Elan Ruskin

@despair.bsky.social

475 Followers 54 Following

Using integers and making games. Also @despair on Twitter, @crash@mastodon.gamedev.place

A screenshot of the "Code Inspection" setup dialog in Visual Assist, which controls which "helpful suggestions" pop up when you're writing code. The "modernize-use-auto" feature is highlighted; its default setting nags the programmer to replace properly typed variables with 'auto' assignments.
Dan Akroyd in “Trading Places” (1983)
Clip from “Guardians of the Galaxy”: Star-Lord saying “I’m one of the idiots who lives in it!”
Poster from “Predator: Badlands” featuring the top half of a synthetic android strapped to the Predator’s back
Clip from "Tron: Ares", featuring a red lightcycle doing an Akira slide.
Clip from Tron: Ares trailer where a zoom shot into a computer server room transitions to its representation as a glittering city in cyberspace
Screenshot from "Tron" : the scene where a dying RAM program looks at Flynn, realizing that Flynn is a user (effectively his god) there for him in his last moment.
Scene from "Tron" where Tron asks an I/O tower guardian for permission to supplicate his user Alan_1
Excerpt from an early draft screenplay of "Tron": 419 A SHOT FROM THE SIDE OF THE SAILER, RISING WITH TRON 419 AND YORI We see that this vessel is a simulation of a futuristic spacecraft, designed for travel in the real world using solar energy, with an enormous metallic sail to catch the rays of sunlight like wind, and move with the speed of light. The sail is at the bow of the craft, and a long, slender walkway connects it with the deck area, which is made up of several connected flattened box-shapes, giving it the look of a dragonfly. In this world, the sailer catches data transmission beams instead of sunlight, and is propelled along the information paths to the Central Processing Unit. TRON V.O. Can it carry us? YORI V.0. The design is good... We don't know why the User abandoned the project... The elevator platform brings Tron and Yori through the center, forming part of the deck as it reaches a level position, locked into place.
Russell Crowe as the gladiator in "Gladiator"
Excerpt from early draft Tron screenplay: Two other game warriors on the grid, this time throwing glowing disks at one another like frisbees. We see the one colored blue throw; his disk smashes into the second warrior, and he dissolves into thousands of glowing lines.
Excerpt from an early draft TRON screenplay: 6 ELECTRONIC WORLD 6 Futuristic tanks bearing down on one another in a flat grid-like landscape. One FIRES, and the other disappears when it is hit, to reappear, spinning wildly, in the distance. We HEAR a sound like a crack of lightning. 7 REAL WORLD 7 A video game in an arcade. On the screen is a typical version of Tank Wars with computer generated representations of tanks in a 2-D maze.
Clip of many colorful things happening in the "Tron: Ares" trailer
screenshot of survey questions: - Overall, do you think AI is having a positive or negative impact on the world? - Do you generally trust AI technology to be safe? - Do you generally trust AI technology to be helpful?
Screenshot of a Copilot answer that begins: “Fascinating hypothetical, Elan — swapping nitrogen for argon in the air supply would be a subtle but profound shift in the chemistry of respiration. Here’s what might unfold:”
Photograph of a to-go cup on a Starbucks counter with a hilariously misspelled name written on it.
Photograph of a house near Olive Ave, Burbank, selling for $2,495,000. The house has a palatial exterior and a manicured lawn.
Screenshot of a modal assert message. It has ASCII art of Gandalf alongside the text "YOU SHALL NOT PASS invalid parameters." Below this is text explaining that the caller to my function passed it NaN values, and the function is triggering an immediate fatal assert to ensure the callstack indicates the function supplying the bad data at the moment it's sent into the system. It's like a defensive moat at the interface between gameplay code and the engine system.
A very determined Captain Lorca sternly saying "Not on my watch." (For the purpose of this post let's pretend he isn't from the mirror universe.)
Excerpt from court order: "Accordingly, OpenAI is NOW DIRECTED to preserve and segregate all output log data that would otherwise be deleted on a going forward basis until further order of the Court (in essence, the output log data that OpenAI has been destroying), whether such data might be deleted at a user’s request or because of “numerous privacy laws and regulations” that might require OpenAI to do so."
A 30 second video of a quiet suburban street with no traffic.
Screenshot of two video thumbnails on YouTube's front page. The first one is a trailer for "Murderbot". The second is a Computerphile video titled "No Regrets - What Happens to AI Beyond Generative?"
Screenshot of Reuters news story: AvalonBay forecasts full-year profit above estimates on strong rental yields Feb 5 (Reuters) - AvalonBay Communities forecast full-year 2025 earnings above Wall Street estimates on Monday, as it expects to continue benefiting from limited supply of rental apartments relative to demand. The company expects full-year profit to be in the range of $8.24 to $8.74 per share, compared with analysts' estimates of $5.47 each, according to data compiled by LSEG.
Adobe Premiere Pro dialog box: "This project was saved in a newer version of Adobe Premier Pro and cannot be opened in this version."
Screenshot of a reply from Josh Simmons on Mastodon: "I think the part that especially upsets me about on change callbacks is when people fix the performance by adding a way to suppress them in a given scope. and then you have a performance problem *and* a correctness problem."
screenshot of an out-of-memory error in a browser window