Chris Blume

industry accolades:
"software engineer" - BleepingComputer
"developer" - Engadget
"Twitter user" - XDA

[Chris Blume @ProgramMax]

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.

[Chris Blume @ProgramMax]

I am envious of @AkBKukU's tiny Pentium.
It's so adorable.

[Chris Blume @ProgramMax]

I'm trying to get local AI looping.

> Ask it to write a complex project.
Done in 30s.
"That seems wayyyy too fast. No shot."
*project doesn't even build*

> Ask it to fix its errors.
It's been churning for over an hour already...

[Chris Blume @ProgramMax]

@davepl1968 Ooohh the color mixing is nice.

I assume you do do a hue around the xy part of velocity. So I'm seeing hues aimed at me and away from me, since I'm side-on.
(Then you rotate through a hue offset)

Very cool

[Chris Blume @ProgramMax]

Earlier AI models were pretty bad at coding.
I learned to distrust it and carefully review its work.

I need to unlearn that.
I need to trust the AI writing it and have a separate AI reviewing it (which I also trust). Otherwise, it is still bottlenecked on the speed of a human.

[Chris Blume @ProgramMax]

@davepl1968 @championswimmer I came to say this.
"To be fair...this isn't part of..."

I'm not even sure the term "GPU" was normal back then. "Video card" more likely.

[Chris Blume @ProgramMax]

@seritools oooohhhh a lot going on here. I'll investigate. Thank you!

[Chris Blume @ProgramMax]

I've been looking at a bunch of tiny Win32 programs.

Almost all of them do not run.

It's shuffling bytes around so "according to these 5 people's claim, this is still valid".

WinXP even says "This program is not valid." (Compared to I got "This program IS valid, but..")

[Chris Blume @ProgramMax]

@JanRingos Entirely likely.
I'm testing first on Win98 and WinXP. Then following up with tests on Win11 once I've sorted those two out.

[Chris Blume @ProgramMax]

@MarekKnapek Haha naaah I got a program running that is just 1 .text section.

But for a moment there I was like "Wait. HAVE I seen a counter example?? This might actually be correct..."

[Chris Blume @ProgramMax]

I'm going to sort it all out and write a blog post with PoCs.

Side note, assemblers are SOOO handy for this. Just throw raw bytes in (or words/dwords/qwords). Automatically calculate offsets so changes are easy....so nice.

[Chris Blume @ProgramMax]

@RichardN7 *IF* you have supported hardware (right now, only AMD GPUs).

And *WHEN* it is released for general hardware.
(btw, thank you, Valve)

[Chris Blume @ProgramMax]

Hot take but "I can build a better Steam Machine" misses several major points.

Yes, you can get more powerful hardware.
But you likely don't want a couch gaming experience where fans are whirring.

Also having a standard target for game devs.
(Also size. But meh.)

[Chris Blume @ProgramMax]

Valve will never go for this, but I would love if they made an anti-download-only option.

Suppose you own the game on Steam and buy a "DLC" which is a physical copy.

[Chris Blume @ProgramMax]

@romero Out of curiosity, how was install base measured back then?

Download counts from various distributors, I assume?

[Chris Blume @ProgramMax]

@lauriewired I remember a Chrome crash report like this.

The crashing instruction was a NEON instruction that we confirmed was reported as supported. But executing it crashed.

I recall like 3 users crashed that same way. All from the same world region. But maybe it was 1 who reinstalled.

[Chris Blume @ProgramMax]

@RichardN7 @lauriewired That said: I agree that you *could* build a local machine with lower latency.

If you look at Steam's hardware survey, most people aren't gaming on great machines. Most people are sticking to a budget.

And within that budget, streaming games makes a lot of sense.

[Chris Blume @ProgramMax]

Dang.
All these gamers are mad at @lauriewired for saying something true about ownership cost.

I wonder if those same gamers are going to buy GTA 6.

Oops, I meant *license* GTA 6.

[Chris Blume @ProgramMax]

@RichardN7 @lauriewired When did you try the steam box? Low latency streaming has improved immensely in the last few years.

I got to test Google Stadia before it went public. Someone wrote a snake game for internal testing. It was a great test because latency is super critical and frustrating.

[Chris Blume @ProgramMax]

Web devs,
I'm only just now learning about Invoker Commands ("commandFor"). They're quite lovely and supported pretty much everywhere. I'm spreading the word.
https://t.co/i394CrXKNH