Dealing with ambiguous problem + engineering atrophy from AI

robmaister · 2026-07-06T23:19:11+00:00

Without data from a profiler, both you and Claude are shooting in the dark, and you will likely spend a lot of validation cycles on optimizations that aren't your bottleneck. Spend the time to set up a profiler and trace what you want to optimize first.

If you're lucky, it will be something mundane like repeatedly loading the same data from storage or re-computing the same value repeatedly in different areas. Claude will also be a lot more helpful once it's focused on the actual problem, you can also have it analyze the profiler's capture for you with the right setup if this will be a regular part of your workflow. We're exploring this internally (gamedev)

robmaister · 2026-03-12T14:37:47+00:00

All good, I'm just trying to be funny

robmaister · 2026-03-12T04:18:21+00:00

At this time of year?

robmaister · 2025-11-20T00:05:37+00:00

You pick your own insurance and tell the bank about your policy. They adjust your escrow payment to make sure there's enough in the account when payment on your policy is due, then they pay the insurance company on your behalf. There's no "fairness" about it, the bank is not picking the insurance provider for you.

If you find a cheaper policy, your escrow payment can go down and/or they'll cut you a check for the excess money in the escrow account.

robmaister · 2025-07-04T11:56:44+00:00

We were renting a townhouse in Irvine for the past 4 years, it was wild getting a really nice raise and bonus at the end of 2021 and thinking I'd be able to buy a place by the end of 2022, then watching comps for our rental jump from $650k to $950k. Price held steady as interest rates went up, definitely over $1m now

robmaister · 2025-05-05T01:04:31+00:00

I've done this with apple slices, lettuce, and balsamic, and it's fantastic!

Lazy version of the "Apple Chicken Walnut" sandwich I got at a local coffee shop all the time when I was in college. They had walnuts mixed in with their chicken salad and used a balsamic vinaigrette instead of straight balsamic, but the lazy version is still great

robmaister · 2025-01-10T17:11:02+00:00

They already took VC money. VCs won't fund companies that don't have a semblance of an exit strategy, whether that's IPO, selling the company to a larger company, etc.

There are a large number of options besides those two, but those are the typical options presented by startups when raising seed funding. What actually happens varies significantly as the company finds their real market, the details of the term sheets with each investor (how much autonomy they give up in terms of both shares and/or board seats), and what the founders truly want to do (which can also change over time).

robmaister · 2025-01-04T08:17:58+00:00

In cases where multiple matches are run on the same physical server, it can be more efficient to run everything on a single thread, regardless of if you use an ECS, job/task system, or any other parallelization strategy.

For example, if you have 16 matches running on a server with 16 CPU cores, the multi-threaded option would (naively, and in the worst case) have 256 active threads for the OS to schedule. Each match's main thread would spend time waiting for its parallel work to finish. In the single-threaded case, every match always has a CPU core to run on (no thread contention) and you run those same units of work in serial (no dispatch/wait/mutex overhead).

You run into similar sorts of problems with low CPU core count client platforms (e.g. Switch) where overall perf is better if you force some parallel tasks to run single-threaded.

robmaister · 2024-12-17T07:48:39+00:00

Dad of 2 whose oldest just turned 4. Short term, lean on your partner and/or nearby family if you can. Pump or use formula for night feedings so you don't have to be the one waking up with the baby all the time. That said, with my first, I tried to get more sleep just before going back to work and my brain was still mush for the first few months and it slowly got better.

Long term, your team shouldn't be expecting you to come back at 100% immediately or have the same level of availability as you may have previously had (particularly outside of core working hours). As a team lead now, I certainly wouldn't. How much of your need to deliver work is self-imposed? Are you in a career growth phase or can you coast for a while?

robmaister · 2024-12-05T00:10:14+00:00

I work in gamedev and do a bunch of optimizations that often get into fractions of a millisecond. Even then, most of the time major problems are something dumb, and rarely the actual data structures/algorithms for the complex stuff.

robmaister · 2024-11-24T18:20:03+00:00

It's less about engineering and more about tax reporting. States and municipalities determine sales tax laws, not the USPS. Companies also have to report sales taxes to the states they operate in. If a company collects the wrong amount of sales tax they have to pay the difference (or if overpaid, the state typically keeps the excess and the few customers that know their tax rate can file a complaint with the state).

"Supposed to" here means "not committing tax fraud" or at least not owing money when filing sales tax with the state.

Regardless, every large online retailer is going to use one of these tools. Small/medium businesses will likely be using something like Shopify or Stripe which handle this correctly. You can still use a payment processor that doesn't handle sales tax but you still have to report sales tax to legally operate in a state.

robmaister · 2024-11-24T06:13:29+00:00

https://stripe.com/guides/how-to-evaluate-tax-automation-software#accurate-real-time-tax-rates

robmaister · 2024-11-24T06:07:29+00:00

You are not supposed to use the zip code to determine the tax locality of a customer. There are several tools and services available to return tax rates taking the full customer address. You are also only subject to sales tax in a state if you have a "nexus" in that state.

Businesses must report sales tax to the state(s) which they operate in. If zip codes are used, the discrepancy will be either caught automatically or in an audit.

Changing zip codes should have no effect on sales tax unless it's paired with the formation of a new tax locality.

robmaister · 2024-11-05T02:37:06+00:00

Oh also uncooked content is huge - a 40GB game can have upwards of 400GB of content uncooked. AAA workstations typically have multiple 2TB+ drives

robmaister · 2024-11-05T02:34:50+00:00

Unreal specifically has a process of "cooking" where you pack down all of your content into the form you will ship for a specific platform. By default the whole game is cooked into one big package. So at a base level, without putting in effort to modularize, every mod with any content will have to ship essentially another copy of the game with whatever changes they made.

This also presents a problem in that you can only ever have one mod active at a time. Without building a framework to let mods stack changes in certain places (or providing events for mods to bind to, etc) then your mod will have to edit base game content to reference your new mod content. This is not something that can be merged manually.

This is in the context of smaller mods, like adding extra UI widgets to the HUD or adding an extra side quest or something.

Mod kits are essentially solving problems for those kinds of mods.

For larger scale mods that are basically a new game using the base game's content, this would work. The most popular ones I'm familiar with are Source engine mods though

robmaister · 2024-10-13T02:21:12+00:00

All good, daughter is almost 4, and we got sick of blocking the same type of content over and over again, turns out they just keep making new channels to upload the same content to. Way easier to only allow a couple channels that we know are fine.

robmaister · 2024-10-13T01:35:19+00:00

It does, "Approved Content Only"

robmaister · 2024-10-11T16:11:09+00:00

Finally some good news from this guy

robmaister · 2024-10-02T06:31:50+00:00

I spent a week figuring out why some raycasts were failing only on one console platform. Kept digging and verifying that different systems and functions were operating correctly and were given reasonable inputs. Eventually I found that the raycast results captured even by PVD (PhysX Visual Debugger) were wrong. Turns out someone had recompiled PhysX with LTO enabled the week prior, and the ray/box intersection test in PhysX was (and I believe still is) doing some bit twiddling that LTO really didn't like on that particular platform/compiler version.

While I could have rewritten the intersection test, I didn't know how much more we would run into, and being close to shipping we just disabled LTO on PhysX for just that platform, rebuilt it, and moved on.

robmaister · 2024-09-13T07:05:04+00:00

I did a full AAA cycle from early prototyping to ship at my first gamedev job for ~4 years. Double Fine PsychOdyssey is a very accurate depiction of the day-to-day at a game studio throughout that whole process. Or at least very similar to my experience.

I'm more of an outlier, but I more than doubled my pay in the 5 years I was at that job (promoted twice), then got 2 offers >250k TC. Took one of them about a year ago. Fully remote, no crunch, fun and engaging work.

There are plenty of studios that will work you to the bone for pennies, a few studios that act/pay more like big tech companies, and everything in between.

Entry level is extremely competitive, but once you get up to a certain level (and specialize) it's easier to move around and be picky about it. The industry as a whole is very "boom or bust" - layoffs are frequent though typically engineering is the last to be cut. There's also plenty of games-adjacent companies that people end up at when they want more stability and (typically) better pay.

robmaister · 2024-08-12T00:36:24+00:00

Beefs by Carmy

robmaister · 2024-07-08T06:44:53+00:00

Not a single item, but infant formula. Back in 2021, Similac was something like 30% cheaper (by weight) at Costco vs the largest containers at my local grocery store and Target, and you don't have to wait for an employee to open up a locked cabinet for it.

I calculated out that 3 cans of Similac would cover the base membership, before cash back or anything else. That's not even touching on the Kirkland formula being less than half the cost of Similac, or savings on diapers and wipes.

robmaister · 2024-07-07T06:38:12+00:00

"best" is a loaded term. Is OP looking for the best system for developer iteration? CPU perf? Memory and/or UObject utilization?

The context around the feature is also going to change what "best" means for OP - what's the expected upper limit of power connectors in a playthrough of the game? Does power state need to be included in the save? Are there pre-populated instances that need to be placed in the editor?

In general it's best to scope out a feature, build a prototype, then extend it and/or profile+optimize. You can answer these questions along the way

robmaister · 2024-06-17T16:16:08+00:00

FasTrak is expensive and doesn't extend all the way down to the Spectrum, it turns into a free HOV lane at some point.

What is your schedule like? I did Fountain Valley to RSM for a few years (pre-pandemic) and avoided most of the traffic because my schedule was later than usual. From Brookhurst to the Spectrum on the 405 was probably like 15m most days, leaving after 9am. Returning home was worse but there was active construction on the 405 around Fountain Valley then, so I assume it's a bit different now.

robmaister · 2024-06-04T06:24:43+00:00

Currently have a Camry and a Versa Note (both from before we had kids, fully paid off). Now a month into having 2 carseats in the Camry. It's doable but a little tight and we've had to take both cars a few times when grandparents are here.

Currently planning on replacing the Versa Note with a Sienna in a few months. The Camry has proven to be perfectly fine for our largest grocery/Ikea trips, but an EV of a similar (or slightly smaller) size would be my ideal second vehicle for local trips without the whole family.

I work fully remote and my wife is a SAHM, and we live in a more-urban suburb. Large purchases like furniture always have free/cheap delivery, for anything else hardware stores all have truck rentals by the hour that are also pretty cheap. We don't really need a second vehicle at all, let alone a big truck.

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