Seth Richards

He's just this guy, you know?

Last Notes

2025-09-28 03:35:28 UTC

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“I can cite several dozen very specific examples in the last 2-3 weeks where it saved me, or my team, quite a bit of time.”
Please do, if you can. Because most time I’ve tried to use LLMs for work the error rate ends up costing me MORE time than I would have spent without, and most AI boosters are short on specifics. We just had a presentation at my job on how we all need to be using AI with no case studies of how it’s actually been useful so far.

2025-06-21 14:14:33 UTC

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I seem to remember that you could also do very early windowed 3D games using similar tricks, back when Voodoo cards were separate boards. But I might be making that up; it's been a few decades.

2025-06-21 14:13:45 UTC

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My recollection is that the graphics accelerators of the time had a sort of single-purpose compositing function that could use a combination of scaling and chroma-keying to overlay video from a TV tuner or MPEG-2 accelerator card in a window on your desktop. I think it worked at the video output hardware level since the systems were too slow to stream video into the framebuffer consistently. By setting the background to the chroma-key color you could do hacks like this.

2025-06-21 12:53:58 UTC

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I definitely remember hearing about this, although I'm not sure I ever did it myself. I vaguely recall it was misusing the "overlay" feature of the graphics hardware that was required to get smooth video playback back in those days?

2025-05-26 11:20:38 UTC

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My experience has been that the most expensive bugs to find and fix, requiring teams of engineers and small armies of testers, are the ones where someone either didn't fully understand the problem or didn't fully understand the code, and the misunderstanding was subtle enough to elude code review and unit test, only showing up in full-scale testing.
As we have more systems where *nobody* really understands the code, both the frequency and cost to fix these bugs seems likely to skyrocket.