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DemetriSpanos
Oct 06, 2026
NOTimothyLottes
Oct 06, 2026
bonzajplc
Oct 06, 2026

pikuma

227 items with this tag.

Aug 29, 2026
pikuma
May 26, 2026
Nobody Cracks Open a Programming Book Anymore:
Aug 26, 2025
Assuming the risk of appearing extremely dumb in front of everyone here but, how would you find and explain your rationale for the value of the angle β in the diagram below? Someone told me that my approach is wrong so I just want to check that I'm not going crazy.
Aug 19, 2025
You need to walk before you run.
Jun 07, 2025
I've decided to make this explanation public, in case someone else is also interested.
Jun 12, 2024
Hardware & OS are extremely more complex now and programmers sit too far from the machine.
Apr 30, 2024
I had a friend that worked in the support team and was famous for being too friendly with the customers.
Nov 16, 2023
Unpopular opinion,
Aug 23, 2023
"nobody cared about graphics."
Aug 01, 2023
I am (un)happy to say that it was easier to find a triangle using assembly language than with a modern graphics API.
May 26, 2026
@pikuma Actually it still happens in #retrocomputing
May 26, 2026
@pikuma Still use books, using llms for learning feels fake.
May 26, 2026
@pikuma O' no, they (I) totally do.
May 26, 2026
@pikuma This year I've read "Game programming patterns" (goated) and a portuguese graphics programming book.
May 26, 2026
@pikuma Also, people stopped watching programming tutorials.
May 26, 2026
I still buy loads of programming books.
May 26, 2026
@pikuma I still find (and keep buying) programming books the best way to learn how to start learning a language or paradigm in the long run, the magic is in repetition and reminders along the way.
May 26, 2026
@pikuma I do, even though they are ebooks these days.
May 26, 2026
@pikuma I have been reading csapp recently, It is really humbling.
May 26, 2026
@pikuma to be fair, i prefer ebooks.
May 26, 2026
@pikuma skimmed "the algorithmic beauty of plants".
May 26, 2026
@pikuma I think within programming, the “How To” books will largely disappear, but I find books like OSTEP and TLPI worth every ounce of their printed weight in gold.
Aug 27, 2025
@KentoAsashima @pikuma @rygorous You could, but the information needed to construct the projection matrix in the first place includes the values of s and g that I mentioned above.
Aug 21, 2025
@pikuma I think a common phenomenon I have occur to is there are a tons of ppl thinking that textbooks are their endpoint of the journey.
Aug 21, 2025
@pikuma uh so what r books 1 and 2
Aug 20, 2025
@pikuma What are your top recommendations for "1st or your 2nd book/lecture about language implementation"?
Aug 20, 2025
@pikuma Good luck telling that to vibe coders
Aug 20, 2025
@pikuma May we ask you to please make a course on how to make Assemblers, Linkers and Loaders from scratch (literally using 0s and 1s for at least the Assembler)?
Aug 20, 2025
@pikuma Nah, all of that is just fancy math for if statements and for loops
Aug 20, 2025
@pikuma Back in my day all they said was read the dragon book and all was cool.
Aug 20, 2025
@pikuma Most insane APL code I’ve ever read in my life.
Aug 20, 2025
@pikuma is c++ compiler doing this stuff?
Aug 20, 2025
@pikuma computer science sometimes feels like an ancient dark runic alchemy theory
Aug 20, 2025
@pikuma no let the children run into walls and climb over them, you needed to walk before you ran because they told you to be scared or it's hard, and it's not
Aug 20, 2025
@pikuma You should be writing a 100 line scheme implementation
Aug 20, 2025
@pikuma i made like five scheme to vm compilers before i even heard of an lvalue lol
Aug 19, 2025
@pikuma I find it ironic when academics write about how to make a programming language and make it with their own language that nobody else understands.
Aug 19, 2025
@pikuma I agree, and this notation comes in handy in a paper where you have space restrictions.
Aug 19, 2025
@pikuma I guess there’s a reason why most beginner compiler tutorials implement dynamic type languages…
Aug 19, 2025
My conclusion in college was that this was all a weird farce to satisfy certain academics, because what you end up doing here is writing a program that is the compiler, except in a fake low-powered programming language that doesn’t even run.
Aug 19, 2025
@pikuma At 15 I was doing this sort of stuff like "if the word is this keyword then do this" and getting all the hellish consequences out of it.
Jun 13, 2025
The general opinion on Vulkan is that it is an incomprehensible mess of different GPU specific calls, which are too domain specific to give any hint to the programmer.
Dec 06, 2024
@pikuma OS/2 era o Windows escrito do jeito certo.
Dec 06, 2024
@pikuma I bought inferno and ran it some a decade or 2 ago, same with opensolaris and minix.
Dec 05, 2024
@pikuma I wonder what happened to Michael Abrash.
Jun 30, 2024
@pikuma Agree, I just had to implement mmap/madvise/munmap on a system that lacked it and goddamn, that rabbit hole made me realize how much complexity modern OS’s hide from us even at the C / POSIX level.
Jun 14, 2024
@pikuma Wasn't that always what practical software engineering was about? Isn't it more of a difference of degree, not kind? There are more layers separating you from the machine, but they are just more layers.
Jun 14, 2024
@pikuma Don’t forget gluing together SaaS products for auth, deploy, redis, logs, etc because those things are also really hard.
Jun 13, 2024
@pikuma Depends on what you'd consider to be the optimum level of abstraction.
Jun 13, 2024
@pikuma My hands are literally less than a centimeter from the motherboard, what are you talking about?
Jun 13, 2024
@pikuma "Actually, that's a tenant of Software Engineering, which is to use abstraction to hide the unnecessary details in order for people with finite amounts of memory and energy (the developers) to build large and complex things."
Jun 13, 2024
@pikuma and people called me crazy for saying that just programming in assembly is easier than to learn how to use a compiler
Jun 13, 2024
@pikuma I just recently learned that in modern software development there are two compilation processes, one from source code to intermediate representation done by compilers and another one from IR to machine code done inside drivers, that’s just a bit too much
Jun 13, 2024
@pikuma That is why I am studying to create my own OS and Hardware connections, I feel there is too much I am missing out.
Jun 13, 2024
@pikuma First learn C and Asm, then do whatever you want.
Jun 13, 2024
@pikuma On the OS question, what's your opinion on Buttazzos book?
Jun 13, 2024
@pikuma And so many levels of highly opinionated abstractions without documents.
Jun 13, 2024
@pikuma It‘s easier than ever to learn to program on embedded hardware.
Jun 13, 2024
@pikuma Worse yet, more abstractions are piled on top of each other every year
Jun 13, 2024
@pikuma What hardware development then?
Jun 12, 2024
@pikuma And this is exactly why its taken me nearly a decade to actually get around to making things myself.
Jun 12, 2024
@pikuma What's your opinion on the AI revolution as it relates to systems / low level programming.
Jun 12, 2024
@pikuma soooooooo trueeeee (I can't do anything on OS or hardware level yet but I do feel my web programming job can be done by a 12 y/o in HS so that means I need to lock tf in)
Jun 12, 2024
@pikuma don’t forget copying and pasting bad scripts from one repo to another, modifying them slightly, creating exponential gargoyles.
Jun 12, 2024
@pikuma I think this is partly because of how bad most CS schools teach courses like Operating Systems, Compilers etc.
May 01, 2024
@pikuma The remarkable lesson for me was placing Nyancat on the production server.
Apr 30, 2024
@pikuma Hehe.
Apr 30, 2024
@pikuma Best humor is the one when you don't know if it's real or not 😃
Apr 30, 2024
@pikuma lol
Dec 06, 2023
@pikuma To me the problem is not with adoption, but with support.
Dec 02, 2023
@pikuma If only Microsoft finished Midori, that would be nice.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma NeXT is now macOS.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma Well Plan9 and OS/2 are still around, but yes, the world has standardized on unixoid systems and mostly Linux.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma I have a single counterpoint which is the difference between the philosophies of KDE and GNOME, but yeah it feels like we're mostly done exploring and stuck with what worked back then
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma I will never forget flying through an audio file in BeOS shown at a games bar.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma Yet all my devices run on NeXTSTEP.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma I ran both Amiga and later BeOS.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma @shanselman We used to have computers running on valves and relays, nowadays everybody uses transistors.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma The most problematic component of a capitalist system is that it drives innovation and then it drives that space to a monoculture to maximize profits.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma Even Linux can be more diverse - kernel is not the defining user experience thing.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma The UNIX wars was UNIX killing itself and Linux took it's place.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma Linux = *nix
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma Plan 9 deserved to succeed based on its logo alone
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma That's because in the late 80's, early 90s we were all busy making our own BBS's so wtf else were we supposed to do? I blame wildcat, personally.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma True the 90s were a wild west of OSs though it's nice to have something to standardise on rather than getting used to one OS and it being sidelined.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma Genuinely a tragedy how Commodore died out the way it did.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma BeOS was the best but was killed thanks to M$ illegal actions.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma Agree, as you point out, I think we have more variation in GUIs, but only a handful of philosophies.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma I agree, we lost the capacity of trying new ways.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma Minix, Amoeba, VSTa, VMS ...
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma You forgot IRIX.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma Experimental periods are the most colorful.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma Lembro de um anúncio no Informatica Etc que dizia que o OS/2 “assobia e chupa cana”, defendendo que era o único SO realmente multitarefa do mercado (de fato, a multitarefa das primeiras versões do win 95 era meio fajuta)
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma Linux is too based, that's why everyone uses it now.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma The core kernel isn’t as interesting as what you can add on top.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma QNX is still around as an embedded system, AIX is alive, so it's Haiku and ReactOS.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma I remember being blow away at how fast BeOS started up on my 386 at the time and how it handled audio and video.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma More unpopular: let’s shutdown all systems
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma Yeah, you can thank Micro$oft for that.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma We also used to live in trees and throw crap at each other.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma The sad thing is that many of those operating systems from the 90s had better GUI (both look&feel and usability) than Windows 11.
Nov 17, 2023
An unpopular opinion that should be a universal opinion.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma @AkitaOnRails The abstraction level only changed.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma When that guy bought twitter we were introduced to a lot of obscure social networks and here we are on this dumpster.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma We still have GNU/Hurd and ReactOS.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma "...now everything is just Linux" - there are still some Windows-systems - i saw one just yesterday
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma I installed Haiku yesterday...
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma Check the embedded space.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma Isn't this a good thing? you can strip down a linux kernel to nothing, and build up exactly what you need.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma On the desktop! Finally - this is the year of Linux on the desktop!
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma Once Unix came around, all the creativity fizzled ;~;
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma At the end, it is all about licensing
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma 1.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma I used FreeBSD and now I'm on Linux....
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma Nowadays, the world is tasteless...
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma Because at the end of the day most of this is not a vehicle for self expression.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma @systems_glitch It’s a nice idea but most of these weren’t production ready.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma people were wildly creative and less worried about clout back then.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma I did my own in 1994.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma @noctarius2k We should ask: "what is Linux missing?"
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma perhaps the outlier amoung all of the unixes there was next step, because it uses the mach kernel, which then evolved into the modern day xnu kernel used by apple.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma there are still all of the bsd oses around and debian also offers a gnu hurd based distribution, so there is still variety.
Nov 17, 2023
Yes, most of them are dedicated hardware and forming a closed ecosystem.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma I remember downloading the QNX demo disk on 3.5 and being amazed at a 21 bit os with a network stat running from a floppy.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma Commodity x86 hardware + Windows NT is what killed those platforms.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma Thankfully, BeOS is still alive in HaikuOS.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma Hey now, NextStep became macOS (and iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, ...)
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma I grew up with the Commodore64 and at this point in life I am very curious to know what a modern PC would be like running a single-task OS and with applications written in extremely optimized assembly code.
Nov 17, 2023
@pikuma But Linux is just a Kernel.......
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma Who needs an OS… just have a super loop on bare metal.
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma Still happily running AmigaOS on occasion over here.
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma Tfw we never got GNU Hurd
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma Computers are boring these days.
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma RISC OS is still about, as are many flavours of BSD
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma I think that in general there was just a lot of space for innovation and little for monopoly.
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma Gustavo … AmigaOS is now bigger than ever and we do still have some UNIX ..
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma And that's completely fine, the problem is that LINUX Devs haven't done enough to make their distros easy to use and easy to install.
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma this consolidation feels like it is happening everywhere.
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma @shanselman You'd think that's great, because everything is compatible and universal.
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma Haiku, the BeOS ”spiritual successor”, *feels* like Linux.
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma https://www.youtube.com/live/eH7qKhibvG0?si=EzgCjZa-6VF0uXbD
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma Inferno, Plan9 and Menuet are unknown to me: time to do some web search 😊
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma There do exist some others but the communities for them are tiny.
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma Too much complexity leads to stagnation and entropy.
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma @shanselman Exploring the nostalgia of BeOS GUI – a blend of coolness 😎 and weirdness 🤪! #TechThrowback #BeOS #GUIExperience
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma Fuchsia, Zephyr, FreeRTOS, QNX, Windows, macOS/iOS, FreeBSD, vxWorks, QNX, Nucleus...
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma ;) Not really.
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma still can use Plan9 on linux
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma You still have bunch of different OS.
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma @thezolbatar Fun fact: BeOS sort-of runs in LG WebOS tv sets.
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma @shanselman And getting drivers or apps for them sucked big time and costs were high
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma curiously, i am not running linux
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma I remember installing BEOS, it was pretty good from what I recall
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma The 90s were a golden age for OS tinkerers
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma except
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma @shanselman Lindows ?
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma The beos philosophy was that it did not run on my graphics card :)
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma still plenty of OS today.
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma Everything will become standardized so more people can understand them.
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma Now we still have that same experience on Android because every vendor customizes the Linux kernel w/ broken code and replace the default launcher, breaking everything in the most bizarre ways.
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma Don't forget Windows 3.11, Windows 95, Windows NT, Windows ME, Windows CE, ...
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma now everything is linux, windows and macos*
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma were some of them open and free ?
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma This is not an opinion, it's a sad fact...
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma Convergence is inevitable, though, even if not desirable.
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma I would just it is mostly UNIX/POSIX.
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma Depending on what you count as an OS (userland system libs, windowing system etc), we have plenty today: MacOSX, Windows, GNU/Linux, Android, iOS, and a plethora of smartwatch OS:es...
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma Even on the GUI side on Linux, I feel we lost a lot of diversity.
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma I used Amiga, OS/2, and CDE in the 90s for work and whole I enjoyed them at the time I wouldn't want to go back to them now.
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma We got juked because everything moved into the browser, OSes stopped mattering (for most personal computing).
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma After FOSS stacks took over, the distro replaced the OS.
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma Explorer shortage in pretty much every field.
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma We also had different & quirky phones.
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma Meneut OS is released in 26 May 2000, it wasn’t there even in 1999 it’s a hobby project.
Nov 16, 2023
@pikuma And that's for *everything*.
Aug 24, 2023
@pikuma EGA EGA EGA all you need is 16 colors
Aug 24, 2023
@pikuma That book in digital form is free.
Aug 24, 2023
@pikuma They don't appreciate what a feat that was at the time...
Aug 24, 2023
@pikuma Remember coming upon the Bruce Artwick graphics book in the Ventury, Ca library.
Aug 24, 2023
@pikuma I have the 2nd book, is so good
Aug 24, 2023
@pikuma Second from top has very master system box cover design 😅
Aug 23, 2023
@pikuma I remember hosting a mirror for the PDF version of this b book.
Aug 23, 2023
@pikuma Hey @pikuma care to share that beautiful piece of tech behind the books
Aug 23, 2023
@pikuma One of the few tech books I've read cover to cover (not the code) - the writing is accessible and entertaining, probably because it was first published in magazines - live this book.
Aug 23, 2023
@pikuma Is Graphics Programming Black Book still worth reading? I hear it mentioned a lot, but I looked inside and it's a bunch of 386 assembly.
Aug 23, 2023
@pikuma I also love The Black Art of 3D Game Programming by André LaMothe, thats the one that got me into programming for DOS
Aug 23, 2023
@pikuma who has the time to read all that, let alone write all that?
Aug 23, 2023
@pikuma 3dfx Quake still looks amazing, btw.
Aug 23, 2023
@pikuma The poster of the meme has to be too young to understand just how revolutionary those graphics were back when they came out.
Aug 23, 2023
@pikuma Sure, we'll just conveniently forget about 'decades' of graphics innovation and pretend like the graphics we have now were divine intervention.
Aug 23, 2023
@pikuma Those are some great books.
Aug 23, 2023
@pikuma Ah, the black book of an ancient wizard said to contain the spells to enchant mortals with marvels and miracles.
Aug 23, 2023
@pikuma I had the black book of 3d graphics programming if I recall
Aug 23, 2023
@pikuma Right? Peope literally cared about graphics in the early arcade and Atari scenes.
Aug 23, 2023
@pikuma I've only seen that Graphics book referenced as being one of those tomes that ought to be had...
Aug 23, 2023
@pikuma One of the top PC games of 1992, before Doom in 1993.
Aug 23, 2023
@pikuma Sir can you recommend any book that goes into details of implementing gaussian blur, deep glow, and similar effects found in video editing tools?
Aug 23, 2023
@pikuma I was gifted the Black Book when I was quite young.
Aug 23, 2023
@pikuma Too young to understand how long it took from drawing a line on a rastered screen to that via bitblitting and all the rest.
Aug 23, 2023
@pikuma Where are the Foley, Ferraro and OpenGL Red Book? 😉
Aug 23, 2023
@pikuma You're missing Foley & Van Dam.
Aug 23, 2023
@pikuma Don't forget Andries Van Dam
Aug 23, 2023
@pikuma Those books were daunting back in the day, nobody makes books quite as big as the graphics/games folk 😁
Aug 23, 2023
@pikuma I've been reading the newly released autobiography of Romero, it seems like Carmack wouldn't be the Carmack we know today if he didn't have the Abrash graphics programming books.
Aug 23, 2023
@pikuma There was one by Lamothe, Tricks of the 3D....
Aug 23, 2023
@pikuma Why is the Ferraro book so compact? Camera perspective or different edition? My copy is a 1200 page cinderblock.
Aug 02, 2023
@pikuma Sad but true.
Aug 02, 2023
@pikuma Spoiler: GTE 👀
Aug 02, 2023
@pikuma I loved optimizing my low-level primitives into asm back in the day :)
Aug 02, 2023
@pikuma Ah, your mistake was in referring to PC APIs as “modern”
Aug 02, 2023
@pikuma Yet another indication of how much crap has been put between the programmer and their machine.
Aug 01, 2023
@pikuma Is that mode 13?
Aug 01, 2023
@pikuma Nice! You need to go deeper, next stop binary 🤣
Aug 01, 2023
@pikuma Are transformation matrices also made using assembler?
Aug 01, 2023
@pikuma On what platform?
Aug 01, 2023
@pikuma doing stuff like this in assembly is so satisfying
Aug 01, 2023
@pikuma I usually find really dificult to use any piece of modern software.
Aug 01, 2023
@pikuma but ofc
Aug 01, 2023
@pikuma Any % triangle is a speedrun category lol https://youtu.be/K84VkRkk8Ns
Aug 01, 2023
@pikuma I was working on realtime 3d graphics when the first PC 3d cards were coming out.
Aug 01, 2023
@pikuma Hmm, GTE+GPU, or SH2/SCU/68K+VDP1? 😉
Aug 01, 2023
@pikuma This is interesting.
Aug 01, 2023
@pikuma If you can initialize DirectX you can do anything.
Aug 01, 2023
@pikuma But after that it is difficult
Aug 01, 2023
@pikuma 3 days latter you are making an bare-metal 3D UEFI game
Aug 01, 2023
@pikuma How?
Aug 01, 2023
@pikuma a plain framebuffer and true vector ISA would be pure joy - if you could have the performance of modern machines without all the bloat and noise..

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