#Silicon (demoscene)

[nhaneh]

Funny thing is, I never really thought of people like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates as these great Tech Heroes™ that techbros seem to see them as - with Gates I'll admit some grudging level of respect because he actually does know how to code, but Jobs to me was always mainly this business guy whose primary talent was in how to take credit for other people's work and this was still well before I found out about his treatment of Wozniak

To me, the people I looked up to in tech was always more people like John Carmack - those whose tech wizardry redefined people's perceptions of what computer hardware was capable of. My idea of what makes a tech genius isn't in Web Entrepreneurs or Silicon Valley Startups, but more like people who make 64K intros* or the like - those with an intimate knowledge of both hardware and software and the ability to take that knowledge and make them sing.

Thing is, programming isn't nearly as hard as most people think it is - if you have the ability to write words and numbers in english then congratulations, you also already have the ability to write a program. The thing that is difficult, that takes skill and experience and expertise and talent, is to learn how to think in terms of how a computer works and how that affects your code. It's stuff like understanding why a CASE statement can sometimes be much faster than using IF-THEN-ELSE, why it's much faster to bit shift integer values one step to the left or right than to multiply or divide them by 2, why it's faster to multiply a decimal number by 0.5 than it is to divide it by 2, and so on. That's the really difficult part, and where you see the difference between a program that does something in ten seconds and one that does the same thing in ten milliseconds.

*a 64K intro is a concept from the demoscene, which itself is basically this subculture within computing which is kind of gaming-adjacent but much more focused on digital art and music and programming; a "demo" in this context is basically a program (or a part of a program) that presents you with images and animations and music and such, and at least in part originate from the kind of "crack intros" that would play before a pirated game whose copy protection had been removed (ie. "cracked") The 64K intro is basically a kind of challenge mode where the the entire demo must also be provided as a single executable no larger than 64 kilobytes in size - typically achieved through significant use of both compression and procedural generation. As an example, here's one such demo from 2006 called "Chaos Theory" - and yes, all that is contained within a single .exe of only 65536 bytes.