She’s not wrong

She’s not wrong

“You appear on a weekly television program and are non-profit? Boy, have you got a crazy sponsor.”

27 Rather, God chose those who were regarded as foolish by the world to shame the wise; God chose those in the world who were weak to shame the strong. 28 God chose those in the world who were lowly and despised, those who count for nothing, to reduce to nothing those who were regarded as worthy, 29 so that no one could boast in the presence of God.

1 Corinthians 1:27-29
Psychoacoustics

Psychoacoustics

Binaural beats, tritone paradox, pitch and tempo circularity, wason effect for faking high performance audio, biological audio effects, and using missing fundamentals for playback on phones and low-quality devices? Casey Connor demonstrates some fascinating audio effects and illusions in his multi-part series of audio illusions and effects. Some of them are used to simulate high performance playback on cheap devices like phones. Good headphones are required for some of them.

Here’s the first video go get you started:

So much truth

So much truth

Wow – I can’t tell you how familiar this sounded. I didn’t work for Amazon, but what she is describing here is almost exactly what my experience was at a different top 25 high tech company. She left early in this down cycle to pursue more healthy environment, while other coworkers stayed only to be laid off.

It brought up the point of how long does one hold on before moving on?

  • Mass hiring during COVID that was not justified for the work being done nor profitability
  • Senior engineers that spend the majority of their day not doing technical work but stuck in roadmap, planning, alignment, turf war meetings to get real work done. Meanwhile not one thing is shipped on time.
  • Senior leadership using ‘investing in AI’ and return-to-office mandates as ways to trim headcount to cover their over-hiring. (Using AI every day for work now is a real thing – but not as justification for the kinds of layoffs we’re seeing).
  • Culture rot: moving from an innovation driven environment to one more focused on headcount and political manuvering.
  • Feeling hollow and empty realizing you’re spending 60-80% of the average day doing planning, paper shuffling, org alignment, and meetings instead of real work.
Bare Metal Gaming!

Bare Metal Gaming!

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/