As someone into performance cars and motorcycles, removing a cat is pretty uncommon, and you're generally seen as a dick if you do it.

There are a lot of "street mechanics" who will remove your cat for free without even needing to ask.

If your program does 1 million adds, but it takes significantly longer than 19 milliseconds, you can guess that something else is going on.

Seb is incredibly passionate about games and graphics programming. You can find old posts of his on various forums, talking about tricks for programming the PS2, PS3, Xbox 360, etc etc. He regularly posts demos he's working on, progress clips of various engines, etc, on twitter, after staying in the same area for 3 decades.

I wish I still had this level of motivation :)

> I wish I still had this level of motivation :)

It's rather: can you find a company that pays you for having and extending this arcane knowledge (and even writing about it)?

Even if your job involves such topics, a lot of jobs that require this knowledge are rather "political" like getting the company's wishes into official standards.

Would you have have chosen to work at your job if you were never going to get paid?

No? But there's a difference between knowing that (which is an obvious fact that anyone would agree with) and walking into your job one day and reminding them you're only there to get paid.

Damn, so you can just choose to not have guns pointed in your face? Regardless of where you live?

Everyone who has had a gun pointed in their face must have been really stupid then.

It definitely makes it simpler. You can do a per-screen window sort, rather than per-pixel :).

Per-pixel sorting while racing the beam is tricky, game consoles usually did it by limiting the number of objects (sprites) per-line, and fetching+caching them before the line is reached.

I remember coding games for the C64 with an 8 sprite limit, and having to swap sprites in and out for the top and bottom half of the screen to get more than 8.

It depends on your network though. In my case the image quality was good, but going to the link cable was a substantial improvement in quality and latency.

Last year I emailed Ken Silverman about an obscure aspect of the Build Engine while working on a similar 2.5D rendering engine. He answered the question like he worked on it yesterday.

Sometimes "just thinking harder" works, but often not. A debugger helps you understand what your code is actually doing, while your brain is flawed and makes flawed assumptions. Regardless of who you are, it's unlikely you will be manually evaluating code in your head as accurately as gdb (or whatever debugger you use).

I think a lot of linux/mac folks tend to printf debug, while windows folks tend to use a debugger, and I suspect it is a culture based choice that is justified post hoc.

However, few things have been better for my code than stepping through anything complex at least once before I move on (I used to almost exclusively use printf debugging).

printf isn't faster if you want to single step through code to find math precision errors.

I've had to do that on a embedded system that didn't support debugging. It was hell.

I’ve always wondered why embedded devs make less than “JavaScript-FOTM” devs.