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And now for something completely different.
When I went over the high wall in 2017 I entertained the idea of monsters.
Monster is a role. Everyone spends a little time in it at least, some more than others. It's easier to be a people than be a monster, so most of us spend the majority of our time being a people. 
A monster is a particularly difficult, stubborn, even recalcitrant role. People don't warm up to monsters very well, because monsters are problematic. But *sometimes* monsters have gifts for us, and we have to look harder at the monster to see. But monsters can be dangerous too.
The way I'm using it, it's morally neutral - monsters aren't *necessarily* "good" nor "bad" by definition (but can be either). A monster is simply difficult and we don't tend to play nice with them until/if we recognize their worth. That's why I chose "monster" despite the moral neutrality I intend to convey - it's a deliberate dysphemism to highlight the fact that we typically find monsters messy and often ugly, regardless of their human potential.
Monsters are important, because they are change agents. They are where human innovation comes from, FOR BETTER OR **WORSE** (WWII era European fascism was itself a kind of "innovation" - horribly so). But also Turing was acting in that role on more than one front, and was imprisoned for it. Arguably that shakeup of Europe ended the practice of empire building, and maybe it was a fait accompli or at least *something* had to bring that about, whether it be fascism and a world war or some other catastrophic human event. Either way, monsters played a central role, be they Churchill, Truman, Hirohito, Stalin or Hitler.
People in the role of monster (whether real or not - take the stories as they are as not everything has to be history), include Tesla, Buddha, Edison**, Jesus Christ, and Moses but also Mao, Pol Pot, and Constantine because they either facilitated a massive social reset, altered the human course of history, or otherwise played a role in shaping our human condition.
At least those are the famous ones.
But difficult humans often touch our own lives in some substantial way as well. Our individual lives in some ways, are a microcosm of our collective experience.
One of the reasons I find all the above useful is it gives me a way to look at history, not as a battle between the forces of civilization and chaos, but rather through the currents of change.
Another reason is sometimes it helps me have patience with people I find difficult. Perhaps I haven't uncovered their value to me in that moment.
I'm not saying it will be useful to anyone else, or that you even have to agree.
This for me isn't so much about the "right" or "wrong" way to look at things, but rather, is it a "useful" way to look at things.
For me at least, sometimes it is.
** I'd argue Edison's innovation was more social and therefore "successful", and Tesla's more scientific, but they both changed our world, so they both get lumped together despite the differences.
Real programmers use butterflies
modified 24-Dec-21 3:41am.
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Looks at the time... Someone ate two of the "Only eat one - trust me" brownies for the Christmas party, didn't they? 
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No, I come by it naturally. Like I said, I went over the high wall. Mania can be illuminating.
Real programmers use butterflies
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Pardon my ignorance , what does over the high wall mean ?
"Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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I went mad. Hallucinations, a week of mania, and more. It was mind bending.
Real programmers use butterflies
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If you think you went mad you probably didn't - that's the problem with the edge the only people that know where it is are the ones that have gone over it.
"Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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You're missing something.
I was diagnosed, and am on medication. With it comes awareness.
I understood what happened to me after the fact.
Real programmers use butterflies
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ok - no offence intended
"Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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Greetings Kind Regards I am sorry to hear of your situation I hope treatment is going well Re/ psychological troubles I know a thing or one or maybe two Some years ago I suffered from considerable depression and other psychological ailments but regular simple Buddhist "meditation" practice over some time and Poof Bingo Presto Voila they all gradually diminished to nothing As for the current trend called "mindfulness" I believe it is hogwash pscho-babble As the saying goes KISS "Just Sit" is the Buddhist rule How simple is that I was tortured just this morning by an hour of pscho-babble on NPR I always wish to call in and give the same advice I am giving here By the way I also found this practice helpful in discovering bugs in my code While "Just Sitting" on occasion they would just become apparent - Best Regards Cheerio
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The mindfulness training and all that comes from dialectical behavioral therapy which actually draws on some concepts from Buddhism.
So much so that I dropped a DBT group course because I wasn't learning anything new. My first serious boyfriend back when I was a very young adult was a practicing Buddhist, and I learned a lot from him - he's gone now, but he was one of the most peaceful people I ever knew.
I think a lot of DBT is simple concepts dressed up in almost clinical language. I personally, don't have problem with that, but I understand why a lot of people would.
The medication works pretty well for me, and for the rest there's yoga. Yoga encompasses meditation so it's efficient. 
Real programmers use butterflies
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Like the designer of RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu, Stormbringer and other similar RPG like to say, Monsters are people too!  
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Despite the fact that Edison never did any genuine scientific work of his own...
Don't ever call a nerd an Edison, it is as bad as accusing an American of being a Nazi, or an Alabama fan an Auburn fan, or even calling a Cold War-era American a communist.
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This reminds me of “the Mule” from Asimov’s Foundation series.
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I have not run any perf test or anything, it just suddenly struck me...
In an effort to improve performance (and interop cost) the .NET ported as much of the .NET framework as possible to .NET
On the other hand here comes WinUI where every single control is in C++ and cost with interop cost.
So I haven't really did performance test... but wouldn't heavy C# WinUI App a tad slower than WPF one?
If, say, I want to do tons of 2D graphics (Visual in WPF, and Direct2D in WinUI I guess)??
Just wondering, haven't testing it.. will one day, but curious if anyone has any practical experience, thoughts, sample on that very matter?!
modified 24-Dec-21 4:55am.
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It's possible that they're using the same strategy with WinUI that they did with the framework in general - porting it to .NET iteratively.
I would say algorithmically speaking, you're looking at a predictable, and small amount of overhead for UI calls. Your basic performance profile will be roughly the same, + I don't know, 10% overhead in terms of time to execute?
It won't be bad at all except for processing window messages and painting. Those are your critical codepaths. Unfortunately, they are central to the UI. The more you have to do there, the more burden you're putting on the thunking/marshalling layer.
That said, the *way* you map your P/Invoke calls significantly impacts marshalling performance. There are some tricks you can do with structs to make the calls a bit faster. Basically a struct is constructed in memory the way it's laid out using the StructLayout/FieldOffset? attributes, so it already fits the "binary footprint" necessary for the p/invoke call. In other cases, it's quicker to marshal by hand. Either way, there are ways to reduce the overhead in critical codepaths.
Real programmers use butterflies
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It's true I haven't done any serious interop since, phew.. 2005? And I think to remember not all interop call have equal cost, some might be free... Good point here! 
Yeah I though as an ideal test I might draw and move, say, 100K Visual in WPF and then do these 100K drawing with Direct2D and see how it goes, probably will have to do that sometimes next year, just to make sure the porting work is worth the effort!
(I'll be fine is the performance is the same, happy to jump to new tech... just don't want it to be a literal mistake..)
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Well, with DirectX you're always going to be dealing with interop from managed code at some layer, because DirectX is hardware supported, and it exports its API as unmanaged calls, so the only question there is is P/Invoke being employed more than once where it doesn't have to be? In many cases, probably not.
Real programmers use butterflies
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OK, it's got no plot, no dialog, no Rocinante, and no characters, but it is a Yule Log[^].
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Be careful, as I heard there's YuleLog4Shell - exploits a mistletoe vulnerability to open a nasty backdoor into your Christmas
Real programmers use butterflies
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Is Jeff Kaplan Working for Amazon now?! 
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Pah! That only lasts for an hour - a real Yule Log lasts for the whole twelve days of Christmas Yule, and still has enough left to light the next year's log. Check it on Wikipedia and Yule see I'm right. 
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I am amazed at the size of 2T: initially I did not believe it. so I ordered one to have a look.
now I got it and plug into my Laptop. it is real!
how amazing current technology goes!
diligent hands rule....
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I keep saying it's a great time to alive, then another week goes by and it's even more better.
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The largest storage in the world is 2 exabytes, which is 2 MILLION terabytes. Must be thousands if not millions of USD, euro, pound or anything.
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