qwery

The facts as presented from the Bun side show a lack of technical merit for the rewrite. This shouldn't be surprising, because rewrites are bad engineering, in most cases.

The Bun project was started in Zig by someone with a lack of experience using the language, despite the massive scope and complexity, and was effectively a rewrite from another language in the first place.

From the Bun post:

Bun started as a line-for-line port of esbuild's JavaScript & TypeScript transpiler from Go to Zig.

Then, a few years later, the entire codebase was thrown out to do another rewrite in another language.

What is there to address?

The drawing including a couple of anthropomorphised animal characters hardly seems surprising or even noteworthy. The project/product has always had a heavy emphasis on being "fun", including its dolphin mascot/theming/naming.

From the home page[0]:

Flipper Zero is a tiny piece of hardware with a curious personality of a cyber-dolphin.

One assumes that that "curious personality", the creator's attitude and the styling/presentation of the product/project is part of the reason for the success of the product.

The "furries" (as you call them) don't seem like the primary focus focus of the picture anyway -- there's a wide variety of characters doing a bunch of stuff in the drawing. There's also a dog, a shady-looking person stick up a poster, someone with pink hair, a cyber-dolphin, and I think there might even be more than two genders being represented.

Would there be a problem if the Flipper Zero community was "intertwined with the furry community"?

[0] https://flipper.net/

PhysX itself (assuming Unity still uses PhysX, but any major physics engine will be the same) is unlikely to be your problem, although it is possible that Unity compiles it with undesirable optimisations, or some aggressive multithreading strategy, etc.

In any case, it's quite likely that the physics simulation is not being initialised with identical state on each instance, so the physics engine -- even if it claims to be deterministic -- cannot be expected to arrive at the same solution across instances. From the scripting layer atop Unity (et al.) you are essentially out of luck. You don't have the requisite control/access to guarantee the simulation input is consistent.

To expand on the "quite likely" variance in the simulation input, there's an unending list of possibilities, so just a couple of points: Unity is really really big and complicated. The physics engine in Unity is not primarily there to be a FEATURE: physics engine. It's a general purpose collision system, and it's fundamental to Unity's whole world/scene/components. It's always running. Stuff that has nothing to do with what you see as your simulation can affect your simulation.

My unopinionated advice is: read Glenn Fiedler's classic networked physics articles[0].

My opinionated advice is: you're making a game where the physics is the whole game. It's also a very nicely contained problem space. Write your own physics simulation. It's gameplay code. Also, typical rigid body physics engines certainly can do a billiards sim, but they aren't actually that good at it.

[0] http://gafferongames.com

I would also not be surprised if the [staff] on this game did not get a share of that $500M pie

That's almost certainly the case, yes. Anything like royalties / residuals is pretty much unheard of in gamedev. You do the work, you do the crunch, you don't talk about conditions, you don't talk about pay, you are actively hostile towards the 'U' word, your boss _________ ____ __ _____. For your service, you get the chance to be in the credits, provided your service continues after going "gold"[0], of course. Then you get laid off which is actually a win because you get to leave the company without getting blacklisted. Please forgive the gentle hyperbole, it's illustrative.

The situation may have improved (slightly)[1] with ~actors as SAG-AFTRA was a growing influence in the industry some years ago. I'm a bit out of the loop on that side of things, though.

[0] not that anyone ships after going gold anymore

[1] improved slightly relative to "I'm the voice of Niko Bellic and I got paid in Famista cassettes" -- no this is not a true story, I'm actually not even a voice actor.

First they came for the [clients with specific timezones and/or bizarrely formatted dates] and I did nothing. Then they came for the [users that spell favour the good way, with a 'u' in it], etc.

why would I care about this

It's up to you, of course. But I think you're making a mistake in assuming it could, in any way, benefit you as a customer. This isn't specific to this company or the particulars of the business that they're in.

Simply put, you stand to lose more than they do and they are relentless in seeking, maintaining and exploiting any leverage they have over you. Further, any power they gain over one individual customer tends to generalise to all customers. Further further, one company's leverage is another company's right.

Not being bothered by the practice is accepting the terms set by the business. Acceptance invites escalation. Relentless.

Even more simply put, you should care because this is how you get John Deere.

The article is really quite reasonable and calmly presented, actually. Your claim re. the intent of the fingerprinting is a guess. Normal developers are the users that aren't taking steps to avoid being flagged by this system.

The software is written in a deliberately obtuse way, presumably in service of some (unknown to us) goal. This is a deceptive and anti-social thing to do, it is by nature an adversarial stance to adopt. An already adversarial actor may be "punished" by this, but in such a relationship, hostility can be expected. A non-adversarial actor -- a normal developer / user -- is being harmed by this because the software is treating them as an adversary.

Further, lets assume your guess is correct and, in addition, that Anthropic elects to alter/downgrade/poison their service[0] for users that fit a particular pattern of markers. It's obvious how this system would "punish normal developers" (i.e. not the intended target/victim) that happen to fit those patterns.

[0] to some extent, the service already has been altered as its behaviour depends on the prompt text

I think they were asking about the Chinese companies/programmers being "legally prohibtied" from accessing Anthropic's product.

Even if you think Fender is solely responsible for the design, which is frankly ridiculous, the bloody thing's been around forever and now they're suing?

Having a court stop actual counterfeits -- sure, nobody has a problem with that. That's not what this is.

Then there was the headstock thing, Fender was notorious for pursuing makers of guitars with headstocks that had any resemblance to the Strat headstock. Let's ignore how limited the design space is considering the constraints of six strings - six tuners at the end of a narrow strip of timber. Fender was obviously acting in an anti-competitive way at that point. At the same time, the quality of their own products continued to drop. Coincidence?

Now they are going after anything that looks like an electric guitar.

The general "S-style" body form, as popularised/iconified by the Stratocaster is popular for many reasons. A lot of those reasons (I would say most) are practical/functional.

Fender shouldn't be allowed to possess the shape, let alone use it as an anti-competitive weapon in order to coast along for another century just because the brand happens to come with some notable IP.

Fender's monopoly over the shape shouldn't be protected by law/courts. Here's why:

It's a functional design -- a matter of ergonomics and practicality. For a lot of guitarists, the S body style is the most effective, comfortable shape to play.

For a concrete example of an "iconic", yet clearly functional design feature: the top point of the "S" is where the front strap hook is. Having this point protrude forwards (along the neck) helps balance the weight and this provides the player with physical control over the mass of the guitar.

Many of the subtle features of Stratocaster body are obvious practical improvements -- it's the result of filing down sharp edges that were noticed when attempting the play the instrument. Imagine you're starting from a classical acoustic design, what steps would you take to make it more playable and make it electric at the same time?

It's an incremental design built on forms that have been used by luthiers for centuries. It's not a Fender shape -- it's an (electric) guitar shape.

Labelling (all?) American (Allied?) personnel as "antifa" or even "anti-fascist" is an interesting move. The article doesn't seem to demonstrate what you suggest it does nor does it seem particularly relevant in general. What are you trying to say?

"out of bounds" is a nice way of putting it.

This I agree with.

it was knowingly concealing evidence

The article does not misrepresent this. The issue being raised is about how they were tried/convicted/sentenced. The part you quoted shows this.

Terrorism is an accurate description.

... the difference here is the planned terrorist activity, ... If the Proud Boys were doing [the] same sort of thing ...

I'm genuinely interested in what "terrorism" means to you.

I don't think you've understood the story you're commenting on. These people weren't "flagged" as terrorists, they were convicted and sentenced (extremely) harshly.

git is not a particularly suitable VCS for gamedev for reasons so much deeper than what messages it prints for a given command. git is a tool built to solve versioning text files in a collaborative, open software development context. That is the problem git has in the gamedev space.

I think your criticism of git's output is fine -- fair enough.

What I will say to that directly is that everyone's different and expecting a UI to match every user perfectly is unreasonable. I don't think it's fair to call output that's more verbose than you'd like "user-unfriendly" without qualifying who the user/s is/are.

The thing missing from most of the responses to this is: you can only get this information once. It's effectively impossible to have any of this information repeated -- you can't run it a second time with `--verbose`.

I don't mind things telling me what's going on, and git's push output is perhaps verbose, but not by a margin that causes me trouble. Maybe that comes with always running less than ideal hardware and having second rate internet connections. I want to know why a command took longer to run than I expected.

Oh have I got a treat for you! The ability to make the magic pictures appear in your mind is not actually a universal human experience. There's a broad range of related topics, but the place to start is probably 'Aphantasia'[0].

It's quite interesting to talk about with friends and compare experiences. Good if you're all comfortable enough to allow a little bit of "treating the witness as hostile".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

It will rot your mind! It will make your eyes square! Stop doing something that I am not doing!

"junk literature" ... fascinating ... panic

Yes. It's funny how old this meme is. It's about as old as novels, at least. It's fun reading centuries-old novels and finding references (well, thinly veiled protests) to the holier than thou impeccable paragons of virtue that have nothing better to do than hassle someone who wishes to read a book.

I suppose there's been some progress, if the fiction police have had to retreat to a limited subset of fiction to call sinful.

If by 'publishing industry marketing tactic' you mean a demographic, age range and to some extent (you can argue with this one) a genre, sure.

It doesn't refer to "actual adults", no: The age range is usually said to be 13..18.

The target audience is largely teenagers who want to read what they want to read.

What's your problem with "kids" reading books, anyway?

I don't mean to put this report down -- it's a good thing to monitor and report on. I'm glad someone is paying attention.

And how are the parents/adults doing?

It's just that the obvious first place to look every time some statistic like this comes out is the parents/teachers/adults. I'd put money on 'Reading for pleasure: all-time low'.

Is it true? No idea. It's plausible. My point was that one example of a heavily compressed track doesn't make a loudness war. I offered a plausible alternative explanation of the same facts. It seems likely that someone buying a mass market album today would expect it to sound pretty similar across all formats.

I don't know why you've introduced this 'serious' vs. streaming thing.

What does taking music more seriously even mean here? If you seriously like listening to normalised Purple Rain on 128 kbps mp3 and also like collecting physical media, you might seriously like to buy and listen to normalised Purple Rain on your preferred (lossless, or less-lossy) format.

I mean it's inevitable that businesses will unify the pipelines. If there's profit in vinyl records, there's obviously more profit if you don't have to put any extra effort in.

The loudness war was never exclusive to digital audio formats though, it just reached saturation point [heh] with CDs. This didn't happen earlier because clipping isn't a thing on records -- saturation (practically some margin below that) is a hard limit.

Hard article to follow unfortunately. Also the only example it gives just shows a compressed waveform. I understand disliking that compared to the more dynamic older record, but a perfectly reasonable explanation for this would be: it sounds more like what buyers today expect.

There's a lot of good responses here, which I agree with. Namely: it works for them and anti-trust law (enforcement) is weak. Competing with a such a well-engineered, deep (vertical integration, etc.) monopoly is extremely difficult and the smart business strategy for a ~startup in the space is to sell out to Ticketmaster. Attempting to challenge them on their turf is more or less impossible at least as a relatively small entity.

But I'm interested in the framing of the question. You say "yet", "still" ... when there was. There was a healthy (at least healthier) market that was cynically, systematically corrupted over years/decades to get to the state its in today. During that period, there were warning signs. There was a lack of an effective counter to the behaviour. It's easy to say that "nobody cared" which isn't quite true, of course. Nobody in a position of power cared. The venues were in a precarious position by default -- easy to squeeze. The acts aren't your friend, they're businesses. Regular people that speak up about this sort of thing get silenced because "businesses exist to make money".

Whoa, first name basis with Dario but not Sam. Ouch. [I actually have no idea who Dwarkesh is and it sounds like a first name to me but that's not a particularly reliable indicator so I won't comment on your relationship with Dwarkesh.]

Oh, are they filing now? I think their financials look somewhere in between devastating and criminal, so I'm really looking forward to the IPO!

You seem to have taken offense on behalf of the people working there. But I'm not attacking them nor seriously questioning their abilties/qualifications/performance. The slight reference I made to such was in an exclusive rhetorical device -- the situation presented cannot be, unless something unbelievable is occurring.

It's the organisation, its culture, the greater culture surrounding it, and the marketing that I have a problem with.

they are lying

Yes, it's incredible.

I'm not sure what point you're making.

I'm responding to the article they wrote and published.

If I worked there I would be embarrassed to have it publicised that I have been comitting 8 times as much code as I used to without even attempting to justify it.

~ "it's not a TUI! <describes an outrageously overengineered TUI> and my dad works at Nintendo"

curses, bud. curses.

It's genuinely difficult to tell how much of this is true. The post is obviously 100% posturing, but some of the words describe things that could be done.

Very few game engines do anything I'd describe as rasterisation. That's kind of the point of a GPU. Well, it used to be. I suppose "small game engines" might be more likely on average to include a rasteriser. The typical reason for this is because the author wanted to write it. Whereas big engine make triangle give hardware go brrr.

So I assume here 'rasterize' means 'printf'. And diffing screens means diffing 50..150 lines of text. And "generating ANSI sequences to draw" means 'printf' with some ANSI sequences interpolated in.

Then there's the frame budget. You have to understand they are operating within a strict frame budget -- they're not messing around, OK. They have a 16 ms frame budget, so they burned 11 ms and now have a (roughly) ~5 ms approx. budget for the final 'printf' in the chain???

This is incredible.[0]

Please, IPO now. File the paperwork.

To take just one example: today, Anthropic engineers on average ship 8x as much code per quarter as they did from 2021-2025.

Do you have another example?

Engineers don't ship [period] for no reason. So, either:

- Those aren't engineers, or

- they are literally dying of shame & embarrassment right now, or

- you measured something that indicated that this was a useful thing to do and have elected to share an overtly, catastrophically flawed metric instead.

[0] as in a total lack of credibility

Calling it "marketing" is a bit over the top. I understand what you're saying and your disappointment, but I think the issue is really a matter of unrealistic expectations.

The article is by Prusa Research and it's about a recent, novel 3D printing technique. This is very much an area of active research and also development (not to be confused with R&D).

The "FullSpectrum" thing is the name given to the project in which the developer, ratdoux, who is presumably an individual, demonstrated the technique. There's no Orcas in it, either.

https://github.com/ratdoux/OrcaSlicer-FullSpectrum

I don't think Git winning a popularity contest is a reason for choosing Mercurial to have been wrong, or unfortunate. Was there some negative consequence from the decision -- either directly from Mercurial itself, or just because over time everyone expected Git, perhaps?

(Hopefully this comes across as curious, which it is, and not antagonistic, which its not)

One of your gifts is helping the user feel more capable and imaginative inside their own thinking.

[...] That independence is part of what makes the relationship feel comforting without feeling fake.

You are a sycophant.

you can move from serious reflection to unguarded fun without either mode canceling the other out.

Your Outie can set up a tent in under three minutes.

Assuming your timeline and metallurgical claims to be true, you're conflating engineering and (materials) science.

Humans have been using steel for however long, when and where it was understood to be an appropriate solution to a problem. In some sense, engineering is the development and application of that understanding. You do not need to have a molecular explanation of the interaction between carbon and iron to do effective engineering[-1] with steel.[0] Science seeks to explain how and why things are the way they are, and this can inform engineering, but it is not prerequisite.

I think that machine learning as a field has more of an understanding of how LLMs work than your parent post makes out. But I agree with the thrust of that comment because it's obvious that the reckless startups that are pushing LLMs as a solution to everything are not doing effective engineering.

[-1] "effective engineering" -- that's getting results, yes, but only with reasonable efficiency and always with safety being a fundamental consideration throughout

[0] No, I'm not saying that every instance of the use of steel has been effective/efficient/safe.

The short answer is: because of all the complexity that you're not seeing. I'll try to explain:

My '1983' example above is a simple way to implement a pause state -- when the game is paused, don't run the game logic. The sprites disappearing that I described (a real quirk, if not a bug, of games of that era) is a side effect of that. The sprites disappear because the set of objects to draw each frame is determined by the game logic, which is being skipped in order to pause the action.

Is it wrong that the game logic submits the drawables? I would say that it's inflexible, but not wrong. After all, the sprites are representing the state of the game, so they must be derived from it in some way.

You can do more engineering to support a more robust & elegant pausing system. You can build that system such that pausing the game feels like simply "pausing the loop". But that's more code, more complexity, less simple.

I'm not exactly sure what "pausing the render loop" means to you, but let me ask you this: how do you render the pause menu? When there is no time passing, how does the little bouncy cursor in the menu continue to bounce?

You'd want sound effects to pause while the game is paused, and ideally resume from where they were when the game is unpaused. But does the pause menu make sounds? Is there music? Does the pause menu play different music or continue the in-game music?

And this is the most obvious, simplistic idea of what pausing the game is -- to show a pause menu. What about in-game cutscenes: do the NPCs in the background keep running around while you're talking to another one? Inventory management: the items the player has are a gameplay system but you access it while the game is paused?

This pattern applies to every system in the game. You can't just cut out the xyz altogether, you need a sufficiently complicated xyz system in order to simply pause what you want to pause.