Night_Thastus

Knowing your constraints perfectly is impossible, and takes more and more effort the closer you get.

And frankly, they change on a regular basis. By the time you figure them out that perfectly, they're invalidated. A new feature is suddenly needed by the customer, a bottleneck that wasn't there before appears now, scale changes, consumer preferences change, new hardware and software come out, everything changes.

IMO, the best engineering is 80/20. Get 80% of the result you want for relatively little effort and complexity, and don't sweat the remaining 20%. Embrace the imperfection. Get it done in the simplest, most obvious way - even if you know it has limitations, edge cases, and some things missing.

Knowing how to get that 80% is extremely hard (and how to do it without causing lots of problems down the road), but I think senior engineers get pretty good at it. And if you absolutely need to, get another 80% of that remaining 20%.

Minecraft 1.7.10, covered in mods, can run fantastic (300+ FPS) if Java 25 is used. That used to be impossible.

It did used to be required. Older Java versions performed pretty terrible. However, Java 17+ completely fixed that. Even the heaviest modded setups run buttery smooth, even on older versions which are not well optimized.

It's hard to say if we ever would. We used up a lot of the very easy to access sources of many resources - minerals, oil, etc.

Without having access to the advanced techniques, I think it's unlikely we'd even reach the industrial revolution again.

Consoles are more and more supporting VRR, as are televisions.

But yes, given the limitations of the hardware, they often offer two modes - a high framerate but lower quality mode and a high quality but lower framerate mode.

I often see people targeting frame rates way beyond their display’s refresh rate. I’m not sure whether this actually provides a real benefit or whether they’re chasing a placebo effect.

Pixel refresh is only one part of latency. A higher framerate will lower several other parts of the overall latency. Monitors Unboxed has charts that visualize the amount of latency for each step.

Clicks and mouse movement do have different latency, but it doesn't matter for this test. The click is the constant part to show relative positioning of X11/wayland/low latency/vrr/etc. The relative performance should be the same ranking for mouse movement, just with different exact values.

IMO, it can be profitable - but only at the business level. A business with many software devs can pay the steep price for access.

For almost everything else, the answer is no. No one else would pay the real costs to run them.

It'll require the whole industry to shrink down massively compared to what we're seeing now - down to a profitable (and much smaller) core.

Well said. I do get the appeal of a somewhat fiddly tool though. Tool gives you a little puzzle each day, then you solve it! A little puzzle solved/accomplishment a day keeps people sane. Plus I think it's just nice to feel like you really understand the tool you're using and know it's 'language' for lack of a better word.

I think I've fallen into the same camp of getting tired of things not 'just working' out of the box. Now I'm always happy to use something with less friction over more.

Would I like to use something with community plugins like VS Code and configure it to be exactly what I want? Sure. But everything where I work was designed for bigger editors like QTCreator and then VS - so that's what I use because it has the least friction with our workflow. Would I like to get the absolute best hi-fi music player application? Sure. But HQPlayer is a pain to learn and configure, so I just went with the far-more-user-friendly MusicBee.

Friction is fun when you're young and have time and energy to burn. Less so once work becomes part of the normal routine.

I think the 'pelican test' is becoming useless. It's been around long enough that now I'm sure good examples are in the training data, and hell they might even do some hand tuning to make it do a decent job since they know people will ask about it.

But either way, with no real way to visualize the result of the text it starts with - it will always be stabbing in the dark. It can't understand conceptually what any of it should look like and then refine the SVG to improve it gradually. It just throws darts at a wall and hopes it comes out alright.

Now let's see this working for Darkest Hours. ;)

(Assuming they didn't fix it themselves, it is a pretty big overhaul to MC1)

99% sure it should work fine for (Exodus and Turncoat), (X-Ray and DSC Raid), and (Xenocide and Bengal Lancers) since those are just custom campaigns.

Lovely stuff. Always a joy to see anything MechWarrior related end up here on HN.

It seems like AmazonBrandFilterList is one of the lists they use. It also seems like there a couple extra features that doesn't have. Either way, it's not like they're hiding the use of it. It would be another thing if it was being secret about it.

There's a bit of misinformation here. At the end of the day, a blu-ray player is reading information from the disc and passing it onto the TV digitally - one player or another are going to do that identically. One can't have 'better color' or anything like that.

HOWEVER, there is an exception: Feature support. For example, not all blu-ray players support 4K blu rays. Not all players support Dolby Vision.

If you try to play a 4K blu ray disc in a non-4K blu ray player, it won't function at all (won't read). If you try to play a disc using Dolby Vision in a player that doesn't support it, it will fall back to HDR10.

But assuming 2 players both support the features a disc uses, the end output will be identical.

There's also upscaling, which some players can do differently.

AI has essentially nothing to do with it. This was standard well before AI took off.

If the server can't be rebooted without anxiety, something has been configured very poorly.

Actually, it's more or less the opposite. In some OS's (Windows, at least) a reboot does additional purging and loss of state that a shutdown will not do. That's by design, so a normal shutdown/startup is fast, but if you're having a problem a reboot will be more thorough.

I shut my desktop down every night and bring it back up in the morning. It only takes all of 2 seconds these days with NVME drives, even with Fast Boot disabled.

It's kind of a power hog and generates a lot of heat, so I try not to run it if I won't be around.

Shut down != reboot, but you get the idea.

No they don't. Why should they bother?

* Costs them money to make

* Costs them money to maintain

* Will only be used by a TINY subset of ultra-enthusiasts (no, neither HN or Reddit are majorities)

* Every user on it is less telemetry and less advertisement

The reality is that most users don't care, and will just use whatever seems to work fine. Finding out that 'oh yeah, feature/software X does not work on Windows Lite" will inevitably mean that almost everyone stays on mainline.

I don't get why people bother making these wish fulfillment posts regarding Windows. It is what it is, either get used to it or use something else. MS hasn't been listening and they aren't going to start. Your wallet and mine don't make even the tiniest dent in their bottom line.

Microsoft doesn't care about end users like you or I. We don't impact their bottom line at all. 0%. They care about business customers using other products, and occasionally data collection.

Windows has to be just functional enough to keep businesses that use it from raising a stink about it.

I'm honestly not sure why this is making headlines. The move to digital-only has been happening for years. I mean, when I got Skyrim's legendary edition, the box only had a code in it, and that was 2013! 13 years ago!

It saves the publisher money and cuts down on reselling, which was cutting into their sales. It simplifies distribution. It gives them far more control, especially if they use their own launcher. Is anyone surprised that they like it when it offers only positives for them?

Also: Many big AAA releases can't even fit on a blu ray anymore. Games are coming up on 200GB+, that will not fit on a disk.

This trend isn't reversing. And the average person buying the game doesn't gaf, so it'll continue.

Of course, there will be some 'protestors' (who will just buy the game anyways) or some """protestors""" (who never intended to buy the game in the first place)

I'll be honest, this discussion is so stale I just don't care at this point. The fight for this ended a decade ago.

And honestly, considering how much more expensive AAA game creation has gotten over the years, and how game price hasn't even close to kept up with inflation, I get it.

There are so many much more egregious behaviors publishers do than this nonsense. Fight them on microtransactions, or making games online-only even for singleplayer content and then shutting down servers. Literally anything than this waste of time.

Join those of us using File Pilot.

It's still fairly early days, but it's SCREAMING fast and I find it very intuitive to use. :)

Lots of customization and power, but the defaults are all quite reasonable.

"Windows really needs to ditch CRLF and just use LF, and switch from backslashes to forward slashes."

Hahahahaha. That's hillarious.

Oh god, you're serious?

Do you have any idea how much of Windows, and user software would break? Any idea at all?

You really want MS, who has built backwards compatibility as a core feature of Windows, to break countless thousands of pieces of software that run on it?

I'm sure there's some idealized fantasy in which that change gets wrapped in a neat little abstraction that prevents anything from breaking. I promise you, there is no way of encapsulating or abstracting that change that works for everyone.

If I could wave a magic wand and make it so without breaking it, I would. But it's a fantasy.

And they're right. If terrible support were an obstacle even slightly, they'd have all gone out of business decades ago.

As long as we're dealing with language models - those models will output human-readable text. An exchange of human-readable text is going to appear to be a dialog, even if it isn't really one.

You could tweak it, but humans are incredibly good at anthropomorphizing anything - even without an apparently dialog. I think it's a lost cause until we move away from LLMs completely to a more generic intelligence.

...it does? This level of automation is recent, and industrialization is the blink of an eye in human history.

If we're talking shorter scale, people have traditionally hand-waived it with 'Oh, these jobs will go away, but they'll be replaced with other, higher-skilled jobs!'.

That's an economist's idealism and doesn't fit reality.

It isn't complicated

Getting reliable, consistent, meaningful performance numbers is in fact, extremely complicated:

* You need a consistent way to reproduce the exact same outputs - accounting for things like the game's RNG. You can't just walk around and snap the FPS counter in the corner of the screen and call that good.

* For Windows (and occasionally Linux) you need to ensure nothing is running that will taint the results (updates, AV scans, etc)

* Sometimes individual driver versions work very poorly with a specific game. Just because it ran badly doesn't mean you got good data, it may just be a bug in that specific driver version

* You can't just run the benchmark once. You need to run it many times, establishing run-to-run variance

* There are often a good dozen-to-hundred individual OS settings which can impact performance, and in some cases run-to-run variance. You need to know which to tweak, and which to leave alone.

* Sometimes the result of individual in-game settings differs between driver versions. Just because setting X had a big impact once, doesn't mean it always did

* FPS is not a great metric - it's an average. You need to check and see if there are huge frametime spikes. If there are, the game will have a 'good' FPS but feel horrible to play due to stuttering.

* You need to decide if you're benchmarking more GPU-heavy or CPU-heavy - those types of benchmarks require drastically different settings. If you run a CPU-like benchmark you may see a wildly different gap in framerate compared to a GPU-heavy one for the same game.

Benchmarking properly means accounting for thousands of tiny variables. Only a handful actually do it right.

MS does not care. At all. This doesn't affect anything that they make a profit on.

Show me the numbers. Show me an identical gaming PC running Windows 11 and then Linux, and show not just FPS - but things like frametime pacing, latency, etc.

This NTSync stuff is very impressive, but I haven't seen a lot of end-to-end numbers versus Windows. The last comparisons I saw showed pretty much every distribution on the order of 5-30% behind Windows, varying on the game. And Nvidia GPU support was still not great.

I WANT to swap. Please give me cause to do so. I'm sitting here with my finger on the button waiting for it to finally get good enough to make sense.

It's diminishing returns, but for those who want it and have the hardware to support it, why not?

I have a 360 and when I play something I can actually get a full 360 out of, it's wonderful! Though honestly anything over 100 I'm perfectly fine with.

What are these features that can't be measured?

Plenty of people who test monitors also compare things like color coverage, brightness, latency, contrast, viewing angles, etc, etc, etc. If you mean the entire monitor, they generally also cover things like how the display swivels/mounts among other things.

I hate Google when they pull anti-consumer crap. I believe they're too big, too unaccountable, and something needs to be done about them. Their power rivals that of a country and that shouldn't be considered acceptable.

But man, I would hate to be the one dealing with Gmail. It's a nightmare for the reasons I listed above.

Someone can in fact hold both of those opinions.

I was also actively telling people to de-Google and go elsewhere for a mail service.

Does everything need to be black and white?