#205 – April 02, 2017
The Strange History of Ransomware
When people first hear about ransomware, there is always this moment of stunned disbelief. It sounds like a plot line snatched straight from dystopian fiction: you flip open your laptop only to discover you have been locked out of all your files.
A good diff algorithm will attempt to identify as much equality as possible. Everything else qualifies as differences. The metric for quality and precision is a smaller count of captured differences. The smaller this number the better, presuming differences aren't escaping undetected.
Why are some programming languages "faster" or "slower" than others?
I have noticed that some applications or algorithms that are built on a programming language, say C++/Rust run faster or snappier than those built on say, Java/Node.js, running on the same machine.
One of the things I didn't touch on at all in the book is the git rerere functionality. This also came up recently during one of my trainings, and I realize that a lot of people probably could use this, so I wanted to let you all know about it.
Thirteen Years of Bad Game Code
There are many, many more embarrassing mistakes to discuss. I discovered another "creative" method to avoid globals. For some time I was obsessed with closures. I designed an "entity" "component" "system" that was anything but. I tried to multithread a voxel engine by sprinkling locks everywhere.