Nicholas Gildea

Programming, Voxels, etc.

[Nicholas Gildea @ngildea85]

I've put the source code for my voxel project up on github: https://t.co/qWnT6tWq9Y

[Nicholas Gildea @ngildea85]

@SheriefFYI Yeah. They are great at "leaf node" code like implementing a function, not so much architecture. Narrow vs broad scope another way to put it I think

[Sinaei @Intel80x86]

AI generally implements what you ask (not what you should have asked for).

I think a big part of software engineering is discovering better designs while building a feature or writing a code. Those insights often come when you are implementing details yourself.

(3/5)

[thinkingcap @chrisheatherly]

I’m actually a child online safety expert and was one of the pioneers in this space with Club Penguin and so I feel uniquely positioned to critique this.

The groomer problem is real but it’s also vastly overstated. The far larger issue we saw at Penguin was suicidality or reports of sexual abuse in the home.

There is no solution for lazy/bad parenting. You can implement all the ID laws you want but if parents are going to just hand kids their phones unlocked, those kids will have access to all the same things the parents have unfettered.

What I found is that these draconian safety laws actually make it harder to be an honest operator of kids apps because on one hand it’s so much legal risk and so much user friction that it simply becomes uninvestible as a business.

Parents will just lie to let their kids use the unfettered internet. For example, I have a friend who works in mobile gaming who has two kids, one above and one below the age limit but separated by just 2 yrs, and the two wanted to play and chat together on Roblox - which is reasonable. To do this, he just verified that his younger kid is old enough for the chat feature when he’s not.

This happens all the time and will happen with these laws to. How far do we want to go with this? Scan the face of the user in real-time to make sure it’s not a kid using the device? We could do that but it feels like a massive unwanted intrusion of privacy.

That’s how you know this law isn’t about kids. COPPA and GDPR-K and so forth already make it illegal to allow chat and other grooming vectors to kids.

What’s really being done here is trying to eliminate online anonymity. And this is a far bigger issue that goes to core speech rights because if you cannot criticize the govt anonymously and if wrong speech is a crime then it becomes easy to identify all the detractors of the govt in power, and ban, fine or jail them for speech crimes.

Starmer has already been doing this and he wants to do it at a much bigger scale. Starmer won’t even acknowledge the problem of actual grooming gangs in Britain’s neighborhoods but he’s worried about online grooming?

No he’s not, and this hypocrisy gives away the game. What he wants is to kill online anonymity so he can enforce censorship of his unpopular policies. No politician should have this power.

[Maurice Heumann @momo5502]

GPU paravirtualization is coming along faster than expected.

Sample is fully emulated (using Windows Hypervisor Platform) and native GPU acceleration.

Performance is nice, but could be better.
I hope soon I can run actual games.

[Nicholas Gildea @ngildea85]

@flying_rodent It's obviously the correct thing to do but I don't think you can then reasonably describe it as "cooperating fully".

[Nicholas Gildea @ngildea85]

@rfleury People see LLMs rebrand open source code then continue to give these companies access to their own IP and can't seem to connect the dots

[Mario Zechner @badlogicgames]

recommended reading. strongly recommended reading.

i really like the pain avoidance angle. slots into my "paon/friction is when you learn" angle. when combined > cognitive debt.

https://t.co/clzPIgXaSU

[Nicholas Gildea @ngildea85]

@daaximus @__silent_ Exactly, it's like the thread of audiophiles arguing about whether malloc or operator new produced better sound quality

[Mark Worrall @infinitehumanai]

Reminds me of Peter Naur's classic 1985 essay "Programming as Theory Building" which argues that a program is not its source code. A program is a shared mental construct (he uses the word theory) that lives in the minds of the people who work on it.

If you lose the people, you lose the program. The code is merely a written representation of the program, and it's lossy, so you can't reconstruct a program from its code.

If you think of total software debt as technical debt + cognitive debt, then previously, we mostly had technical debt. Now with AI we have both.

Previously, when you built something, you accumulated technical debt but relatively little cognitive debt because you had to understand what you were building in order to build it.

In other words: the theory came for free as a byproduct of the work.

AI breaks that coupling. Now you can produce code without building the theory.

So you're now able to accumulate both kinds of debt simultaneously - technical debt in the code and cognitive debt in yourself. And cognitive debt is arguably worse because you can fool yourself into believing it doesn't exist.

Technical debt tends to show up in semi-obvious ways that we understand well as an industry.

Cognitive debt is more insidious - it means you're unable to even reason about the program (because you possess no theory of it) - which is what Naur describes as the "death" of a program.

[Mike Dereviannykh @Mishok2000]

Interesting way of guiding speculative execution

[Nicholas Gildea @ngildea85]

@OlexGameDev Nice :) Are you emitting textual form because that's easier from the AST traversal?

[Nicholas Gildea @ngildea85]

@Aryan100100 @kaetemi @yoheinakajima Ask stupid questions and get stupid answers

[Nicholas Gildea @ngildea85]

@HSVSphere How do you know you're writing secure software if you can't do reverse engineering to assess it?

[Vinod Grover @vinodg]

Compiler research intern (Summer 2026) positions at NVIDIA (Seattle) for ML. Functional programming, polyhedral compilation, program synthesis, compiler optimization. Send resume to [email protected]

[Nicholas Gildea @ngildea85]

@arianevans @geofflangdale How do you handle telling a 3rd party (Anthropic) information that is under NDA with your employer?

[Nicholas Gildea @ngildea85]

@JadeCole2112 And if they did have an original insight to include in the prompt they've just told it to a 3rd party!

[Nicholas Gildea @ngildea85]

@Felbloodreaper @TracketPacer Your newbie claims to have been coding for 30 years!

[Nicholas Gildea @ngildea85]

@lemire @matthew_gream Agreed, but on the journey to understanding you can't test your way out of bugs when they are unknown unknowns. Once you understand by debugging, then you can make tests against your new understanding.

[Nicholas Gildea @ngildea85]

@matthew_gream @lemire That presupposes you fully understand the problem before you've started though. If you don't understand the problem you won't know what tests to write and even if you try you won't be able to cover everything ahead of time. Particularly if your input set is infinite

[Maurice Heumann @momo5502]

I held a talk about reverse engineering and bypassing Denuvo in Hogwarts Legacy at @NavajaNegra_AB

The recording and the slides are now online :D

https://t.co/l6PVOEQfS3