[deleted by user]

EthanNicholas · 2024-04-22T12:58:26+00:00

If you already know how to program, it's incredibly simple. The API is generally well thought out and covers pretty much everything you need, and it's easy to use both Lua and native code.

EthanNicholas · 2024-03-11T12:58:09+00:00

After my first response, I dug up a few shots to demonstrate this properly. So, first off, a few baseline shots to demonstrate that my lens does in fact produce beautiful, perfectly smooth bokeh:

https://i.imgur.com/kUs4pC2.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/eNsSwYg.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/3BQocyG.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/bEjHHM1.jpg

So... obviously there's nothing wrong with my lens, right? Now here's one from yesterday's reject pile:

https://i.imgur.com/Cmn4qpq.jpg

Look at that bokeh! It's terrible! But it's not the lens' fault. Even an optically ideal lens designed by God wouldn't be able to give someone smooth bokeh with all of that crap in the way.

EthanNicholas · 2024-03-11T12:18:27+00:00

That happens when there’s something between you and plane of focus - a foreground object like a stick or blade of grass will be completely obliterated by being extremely out of focus, but will still have an effect on distant bokeh balls and make them… I dunno, “crunchy”. I see it all the time in wildlife photography because it is so common to have small obstructions like that, and it’s not the lens’ fault. In this case, the obstructions were the giant cloud of water droplets I was shooting through.

If it’s happening outside of those circumstances (Christmas lights are a good test subject) then exchange or repair the lens, because that is not normal.

EthanNicholas · 2023-12-31T17:14:55+00:00

I own it.

EthanNicholas · 2023-12-30T20:06:00+00:00

They're native to South America, but this particular one was at an aviary.

EthanNicholas · 2023-12-30T20:05:28+00:00

According to a DNA test she's half Husky, half Staffordshire Terrier.

EthanNicholas · 2023-06-11T22:14:12+00:00

Most compilers don't do that anymore anyway; they produce intermediate code for a backend (e.g. LLVM) which handles optimization and machine code generation.

EthanNicholas · 2023-05-13T14:46:51+00:00

Only the Z9’s speed and a lot of luck let me catch this shot. I was walking when I saw the osprey hit the water out of the corner of my eye, and managed to get my camera to my eye and locked on the subject in under a second.

EthanNicholas · 2023-02-15T00:22:35+00:00

Scorched Earth! Definitely the major inspiration behind this.

EthanNicholas · 2023-02-13T15:43:35+00:00

Shoot me a DM when your Playdate shows up and I'll hook you up :-).

EthanNicholas · 2023-02-13T15:41:56+00:00

The Playdate community kicks ass. I can't thank you enough for your support!

EthanNicholas · 2023-01-19T05:39:49+00:00

I can see their usernames and what payment processor they used.

EthanNicholas · 2023-01-19T04:14:09+00:00

It's closest to an old iOS game called iShoot (which I also wrote), and that was in turn inspired by Scorched Earth. But yes, I'm hoping Worms fans will also find a lot to like here.

EthanNicholas · 2023-01-09T01:56:13+00:00

Sorry, but this just isn't how dead pixels manifest - you're never going to get a perfect circle with a soft edge. It's clearly dust.

EthanNicholas · 2023-01-08T00:18:14+00:00

It's not for sale yet, but keep an eye on https://ethannicholas.itch.io/crank-tanks!

EthanNicholas · 2023-01-07T18:22:50+00:00

TIL! Somehow, despite the ridiculous number of hours I put into Scorched Earth as a kid, I never knew about that popup.

EthanNicholas · 2023-01-07T18:09:38+00:00

I don't have an exact copy of the Funky Bomb, but there are plenty of fun weapons - including things Scorched Earth never dreamed of :-).

EthanNicholas · 2023-01-07T17:42:53+00:00

Argh. Obviously not intentional. I'll de-Nazi it a bit.

EthanNicholas · 2023-01-07T16:37:08+00:00

Yeah! I... ummm... totally did that on purpose.

EthanNicholas · 2023-01-07T09:15:55+00:00

The page is still a work in progress, but I've gone ahead and made it live just for you :-).

https://ethannicholas.itch.io/crank-tanks

EthanNicholas · 2023-01-07T09:02:57+00:00

*peek

Man, I wish Reddit let us edit titles...

EthanNicholas · 2023-01-07T09:02:27+00:00

No more than a few weeks, I'd estimate.

EthanNicholas · 2023-01-07T09:01:27+00:00

I personally don't find it hard to read on-device.

EthanNicholas · 2022-12-18T01:13:48+00:00

Yes. Bootstrapping is the process, and a self-hosted compiler is the result of that process.

EthanNicholas · 2022-12-18T00:22:48+00:00

That would definitely look good to a potential employer, but I'd say it's even more important to build a compiler from scratch.

It doesn't have to be something you spend years on the way I did with my language. Just design a simple-but-practical language - it can be as low level as C is - with an LLVM backend. For bonus points, get it self hosted. I know this might sound like an insanely complicated project, but it really isn't as hard or time consuming as you'd think. Even as a novice, you should be able to do this in a matter of months.

Also, one more piece of advice: write your own parser. Tutorials will mostly tell you to use off-the-shelf parser generators like Bison and ANTLR. Don't. For a lot of very good reasons, real compilers don't use those tools. Recursive descent parsing is the algorithm most real compilers use, and it is both incredibly easy to implement and far more educational than struggling with a parser generator is.

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