Linkblog/2025/02/15

I’ve been on a bit of an Odin / SDL3 GPU bend as of late.

The previously mentioned Billy Basso interview made me curious if I was going to head into graphics programming land, it would be worthwhile early on to look into hot reloading.

Billy mentioned that very early on into the Handmade Hero series, hot reloading is mentioned, this def. made me think about trying to look into this early rather than a down the line nice-to-have feature.

Also my physical copy of Billy’s game, Animal Well, finally arrived!

Anyways, Karl has a blog post on this, which is pretty concise and to the point with lots of code of how one can approach this!

I haven’t gotten to the point in arctic char* to having a properly rendering mesh on the screen, but I think I’m going to be looking into this shortly, and this article is going to be what I base everything off of for sure.

Karl has also written a book on Odin, I picked up a digital copy online, and charged up my Kobo (Thanks to Steve for sending it to me in the mail years ago, sorry it hasn’t seen much use) so I can chuck it on it and maybe just maybe read a physical book digitally for the first time.

Richard Kim, the founder of the Zero Edge crypto casino, resigned on July 2, 2024 after blowing most of the project’s seed funding. […] Within a day of closing a seed financing round on June 20, Kim had begun putting the money into leveraged crypto bets, resulting in “the significant loss of company funds”. On June 29, he admitted in an email to Zero Edge shareholders that he had blown around $3.67 million in company funds.

Don’t get high on your own supply!

Crazy clip, go give a watch.

Floor796 is an animated scene showing the lives of characters from various works on the 796th floor of a huge space station.

Always a fan of going for a dive on Floor796 to find some fun scenes / characters / references / etc.

Funny little Half Life scene.

A new bill would allow for Nazi and Confederate flags to be displayed in some instances in Utah schools and government buildings, but pride flags would be banned.

.-.

Still haven’t really bothered using Reddit very much since the API debacle that killed third party apps, lovely to see enshittification continue.

Mastodon is making a change that might have some users divided. In an update on Friday, the decentralized platform announced that it’s working to add quote posts “to help people to transition away from proprietary, billionaire-owned social media to the open social web,” as spotted earlier by TechCrunch.

This is nice, obviously you can have a social media without the ability to quote posts, but quoting can be a nice way to discuss something / add to what someone else is saying in the context of a post of your own.

Good for fediverse.

When you write, you think better. When you think better, you create better.

So, who’s there real audience?

You’re not just writing for today’s invisible audience. You’re writing for:

• Future you. Your posts become a time capsule of your evolving mind.
• One right person. Maybe one day, someone stumbles across your words at exactly the right moment. And that changes something for them.
• The work itself. Consistency beats virality. A hundred posts with depth will outlast a single viral hit.

PoreFX, what a lovely name.

Back in January, I made this startup’s first landing page. I used Cursor to make an interactive background (like the one on this page). Within a couple days of publishing, multiple developers messaged me compliments. One even asked if I hired a professional designer.

I was surprised by the feedback, because it was super easy to make. I basically just prompted and reprompted LLMs. Artistic components are perfect for AI: they’re isolated, they can’t cause serious damage, and you can verify the logic by looking at the result. Here’s the React + Tailwind code, simplified a bit.

Being complemented for AI authored code is always weird, because although you were technically the prompter, and the one who is able to check it for a level of quality you deem fit, its not really your code in some regards.

At work today, my coworker was asking to refactor some code to permit it to work with a new paradigm, but in the process the LLM came up with an entire new feature that didn’t exist beforehand during what should have just been moving some code around.

Ben’s patterns in the blog post / landing page are dope though, the LLM cooked.

It’s a strange time to be a software engineer. Large language models are very good at writing code and rapidly getting better. Multiple multi-billion dollar attempts are currently being made to develop a pure-AI software engineer. The rough strategy - put a reasoning model in a loop with tools - is well-known and (in my view) seems likely to work. What should we software engineers do to prepare for what’s coming down the line?

Some great points from Sean, I’m of the same (biased) mind that what I have to bring to the table alongside a LLM will stay relevant.

But, deep down…