mindbleach @ mindbleach @sh.itjust.works

Posts

1

Comments

5,285

Joined

2 yr. ago

In case you had any doubts who they're working for.

Relevant XKCD.

Because it worked so well for Amazon.

... and Amazon didn't invent its own proprietary graphics API that's only supported by Dolphin. Not even Fortnite gives a fuck about Metal.

There's this movie called Believe that is unironic Ebeneezer Scrooge apologism, and I think that's where the rich-asshole protagonist references "There's a difference between guys who sign the front of the check, and guys who sign the back." It might be the only time in history that's been treated like it favors the guys who sign the front.

This feels similar.

Clean and usable. It's not like Windows 3.1 or 68K-era Mac OS - or modern Windows - where everything's flat. Undifferentiated. Lacking visual hierarchy, despite necessary functional hierarchy. Windows 95 managed relief shading and instant on-click skeumorphism in sixteen colors.

Nowadays they're afraid to put text on buttons. The buttons don't even depict things! You get a field of abstract squiggles, all with the same color and weight.

And it's not like Windows 95 was built for experts. There's a "click Start" animation on first boot, it offers a "Windows tour" on every boot, and everything sprouts a tooltip if you hesitate. They treated users like distracted idiots - unlike today, where they treat you like a child.

Still signed by Noah, at a spry 413.

There was a tech talk about Quake 3 - surprisingly not by Carmack - which highlighted how id is technologically conservative. Quake 3 was their first game with no software renderer, and it still asked for nothing but OpenGL 1.1 and a Pentium II. It somehow featured curved surfaces, volumetric fog, and believe it or not, shadow volumes. Dynamic lighting was all Blinn-Phong from 1977. Static lighting was one (1) 128x128 lightmap, for dramatic gradients all over a stadium-sized level.

Doom 3 had steeper system requirements because it still did shadow volumes on the CPU and re-rendered most of the scene for each of them. But if you look at a screenshot with lighting disabled, the polygon count was closer to Quake 2, with bump maps adding all of the detail.

Rage, with its unique texel for every square inch of its gigantic world, could both run on an original iPhone and stream from a DVD on Xbox 360.

So it's really fucking weird to see them demand raytracing. Look: I've been following real-time raytracing on GPUs since 2009, when Ray Tracey on Blogspot coerced it out of his GTX 300-series. It seemed like an obvious choice, once we figured out how to use fewer rays. (Blending with past frames was an ugly kludge; obviously that wouldn't continue.) I had mixed feelings when Nvidia made it yet another proprietary anticompetitive gimmick. I do not understand how modern cards have hardware specifically for this thing - and it still chugs. It just uses more rays. Like your low-frequency indirect lighting needs multiple samples per-pixel, instead of updating some probes.

Quake 3's volumetric fog used naive raymarching. By the PS3 era we'd figured out you can do it badly, per-pixel, and then blur. OpenGL 1.1 didn't do "blur." OpenGL 1.1 barely "per-pixel." id Software did it the hard way, in tiny steps, on the CPU. And yet it still ran great, because they did it per vertex, and blended across wobbling triangles, and it looked fucking great.

I'm tempted toward an "eat hot chip and lie" rant about modern developers who can't imagine doing anything only a thousand times per frame.

It insists upon itself.

Trees are tall because trees are tall.

Any transformation is transformative.

The magic word here is transformative. If your use of source material is minimal and distinct, that's fair use.

If a 4 GB model contains the billion works it was trained on - it contains four bytes of each.

What the model does can be wildly different from any particular input.

Oh damn. Contrast with DookNookim's Doom8088 efforts, on the same hardware, and also on a 286, and on an IBM 5160 with a 4.77 MHz 8088.

The dithering on this version is fantastic. It's a slideshow, but it looks the business.

God Awful Movies covered Boondock Saints a couple years back, and one of the hosts demanded to know who replaced the movie they loved in college with some intolerable horseshit.

The sequels were all fanfiction. But they're all distinct kinds of fanfiction.

7 is written like the characters are also fans of the movies: Finn is shocked by hologram technology he'd see every day, people parrot lines that were once clever, the camera lingers on a broken astromech droid, et very cetera. The returning characters are living legends famed for their transformative effect on the whole galaxy but also haven't changed one iota since we last saw them.

8 is an anarchist deconstruction of Star Wars that somehow got turned into an actual Star Wars movie: a rebel soldier becomes disillusioned after her sister died for nothing, the good guy and bad guy agree the current conflict is a pointless sham, and details throughout scream that no mere organization could ever own the magic that belongs to all living beings. And then a surprise fourth act goes "whoops nevermind."

9 is a toddler telling a story: "and then... and then... but no he didn't?... and then..." It's like a child learned about fakeout deaths yesterday and expects it to be equally shocking every single time. Then the big battle needed to involve every toy in the toybox, especially the horses, because spaceships can't look up. At least in the end we got the Rey x Kylo connection it all built toward, and their kids are gonna be the most powerful nevermind.

Lemmy's respect for copyright only in relation to the magic content robot is endlessly amusing.

I don't give a shit what public data gets shredded into a gigabyte of linear algebra. That process is transformative. If the result is any good at reproducing a specific input, you did it wrong.

Some new ones:

Lending - the real way to make gold.

Dust - makes everything a little cleaner.

Lust - makes everything a lot dirtier.

Bare - put that back on.

Lightning Lute - lets bards play Dragonforce.

Lightning Lube - lets bards do other things.

Massage - see above.

Child Touch - why don't you have a seat over there.

Fire Colt - impractical to ride, but looks badass.

Fine Bolt - produces some excellent cloth.

Sopping Sting - material component: towel.

Cause Tear - material component: onion.

Thundercrap - makes everything a lot dirtier.

Compelled Duet - the bard ropes you into a musical.

Defect Magic - counterspell, but funnier.

Dog Cloud - oh gods, who fed him cheese?

Inflict Sounds - I cast tinnitus!

Wild Canning - preserves food.

Arr Bubble - everyone in range talks like a pirate.

Zine Of Truth - mimeographed to fight the man!

Animate Lead - it's just a gun.

Speak With Deaf - need your hands free.

Wall of Wafer - ineffective, but delicious.

Egg Whip - stiff peaks!

Heath Ward - man, fuck that guy.

Magic Bar - goes well with Tending.

Glyph of Carding - let's see some ID, "halfling."

Wine Walk - after hitting the Magic Bar.

Soul Cafe - much more relaxing.

Wash - finally, everything is clean.

Produce Blame - shift responsibility onto an adjacent player.

Beacon of Hose - keep any bards in range from doing the deed.

Flesh to Store - morbid way to buy and sell goods, far away from civilization.

Tiny Hat - purely cosmetic, but so worth it.

Mage Sand - sha-sha-sha!

Tree Strife - an off-color joke that will get you cancelled by the ents. Eventually.

Punburst - a barrage televisable jokes which might still get you killed.

Arcane Lick - you're lucky restraining orders haven't been invented yet.

Tire Shield - surprisingly effective.

Fund Steed - they're fucking expensive!

Revilify - shift responsibility onto any past target of Produce Blame.

Fare Storm - lawful neutral highway robbery.

Blank - counterspell for a scroll.

Knick - does minimal damage, but it really hurts!

Mass Peal - deafen nearby enemies with a cacophony of bells.

Bending - it's just Move Earth, but you get to pretend you know karate.

Spore the Dying - cordyceps infection technically is not necromancy.

Cull Lightning - increases rendering efficiency.

Dispel Gold - really pisses off the munchkins.

Wall of Firs - like Wall of Stone, but biodegradable.

Counterspill - put any liquid back into its container. Potions included.

Reflective LCDs would have been equally blurry, in full color, and still tolerated optional tennis-ball-green frontlights for playing under the covers.

The real surprise came a decade later when everybody except Nintendo missed that active TFTs made color a decent option.

Stop putting his toddler babble in the goddamn headline.

Oh god, Ni-Cd. Six hours of charging for fifteen minutes of use.