iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Chris Blume @programmax.net · 20h

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

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I finally ran the exercise today. It took very little time and money on my end. It also produced nearly the same program. The benefit of this IMHO is handling tech debt. So long as we document & test the parts that matter, the design and implementation is easy to rewrite.

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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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Aye, the Phoenix Architecture coined by Chad Fowler (a spin on Martin Fowler's Phoenix Servers). I'm actually about to test this now on one of my own projects. Although, I wouldn't describe it as "later removed". I would describe it more like code gen. I still check-in and keep the generated code.

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

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

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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.

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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.

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Yeah. Honestly, this is mainly due to tests which had a 30m timeout they were waiting on :) bad edge case that happened to trigger a few times on a few runners Likely, I'll be fine next month.

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

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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...

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<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*

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

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...

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

I checked replies to mention exactly this: github.io will host your content if you want.

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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.

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

Or maybe it is just tedious to clean up AI's code. Greenfield programming is always a joy. Cleaning up someone else's messy project isn't fun.

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.

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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.

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

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

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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?

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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!

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

Correction: AllocConsoleWithOptions() handles this. But that was only introduced in Windows 11 24H2. So the problem I described has existed for a long, long time.

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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.

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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.

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

Said another way: Currently, the only way to share a variable between two blocks is to put that variable in a shared parent block. Even if the parent doesn't care and the other blocks/code don't care. It feels like there has to be a better way.

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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.

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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 16/09/2026

haha this post is how I learned of it. Thank you

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.

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Chris Blume @programmax.net · 12/09/2026

hahaha omg... those are vertical floppy drives. Got it. I genuinely was like "toaster case? genius"

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.

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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.

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Please tell me the king fish dude still takes 30 seconds to scoot one butt cheek at a time to unblock the path.

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Maaaan I don't want to buy a Switch 2. But I feel the call to HUT HYAAAT

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Weeeeeell that Ocarina of Time remake looks amazing.

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I might try to do a lambda thing like that. I'll investigate. Originally, my concerns were 1.) multiple events (clicked/hovered) and 2.) if the handling logic got long the whole thing became difficult. #1 can be solved with a builder pattern. Do you think #2 isn't really a problem?

maxGUI/Code/Examples/2-StylingExample/EntryPoint.cpp at tip-of-tree · ProgramMax/maxGUI

Is the behavior proximity a gradient? Like if it is reasonably close that is okay? I'm familiar with Qt having signals for events and I feel like rigging up those signal handlers is messy. Would this example feel close enough and not messy? github.com/ProgramMax/m...

github.com

maxGUI allows for easy, light-weight, and cross-platform* GUI coding. - ProgramMax/maxGUI

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