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Chris Blume

@programmax.net
189 followers 77 following 656 posts

Retired software engineer. Volunteering as chair for the W3C PNG Working Group. Formerly Google & Twitch.

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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.
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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.
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 02/10/2026
Whoops. Let's go ahead and add node_modules/ to .gitignore
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 18/09/2026
It's embarrassing how long it took me to get around to coding up console formatting.
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 07/09/2026
A friend of mine worked on Robonaut back in the day. If there is a problem outside the space craft, it might take too long to suit up--have a robot fix it! Why humanoid? Because all the tools need to be human-friendly anyway. Sending 2x tools would be bad. This same logic applies to home robots.
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 30/08/2026
What the. I didn't clone any big repos in the last day or whatever. How...
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 29/08/2026
How did we get here?
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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.
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 20/08/2026
Catch!
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 10/08/2026
Good job, AI. Burn those tokens.
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 13/07/2026
Holy cow. I forgot I have this. Enterprise Edition, still in shrink wrap. BUT the shrink wrap crushes the box lid over time. I think I need to unbox it. I almost don't want to.
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 26/06/2026
I don't get what everyone is complaining about. Seems pretty cheap to me.
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 17/06/2026
*sigh* I'm forced to use inline assembly on old compilers that don't support the intrinsics I need. But the optimizer has to get real dumb around inline assembly.
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 14/06/2026
It is 2026 and companies that are big enough to do better still crash their homepage. It was eBay just a month or so ago.
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 11/06/2026
You see this guy? Ranked #50 in the world (front page of results) on this GPU overclocking benchmark. Look at his GPU temps. He was using liquid nitrogen. Not any more! Not on my watch!
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 10/06/2026
I seen it! Sephiroth DID do this!
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 08/06/2026
Now THAT is interesting. Why does my debugger know about this magic __IMPORT_DESCRIPTOR_KERNEL32 value?? Where does it come from? Is Kernel32 always loaded into the same location??
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 04/06/2026
That's...unexpected.
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 28/05/2026
Okay sooooo fun fact: Kernel32, GDI32, etc alphabetize the ordinals, which shifts them around as new functions are added to new versions of Windows. This is presumably so you can binary search the names. However, Lz32.dll does not follow this. Or at least, didn't in Win98.
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 27/05/2026
Internet cut out this morning due to a storm. The complete lack of distractions was eye opening. It was refreshing. And I was able to pull up docs from a Win98 VM I had previously setup. Something about that atmosphere helped, too.
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 04/05/2026
I think I figured out what is going on. I have some control here. 54% of the tokens (321.7k) are just "messages". I think it is loading all the previous context. So effectively starting each new session gets more and more expensive until I /compact or /clear.
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 04/05/2026
What is going on with Anthropic limits?? It is Monday, 1:15pm. I asked AI to do one task on my code--one prompt. And it used 48% of my session token limit??
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 03/05/2026
Only 2 more weeks of Karazhan. I don't think I'm going to get orange in every slot. Close, though :D Proud of thank rank 298 on Netherspite. Also, how the heck are rogues supposed to parse on Nightbane?!
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 30/04/2026
This is Google Maps showing the main Google HQ. If you drop into street view...that definitely isn't Google HQ. Maps lets you report the mistake. I have. But it was too funny so I had to record it, too. (Also, wow. This place is beautiful. Where is it?!)
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 27/04/2026
Published in 1995. Yikes.
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 27/04/2026
Huh. eBay is down
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 23/04/2026
FINALLY. Got the hard case (dynamic blocks) working in my deflate compression. Now to fix some edge cases & clean up the code. Then onto performance.
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 21/04/2026
Hey cool. My buddy got #1 global AI demo. Grats, Jack!
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 18/04/2026
Been playing with VC6.0 recently. Soooo much easier to get ICEs. We've come a long way, baby.
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 16/04/2026
I setup a Win98 VM and got to work on what all us nostalgic programmers enjoy: making a tiny program. This is it running--window, text, regular ol' C++. It weighs in at 2kb. The sections are as small as Win98 allows. The only imported function is GetModuleHandleA. It gets all the others from that.
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 06/03/2026
Got Lempel-Ziv compression working. Now to combine it with the Huffman from before to get Deflate. This is how Lempel-Ziv compresses Green Eggs & Ham. The numbers inside the parentheses are the offset from the start and the length. (5, 3) is the "Sam" it saw before. (0, 4) is the "I am".
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 06/03/2026
I feel like that might be a new one for me.
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 03/03/2026
Finally getting around to writing my own compression implementations. Got a naive Huffman compression going. Had to take some notes while debugging. LZ77 next.
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 26/02/2026
February is almost over. Sit rep: I added a state machine for the player and am feeding it input. So now there is a "running left" state, for example. I also cleaned up a bunch of animation code. But I didn't add frame timing yet. So the player's animations are way too fast.
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 14/02/2026
Theeere we go. Got a player sprite working.
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 08/02/2026
Woooooow. I wonder how much Twitch got paid to put Roblox in its top level naviation. Back when I worked there, I was tasked with adding an in-nav ad to the Android app. I hated it. At least we would only show it if the user didn't have Twitch Turbo (no ads). This shows WITH Turbo. On the website.
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 04/02/2026
Fun bonus: I messed up the animation tiles while working on this. That's not a lovely wave crashing...
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 04/02/2026
Got animations & keyboard input working
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 31/01/2026
I'm learning 3d modelling (not creativity/art--just tooling). A lot of this seems to be knowing what steps you need in what order. If I prep this step, I can unlock the clean way of doing next step.
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 30/01/2026
One of my 2026 resolutions is to finally make a game. The end of Jan is coming up. Here is my game so far. For 1 month, not too bad.
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 25/01/2026
Trying to get Omarchy to run in a VM seems...difficult.
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 23/01/2026
Fixed at 2:30am
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 23/01/2026
It is both neat and annoying to watch my ISP fail over live. The yellow dotted line is latency to Microsoft, Google, and Cloudflare servers. It has consistently been around 18ms. Then at 10:10pm ET it jumped up to 27ms and has stayed there for about 2 hours.
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 30/12/2025
That was cool. I just matched up with Post Malone, Shroud, and xQc in a game. Got a headshot on PM :D
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 25/12/2025
Things like the NORAD Santa Tracker warm my heart. But uhhh any chance some of us graphics programmers and artists can contribute? Look at the way those reindeer animate. "Skinning" has been around since the late '90s.
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 16/12/2025
Steam Replay time. 97%ile, 98%ile, and 95%ile. Ashamed but proud.
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 11/12/2025
Look at that RAM usage. Loading up an AI model? Nope. WoW Classic. (What the...)
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 05/12/2025
My main computer died while I was on vacation. I had a second computer I was working on water cooling and getting a top 100 in the world rank. But it wasn't ready for sustained usage. Blessing in disguise? I guess now I know the VRAM isn't getting enough cooling.
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 04/12/2025
Most people aren't computer nerds, so they wouldn't have noticed... RAM prices are SKYROCKETING. There is a long story why. But the short version: AI datacenters demand RAM.
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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 02/12/2025
You ever just pause and recall how INSANE it is that we have satellites in space to monitor weather?
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