iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

I had a time-of-check to time-of-use bug across two processes. I'll be honest: I don't think I ever would have fixed a bug like that before AI.

000

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 17h

I said I wouldn't buy the game until the furloughed staff are back. I'm keeping to my word. Gonna go buy it. Star Wars Zero Company developer Bit Reactor begins bringing furloughed staff back | GamesIndustry.biz share.google/ZuUvQaq0nzL1...

gamesindustry.biz

GamesIndustry.biz

The resource for people who make and sell games.

010

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 17h

Sony publishes games on Steam. Microsoft publishes games on Steam. Imagine if Nintendo did, too. I would buy so many games day 1.

000

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 07/10/2026

Over the last week or two, I worked on adding sufficient conformance tests and documentation for the phoenix architecture. The idea is I completely delete the code (including unit tests, integration tests) and have AI rebuild it from just those conformance tests & documentation.

100

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 07/10/2026

All these issues with GitHub actions are helping me find timing problems in my tests. :)

000

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 06/10/2026

This podracing game (I'm calling it that) is great! Also, it is hard! Right now, <20% of players have made it out of qualifiers. I have not.

000

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 05/10/2026

You know when you shut down your computer and "Still waiting on these programs: Explorer". I feel like that is very telling.

000

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 02/10/2026

It is Oct 2nd. I'm boned. One down side to AI coding is a LOT of CI runs.

110

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 02/10/2026

Fun debugging: Sometimes, CI is fast. Sometimes, it is dog slow. I have some code that archives data on the hour. But that data comes from the network. I gave it a timeout of 10 minutes past the hour for all data to have arrived. Sure enough, if I run my tests at 9:00am...

000

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 02/10/2026

<me, to coworker> Some coding tasks are no longer interesting or challenging. I struggle with motivation on them. I wish I had a junior dev who would find them interesting. *monkey's paw curls* *Google releases the transformer paper that ushers in the age of AI*

001

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 02/10/2026

Whoops. Let's go ahead and add node_modules/ to .gitignore

010

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 01/10/2026

In the age of AI programming, I think we're going to see a LOT more tests. Not just unit/integration tests. Conformance, contract...

000

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 29/09/2026

Another AI-related introspection: When I want something coded a specific way, I don't trust AI to follow the existing code base. I've tried and end up rewriting it. But when I don't care about code details and take a manager's view, I do trust AI--I can see the feature works.

001

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 27/09/2026

I've seen people say coding with AI is making them bad at programming. I interpreted that as they forgot how to be good, which made me doubtful. However, I recognize something in myself. Manually coding feels a bit like cleaning my house. It is nice. But it is tedious.

200

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 27/09/2026

Blender is an amazing example of open source success. It is wonderful. I need to check Gimp again. I feel like it needs some love, too.

010

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 26/09/2026

std::vector<T>(size) default constructs |size| elements. IMHO, that should have only reserved, not constructed.

000

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 26/09/2026

It is easy for me to envision when to use performance cores (time-critical) vs. efficiency cores (not). But there are cores in the middle I don't get. Surely it isn't just "not time critical but don't take too long". Maybe efficiency cores are missing certain units? SIMD?

000

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 26/09/2026

omg I *just* learned there is a Win32 MsgWaitForMultipleObjects(), with "Msg" at the front. (The message queue isn't exposed as a handle and so there previously was no way to sleep until a message *or* an event.) Today is a good day!

000

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 19/09/2026

Huh. There is no way for a program compiled with /SUBSYSTEM:WINDOWS to know that it was launched with CREATE_NO_WINDOW. The flag is used to run a console program silently. My program creates a console. And it has no way to check if it should be silent.

100

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 18/09/2026

It's embarrassing how long it took me to get around to coding up console formatting.

010

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 18/09/2026

Probably a spicy take but I think variable scope clarity in programming languages could be improved. bool flag = false; if (foo) { ...many lines... flag=true; } ...many lines... if (flag) { Really, flag just needs to exist in both of those blocks, no the parent block.

100

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 13/09/2026

I'm designing a simple DIY CPU that can be made easily enough with discrete components. This means limiting transistor count. I'm seriously considering dropping conditional branches in favor of the PDP-8's style conditional skip.

000

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 11/09/2026

How is it 2026 and Windows doesn't have a way to set a per-program default network adapter? I'm sure we'll get 100 more hated features before it's on someone's TODO list, too.

000

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 11/09/2026

I wouldn't be surprised if this is already happening behind the scenes and waiting for privacy to dip enough to monetize it. I suspect 'associations' will be tracked. IE you and these 3 other people all suddenly saw this wifi point. And again on these occasions.

000

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 08/09/2026

Weeeeeell that Ocarina of Time remake looks amazing.

100

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 07/09/2026

An old, old website I run had 17.5k hits *today*. They're almost entirely AI bots.

000

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 06/09/2026

I want to play Star Wars Zero Company. But I *hate* that they furloughed their people. I do not want to support a company that does that.

141

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 03/09/2026

Bernie's proposal is bad. Partly because if AI *is* the next industrial revolution, we are worse off letting China beat the US--even for people who dislike AI. But mostly because it applies to anything above human intelligence and...humans are dumb. A spell checker is banned.

000

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 03/09/2026

Boy, that GitHub runner (Ubuntu 20.04) queue sure is taking a while. I'm not sure if this is the new norm for that specific runner or if GitHub is just having a bad day again.

100

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 02/09/2026

Just added this to my AGENTS.md. I wonder if it'll be effective # Ethics When making a change, consider the ethics of that change. Is there a group of people who would be harmed by this change? Can this changed be misused to do harm? If there is an ethical problem, call it out.

000

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 31/08/2026

I can't exactly place why, but I don't love C's _BigInt(N). C++ is very likely to adopt it. I think because it doesn't look like a type?

100

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 30/08/2026

What the. I didn't clone any big repos in the last day or whatever. How...

000

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 24/08/2026

Happy 31st birthday, Win95!

000

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 23/08/2026

Question for coders using AI: Claude seems to be updating AGENTS.md with every change--like a conversation history. I understand updating AGENTS.md when it really should include some knowledge. That's the whole point of the file. But it seems overzealous. Is this normal?

011

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 22/08/2026

I don't want to like AI vibe coding as much as I do. This grabs all US weather from the NWS and then more actively checks on areas with bad weather. A visitor can of course check their local weather. It does the matching locally against the NWS data it already fetched.

010

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 19/08/2026

I can't believe even hard drive prices are shooting up. :'(

000

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 15/08/2026

Oh man. Is the whole reason for preferring to 3d model with quads because 3- and 5-poles suck? I think maybe I get it now.

000

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 13/08/2026

Thinking out loud: I think AI is a huge problem for big tech. Previously, the difficulty of making all that tech acted as a moat. Big tech now has huge costs and their differentiator is marketing/brand. They'll reduce costs, which will weaken the brand. Thoughts?

010

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 10/08/2026

Good job, AI. Burn those tokens.

010

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 08/08/2026

I'm curious to make a game but facing existential crisis. I began gaming as a young, shallow kid. Presentation meant more than depth to me. Doom exploded, so I think many others were in the same boat. But today, insane graphics and sound isn't so impossible. It's normal. (1)

100

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 30/07/2026

The stock market keeps dipping. It is making me want to come out of retirement and start a company just for a side income.

100

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 30/07/2026

I've seen about 9872345 posts about destroying books for AI. I feel the need to chime in because it seems many are missing a key point. They *tried* to preserve the books. The courts didn't let them. The cannot train on it AND preserve it. Be mad at the courts.

000

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 29/07/2026

The bottleneck was never been code production—its complexity management. This is even more true in the age of AI, btw. AI is good at predicting the next word. But it is not good at understanding meaning. Hence "strawberry". If you can keep complexity low, you can help AI make sense of the code.

010

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 28/07/2026

I'm curious about the thinking between tying Visual Studio and the documentation together. Old MSDN required you have the matching VS version installed. Was it because you would need a document viewer? And that's how they kept you updated? Was there some business reason?

000

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 27/07/2026

Once upon a time, I could Google a question and find an answer quickly. Meaning it was in the summary or the page(s) were to-the-point. Showing an ad once was sufficient. They made their money. Now, YouTube needs 15m videos that are mostly filler, sites show multiple ads...

100

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 23/07/2026

Wait. The fourth in the series is Where in North Dakota is Carmen Sandiego? ???

000

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 21/07/2026

<me> "You aren't bad at math. You're out of practice." Then I read this white paper and think "I'm bad at math." "Each anisotropic Gabor primitive is a Gaussian envelope with a cosine planar wave. A plain Gaussian is a special case of the anisotropic Gabor where the modulation frequency ω is zero.

040