animatethrow

Sure, but that's a fair bit of extra time and friction to watch an HDR video versus just clicking the play button on Windows or Mac and being done with it. It's also nice on Windows how every Steam game launches and runs without a "missing libfoo.so" error like you get for a number of games on Linux, though I'm glad Linux support continues to improve and look forward to switching back to Linux from Windows when there are sufficiently few issues I have to research how to work around and fix.

One can choose to have neither a Samsung Account nor a Google Account on a Samsung phone, as I have done, and use F-Droid and Aurora Store as I mentioned in a parent comment. The linked video shows that all the settings needed to disable the bad behavior are already included on the device with a nice UI. Meanwhile with an iPhone one is stuck with the App Store and Apple can and has remotely deleted apps. Apple has deleted data tethering apps. Apple has deleted the VPN apps of Chinese users. Apple also is trying to memory hole that time it was going to scan one's private photos on one's own phone. It's very clear iPhone users do not have the final say over who ultimately controls their devices.

Yes, I concede these niche operating systems won't show me ads. But can I play an HDR YouTube video in a web browser on my HDR display using FreeBSD or OpenBSD? No. One can't even do this with Linux yet as far as I know, though Firefox on Linux recently in the past few months now has experimental HDR support (haven't tried it yet).

I can disable the Ubuntu terminal ad in seconds, whereas the last time I tried to install Debian I gave up after several hours of dealing with getting the correct proprietary firmware blobs, etc., that the Ubuntu installer mostly handles for me. But ultimately Ubuntu doesn't have as effortless of desktop hardware support for gaming laptops/PCs as Windows does.

You can quickly disable all the Windows start menu ads using either gpedit.msc or regedit. On Linux Ubuntu there's a least one Ubuntu Pro terminal ad I remember having to disable, so no OS is immune from this. As a long time user of Linux, Mac, and Windows, Windows involves the fewest time concerning hassles to tweak a system to be perfectly comfortable and distraction free. With Linux I have spent way too much time solving hardware issues like a laptop not waking from sleep or a bluetooth device freezing Gnome or NVidia drivers not playing nice with Wayland, etc. Linux has been way too slow to support HDR monitor output for YouTube. Mac has way too many issues with third party hardware. If you use a non-Apple mouse with a Macbook the scroll wheel direction will be wrong until you research and install a third party scroll reverser utility. I also remember having a lot of trouble figuring out what third party software I had to install to disable mouse acceleration on the Mac (Steelseries Exactmouse was one older solution). Last I used a Mac the Night Shift feature didn't work with non-Apple monitors so I had to research and install the third party Flux solution, but I recall that had some bugs and its own privacy concerns.... Meanwhile, Windows works great with all my non-Microsoft hardware because that's the nature of its open ecosystem. Windows 11 now also does proper desktop color management like the Mac has had for ages.

Only downside is no blue bubbles texting family, ha ha. Seriously, the switch was easy. My Samsung phone included a migration app that transferred over all photos and other important stuff from my old iPhone. I love the Samsung S-Pen, something you can't get on iPhone.

At least with Windows one can 100% disable start menu ads using either gpedit or regedit. A major reason I switched from iOS to Android are the much more powerful adblocking options for browsers (Brave, Firefox, etc.). On Android I can use F-Droid and Aurora Store and install a bunch of Google Play Store apps without a Google account. I can use a proper terminal with a real filesystem and git.

When a 300mph Japanese maglev passes close by it looks like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Gp4DcRsELc

Imagine living in the SF Bay Area and seeing a BART train move like that? Just unreal.

Playstation 1 didn't do perspective correct texture mapping. If you scroll way down this WebGL tutorial page a few examples are shown:

https://webglfundamentals.org/webgl/lessons/webgl-3d-perspec...

Nah, just create the world at a state where modern medicine can cure cancer, like we're on the slow road to doing.

We would have cures for every illness if not for human selfishness and evil. Look at all the money and effort spent on war during the last 10,000 years, on legal fees and disputes for the last 5,000 years. Rather than love our neighbors as ourselves, too many of us in our hearts say, "This land is MINE! This money is MINE! This patent is MINE! The credit is MINE!" If all this effort went to instead cultivating gifted individuals to research and cure diseases we'd have all our cures.

I needed this cute video to tell me what the heck conker is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLGuZZraIqg

You and your opponent each attach a chestnut to a shoestring. You try to destroy your opponent's stringed chestnut by swinging your own stringed chestnut at it. The video explains different ways to cheat, such as coating the chestnut with nail varnish.

Only iPad Pro has M4? Once upon a time during the personal computer revolution in the 1980s, little more than a decade after man walked the moon, humans had sufficiently technologically developed that it was possible to compile and run programs on the computers we bought, whether the computer was Apple (I,II,III, Mac), PC, Commodore, Amiga, or whatever. But these old ways were lost to the mists of time. Is there any hope this ancient technology will be redeveloped for iPad Pro within the next 100 years? Specifically within Q4 of 2124, when Prime will finally offer deliveries to polar Mars colonies? I want to buy an iPad Pro M117 for my great-great-great-great-granddaughter but only if she can install a C++ 212X compiler on it.

Consider a simpler example from basic math. Is 1/x infinite when x==0? The answer is that 1/x is undefined when x==0. In calculus one can take limits as x "approaches" 0 but x==0 is still undefined. Likewise, the Lorentz length contraction is undefined when traveling at c.

How were these drawings made? It seems the only accurate way would be to painstakingly excavate soil around the root systems a few tiny clumps at a time so as to record how the root system really is shaped prior to any disturbance. This would mean slowly observing the root system from shallower to deeper levels, then reconstructing the side views seen in the drawings.

Growing the plants in some sort of 2D glass observation vessel in order to observe the roots from the side would cause the roots to grow more unusually than in nature.

Very curious how these were done.

This appears to be more limited than what CBMC[1] (the C Bounded Model Checker) can do. CBMC can do function contracts. CBMC can prove memory safety and even the absence of memory leaks for non-trivial code bases that pass pointers all over the place that must eventually be freed. Applying all the annotations to make this happen though is like 10x the work of getting the program actually running in the first place. CBMC definitely makes C safer than even safe Rust for projects that can invest the time to use it. There is an experimental Rust front end to CBMC called Kani[2] that aims to verify unsafe Rust (thus making unsafe Rust become safe) but it is far from the speed and robustness of the C front end.

[1] https://github.com/diffblue/cbmc

[2] https://github.com/model-checking/kani

Again, my intention wasn't to downplay the importance of the EPA's ban. My intention was to point out that natural sources of pollution remain, as natural sources of pollution is something I have been fascinated with for a long time. For example, certain tree forests can emit sufficient unhealthy levels of hydrocarbon smog that the smog becomes visible in the air, kinda like Los Angeles before catalytic converters. But I certainly think eliminating man-made smog is a great thing, even if tree-made smog remains. And again, I have come to see now that my wording to the effect of, "An EPA ban on pollution X can't prevent natural sources of pollution X" has been interpreted as a statement logically identical to "EPA bans of pollutant X are pointless because natural pollutant sources of X still remain." But those two statements are not, in fact, logically equivalent. And again, I need to better learn that humans frequently suspect implications and insinuations in words that the speaker did not intend.

I never said the EPA ban was bad. My point was to point out that natural asbestos sources remain a threat. I was quickly massively downvoted though because readers assumed I was criticizing the EPA when I in fact was not. I will have to be more careful in the future to understand that many readers don't carefully read what one actually writes, but rather read what they think someone might be implying.

An EPA ban can't do anything about natural mineral asbestos that occurs near many residential areas. Floods continue to contaminate residential areas with natural asbestos and have done so for millennia. Recent report from Washington state:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfbedUVOxCU

California's state rock is serpentinite, which is known for its often beautiful green coloration, and for containing chrysotile asbestos:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serpentinite

There's an outcrop near the Golden Gate bridge (scroll down for photo):

https://www.nps.gov/goga/learn/education/serpentinite-faq.ht...

For many years the XOR sprite cursor was patented, but the patent seems to have expired in 2013. One of us should make the request to the GNOME/KDE/Wayland/DE people and link the expired patent:

https://patents.google.com/patent/US5471570A/en

EDIT: The linked patent seems to only cover 1 bit inversion, not full color inversion. I can't find the patent for the full color, but recall reading that a patent stopped the adoption of a nice color inverting cursor for Linux that Windows has had for so long. If Windows has had it for as long as you say, then perhaps any relevant patents have expired?

There's a video that is better than the linked article about why Tolkien disliked Dune:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDqeftRRpB0

This video mentions that Tolkien started a sequel to LotR titled The New Shadow but quickly abandoned it after realizing the story would inevitably be about politics and the evil of Men, about the descendants of Aragorn becoming like Denethor, or worse. And Dune is full of politics and far-future men becoming much more sinister than Denethor. LotR is about good vs. evil, about little people having the power to change the world. In Dune almost everyone is self-interested and Machiavellian, the powerful cruelly use the powerless for their own ends.

Aliens could plausibly sterilise earth from light years away using an electron beam, according to a great Kurzgesagt episode:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tybKnGZRwcU

An electron beam seems to be the stealthiest of the three extermination options, the other two being a star laser and antimatter "rods from God."

Nowadays how well are old-school X11 window managers doing necessary interop with the desktop bus to keep modern GTK/QT apps rendering correctly on 4K HiDPI screens? I was forced to give up on FVWM because tweaking my X resources Xft.dpi and GDK_SCALE settings for one app such as firefox in order to get it rendering correctly on a 4K screen would break other apps. Firefox only seemed to do HiDPI correctly when run under a full GNOME desktop that provides the dbus messages it is assuming to set the 200% font size and UI scale correctly. Is there a way to run an old-school X11 WM now that allows snaps/flatpacks/GNOME-bloat dbus apps to run without issue with 200% scaling on 4K screens?

So I read through the materials on mesh shaders and work graphs and looked at sample code. These won't really work (see below). As I implied previously, it's best to research/discuss these sort of matters with professional graphics programmers who have experience actually using the technologies under consideration.

So for the sake of future web searchers who discover this thread: there are only two proven ways to efficiently draw thousands of unique textures of different sizes with a single draw call that are actually used by experienced graphics programmers in production code as of 2023.

Proven method #1: Pack these thousands of textures into a texture atlas.

Proven method #2: Use bindless resources, which is still fairly bleeding edge, and will require fallback to atlases if targeting the PC instead of only high end console (Xbox Series S|X...).

Mesh shaders by themselves won't work: These have similar texture access limitations to the old geometry/tessellation stage they improve upon. A limited, fixed number of textures still must be bound before each draw call (say, 16 or 32 textures, not 1000s), unless bindless resources are used. So mesh shaders must be used with an atlas or with bindless resources.

Work graphs by themselves won't work: This feature is bleeding edge shader model 6.8 whereas bindless resources are SM 6.6. (Xbox Series X|S might top out at SM 6.7, I can't find an authoritative answer.) It looks like work graphs might only work well on nVidia GPUs and won't work well on Intel GPUs anytime soon (but, again, I'm not knowledgeable enough to say this authoritatively). Furthermore, this feature may have a hard dependency on using bindless to begin with. That is, I can't tell if one is allowed to execute a work graph that binds and unbinds individual texture resources. And if one could do such a thing, it would certainly be slower than using bindless. The cost of bindless is paid "up front" when the textures are uploaded.

Some programmers use Texture2DArray/GL_TEXTURE_2D_ARRAY as an alternative to atlases but two limitations are (1) the max array length (e.g. GL_MAX_ARRAY_TEXTURE_LAYERS) might only be 256 (e.g. for OpenGL 3.0), (2) all textures must be the same size.

Finally, for the sake of any web searcher who lands on this thread in the years to come, to pack an atlas well a good packing algorithm is needed. It's harder to pack triangles than rectangles but triangles use atlas memory more efficiently and a good triangle packing will outperform the fancy new bindless rendering. Some open source starting points for packing:

https://github.com/nothings/stb/blob/master/stb_rect_pack.h

https://github.com/ands/trianglepacker

The new modern APIs are not to be understood as graphics APIs, rather as GPU APIs

I've heard this repeated a lot in internet forums, but my experience working through hundreds of pages of Frank Luna's 800+ page DX12 book before concluding it pointless for 2D was that DX12 is actually fundamentally very similar to DX11 with most of the API focused on graphics rather than general compute. Compute shaders are just one chapter (13) of Luna's book, roughly 40 of the 800+ pages. I did some of the LunarG Vulkan tutorial and browsed the Khronos ref pages and reached a similar conclusion for Vulkan. I played with CUDA a bit and that's what real GPU programming looks like, almost no mention of graphics for much of the documentation. The "hello world" program isn't drawing a triangle, it's adding two arrays. Whereas a great deal of DX12, Vulkan, etc. is all about pixel formats, pixel shading, swap chains, geometry and tessellation, blending, depth and stencil, mipmaps and cube maps, clip coords, triangle winding and culling, the perspective Z divide, viewports, indexed and instanced draw calls, ... you know, graphics. But in chapter 9 of the DX12 book, end of 9.4, Luna writes, "Texture atlases can improve performance because it can lead to drawing more geometry with one draw call." So the conclusion I reached is that DX12 doesn't offer some fancy GPU compute way of writing a GPU program that can use 1000 distinct textures to draw 1000 distinct quads using only one CPU function call to launch this GPU program.

Now I've been doing more research and there is some sort of new feature called bindless textures not covered in Luna's DX12 book that might accomplish what I want (I'm not sure), but it seems to be Win11 only, WDDM 3.0 only, shader model 6.6 only, very new cards only. With this feature I might be able to set up 1000 distinct integer ids for my 1000 distinct textures, and then, with one single CPU draw call, have those 1000 textures applied to the correct 1000 quads, with no need to pack those 1000 textures into an atlas. Doing more web searching just now, this possibly can also be done in OpenGL on cards that support NV_gpu_shader5, but only semi-recent nVidia cards might support this. (I'm finding it difficult to get quick, quality answers to these sorts of questions using either web searches or LLMs.) Anyway, a gamedev forum or DX-focused reddit might be a better place for me to ask these sort of technical questions.

Does WebGPU enable a pure 2D game with many sprite animations to not need to pack a texture atlas for best performance? I.e. can I tell the GPU, "Draw these 1000 quads using the following distinct 1000 textures using just this one draw call. I'll be changing the 1000 textures each frame." My experience with OpenGL and D3D11 is that an atlas is the only way to do this. (I've found stb_rect_pack.h to be the least hassle route to packing the atlas.) I started looking at D3D12 and saw that it had command recording but it wasn't clear to me if this is any more efficient for a 2D game than just using D3D11/OpenGL to send 1000 separate pairs of commands to set-this-texture/draw-this-quad. With D3D12 the CPU is still performing thousands of function calls per frame to "record" these commands and I don't see how this is cheaper than having D3D11 do thousands of draw calls. D3D11 just puts a draw call into a command queue and immediately returns so isn't this effectively kinda the same thing as using ID3D12CommandQueue "command recording"? I never got around to benchmarking or learning more, so I'm sure I must be misunderstanding the advantages. I've also noticed that despite D3D12 launching back in 2015, the #1 most used engine Unity is still defaulting to D3D11 and has struggled to make D3D12 as performant/stable. So it seems I'm not the only one who can't figure out how the newer APIs offer more performance.

Are Windows prebuilt Dawn WebGPU libs available anywhere so I can try to draw a triangle using C/C++? Many Google projects are extremely time consuming to build on a Windows machine and need like 30+ GB of space for all tools and dependencies. Windows is still over 95% of the paid non-console gaming market so those who want to pay bills making games can't ignore it. BGFX is easy to clone and build from GitHub; examples are up and running in only a few steps. Any way to do the same with Dawn WebGPU?

GNOME and KDE have been doing Linux desktops since the 1990s, "literally decades". At Microsoft and Apple there are evidently product managers incentivized to ensure bluetooth earbuds "just work" and do not hang the bluetooth settings app. Apple has sold more than 150M AirPods, has over $12B revenue from them, and would lose a lot of profit if they don't "just work". Core desktop Linux devs on the other hand be like, "Whatev.. I don't use bluetooth on my 24-core BeastStation. Not my problem." They have the brains and talent to make it work, but not the motivation. Open source people work on what they find interesting.

There's the Babylon Bee deplatforming that led to Musk buying Twitter. The Babylon Bee called a public official who is a biological man a 'man'. So Twitter deplatformed the Babylon Bee.

The ADL has been successfully sued for defamation before. Back in 2000 the ADL lost $10.5 million for defaming a Colorado couple:

https://jweekly.com/2000/05/12/judge-fines-adl-10-5-million-...

"On April 28 [2000], the jury found most of the charges leveled by the ADL, based on the tapes, to be 'not substantially true.'"

There’s nothing stopping anyone from going back and using all of that old software exclusively.

Monthly bills are stopping me. Can I use Apple's MPW C compiler to build for iOS?