought a more distributed or even random physical networking connectivity architecture would be faster and remove many bottlenecks often found in strict tree or ring hierarchies.
What finally makes it possible are two key innovations. On the hardware side is a device called a ShuffleBox, which randomizes physical cable connections between network components to make the network structure more efficient. It pairs that hardware with routing software called Spraypoint, a custom traffic-routing algorithm specifically designed to work within the RNG design.
Fenris Creations (Formerly known as CCP Games until May 2026) announced today that Carbon, their cross-platform game engine framework behind EVE Online (and EVE Frontier) is now completely open source.
The full code release includes lots of different modules like Destiny, Carbon’s physics simulation and pathfinding technology, and Trinity, Carbon’s graphics module. There’s also networking, UI, audio, resource management, scripting, scheduling and many more. It’s an amazing body of work for people to learn from.
The purpose of releasing it according to Ben Hunter, Senior Development Director?
“Carbon was built for a very specific purpose: to support living virtual worlds that can endure for decades. It has carried EVE Online through more than 20 years of continuous operation, from everyday player activity to some of the largest battles in videogame history. Open sourcing Carbon is about making that foundation visible, understandable, and useful to others. It is a commitment to transparency, longevity, and the belief that the next generation of persistent worlds will be stronger when more people can study, challenge, and build on the technology beneath them.”
2026 Unity Game Development Report reports a lot of things many already know. The game industry – after massive hiring during Covid when people had nothing to do but play games – is now going through one of the worst layoff periods since the video game collapse of the 1980’s. This is causing major shifts in how and what game development teams are building. The report tells us the practical effects.
The activist elements of the game development industry have been staunchly anti-AI. As the survey shows, however, it’s probably already a losing position. This is especially true in the hyper-competitive environment that is game development where speed is critical.
It’s not just game developers. I recently read the lament of one seasoned programmer that interviewed really well at nVidia until they got to a set of AI experience questions. The tone changed when he said he didn’t use AI and had little experience coding with it. He went further and said he’d prefer not to use it. He didn’t get the offer and was complaining on the forum as to why that mattered since he was an excellent coder with over a decade of experience. An nVidia employee responded and said it clearly: the poster wouldn’t be successful at nvidia. Reason? Because everyone else would be coding circles around him. You simply cannot write the volume that is expected from you without it. Sticking your head in the sand and just doing everything by hand means you’ll soon be driving 40 on the freeway when everyone else is driving by at 65.
AI models that could only churn out slop 12 months ago started getting ‘good enough’ for testing and other menial tasks about 6 months ago. Now, in mid 2026, they’re good enough to create entire software stacks.
As a software engineer myself, the reality is it’s not a question of if you are using AI or not. If you are not, you simply cannot keep up with those that have learned how to use AI. AI has it’s problems, but it’s also a profound force multiplier.
Are jobs being lost to AI – almost certainly. But it doesn’t have to be the end of your career. What it does mean is you have to learn to use the tools and demonstrate you are more proficient than your competition at generating quality output.
Artices:
Back in April this video came up in my feed – and the whole series are some of the best talks on the state of engineering software in the age of AI; but this particular talk by Matt Pocock was particularly good.
Edwin “James” Nagle decided to see who actually owned the COMPUTE! magazine trademark. It turns out, nobody did. The name and assets of COMPUTE! were traded and sold and eventually put up as collateral which when the loan failed, reverted to a company that no longer existed.
He stepped in and got the rights from the US patent and trademark office and now officially has revived the Compute! Gazette magazine – complete with type-in programs!
Here’s his excellent talk on the subject.
Oh – and he considered the old print versions of the magazine he now owns the copyrights for as ‘free and open source’.
Ah, the good old days of using INT 10h, AH=0x00 graphics modes to write directly to video memory at 0xA0000/0xB0000/0xB8000 (depending on the mode).
Nir Lichtman walks us through some of the things I was teaching myself in middle school – writing VGA graphics in assembly (often using the great book Programmer’s Guide to the EGA and VGA Cards by Ferraro, Richard F.
I even wrote my own (terrible) little paint program that would then save the buffer into a file and reload it. What good times!
Inkbox decides everything in computing since sending man to the moon was a bad idea. Even operating systems and programming languages!
He sets out to write a complete clone of Zaxxon in assembly language with no operating system. He handles display, keyboard, mouse input, booting the system himself – and walks us through it all.
This kind of coding is exactly what got me into computer science as a kid. Watching demo scene videos and learning to program right to the display buffer with assembly was an era we don’t see much anymore. Still, I did get to make a graphics app that directly booted the display controller on recent hardware for an embedded platform (but that’s a story for another time).
How does it go? Awesome! Open Source Project on GitHub: https://github.com/InkboxSoftware/spacegamex64/
Hook’s Humble Homepage has a pretty good write-up on putting copyright notices in your source code.
https://matija.suklje.name/how-and-why-to-properly-write-copyright-statements-in-your-code
I’m not a lawyer, and I’m not sure he is either. But as he points out, he could not find any other information so he put together what he could find.
Inkbox decides to program without an OS. Back in the day, we used to do this by programming directly to the system or to BIOS with interrupts for things like disk, device, and display access.
Fast forward, and if you want to do this today, one doesn’t talk to BIOS – they need to program via UEFI services. Inkbox walks us through doing multi-core bare metal programming of the old game Zaxxon. It’s excellent work and fun walkthrough.