Plastic industry knew recycling was a farce for decades
Plastic producers should ‘pay for the damage they’ve caused’ after decades of deception, the report’s authors say. ADVERTISEMENT Recycling has been promoted as a solution to plastic waste management for more than 50 years. But big oil companies and the plastics industry have known for decades that it’s not a technically or economically viable solution, […]
The majority of traffic from X may have been fake during the Super Bowl
This week, Super Bowl 2024 shattered records, with the NFL championship broadcast on CBS becoming the most-watched televised event in U.S. history. Also riding high from the big game? Elon Musk’s X. The company formerly known as Twitter published its own press release, lauding Super Bowl LVIII as one of the biggest events ever on […]
Recording and visualising the 20k system calls it takes to “import seaborn”
Last time we counted CPU instructions, let’s look at syscalls now! I’ll show you a little tiny tool I added to Cirron that lets you see exactly what syscalls a piece of Python code is calling and how to analyze the trace more effectively. Let’s start with print(“Hello”) as before: from cirron import Tracer t […]
Show HN: Driftmania – an open source PICO-8 racing game
Driftmania is an arcade time trial racing game. Your goal is to get the fastest possible time on each of the 15 challenging tracks Controls Up Arrow or Z: Accelerate Down Arrow: Brake + Reverse Left Arrow: Turn left Right Arrow: Turn right X: D-Brake R: Restart level P: Pause game + Options menu Tips You turn faster when holding […]
Paying people to work on open source is good
Warning: rant ahead. I’m writing from a place of frustration and not particularly interested in trying to moderate my tone. If you don’t want to hear me yell about open source for a while, please skip this one. Earlier this week, in a moment of frustration. I wrote on Mastodon: “We believe that open source […]
Hyrum’s Law
Hyrum’s Law An observation on Software Engineering Put succinctly, the observation is this: With a sufficient number of users of an API,it does not matter what you promise in the contract:all observable behaviors of your systemwill be depended on by somebody. Over the past couple years of doing low-level infrastructure migrations in one of the […]
Ancient Rome’s Failed Building Projects
Troubled construction projects are perennially in the news. When looking for historical parallels of grand and wasteful infrastructure schemes, journalists and political commentators often reach for absurdities and failures that were occasionally undertaken by 20th-century communist regimes. But go back further and we see that even those ancient civilisations commonly renowned for their ability in […]
If you’re just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly
Raymond Chen There may be times where you need to make an API do nothing. It’s important to have it do nothing in the correct way. For example, Windows has an extensive printing infrastructure. But that infrastructure does not exist on Xbox. What should happen if an app tries to print on an Xbox? Well, […]
Learning about Debuggers
January 8, 2024 Today’s article is a collection of materials to learn more about debuggers: how they work, which technologies are under the hood, what kind of problems exist in this area. There is of course a big overlap with related components like compilers and linkers, so get ready to learn lots of new things […]
GPU synchronization in Godot 4.3 is getting a major upgrade
Darío, the author of this article, is a new face around this blog who was hired by W4 Games last summer to start contributing to the project. His work was kindly sponsored and donated to the Godot Engine project by W4 Games. You can find more of his contributions to the engine in his GitHub […]