Kara Swisher says I have a male eating disorder. She's closer to right than she knows. There is a decade of my life where I didn't take any pictures of myself because I was overweight, unhealthy, and sad. That version of me ate his feelings and self-destructed. No one called that version sick. The obsessive measurement didn't create the disorder. It was the treatment for one that already existed. My internal signals were so broken I couldn't trust them. I needed external data to find my way back. I had to rebuild from scratch. Kara says this is body dysmorphia cosplaying as science. I'd say it's what happens when a person loses the plot so completely that the only way home is through the numbers. I publish it all. Including the failures, embarrassment, and the erection data, because hiding is what created the disorder. She can call it a circus, repellent, or eating disorder. You cannot call it hiding.

I'm usually not one to write thought pieces without much technical depth. But here we go. Slow the fuck down. mariozechner.at/posts/2026-0…

Is it weird that AI coding assistance is not giving me identity fracture? A lot of software developers are feeling disoriented and threatened these days. Programming by hand is clearly going the way of the buggy whip and the hand-cranked auger. Which is how we're finding out that a lot of people have their identities bound up in being good at hand-coding and how it feels to do that. That's not me. It's not me at all. Rather to my surprise, I don't miss coding by hand, not any more than I missed writing assembler when compilers ate the world and made that unnecessary. (That was in a couple years back around 1983, for you youngsters.) Maybe the fact that I'm not feeling any of this disorientation disqualifies me from having anything to say to people who are. On the other hand...if you can learn to emulate my mental stance and be completely unbothered, maybe that would be a good thing? So. If you're a programmer, and you're feeling disoriented, try this on for size: I like being a wizard. I like being able to speak spells, to weave complex patterns of logic that make things happen in the world. Writing code is a way to manifest my will. Yes, I've piled up a lot of arcane knowledge over the 50 years I've been doing this. But languages of invocation, they come and they go. Been a long time since I've had any use for being able to program in 8086 assembler, and that's okay. I have better spells now, and these days some rather powerful familiars. What I'm inviting you to do is think of yourself as a wizard. Not as a person who writes code, but as a person who is good at assuming the kind of mental states required to bend reality with the application of spells. And if that's who you are, does it matter if the spells are painstakingly scribed in runes of power, versus being spoken to an obedient machine spirit? It's all one; it's all the manifestation of will. Arcane languages come and go, machine spirits appear and then diminish to be replaced by more powerful ones, but you? You are the magic-wielder. Without you, none of it happens. Same as it ever was. Same is it ever was. And so mote it be.

I love this video. Everyone should celebrate accomplishments like this. youtu.be/ONg0951RfGI?si=i_tF…

Great episode. As an old Unreal Tournament modder, I loved that he talked about the subtractive level geometry system. Was cool to hear it came out of a 30 hour coding session.

An entire article about the cost of butter not a single mention of the soviet-style supply managed system not a single mention of milk dumping not a single mention that you need a $53,000 permit to milk a cow not a single mention that import are effectively banned not a single mention that farms in Canada have no incentive to innovate because they have no pressures no mention that the butter "price decrease" theyre refering to is a FRACTION OF A PERCENTAGE, around a penny per kilo this is why media needs to go bankrupt

I had a game engine debugging dream last night. Every couple seconds, a particular piece of furniture would flip on its X axis and scoot across the floor for a bit. I determined that the axis flip was moving the center of gravity and the physics engine was interpreting it as an acceleration impulse and giving it a little kick. (AFAIK, no actual engine behaves like that, but Dream Logic) I didn’t root cause the problem, but I suspected an uninitialized variable, so it must have been a C codebase. I haven’t done game dev in years, but I was making a suggestion to @boztank about avatar rendering recently…

Diving back in for some subnautica style composing. U guys better enjoy it when its done, im getting ptsd doing this shit ( im not, its fun,)

Best news I’ve heard all week

Reminder: play Saint’s Row the Third if your haven’t in the last 10 years. Best use of 3rd party music in the first 2 hours.

I've loved the souls games but... I'm curious how trivial all souls games would be if the game indicated in the UI the right time to dodge each enemies attacks. The majority of the "get gud" is simply learning each unique attack animation of the enemies, over and over again.

Check out my latest article: Simulacrum Tests linkedin.com/pulse/simulacru… via @LinkedIn

From a DM, just in case anyone else needs to hear this.

I love Balaji’s long podcasts, but it’s even better when he chats with the execs I work for. 🔋

Had a good time at #RubyConf2022. Went to some great talks and did an impromptu lightning talk for fun