HN user
This 100x.
People like to complain about the time it takes to ship AAA games and how huge the budgets have gotten... and then complain that the UE5 games all look the same. You either use some amount of systems 'out of the box' or customize/rewrite everything and burn $$$.
For sure, if you restrict what can (and can't) be done in shaders you can optimize buffer layouts and rendering passes, not allow things that explode shader permutations/switching or explode shader instruction count and kill occupancy.
The flip side is the artists loose control and cannot author custom materials.
id tech is probably the last engine that used a signature game to showcase the engine to licensees. The business model of idTech, Unreal Engine, and Crytech used to be 'make amazing looking game that sells the engine to licensees'. The problem with that model was you got a cut of the game code for whatever the 'amazing looking' game was and told to figure it out. If you wanted to make a Gears of War clone then Unreal Engine 3 was perfect... for every other game genre you had to rewrite and implement huge chunks of code.
Unreal Engine managed to evolve and expand the engine to the point where it is somewhat game agnostic, crytech became lumberyard under Amazon and died, idTech became the engine solely for iD games (ie the same business model as every other game or publisher custom engine).
iD tech's rendering pipeline is focussed on the one AA game iD are publishing that year and making that one game run efficiently and beautifully on mid-high end PC and current consoles. UE5 is focussed on providing tools for anyone to (relatively) easily make good looking games and applications that can be published to a wide range of devices.
Even in high cost of living coastal Southern California these numbers are insane unless you have a $10mil house with 10,000sqft
This comment seems insane to me. Like at $50 an hour thats 30 hours a month, or 8 hoursish a week. How dirty or huge is the house? And $50 an hour is way over what most hourly degree edgucated workers earn so definitely not exploitation.
Which organizations had those shared goals and actions?
In the charity/non-profit space a lot of organizations are led and operated by retirees and others for whom money is a solved problem. And they are rife with infighting, politics and dispute.
Lowering interest rates to juice the economy is done when unemployment rises … which hasn’t happened yet in the wider economy.
Juiced economy and free cash is what led to massive inflation. Powell is trying to save hay until winter - when we get a recession the interest rates cuts are the only knob he has to turn to soften the blow.
Scenario 2 now has country C1 with 100 tech workers, and they got their pick of the 50 best workers from (lower paying) country 2.
Country 1 is now a better place to start a new company or expand your existing company because all the best workers in the field work in country 1. Starting the same business in country 2 will almost certainly fail.
This is literally why the Bay Area became the world’s most important tech hub and isolationism will allow (and is allowing) Chinese tech to jump ahead of the US. The government doesn’t care about losing a literal arms race, largely to reduce the political power of California. By no longer educating and welcoming the world’s brightest engineers the USA is going to be reduced to support and manufacturing roles where its large workforce will have to compete with everyone else and salaries will tumble.
Until maybe 2 years ago absolutely. Huge demand for tech workers and not enough smart US workers to fill the roles… lots of low quality candidates from crappy colleges but anyone with skills or smarts (and not unreasonable salary expectations) got a job.
Since the ai data center cash suck the jobs have dried up… ai productivity gains maybe too, although we’re waiting to see meaningful results there.
From a recruitment perspective it’s still difficult to find experienced candidates with specific skill sets because any job openings get flooded with 10,000 ai generated slop applications that have to be screened by ai and the 10 excellent candidates get lost.
The Zune hardware was slick, particularly the solid state players. The music store worked great and their music licensing was so much better than Apple - $10 a month for unlimited streaming, unlimited downloads (rentals) to Zune devices and 10 free mo3 downloads to own.
Their only misstep was making one of their colorways poop brown! That and being too late to market with a phone that used the same design language
What does the end user do with the AI chat? It sounds like they can just use it to do searches of client information… which the existing site would already do.
modern left wing goals like unlimited mass immigration.
Ahh and there we are. It's the immigrant's fault. Once all those illegals are out the of the country we'll be great again - the world will once more bend to Queen Victoria's will and Bobby Charleston will again lift the world cup for England, it's rightful owners (hard /s btw).
No major party on either side of the Atlantic are pro-illegal immigration or advocating unlimited mass immigration (or anything close to unlimited).
The US is a very right wing country. It's politicians are better able to avoid populist price controls. Maybe with Mamdani that's now changing.
Rather than placing price controls on private companies the US slashes taxes to the point where public services then cannot invest in infrastructure and maintenance - and then use that as an argument why public services should be privatized.
If tax cuts aren't populist policies I don't know what are. The magic trick of the right wing parties has been to sell tax cuts as a great thing to the very people who don't benefit from the cuts and are hurt by the fiscal fall-out. That and attaching themselves to Christianity while not following any of Jesus's teachings.
When a service is a monopoly there is no good reason for turning it into a for profit company outside of feathering the pockets of the rich. If the electricity supply to my house (and by extension my street and my city) is controlled by one company and they own the cabling and infrastructure then what is the motivation for them to not jack up my prices to generate profits to their shareholders, as they should as a shareholder owned company? What is their motivation for encouraging renewables or improving infrastructure when those would reduce profits and reduce shareholder value?
Mamdani hasn't even been voted in yet. Keep sowing that fear so that the people his policies might benefit don't actually vote for him - because he's a scary socialist (in the loosest, most American, definition).
What was weird was when the restaurant was closed and looked deserted but you could still order online and hope the locker with your order lit up with your food (it did).
I found it disconcerting that I couldn’t tell who was making my food, it felt dehumanizing and weirdly off putting
I think your parent made a perfectly good point. Going into the store is a whole lot less pleasant than staying in my car and waiting a couple extra minutes in an environment I enjoy.
If I’m in a hurry then yes maybe I can shave a few minutes by going in, but if I’m getting fast food I probably don’t feel like interacting with people, and listening to crappy piped music while standing in an artificially lit corporate chain restaurant waiting for my order.
Some people stop every day on the way in to work rather than make coffee at home in the morning. They’re often ordering some caffeine concoction rather than drip coffee. I have known people with $100+ per month Starbucks habits.
Yeah it’s this, Starbucks isn’t a coffee place; it’s a caffeinated drink place. Their brewed coffee (outside of their higher end tasting room stores) is deliberately undrinkable to push you to their espresso drinks or their sugary concoctions.
It’s not entirely trivial (if you care about texture quality) you’re choosing 2 endpoints in 3d space that can be linearly interpolated to values that best fit 16 points in 3d space.
I may have been a little off with saying seconds per texture but it’s definitely non trivial amounts of time. And ects (mobile) and BC7 are certainly still not something you want to compress to at game load-time.
Some comparisons of texture compression speeds for various formats (from 2020 but on a 12core i9): https://www.aras-p.info/blog/2020/12/08/Texture-Compression-...
If you’re compressing at load-time it can be a lot. You can do a quick and dirty compress to BC1-3 (assuming you are on PC) in a few tens of milliseconds but quality will be suboptimal, higher quality will likely take a few seconds per texture and going to BC6 takes even longer but will look much better.
For a few years it seemed like Tesla and SpaceX were those companies - reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, boosting clean transportation and solar, pushing forward space exploration.
But the promises turned into stock boosting lies; the environmental good into vote buying for climate change deniers, and space exploration into low earth cell-towers.
Maybe there will be a benefit from the additional power generation and infrastructure that will still be available if the data centers don’t need it.
Can’t believe I have to state the obvious and say that is only a potential gain if the power/cooling is from renewable sources. But I do
The RCP was actually two hardware blocks, the RDP which as you say did the fixed function (but very flexible) pixel processing and the RSP which handled command processing and vertex transformation (and audio!).
The standard api was pretty much OpenGL, generating in-memory command lists that could be sent to the RSP.
However the RSP was a completely programmable mips processor (with simd instructions in parallel).
One of my favorite tricks in the RDP hardware was it used the parity bits in the rambus memory to store coverage bits for msss
EA not making sports games for Dreamcast wasn’t a bad decision for EA. It cost Sega a huge amount of money to produce and license their own sports games exclusively for Dreamcast, not having EA sports was a huge blow.
And while NBA 2k destroyed NBA Live it took until 2009 for that to start happening (long after Sega ownership), mainly down to sliding standards in EA’s NBA Live titles and eventually some disastrous EA launches.
I know you are making a flippant and pointless comment, but I’m compelled to respond.
Of all the laptops I’ve owned my 2020 MacBook Air is still my personal daily driver, my 2010 Mac mini still works fine for running my 3d printer, my 2014 Mac mini works great for crafting and my 2020 iPhone SE2 is still getting OS updates and is sending this message. Are they repairable? Not easily. Do they still work, absolutely. Having used a bunch of non apple laptops and devices at home and work I would say the Apple products last at least 2x as long before breaking or hitting enforced obsolescence.
Tempting fate here but I don’t see any reason why my cheapo spring loaded toaster won’t give me another 10 years of life. There’s nothing to go wrong if used correctly.
Back when I was a kid in the 80s toasters would break because we shoved in hacked up pieces of bread or bagels where the food touched the elements and caught fire. And knives were poked inside to extract burnt remains from the heating elements.
I was shocked to see there are toasters with motorized lifting mechanisms. Is there any practical reason why this is better than a spring?
Did the needle go far left? I didn’t see it go much past the American center (which is very right compared to most of the western world). We got some DEI that has for the most part been proven to be lip service, so much for equal under law and land of the free. We got some money for infrastructure, we put people who participated in an insurrection in jail, we got business as usual. We didn’t get universal healthcare, we didn’t get a reduction of the power of monopolies, we didn’t get a reduction in the military budget, we didn’t get a minimum wage that tracked inflation let alone was a livable wage, we didn’t get money out of politics and politicians, we didn’t get the rich to pay their fair share. The only way I’d measure the past 4 years as being left is because of the current jarring swerve into a right wing oligarchy
The compilers tend to lag a few years behind the language spec too, especially if you have to support platforms where the toolchains lag latest gcc/clang (Apple / Android / game consoles).
Respectfully, you might want to add at least a few C++20 features into your daily usage?
consteval/constinit guarantees to do what you usually want constexpr to do. Have personally found it great for making lookup tables and reducing the numbers of constants in code (and c++23 expands what can be done in consteval).
Designated initializer is a game-changer for filling structures. No more accidentally populating the wrong value into a structure initializer or writing individual assignments for each value you want to initialize.
I have used auto liberally for 8+ years; maybe I'm accustomed to reading code containing it but I really can't think of it being a problem. I feel like auto increases readability, the only thing I dislike is that they didnt make it a reference by default.
Where do you see difficult to track down performance/memory implications? Lambda comes to mind and maybe coroutines (yet to use them but guessing there may be some memory allocations under the hood). I like that I can breakpoint my C++ code and look at the disassembly if I am concerned that the compiler did something other than expected.
You don't 'have' to keep up with the language and I don't know that many people try to keep up with every single new feature - but it is worse to be one of those programmers for whom C++ stopped at C++03 and fight any feature introduced since then (the same people generally have strong opinions about templates too).
There are certainly better tools for many jobs and it is important to have languages to reach for depending on the task at hand. I don't know that anything is better than C++ for performance sensitive code.
If the product stops working if you don’t pay the maintenance fee then it’s a subscription model with an initial down-payment. Car maintenance doesn’t fall into the annual fee model, as much as manufacturers and dealers would like, you don’t have to use them for periodic repairs or servicing. Car features that require yearly renewals (navigation and the like) would be subscriptions with a one-time free trial.
One time purchase plus yearly renewals to keep the product operating are one shaky legal grounds.