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Nice

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I asked my good friend gpt-5.4-medium to write a little test for my CMake destroyer of a package manager. It was one step beyond cut-n-paste, and the machine politely obliged me. Test passed. Story’s over.

Wait, no! We must look at the code produced by the machines, for it is often fraught with the wringing of many hands. And this one confused me; I added globs, so you can do src/*.c, for example. The fixture it created had two C files in child directories, and then included them in the target by glob.

Franz Kafka's Lost Treatise on Wayland

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

One day, I tried to run a Tauri app. After a long period of reflection, I have categorized this broadly as a mistake.

The app crashed on startup with a Wayland error; I found the same error on a GitHub issue and thought, well, someone’s gotta fix it. How hard can it be?

Well. Somewhere between understanding how a fucking button is rendered in a Tauri app on Linux and my third round of selecting all squares which contain a motorcycle to get into the self-hosted GTK GitLab instance, I thought: pretty fucking hard¹

Claude Code's renderer is more complex than a game engine

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

One of the maintainers of Claude Code said something extremely funny on the internet.

I’m not here to dunk on this person who is clearly earnest and well-intentioned. I have thought and said far worse, far more confidently.

But…how silly is it? Clearly, comparing Claude Code to Grand Theft Auto 6 is not fair. The author did specify a small game engine, and even the most brittle, sun-bleached of straw men would concede that that’s not what they meant.

We don't practice fucked

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A story. From Ron Jaworski’s excellent The Games That Changed The Game. Jaworski’s in Indianapolis, watching the inimitable Peyton F. Manning taking snaps in practice. A lot of snaps. So many snaps that, after a short while, it becomes clear that the Colts do not plan on anybody whose name is not Peyton Manning having a football hiked to them in the venerable Lucas Oil Stadium, on that night or any other.

Claude Code changed my life

Thu, 25 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

What brand of AI grifter would write such a thing? With paradigm shifts comes money; and with money come the grifters. But lost among the AI grift, wealth extraction, silicon hoarding which can only be described as Smaug-like, and so forth and so forth is something beautiful, plain, earnest:

LLMs have changed my (and probably your) life, foundationally, permanently, and for the better.

All of this boils down to the fact that while LLMs are merely pretty good at writing code, they are dear-god-how-did-we-ever-work-before-this good at reading code. It turns out that having a little fella on your shoulder that can read code an order of magnitude or two faster than you can literally change your life.

Claude Wrapped

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

» tldr

Run to compare your Claude Code usage against the rest of the world while enjoying a spirited holiday Santa Claude rendered in fully lit 3D in your terminal with the power of WASM.

bun x @spader/claude-wrapped

» slightly less tldr

cpu-destroying wasm claude

Click to load...

I wrote a raymarcher that can render scenes of SDF functions and lights in plain C, compiled it with WASM, jammed it all into a Bun executable that grabs your ~/.claude/stats-cache.json, uploads it to a SQLite database on The Cloud so you can see how your Claude Code usage stacks up with the rest of the world.

This Ain't Yer Granddaddy's C

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve dragged myself out of the rubble of broken glass and half-juiced lemons that is the C programming language to bring you some fun tricks. These aren’t tricks in a clever or brilliant sense. I’d consider APE binaries a brilliant trick. These are more about ergonomics.

These go a long way in making C feel like a modern language. I took care to make sure that you can just cut-n-paste most and put them directly in your code¹.

Chicken Soup for the Grug Soul

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

c is my daily driver

Almost every day, I write C. I am not an embedded developer. I exclusively use regular computers (a Linux desktop and a MacBook Air) and write mostly regular code (small tools, throwaway scripts, GPU experiments, video games).

Unless I have a good reason otherwise, I do it exclusively in C. I legimately find it to be the best tool for most things I do.

Out of the box, C is a (mostly) well designed language with perhaps the worst standard library and tooling of any commonly used language. It’s truly bad. But those things are not C; they’re just the environment. And even though some of C’s warts are baked in too deeply, the vast majority of them are not.

A Dead and Dying World

Wed, 28 Jun 2023 14:13:33 -0400

Found in Unreal Engine 5.1 source, UserWidget.cpp, line 2035¹

// Look for indications that widgets are being created for a dead and dying world.

Maybe so.

You need to jump through lots of hoops to view Unreal source on GitHub, but here’s the file. It’s there as of Unreal 5.1, but seems to have been deleted at some point since. ↩︎

A Very Simple Class Implementation in Lua

Wed, 30 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Lua is a beautiful language.

Most scripting languages will make you feel dirty at some point. Packaging a project in Python is a hellscape littered with broken glass, plus it’s about three thousand source files between the C stuff and the Python stuff. V8 is roughly two million lines of source code, and the ecosystem around it is frac tur ed and generally gorged to exploding with transpilers and polyfills and bundlers other various flavors of bullshit.

This is fine, in the same way that traffic in my city (Atlanta) is fine. It’s terrible, and it makes you want to stay away from your car, but nobody’s really to blame. Institutional problems, sure, and the general shit-rolls-downhill quality of the actions of large groups, but it’s really just this thing that Sucks and that you can’t do anything about.

Firmament Demo Inside!!

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The long awaited day is here. Thousands – no, millions – have sat – no, on third thought it’s probably something like billions; sorry – HAVE SAT monk-like, forgoing even basic human qualities of living such as eating, sleeping, having sex, or even drinking water. They wander the desert, like the Israelites of the Old Testamant, waiting for someone to deliver them.

No longer! That’s right, Firmament is out! It’s “just” a demo, and it spans the first part of the game. The finished product will be perhaps four times larger, or perhaps will never exist. Here are some neat stats about the game!

Half Circles, Quarter Circles, and So On

Wed, 22 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’m making a game. It’s an interactive novel mixed with an RPG. It’s called Firmament. This is a piece of concept art I wrote while designing the world.

In this story, a boy learns an important lesson about binary search.

HALF CIRCLES, QUARTER CIRCLES, AND SO ON

I was looking for Alexander. A few months ago, my assignment had been switched from changing out capacitors on a little patch in 440A to running integrity checks on some of the Unchanging Sums. I liked this. Working on capacitors meant that your hands would always smart after your Maintenance shift. The sums were easy, though. The worst that would happen with those is that your eyes might cross after a few hours of comparing the readouts to what was in the Manual.

Static Charge

Tue, 21 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This is the first “concept art” story that I wrote for the game I’m making, Firmament. If you haven’t yet received the Glory, well, what are you waiting for?

In this story, two techs who replace panels of the dome’s wall notice readings that are inconsistent with the staticism of the dome.

Static Charge

Lao Tzu awoke the same way he had for two decacycles now, in an unfamiliar tunnel in an unfamiliar segment of the Dome with citizens that were not from his pod. He could not remember most of their names. The only man he had bothered to make acquaintance with was Tiberius Gracchus, a large, quiet man who did the same work Lao Tzu did.

What's a Firmament?

Mon, 20 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I am making a video game. It’s called Firmament, and it’s an interative novel + RPG set in a domed society at some point in the future. The dome provides everything that society needs, and was created with a manual detailing instructions for perfectly static homeostasis. Naturally, our player arrives at a time when homeostasis is not perfect, nor static, and is in fact very imperfect, and dynamic. I am making a video game.

The Fastest Gun

Wed, 26 Feb 2020 22:21:47 -0500

“Killin’ just don’t do it for me anymore, Tex.”

Joe leaned into the dusty oak bar. “I come home’n I take apart my gun, but oil’n it just don’t feel quite the same.” The keep put a cold draught on the table, and Joe took a long swallow and tossed him a few chits.

“How d’ya mean? Shootin’s shootin’. Ain’t nothing more to it’n that, ain’t never will be.” Tex said. He drawled how he looked, slow.

A Primer on Competitive Pokemon

Wed, 30 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

An Introduction

Hello! My name is Spader. I have been playing Pokemon at the highest level of singles play for about ten years now (albeit less active recently). You may know me on Smogon as user: Bad Ass (bonus: an interview I don’t remember in the slightest¹). I play virtually every tier in existence, and love almost all of them! I don’t have as much time to invest in the game as I would like, but I’ve noticed there is a lack of guides on improving at Pokemon (as opposed to fighting games, where theory and strategy are overflowing on the internet). This will be a series of articles to help you improve at the game.

2D Collisions with Minkowski Differences

Sat, 25 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

This post is going to explain the basic idea behind a Minkowski difference – what they are, how to visualize them geometrically, and a simple case of leveraging them for collision detection. The intent is to give you a solid intuition for a concept that is very fundamental in many collision detection algorithms, as well as what problems you need to solve to extend my basic presentation of it!