> However, there isn't a Morrowind speedrun category where someone tries to become the head of all factions. For all its critical acclaim and its great story, most of quests in Morrowind are basically fetch-item or kill-this-person and there aren't many quests that require anything else. But planning such a speedrun route could still be extremely interesting for many reasons.
Some really neat stuff about treating speedrunning as a search/optimization problem. I was a little bit annoyed by the parts where the story strays from that, and the author instead uses human intuition to e.g. select which set of quests to do or which skills to train. Also, part 2.
Two things you don't see often in CS. Trying to replicate a systems design paper, and publishing a negative result. And also showing just how many crucial details can get left out in a systems description that makes it impossible to actually implement. And when you do implement it and don't get the hoped for performance, what then? Obviously more and more optimizations that the original system probably didn't have.
It's kind of interesting to read the original paper's HN comments after this.
> Assuming typical game theory for the jerks, here’s what the thinking would have been: I was a jerk too, and my real goal here was not to actually solve a problem, but was to leverage SIMD either to usurp the people who led parallel programming models in the compiler group or to advance some other nefarious agenda.
A personal retrospective on the development of ispc (a compiler for a shader-programming style C dialect for x86-64). What a great story of big-company intrigue and dysfunction. I'm reloading this site daily to check for new installments.
Proxying traffic through home Wifi routers that expose UPnP to the internet. (I'd heard of malicious proxying through home routers, but I'd thought they were compromised devices rather than just misconfigured ones).