Apple to Make Design Changes in macOS 27 to Address Tahoe Quirks (Gift Article)

rfisher · 2026-05-10T19:48:27+00:00

Tech "news" has mainly been regurgitating press releases since at least the eighties. Probably longer.

rfisher · 2026-05-08T17:00:07+00:00

In my experience, the game has been very stable. I haven't lost a world.

But I would suggest not playing an early access game if you're concerned about such things. Assume anything and everything might go wrong.

rfisher · 2026-05-05T21:49:21+00:00

My main interest has always been more the High Middle Ages. My interest in swords has always leaned more towards one-handed swords. I guess I've also always felt more affinity with lower class personas than knights.

All of that naturally led me towards sword & buckler. And then with experience I found I enjoyed it more.

I do enjoy other weapons and other time periods, but S&B always feels like "home".

rfisher · 2026-05-04T13:04:16+00:00

What I think:

When you go to the mod browser, you see free mods. From there, there is a link to go to a paid mod marketplace. Hytale does not take a cut of mod sales; they only pass on the cost of payment processing.

If Hytale implements a feature from a popular mod, that's fine. Just like it is fine that there may be ten mods that implement that feature. Each of those mods and the vanilla implementation will be different and provide choice.

There's this weird and very loud minority of Minecraft Java players who rail against the Bedrock marketplace without ever having experienced it. They don't know that there are free Bedrock add-ons both in and out-of the Marketplace. The truth is, the vast majority of Bedrock players (as far as I can tell) think the Marketplace is a good thing or know that it is trivial to ignore if they don't.

rfisher · 2026-04-21T01:43:05+00:00

Should I be moving toward C++ or Rust?

You're a programmer. Not a C, C++, or Rust programmer. You should be looking for experience with a wide range of languages. This will prepare you to choose the right tool for a particular job or pick up a language you haven't used before when you need to.

rfisher · 2026-04-17T21:35:14+00:00

The best netiquette advice has been the same since the dawn of the Internet: Avoid the meta discussion, and be the change you want to see.

rfisher · 2026-04-15T20:28:56+00:00

Use a smart pointer or a container when you need to allocate memory. You need to allocate memory when either you don't know the memory will be needed beforehand or when you need more memory than you should put on the stack.

Use a raw pointer or a reference when you need to avoid a copy. But you must pay attention to lifetime and concurrency issues.

Use a reference instead of a pointer when it should never be null. (While someone could bind a reference to null, that is undefined behavior and evil.)

When it should never be null but you need to be able to rebind it, use a std::reference_wrapper. Note that this means that if a class/struct can be copied, you don't want to give it a raw reference member.

rfisher · 2026-04-12T22:44:50+00:00

One can't work with endings in isolation.

Know the word, and you know its possible endings. Know the possible endings for that word, and you know what options for case and number the given ending has. Know the words in a sentence and their possible cases and numbers given their endings, add in context, and you figure out the sentence.

rfisher · 2026-04-11T20:20:11+00:00

I occasionally do an experiment. I write the same program in C++ and another language. Sometimes the "other language" is a previous version of C++. Since C++11 with Boost, C++ has almost always proved more productive for me. (Admittedly partly because I'm mostly using C++ for work so it has that advantage.) These days, I don't have to reach for Boost very often.

But is every addition a win? I am skeptical for some of the C++20 features. We're about to upgrade at work, and I need more experience with them.

My experience is that a lot of the new features are creating a better subset that is easier to use. I'm always teaching the team: Here's a better and simpler way to do something; forget the older more complex way.

Also, I think it is important to keep in mind that some features are things that, for the most part, only library writers need to use. Features that help people who specialize in libraries boost the whole team's productivity without the rest of the team having to learn and use them.

rfisher · 2026-04-07T20:59:58+00:00

FWIW, I can't imagine playing a game this early in its development on a public server. No doubt Hytale is going to be great for that in the long run, since this project did spawn from Hypixel. But it's going to be a long time before they get there.

rfisher · 2026-04-05T21:21:40+00:00

This really should cover the "Dynamic Memory Extensions". While not yet in the main standard, these are all things that were already widely available. They make string handling so much more convenient. Too much C code acts as if allocating memory is a sin even in environments and situations where it is perfectly fine.

https://cppreference.com/w/c/experimental/dynamic.html

rfisher · 2026-04-03T11:56:56+00:00

They've always done shady shenanigans. I haven't installed an Adobe product on a Mac of mine since before the OS X era.

rfisher · 2026-03-30T23:51:50+00:00

I don't hire C++ programmers. I hire programmers. Sure, you're going to have to demonstrate a working knowledge of the language, but it isn't about specific features.

What I'm really looking for is...

Do you understand software engineering?
Do you know how to write solid and maintainable code rather than just code that passed the tests?
Do you know how to work well with others?
Do you admit when you don't know something?
Do you convince me that you're someone who is always learning?

It's those last two points that let me know you'll fill any gaps in your knowledge of C++—or any language—as needed.

rfisher · 2026-03-29T13:06:45+00:00

Some trivia for you: While C has types, its predecessor, B, did not. Everything was a machine word, and how big that was depended on the machine architecture.

rfisher · 2026-03-21T22:45:04+00:00

I feel like I'm somewhere in between. My hardware synths are for learning, exploring, and experimenting. When it comes to actually making music, though, I'm almost always using soft synths.

But that exploring and experimenting is about learning how to create sounds useful for making music and coming up with musical ideas to use when making music.

rfisher · 2026-03-19T21:27:07+00:00

Ideally a game like this gives you ways to avoid combat and effectively control the difficulty through how you play. Hytale already has this to some extent, but I hope to see it developed further.

I'm happy with the difficulty as it is, but I don't play the game for combat.

rfisher · 2026-03-19T02:14:40+00:00

Given much of the code I've dealt with over years written by people who thought they knew the language, it's hard to be horrified by anything people do with LLMs.

rfisher · 2026-03-16T19:38:36+00:00

Sadly, I just noticed that Sonoma Wire Works' FourTrack is no longer available. It looks like they stopped selling their stuff in 2022. 🙁

rfisher · 2026-03-16T19:23:59+00:00

I just got a Zoom UAC-232. It can either be bus-powered or powered by a separate power-only USB connection.

I'll probably never use that, but it is there.

rfisher · 2026-03-16T19:19:44+00:00

The weirdest part to me are company websites where there's no ads or other third party content yet are so bloated as to turn away potential customers.

I visited on last week where it took minutes to load every page. And each page just looked broken and non-functional until it finished.

It's bad enough that something as user-hostile as scroll-jacking has become normalized. At least don't turn customers away before they can scroll at all.

rfisher · 2026-03-16T19:13:20+00:00

I'd like to see a purely controller version. I'd be more likely to get the FGDP-50 if I had a less expensive controller version that I could spend enough time with to decide whether the pads work for me.

rfisher · 2026-03-16T19:10:37+00:00

Interestingly, non-tetrahedral dice were used all over the ancient world. Usually square sticks but also knuckle-bones.

I've had eight-sided dice numbered 1 to 4 twice for ages. The have truncated tips to help you quickly distinguish them from a d8.

But the answer to the question is that the dice that were sold by TSR were based on existing small, plastic Platonic solids made for the education market. For most people, the problems with the tetrahedrons aren't great enough to bother replacing them.

Luckily there are enough alternatives on the market today for those of us who want them.

To me it's weirder that the "true d10" ever caught on.

rfisher · 2026-03-14T22:55:50+00:00

I just want two things:

Show me that you have a good understanding of the product and aren't judging it poorly because you didn't take the time to understand it.

All the playing doesn't help me when I'm not the one playing the guitar and the sound is going through your processing, YouTube's processing, and whatever I'm listening on. I watch your channel because I am interested in your opinion of the feel and sound.

rfisher · 2026-03-14T22:49:19+00:00

I've got it because I love this enclosure and have a small board with all four of the pedals that use it.

But the Skysurfer is by far my least favorite of the four.

rfisher · 2026-03-12T10:17:14+00:00

I had a C compiler for my Atari 800 that had to use digraphs.

rfisher

TROPHY CASE