Veteran game programmer. Descend the stack and build upwards from first principles. A curious fellow.
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Joined September 2008
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Martin Scott retweeted
RIP Patrick Stewart. True legend. Captain Picard, Professor X and maybe the funniest TV cameo ever with Ricky Gervais on “Extras” as himself.
Martin Scott retweeted
Oh, no. This one really does hurt. Patrick Stewart has passed away. Rest in peace, Captain.
Touch screen laptops are a sure fire route to shoulder pain in the future. Terrible decision by Apple.
Martin Scott retweeted
The single best joke in any Carry On film.
“I tried it once and didn’t like it.”
If you use agents to accelerate coding and you lose control of the project that's on you, not the agents.
Martin Scott retweeted
The Cost of Britain 🇬🇧
Here is the single MADDEST number in today’s Budget - and the Chancellor didn’t mention it once in his speech 👀
From April, the National Living Wage rises to £13.21 an hour.
For a full-time 40-hour week, that is £27,477 a year.
That’s GREAT right?? 🤔
At the same time, today’s Budget leaves the 40% Higher Rate tax threshold FROZEN at £50,270 right through until April 2031.
Do the maths on that:
In Britain today, earning just 1.8x the minimum wage now classes you as a Higher Rate taxpayer.
When the 40% tax band was created, it was meant for the top 3.5% of earners - bank directors and senior executives.
Today, a skilled tradesperson, experienced nurse, police sergeant or salaried worker earning 1.8x the legal minimum wage hands over:
❌ 42p of every extra pound to HMRC (40% Income Tax + 2% NI)
❌ 51p of every extra pound if they have a student loan
That single threshold freeze is quietly pulling an extra £34 billion a year out of working people’s pay packets - without the government ever having to announce a headline tax rise.
Pushing minimum wage up from the bottom
Whilst freezing the 40% tax trap at the top
How can earning 1.8x minimum wage possibly be classed as a “higher earner” in 2026?
Martin Scott retweeted
“The best programs are the ones written when the programmer is supposed to be working on something else.” — Melinda Varian
Martin Scott retweeted
Everyone should focus on automating code reviews.
Right now, agents can write a virtually infinite amount of code, but it's for nothing if it doesn't work.
I see people clinging to "manually reviewing the code" as the only way forward. I think this is a mistake and a major bottleneck we all need to get rid of.
You want people to focus their time on things only people can do.
You want agents to focus on everything else.
There's no one-size-fits-all solution here, but you should spend as much time as possible building a process that removes the review bottleneck.
Martin Scott retweeted
Here we go again. Above inflation rise to the minimum wage which will cause even more pressure on businesses and feed into inflation. It will make life even less affordable for the lowest paid.
Cue the usual "your business isn't viable if you cant afford to pay a living wage" posts from the terminally thick that would struggle to run a bath, never mind a business or employ people.
Here, for anyone that can be bothered to educate themselves even in the slightest, is why the circa 50% rise in minimum wage in the last 6 years has made life less affordable and contributed to the cost of living crisis.
Minimum wage employee 2020:
Total cost to employer (wages + NI + pension): £18,460
Employee can make 18,460 widgets in a year.
Cost per widget (ignoring any other cost or profit): £1
Take-home pay: £15,202
Widgets the employee can afford: 15,202
2027 min wage of of £13.20:
Total cost to employer (wages + NI + pension): £29,436
Widgets made in a year (same productivity): 18,460
Cost per widget: £1.59
Take-home pay: £22,050
Widgets the employee can afford: 13,868
They’ve had a 45% increase in take-home pay but can afford 9% fewer widgets.
This is why you are worse off. Now factor in other business costs, higher corporation tax, higher energy costs, higher risk from new legislation, maintaining pay differential, etc. etc. etc..
Yet the thick "yOuR bUsInEsS iSnT ViAbLe iF yOu cAnT aFfoRd AnOtHeR 50p" brigade are out in force championing this.
Just increase the tax free allowance and reduce spending, for f***s sake. They are just driving businesses off a cliff in the UK.
Martin Scott retweeted
Another great course that I enjoyed a lot is "From NAND to Tetris" by Noam Nisan and Shimon Schocken (@mitpress also has a book on it) nand2tetris.org
Martin Scott retweeted
Actually this was really good - a tour from one transistor to a small CPU (Scott CPU, to be precise).
The YouTube playlist:
youtube.com/watch?v=HaBMAD-D…
I also haven't yet come across the "But How Do It Know" by Scott, which this is based on, and which looks great:
amazon.com/But-How-Know-Prin…
Turns out this is a whole deeper rabbit hole of people who've also built + simulated it in code, e.g.:
djharper.dev/post/2019/05/21…
Now I must resist the temptation to simulate Scott CPU in C, add tensor cores to it, move it to an FPGA and get it to inference a Llama.
I've been playing around with the problem of agentic coders losing touch with the code the agent is writing. I've built a skill which tests the user's awareness of the coding decisions that the agent made during the edit, with the aim of teaching the user *why* certain architectural decisions were made.
I've already learnt a few things and made some changes to how my code is structured.
Could be handy for juniors... try it out:
github.com/mslinklater/Agent…
Martin Scott retweeted
Time to post my biannual “how artificially compressed are British wages”.
Rising minimum wage and a 50k+ p/a tax bracket that runs to 40% of earnings, and hasn’t adjusted for inflation. This form of artificial wage compression has turned everyone in Britain into low productivity tax cattle - you have zero incentive to become anything other here.
This is also a form of ambition and productivity compression.
Source, ONS, Fig 5: ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabo…
I'm not sure a lot of people understand what game coders actually do. We're not spending 9 hours a day finely hand crafting artisan software and expressing our inner dreams... 90% of the time we are fighting compilers and existing architecture, having to work out how undocumented code works, and tracking down obscure bugs and behavioural issues.
Most of game programming is just difficult, tedious, laborious grunt work, and the cognitive load we have to endure to get anything done is tiring and frustrating. No game coder is doing it for this 90% of the job.
We make games because the 10% that IS actually about making things fun and expressing ourselves is so incredibly rewarding it makes the other 90% bearable.
Now imagine if there was a tool, some kind of AI agent maybe, which could do most of the 90% grunt work for you, leaving you to just make all the decisions and express your creativity. How amazing would that be. How completely revolutionary would that be.
The /grill-me skill from Matt Pocock is amazing. Excellent tool for specifying what you actually want from agents.
Martin Scott retweeted
Geoffrey Hinton once noticed that the tellers at his bank kept changing. When he asked one of them why, the teller didn't know, only that they got moved around a lot.
Hinton guessed the reason... if staff never work with the same people for long, it's much harder for a few of them to team up and cheat the bank.
That thought became one of the most useful tricks in deep learning. While a neural network trains, you randomly switch off about half its neurons at every step. No neuron can lean on a particular partner, so each one has to learn something useful on its own. The trick is called dropout, and it helped AlexNet win the 2012 ImageNet contest, which set off the modern AI boom. It's still built into many of today's networks.
Martin Scott retweeted
Tim is right. Steam's AI disclosure rule is abhorrent.
I recently shipped an AI-assisted game, and that label doesn't help anyone pick a game. It's a target. It tells the angry mob exactly where to send the review bombs.
Nobody discloses which engine, which brushes, or which plugins they used. AI gets singled out for one reason: so devs can be punished for using it.
