Numbers and tagged pointers in early Lisp implementations

I've seen a lot of discussions in the last week about the Web Environment Integrity proposal. Quite predictably from the moment it got called things like "DRM for the web", people have been arguing passionately against it on HN, Github issues, etc. The basic claims seem to be that it's going to turn the web into a walled garden, kill ad blockers,...

In articles and discussions about monorepos, there's one frequently alleged key benefit: atomic commits across the whole tree let you make changes to both a library's implementation and the clients in a single commit. Many authors even go as far to claim that this is the only benefit of monorepos. I like monorepos, but that particular claim makes...

This blog post describes the level generator for my puzzle game Linjat. The post is standalone, but might be a bit easier to digest if you play through a few levels. The source code is available; anything discussed below is in src/main.cc. A rough outline of this post: Linjat is a logic game of covering all...

A couple of months ago I finally had to admit I wasn't smart enough to solve a few of the levels in Snakebird, a puzzle game. The only way to salvage some pride was to write a solver, and pretend that writing a program to do the solving is basically as good as having solved the problem myself. The C++ code for the resulting...

Game downloads on PS4 have a reputation of being very slow, with many people reporting downloads being an order of magnitude faster on Steam or Xbox. This had long been on my list of things to look into, but at a pretty low priority. After all, the PS4 operating system is based on a reasonably modern FreeBSD (9.0), so there...