Software engineer (video games). Likes dogs, DJing + EDM, running, electronics and loud bangs in Reservoir.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • What I love most about 8-bit era games are how small they were storage-wise. Most of the ROMs are tens of kilobytes for the entire game. Developers were severely constrained by the hardware limits which led to some creative decisions, eg. the bushes and clouds in Super Mario Bros are the same sprite just drawn in different colors. All code was written in pure assembly for efficiency and size.

    To put it into perspective, AAA games today are one million times bigger.


  • Haha, love the last paragraph. It’s hard for software engineers to release code publicly knowing their work is going to be scrutinized by other engineers, without adding a disclaimer or caveat of some kind.

    “We had very little time and were crunching for months”

    “I know this is a bit hacky but I was 7 years old”

    “I wrote this code in hospital while I was recovering from anesthesia”

    It reminds me of a musician playing their song publicly for the first time.


  • I would strongly consider just crying about the headphone jack. Like you I’m really annoyed that most phones got rid of it, but take a look at how many more options you have on gsmarena phone finder if you ditch it.

    My main use case for it was sharing my wired noise cancelling headphones between my work PC and phone for zoom calls. But I ended up getting a nice pair of Bluetooth headphones recently and so haven’t used it in a long time. I’m sure it’ll still annoy me on occasion living without it, but if it’s only a few times a year I can live with that for all the options it opens up for new phones.







  • Slight tangent, but I recently cleaned out the house of a parent after they passed away. There were boxes and boxes of family photo albums. We kept them for a while out of guilt, but we really didn’t know anyone in the photos aside from one or two people. Eventually we got rid of them. Point being the value of your stuff is probably far less to others then it is to you, especially photos to future generations.