They gave me a Claude subscription and told me to get tokenmaxxing, so I tried to give it a fair shot.
It’s getting hard to avoid LLMs these days. Even if you avoid social media (or at least curate a follow list that avoids the bulk of the slop factory) and shrug off grandiose marketing statements that end up taken at face value in the news, it will likely come and find you at your place of work. Unlike the silver bullets of the past (like microservices or NoSQL), AI adoption seems to have been mandated in many places from the top layer of management, regardless of how many of them ever worked (or studied for) an engineering job.
Two conferences in one. You can see France in the distance but then they pour wine from a can into plastic glass to remind you where you are.
I’m aware that I’ve have been writing less lately, partly for work reasons and partly for conference reasons. Speaking of, let’s talk about ACCU on Sea 2026.
Let’s talk about game simulations. In this special issue we talk about how to handle buffs, modifiers and other stat bonuses.
Whether one is making a RPG or a strategy game, there usually comes a time where designers want to attach a bunch of stats buffs and debuffs to each and every object in the game. The game actors start small but eventually we want our characters, units, countries and monsters stats to be able to be affected by a mix of equipment, perks, area effects, difficulty settings and whatnot. And if we don’t take care, it might turn our game into buff recalculation simulator 2000.
Every 6 to 12 months, I try to use C++ modules, run into a hurdle, maybe rant about it on social media, then move on to something else. Despite watching multipletalks on the topic, there’s always something that gets in the way. My biggest success so far has been managing to use the VulkanHpp module in my renderer library, after which things started breaking down. But after making some progress again last week (and running into new hurdles), I feel like I have enough to make a proper summary.
Two C++ code snippets. A good interview question would be which one to pick, and why. And what they would change. Or you could just ask which one is AI.
A tweet has been making the rounds over the weekend after escaping the C++ community containment. It offers 2 different ways of handling a somewhat classic “insert or return existing” associative container problem. The author claims one was made with AI and the other hand written. They’re both bad, but they make for a good interview question. And also a deeper discussion about AI generated code. Let’s delve (wink, wink) into it!