New blog post: A Decade of Slug
This talks about the evolution of the Slug font rendering algorithm, and it includes an exciting announcement: The patent has been dedicated to the public domain.
terathon.com/blog/decade-...
Immigrants: Thank Goodness You're Here!
If you donate to our ICE Out Charity Drive with @giantbomb.bsky.social, you're in the running to win a game code! Help thank the good folks at @panic.com, @annapurna.com, @visaigames.bsky.social, @lululu.games, and @popagenda.co!
bit.ly/iceoutminnea...
From food security to emissions, disappearing data is making it harder to understand what’s really happening in the US.
A tweet from John Carmack with the following text: It would be nice if some of the Twitter diaspora returned. So many creatives, but also many developers, that generally enriched the experience are no longer active. Those that performatively left and those with a seething hatred of Elon probably won't be back soon, but a lot of people just disengaged on vague cultural grounds that can be reevaluated. There are probably some technical tweaks to the algorithm that could make them more comfortable. I don't mind the existence of independent echo chambers that people are happy within. There is only a problem when some echo chambers are allowed and others aren't. Reach out to lapsed friends!
Carmack is disappointing.
He should reflect on why some of the most creative and smart people he wants to engage with have left the platform, instead of dismissing their concerns.
Crypto driven games never offered anything of real value to players and they were made by people who arrogantly did not respect the existing games industry.
Time and time again VC and big tech folks act as if they're better than people who work in games, and they get burned.
The date of the first day of the year corresponds to a hex color code.
Today we embrace the spirit of change and say goodbye to #010125 and welcome in #010126.
A painting of a woman reaching into a pond to gather lily flowers.
A crop of a painting of a boat sailing at sea. The detailing of the canvas is visible due to the tight crop.
A boy carrying a bucket riding on a barrel that itself is pulled on a sled. A detail from a larger painting.
A close up crop of just raspberries from a still life painting.
I have also appreciated this as an exercise in paying attention to small details in art. There's a lot of beauty in tiny details people would typically miss, but which make for a nice card back.
A strange headless body with a face on the torso striking an odd dance-like pose. From 1290.
A painting of ripe pears
A painting of a bow blowing a bubble while leaning out a window sill.
A woman drawn with bold colors in art nouveau style. From a 1928 magazine cover.
I've been building a simple web solitaire game for fun and one of the things I've spent hours on, perhaps to my joy more than any player's, is browsing through public domain art to crop as inane or beautiful unlockable cardbacks.
There's such a depth of odd and unusual art out there.
My "No Graphics API" blog post is live! Please repost :)
www.sebastianaaltonen.com/blog/no-grap...
I spend 1.5 years doing this. Full rewrite last summer and another partial rewrite last month. As Hemingway said: "First draft of everything is always shit".
I'm not sure LLMs will soon able to solve the long tail of cases needing expert human invention any time soon, but I suspect with the right formal verification they'll rarely need the expert in the loop.
A leap forward for productivity, but not so great for the relevance of my skills.
This is accurate: martin.kleppmann.com/2025/12/08/a...
I suspect many companies are working on programming languages with formal verification tailored to today's AI. Even with LLMs as they are such a thing could be an unnervingly dramatic step forward.
a shot of a god botherer in a car, next to him on the passenger seat is a skull in an ornate box
'Skull of St. Thomas Aquinas being transported to Fossanova Abbey.'
Photograph by Daniel Ibanez
A big part of went wrong, for me, was Meta's software.
Software jank is many times worse in VR and the software + headset discomfort rewired my brain into not enjoying the medium.
Before that I had spent dozens of hours in the DK2 and HoloLens and mostly enjoyed the experience.
Pre the metaverse wave I was building out a VR product, a 3D modeling tool, banking on the idea that the killer feature of VR would be 'worlds' crafted by users.
It became difficult to stay motivated working on a product in a medium that was very uncomfortable for me.
Valve's new VR headset looks cool: store.steampowered.com/sale/steamfr...
I was heavily invested in VR and worked on it a lot, but I never got over comfort issues due to weight and poor software.
I'm happy to see this headset is lighter than recent headsets, in line with the DK2.
I'm leery of the term. It evokes this idea that a designer is just 'discovering' what the player wanted all along, but I think most of the time designers are creating new experiences the players never quite knew they wanted.
Asking "Does this fulfill the player's fantasy?" feels limiting.
I've thought about something like this in a cyberpunk setting where most of what you do is figure out how to navigate esoteric public transit, traverse neighborhoods, gather info, and figure out daily life.
love a november
Something that scares me is how so many more people want to pick and choose "facts" that feel the best. So many people just say "no [some alternate reality] is correct" despite the evidence, and it seems AI generated video may greater enable that.
Can't overstate how fucked up it is that unraveling what is arguably the greatest achievement in the history of humanity is now a motivating issue of one of the two dominant parties in the U.S.
Speaking of which this is a fascinating Rust library for rapidly exploring all permutations of rewrites according to a set of rules: github.com/egraphs-good...
In addition to more conventional use I can see its potential for use with toy programming languages, or even procedural generation.
Turns out @zed.dev has an irreversible Delete option in the context menu that skips the trash, and they have yet to implement Ctrl+Z.
I just lost about a day of work to this design.
A screenshot of a google search query for "How many days are between halloween and christmas" and Google responds 420 days because for some reason it calculated between different years.
Over the last few years I've noticed Google getting weirdly worse and worse at simple queries, but the most egregious example I noticed recently is this one.
When asked "How many days are between Halloween and Christmas" Google confidently "420 days".
An opportunity for Canada is to try to poach US tech companies and talent in light of unpredictable and harmful US regulations.
When I was at Microsoft they already had a location in Vancouver to locate employees until a US visa was secured.
Perhaps such locations will be substantially expanded.
I've been experimenting more with using AI to write Rust code from specs.
Previously it would take a junior engineer a few days to write an unusably buggy implementation.
Now with AI it takes only minutes to write an unusably buggy version.
A very irregularly updated thread of cool web toys with a creative bent (1/n)
For creative disciplines this means it will become important to have a public persona, and to help people understand the personalities and lives behind a work.
With the rise of AI art I think it's more important than ever to focus on the social value people get from art.
Often what makes someone care about a work of art is the human behind it, and their personality / lived experience you can sense through the work.
Lately I've felt grateful I am insignificant enough that I can stay honest.
What's the point of incredible power if you can't defend your own principles?
Maybe it's too complex, but yes it'd be more automatic.
I think it could get to the point where if just a few people with some credibility block someone it'd immediately take effect for most other reasonable people.
It's probably like a "recommended follows" algorithm but in reverse.