Blogs on Erik McClure

Big Walk is very good, although its not the best game ever made - in fact, I have quite a few gripes about the execution.

For basically my entire software engineering career, I have argued that programmers should strive to write as little code as possible.

There is a crisis in the open-source community right now.

Years ago, I realized that trying to become a “programming expert” was both an ill-defined goal and did not actually correlate to being paid well.

Three months ago, the idea of using AIs to help debug code sounded like complete nonsense to me, given that they couldn’t even write code well.

My relationship with AI is getting increasingly strange.

It seems almost impossible to describe this very simple concept to an increasingly large percentage of leftists: If you disagree with someone’s opinion on [Political Position A], but agree with them on [Political Position B], you can still work with them…

The new discord overlay no longer uses DLL injection, and is instead a permanent HWND_TOPMOST window glued to whatever window it happens to think is a game.

Something that is very common is for people pushing the boundaries of technology (or pretending to, anyway) to hold weirdly conservative social views.

I started learning Rust about 3 or 4 years ago.

One of the most fundamental problems with Rust is the design of Result.

*shaking voice* "so, here's the thing — you're not gonna force all of us to learn rust" the way this is said... you'd think they were being deported or something. incredibly childish people at the helm there.https://t.co/fcgA6m9fvq — fasterthanlime (@fast…

Sturgeon’s law states that 90% of everything is crap.

[programmers frantically pulling cables out of the wall] AI: "Nuclear power.

I originally posted an even more snarky response to this, but later deleted it when I realized they were just a teenager.

Discord’s Recent Announcement made a lot of people mad, mostly because of Hyrum’s Law - users were relying on unintended observable behavior in the original username system, and are mad that their use-cases are being broken despite very good evidence that…

Death: No.

You can’t have a 4-slot GPU.

What exactly happens when you write Foo* foo = new Foo();?

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing over The Technical Interview lately.

C++17 introduced an alignment argument to ::operator new().

Back when Discord was a wee little chat platform with no rate limiting whatsoever, it’s API had already been reverse-engineered by a bunch of bot developers who then went around spamming random servers with so many messages it would crash the client.

I recently discovered that in Rust, this is a relatively common operation: let foo = String::from("foo"); // stuff that needs ownership let foo = &foo; Or this: let mut vec = Vec::new(); vec.push("a"); vec.push("b"); let vec = vec; /* vec is immutable n…

Metaprogramming, or the ability to inspect, modify and generate code at compile-time (as opposed to reflection, which is runtime introspection of code), has slowly been gaining momentum.

Today, there was an announcement about a new RISC-V chip, which has got a lot of people excited.

I’ve finished constructing a new personal website for myself using hugo, and I’m moving my blog over there so I have more control over what gets loaded, and more importantly, so the page doesn’t attempt to load Blogger’s 5 MB worth of bloated javascript n…

I was recently told that my niece was trying to memorize her times tables.

Have you built an algorithm that mostly works?

A long time ago I thought Google was this magical company that truly cared about engineering and solving problems instead of maximizing shareholder value.

Lua is a popular scripting language due to its tight integration with C.

The most surreal experience I ever had on discord was when someone PMed me to complain that my anti-spam bot wasn’t working against a 200+ bot raid.

One of the most common things I hear from people is that companies should be “apolitical”.

UPDATE: I have confirmed all the results presented here by taking the low frequency test with someone standing physically next to me.

It’s been known for a while that windows has a bad habit of eating your exceptions if you’re inside a WinProc callback function.

About two months ago, I got a new laptop and proceeded to load all my projects on it.

Did you know that CSS3 does all its linear gradients and color interpolation completely wrong?

Today, a friend asked me for help figuring out how to calculate the standard deviation over a discrete probability distribution.

I am going to tell you a story.

"I have the solution, but it only works in the case of a spherical cow in a vacuum." - *[old physics proverb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow)* Whenever I am designing something, be it an API or a user interface, I try to remember that I am not

*The only thing more addicting than heroine are numbers that keep getting larger.* Incrementer and idle games are seemingly simplistic games where you wait or click to increase a counter, then use that counter to buy things to make the counter go up faste…

Are there any programmers left that actually care about writing good software?

It’s that time of the year again, when everyone and their pony puts on a sale, except now it seems to have started much earlier than the traditional Black Friday.

One of the most bizarre arguments I have ever heard in ethics is whether or not people can choose to be gay or not.

Frustrated with C profilers that are either so minimal as to be useless, or giant behemoths that require you to install device drivers, I started writing a lightweight profiler for my utility library.

Many people assume that modern graphics technology is now capable of rendering photorealistic video games.

Google is going down the drain.

**im·bro·glio** *noun* 1. an extremely confused, complicated, or embarrassing situation.

*"Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler

*Premature optimization is the root of all evil* - Donald Knuth Ever since I started putting words on the internet, I have complained about the misinterpretation and overgeneralization of this Donald Knuth quote.

**Pros:** For the most part, does what it claims it does, and gives you extremely precise, fast tracking of fingers.