oddity

9 ms·

31.
by oddity 4y ago
There are a whole lot of steps in between having a netlist and having useable hardware. Normally, if you're a large company, you have a small army of engineers handle that process and occasionally tell your architecture people that th
32.
by oddity 4y ago
I've started learning Godot to replace Unity for the prototyping role, but under no circumstances would I ship a game in stock Godot except for a game jam. The stock editor workflow is solid enough and overall fairly pleasant, but the
33.
by oddity 5y ago
The race to the bottom was absolutely Apple's fault. Software distribution over the internet existed before the App Store. Even Steam existed before the App Store. But Apple based the App Store on iTunes, where the songs were 99 cent
34.
by oddity 5y ago
Driver developers would like for it to be their concern and their concern only, but this doesn't scale when an application developer needs their app to run on hardware from vendors with different levels of driver quality. Vulkan and D
35.
by oddity 5y ago
Most GPUs are not self-sufficient to the degree that CPUs are. Where on a CPU, I can spawn an arbitrary child process/thread running (almost) any code with customized communication between the threads/processes, on a GPU, the har
36.
by oddity 5y ago
Performance, at the level of a single frame, is a complicated multi-system interaction where only a few layers are visible, and small bubbles can cascade into missed frames. None of the IHVs are incentivized to make all layers visible, so
37.
by oddity 5y ago
Even if the driver were a thin layer over DMA talking to the hardware such that every button being pressed was obvious, the performance characteristics of the buttons the driver pushes are not unless you can see their RTL or otherwise know
38.
by oddity 5y ago
For most games that people might want to make with Godot, it's probably good enough. Not everything needs to be perf-optimal. Also, the driver source being open doesn't mean that all their secrets are too.
39.
by oddity 5y ago
Sadly, it's even more complicated than what's described here. There are a lot of undocumented fast paths and nonorthogonalities between features where you can really only learn about them by talking to your friendly neighborhood
40.
by oddity 5y ago
Well, one of the authors is from NVIDIA, and the paper already mentions CUDA, and it's only to argue that CUDA is a good point of reference but doesn't do what the authors need it do (shader programming). SYCL doesn't add an
41.
by oddity 5y ago
This isn't a case of a standard coming along to a crowded market. Rather, this is the opposite scenario. USB-C won and now they have to deal with the fallout of unifying all the things past, present, and future.
42.
by oddity 5y ago
Certainly, Apple's crippling of PWAs and total control of browsers on their platform is a problem, but I've seen enough to know that what (web) devs really want is Chrome (or, more accurately, a monoculture). Whether it's Ch
43.
by oddity 5y ago
WebGPU is a much more approachable API than Vulkan or DirectX 12 and is more portable than either (or Metal, which is secretly the best graphics API available today if you can put up with Apple). If you're trying to hack something tog
44.
by oddity 5y ago
On the Android side, this would be a small but welcome improvement. Though, with smartphones approaching commodity status, I'm sure we'll see more and more upstart phone vendors that go out of business 2-3 years in to dodge suppo
45.
by oddity 5y ago
I'm not a professional artist or marketer, but I suspect the main reason we see the pursuit of realism in games is that it's easy to communicate and coordinate, so it reduces uncertainty across the board. Developing a style is ha
46.
by oddity 5y ago
This isn't because of the writing though. The whole article, start to finish, is about alternatives to lithium ion batteries, of which a derivative of durian is an option. Judging by the URL ( https://www.bbc.com/futur
47.
by oddity 5y ago
It is. From the article: > Vincent Gomes, a chemical engineer at the University of Sydney, and his team, including Labna Shabnam, are turning waste from the world’s smelliest fruit, durian, and the world’s largest fruit, jackfruit, into
48.
by oddity 5y ago
Chip development cycles are long enough that sometimes the only response companies have is to downplay their competitor's innovations until they have their own version. The hilarious part is that sometimes it works.
49.
by oddity 5y ago
A 64/128 core variant would effectively be a revival of their Xeon Phi line, which, in its later days, was basically this. It seems inevitable we'll see it again. My guess is it'll happen after Intel gets comfortable enough
50.
by oddity 5y ago
Indeed. I also expect this failure mode will be undetected for a long time due to how our sense of hearing works. My last neuroscience class was many years ago, but I do remember that in some sense, we hear what we expect to hear (more so
51.
by oddity 5y ago
> But only Apple and Google are big enough to fight the other bad actors "big" is not the deciding factor. Amazon and Microsoft are also big. They do not decide what's on your phone. Apple's and Google's store
52.
by oddity 5y ago
Oh I wish avoiding code cleanup was the worst of it. I've seen people totally ignore the most easily fixable bugs. Everyone knew what they were and how to fix them, but no one wants to be that person who spent time working on the bug t
53.
by oddity 5y ago
What splitting the app store from the OS does is encourage stores to compete on the basis of quality of the store and not the quality of the store + OS + hardware. Apple and Google will have less leverage, but all the qualities of an aggre
54.
by oddity 5y ago
Ugh. This mentality is fine when you want to ship an MVP but it's absolutely poisonous to the team and the project if you hold on to it. You need some slack for people to address the problems they think need solving without needing t
55.
by oddity 5y ago
I'm extremely bullish on AR/VR, neurotech, and smart wearables over the next decade or two, but this article seems oddly focused on AR glasses replacing phones. We're definitely seeing the phone separate into pieces closer t
56.
by oddity 5y ago
Given the price of these systems and the current value proposition, I think it's more likely that they only do it when someone else is paying for it. Think business class. You wouldn't exactly say you were "forced" int
57.
by oddity 5y ago
Absolutely! A common example I like to use is Java. It might be hard to imagine now, but there was a time where Java (and then C#) were pitched as a replacements to C++ (even the name "C#" supposedly derived from "C++++&quo
58.
by oddity 5y ago
Anecdotally, everything I've seen (hardware drivers) has been in (MISRA) C or a subset of C++. Ironically, many of the alternatives require too much discipline to keep devs happy. MISRA C at least lets them pretend they're in th
59.
by oddity 5y ago
(I'm assuming you're coming from C and don't already know C++ because of the linked article) If the ecosystem that's available is sufficient for your needs on the platforms you care about and you're not interested
60.
by oddity 5y ago
Sigh. I'm annoyed by articles like this where the subtext is that the people involved are either fools or evil. And, there's no doubt that much of the Trumpverse has detached from anything I recognize as sanity, but there should

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