Podcast Appearances, New Video on the Way, etc.

For the past two weeks I’ve been working on the Sisyphean task of making a video that corrects misconceptions about what a GPU core is. Uncharacteristically, I wanted to do this as a short, concise video that could be quickly viewed, shared and understood. My hope is that brevity will increase the chances the wider programming audience will actually watch the video and stop believing that a typical consumer GPU somehow has many thousands of “cores”.

It’s really hard to make something that is short, clear, convincing, and not likely to lead to more misconceptions than it corrects. It definitely “takes a lot of takes”. However, unlike Sisyphus, it appears this boulder of a video is finally cresting the top, so I hope to premiere it here shortly.

In the meantime, I have two podcast appearances I wanted to mention if you’re looking for more content to fill your week. First is the Backend Banter podcast, whose VOD (complete with annoying thumbnail) is up now:

Because I complained about it — something I’ve never had to do as a podcast guest before — they have updated the thumbnail to something less offensive, and it is in the process of propagating out through the internet’s many layers of caching. If you happen to see the original, I was, to put it mildly, very unhappy that it had a giant “YOU SUCK..” [sic] on it. In case it’s unclear why this is a problem, three points:

1. If the “you suck” is directed at the audience, that makes it sound like I think the audience sucks, which is not only untrue, but nowhere in the podcast do I ever suggest anything like that. So it’s just a complete fabrication, made up out of thin air for clicks.

2. If the “you suck” is directed at me, I’m at least slightly offended that you would invite me on a podcast and then say that I suck. I definitely do suck at some things (game design, rock climbing, etc.), so it’s not inaccurate, but I don’t need to go on a podcast to be reminded of that.

3. Regardless of which interpretation you pick, in English, there is no such thing as ending a sentence with a double period. If it was supposed to be “You suck.” that’s one period, and if it was supposed to be “You suck…” that’s three periods (technically an ellipsis). If you’re going to make garbage clickbait thumbnails, at least try to learn how punctuation works for the single two-word sentence you had to proof-read.

Looking at the episode listing on their webpage, it is also at least somewhat suspicious that a podcast which is supposed to be about professional web development doesn’t seem to know how to serve escape sequences for true apostrophes:

Remember kids: escaping once is a necessity; escaping twice is a bug. I guess the main takeaway here is that these folks are punctuation-challenged across the entire pipeline, from thumbnails to text fields.

Moving on, Wednesday morning at 10AM PDT I will be back on Prime’s Twitch channel to talk about game engines. As many of you know, I love appearing on Prime’s channel because he’s a great host and I always have a lot of fun. Plus, when his show puts up clickbait thumbnails, they’re usually a janky Photoshop of his head onto something — like this one, from the last time we did an episode together:

Notice, also, that there are no glaring grammar mistakes. This is the kind of clickbait I can get behind.

That’s all for now. Hope to see you all Wednesday morning!