My retirement treat was to spend three months learning OpenGL and 3D game programming by porting a classic Java RTS game, Tribal Trouble, to more modern OpenGL and Java. I learn much better working with real code and this was a great experience. It was certainly a different experience than it would have been without an LLM teacher, reviewer, helper, assistant. The app was beautifully designed and very cleanly implemented back in Java 1.4 days of 2004 so it has been a joy to modernize it while attempting to preserve the clean design. The OpenGL work and the necessary math was a lot different than what I have been doing for most of my career so it was a lot of fun. I will probably continue tinkering with Tribal Trouble occasionally as I still enjoy playing the game. I want to learn Blender to edit/improve the 3D models. (https://github.com/bondolo/tribaltrouble)

For now I have mostly moved on from gaming and am instead working on improving the accessibility (#a11y) of the Wireshark network protocol capture/analysis tool. There are a lot of blind and low vision IT folks for whom this tool is a job requirement. The current accessibility is unfortunately poor. I've submitted my first PR and am relearning the Wireshark source after last contributing 20 years ago. It's also been 15 years since the last time I did anything with Qt so that has been a refresher as well. I don't enjoy working in C++ but the goal matters so I will suffer through. (https://wireshark.org)

I plan to work on Wireshark for a couple of months at least and then look for something else to contribute to, probably also accessibility related. I have some ideas already about next apps. I'm currently tempted to build an NFC app for iOS in Swift but haven't decided yet. After having built in the last year both Kotlin Compose and TypeScript React apps, none of which I enjoyed very much, I am somewhat curious if Swift and SwiftUI will be more fun.

I say this with great anger as someone who works in accessibility and has had PDF as a thorn in my side for 30 years.

But most of all it seems like it was designed by people who don’t even know what it is for. That combined with the superficial “implement my Figma masterpiece in code” development approach that includes little to no user testing. Tog weeps. Don Norman weeps. Observe how much breaks when you do something as trivial as bump the default font size by one notch. I am sure it is pixel perfect at default size though.

Enter a birth date in a contact entry without a year. Watch as it jumps to the next day when you save because you are editing the date after 0000 of the next day in utc time. That bug has now been in MacOS/iOS for at least 17 years.

Sorry, got in to rant mode. I really want “less but better” from things in my life. We as consumers aren’t rewarding companies that take this approach apparently.

The same dentist was offering the same to adults of any age. My mom, about age 19 at the time, was also offered it as solution to having misaligned teeth. She asked a critical question of the dentist; "Do you have dentures or are those your own teeth?" When he replied that his teeth were not dentures she "noped" right out there and still has most of her teeth to this day.

Unfortunately about a year after I joined Amazon chose to adopt an RTO policy as well. It is not going well. Dissatisfaction is high, people are quitting, people are planning to quit, respect for upper management dwindles. There are many heartbreaking stories of productive long term employees being force out by RTO. WFH had also been opening new opportunities to people who were unable to commute either because of disability, location or other reasons. It has been sad to see those people shut out again.

The RTO policy has really soured the culture. Adrian highlights the issues very well. Amazon is a global company. We are expected to work with remote teams routinely. Many teams, like mine are also geographically distributed. Going in to the office doesn't make a damn bit of sense for most people.

Obviously there's little good reason to admit someone who wants to overthrow the government (there are already enough of those locally) but literally anyone who says that the US is less than perfect?

I certainly don't want this decision to be in the hands of an unaccountable and capricious ICE officers. I've personally experienced just a taste of how petty they can be and have little reason to doubt that they are routinely spiteful assholes.

The MPW C compiler code generation was so predictable in part because of the symmetry of the 68k instruction set. They wrote a simple compiler and it worked. For the most part effort was spent elsewhere. Since you could reasonably predict what code would be generated if you were unhappy with the code generation you fixed the source. I like that the javac compiler has a similar ethos, With similar effect. Once you know the patterns to use you can generate fairly close to optimal byte code.

Reddit has been hands off (which is why /r/trees is not about trees) and made things worse (which is why mods of top subs is so concentrated among a small group).

This is a turn for the much, much worse. I imagine that this will result in even tighter consolidation of moderation of the big subs in an even smaller set of people with a stronger devil's bargain between them. It is going to devolve in to reddit and "pro"-moderators simultaneously loathing, sabotaging and undermining each other and depending on each other at the same time.

For my own purposes I would like to see accurate day/night line that moves with the map.

It has saved me hundreds of hours of debugging since I first started using it in 1990. The very first day it found a ‘write past end of array’ in some code written by a Pascal programmer which was doing a[sizeof(a)] = ‘\0’; that would have stymied us for days.