Reverse engineering SkiFree

Gosh, I played this game so much as a kid. Great read. Can’t help but think it should be a blog post somewhere, though.

I think I finally figured out the source of one of my frustrations of setting up a complicated test context, like I’m trying to do for a project I’m currently working on, is that we spend all this effort in our codebase being sure that objects can only be created via our complicated logic paths (i.e. Service Objects, etc). But then for the test we go and manually set all this stuff up again. What I really want to do is setup my test context via the exact same code paths that will be used in production to set them up, so I get all the same side effects.

And I want the tests to be fast.

What a crazy bug.

Adoration of Moloch permeates the country, imposing a hushed silence as he works his will. One cannot question his rites, even as the blood is gushing through the idol’s teeth.

Our Moloch, by Garry Wills

Most days Docker really feels like a tremendous step backward for software development.

Came across this library, via the GitHub command line tool, that offers support for in-terminal progress spinner style UI. The list of characters is this list is great, and useful for snagging into my own libraries.

Turns out influenza still sucks.

What an absolutely horrific end to the Suns season. Abysmal.

I recently wrote about how we sped up our CI pipeline at CompanyCam by over 4x.

Astronomers have unveiled the first image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy.

Incredible.

Alan Jacobs on “the speed of God.”

Grand Seiko Snowflake. Finally got to see one in person. Incredible.

Alan Jacobs:

The older I get, the more common this experience becomes: finding that I am simply unable to read essays and articles on certain topics. I may, out of a sense of duty, begin to read something on these topics, but almost immediately my eyes begin to wander, or to glaze over. I strive to refocus; I re-read the same few sentences; but before long my mind has wandered elsewhere. Eventually I give up.

Me too.

This footage of a tornado in Andover, KS is one of the most amazing pieces of footage you’ll ever see.

Photos of the debris left over from the Mars Perseverence landing, taken by the Ingenuity helicopter. Amazing!

I wonder what would happen if players had to call their own fouls in NBA games, like we did at recess growing up.

Magical animated Rick Astley QR code.

Read this post today on Kottke, which is mostly commentary around this twitter thread.

One quote toward the end stood out: > The idea that we can live with Covid WITHOUT any mitigation measures and expect things to turn out ok (both for individuals and as a society) is a lie.

The thing is, we have the best mitigation measure we can get: vaccines. It isn’t going to get better than this, and human beings have already stretched themselves as far as is possible with quarantines and the like.

SARS-Cov-2 is here to stay. Get vaccinated, and get back to life.

Another great Twitter thread, this one about how Hall Thrusters work.