This machine uses 75kWh per day to make 1 gallon of gasoline. Using the cheapest electricity in the country, that’s $9.29 per gallon (+ the machine itself is $20k).

22 characters is significantly less useful than 255 characters. I use this for resource name keys, asset file paths, and a few other scenarios. The max size is configurable, so I know that nothing I am going to store is ever going to require heap allocations (really bad to be doing every frame in a game engine).

I developed this specifically after benchmarking a simpler version and noticed a significant amount of time being spent in strlen(), and it had real benefits in my case.
Admittedly just storing a struct with a static buffer and separate size would have worked pretty much the same and eliminated the 255 char limitation, but it was fun to build.

I came up with a kind of clever data type for storing short strings in a fixed size struct so they can be stored on the stack or inline without any allocations.
It’s always null-terminated so it can be passed directly as a C-style string, but it also stores the string length without using any additional data (Getting the length would normally have to iterate to find the end).
The trick is to store the number of unused bytes in the last character of the buffer. When the string is full, there are 0 unused bytes and the size byte overlaps the null terminator.
(Only works for strings < 256 chars excluding null byte)

Implementation in C++ here: https://github.com/frustra/strayphotons/blob/master/src/common/common/InlineString.hh

Edit: Since a couple people don’t seem to understand the performance impact of this vs regular std::string, here’s a demo: https://godbolt.org/z/34j7obnbs This generates 10000 strings like “Hello, World! 00001” via concatenation. The effect is huge in debug mode, but still has performance benefits with optimizations turned on:

With -O3 optimization
std::string: 0.949216ms
char[256] with strlen: 0.88104ms
char[256] without strlen: 0.684734ms

With no optimization:
std::string: 3.5501ms
char[256] with strlen: 0.885888ms
char[256] without strlen: 0.687733ms

(You may need to run it a few times to get sample numbers due to random server load on godbolt)
Changing the buffer size to 32 bytes has a negligible performance improvement over 256 bytes in this case, but might be slightly faster due to the whole string fitting in a cache line.

You’d need to set up a firewall rule on your router to block that device from accessing the internet. If you’ve got a fancy enough router you could set up a VLAN and second SSID for all your IoT things and only whitelist connections and devices you want to allow. That can get a little tricky to set up though

I’ve been working on my own game engine for years, and there’s all sorts of cool stuff it can do, but recently I’ve been expanding the scripting to be capable of streaming images to the GPU.

Today I got Doom running inside my engine as a hot-reloadable plugin script:
Video: https://wednesdayos.sw0.com/share/2025-12-13_00-25-14.mp4

The engine has real-time bounce lighting using a highly modified voxel cone tracing algorithm I developed (doesn’t require ray tracing hardware), which I’ve been able to get running even on my Steam Deck! Video: https://wednesdayos.sw0.com/share/2025-03-21 23-50-29.mp4

The whole thing is open source here: https://github.com/frustra/strayphotons