"Clearly if your manager passes your doc through an LLM, you made an error in judgment"
It could also be the PM, passing everything through an LLM to make it "more understandable". Clearly, they didn't care enough to check the result.
Seb is incredibly passionate about games and graphics programming. You can find old posts of his on various forums, talking about tricks for programming the PS2, PS3, Xbox 360, etc etc. He regularly posts demos he's working on, progress clips of various engines, etc, on twitter, after staying in the same area for 3 decades.
It definitely makes it simpler. You can do a per-screen window sort, rather than per-pixel :).
Per-pixel sorting while racing the beam is tricky, game consoles usually did it by limiting the number of objects (sprites) per-line, and fetching+caching them before the line is reached.
It depends on your network though. In my case the image quality was good, but going to the link cable was a substantial improvement in quality and latency.
Last year I emailed Ken Silverman about an obscure aspect of the Build Engine while working on a similar 2.5D rendering engine. He answered the question like he worked on it yesterday.
Sometimes "just thinking harder" works, but often not. A debugger helps you understand what your code is actually doing, while your brain is flawed and makes flawed assumptions. Regardless of who you are, it's unlikely you will be manually evaluating code in your head as accurately as gdb (or whatever debugger you use).
I think a lot of linux/mac folks tend to printf debug, while windows folks tend to use a debugger, and I suspect it is a culture based choice that is justified post hoc.
However, few things have been better for my code than stepping through anything complex at least once before I move on (I used to almost exclusively use printf debugging).
Even more annoying than the idolization of game devs is when you open up the "Displays" submenu of the osx system preferences application, and it takes several times longer to load than the previous major os version, several seconds!, with the only significant change being a different layout, and constantly trying to ignore how nearly everything takes so much longer than necessary, wasting so much time and energy.
I agree that not everything is like a game, but it makes me legitimately sad when it seems like nobody cares about performance (aside from a few domains).