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2 yr. ago

  • A weapon to surpass metal gear!

  • Programming a robust global date-time system and having a transparent conversation between metric and *imperial/traditional" units is just a warm-up to show that you can work with the truly demented currency system. Make sure everything is rounded off to the nearest whole ha'penny.

  • Not that I disagree with your point about walled gardens, but "better" hardware for a handheld gaming machine needs to have a decent balance between performance and battery life. Longest plane or train journey that I'm likely to take is about five hours, and I'd need to rate any gaming hardware on the ability to run for that length of time. On that basis, the Switch is pretty much optimal. My phone has a higher resolution and can probably push more frames, but it would run hot for about forty-five minutes maximum. Plus, I'd then not be able to make calls or listen to tunes at my destination.

    Steam deck would probably be a better choice, though. Fuck Nintendo.

  • Uncle Max looks so much like Bill Waterson does in real life. He got dropped out of the comics because "not being able to address Calvin's parents by name" was awkward, but really this is a comic about a boy and his tiger and how they interact with the world - adult to adult viewpoints just don't belong. Although this one works for me.

  • DLSS2.0 is "temporal anti-aliasing on steroids". TAA works by jiggling the camera a tiny amount, less than a pixel, every frame. If nothing on screen is moving and the camera's not moving, then you could blend the last dozen or so frames together, and it would appear to have high resolution and smooth edges without doing any extra work. If the camera moves, then you can blend from "where the camera used to be pointing" and get most of the same benefits. If objects in the scene are moving, then you can use the information on "where things used to be" (it's a graphics engine, we know where things used to be) and blend the same way. If everything's moving quickly then it doesn't work, but in that case you won't notice a few rough edges anyway. Good quality and basically "free" (you were rendering the old frames anyway), especially compared to other ways of doing anti-aliasing.

    Nvidia have a honking big supercomputer that renders "perfect very-high resolution frames", and then tries out untold billions of different possibilities for "the perfect camera jiggle", "the perfect amount of blending", "the perfect motion reconstruction" to get the correct result out of lower-quality frames. It's not just an upscaler, it has a lot of extra information - historic and screen geometry - to work from, and can sometimes generate more accurate renders than rendering at native resolution would do. Getting the information on what the optimal settings are is absolute shitloads of work, but the output is pretty tiny - several thousand matrix operations - which is why it's cheap enough to apply on every frame. So yeah, not big enough to worry about.

    There's a big fraction of AAA games that use Unreal engine and aim for photorealism, so if you've trained it up on that, boom, you're done in most cases. Indie games with indie game engines tend not to be so demanding, and so don't need DLSS, so you don't need to tune it up for them.

  • For something that doesn't run continuously, like eg. a refrigerator, then an average daily usage is more useful, no? "This product draws 1.5 kW with a duty cycle of 0.08" doesn't really help when comparing efficiencies of potential purchases, you'd need to convert it to electricity consumed in a set period anyway.

  • Absolutely NO sexuality explicit content. This includes, but not limited to, images/videos/chat around sexual acts. There are other places on the internet for this.

    😥

  • Having the suit one corner and the rank in the other is going to make these a bastard to play games with. How would you hold them in your hand so's that you can see both?

  • Identity is a many-layered thing, and I'd never describe myself as British unless very specifically prompted to do so, but I can at least sign that. 5,071 let's go!

  • So far we've had "amazing Fallout RPG on a janky engine" when (Black Isle / Obsidian) developed it, and "bland Fallout RPG on a janky engine" when Bethesda have developed it. Having both great writers and a decent engine would be amazing for Fallout, although just Obsidian and their Pillars of Eternity engine would be perfect with me.

    Larian have said that they'd like to get away from DnD 5e after working on BG3 for so long, so I'm assuming they won't have licensed Pathfinder either. If we take the set of all possible IPs and strike out those two, then that must make Fallout more likely. (Albeit not very likely.)

  • 64-bit brings a lot of benefits - can use more RAM directly, more opcodes and lots more registers allow code to run much more efficiently - but for a programme that I just want to open, click on a couple of times and then for it to be almost completely out of the way, those aren't the biggest selling points. In fact, definitely supporting 32-bit for older games might be better. They might just not want the maintenance headache of supporting two builds.

  • Halo: Combat Evolved sucks? That's a hot take - been a few years, but I did enjoy playing it, massive controllers and all. Or did you have a specific one in mind?

  • Logic

    Jump
  • "HANA needs it for analytics purposes, so the actual purpose of your job isn't to sell things or keep customers happy, but to gather metrics."

  • Logic

    Jump
  • Instructions unclear, now an alcoholic with dick stuck in middle manager.

    I'm sympathetic to instructions like "you need to do it this way BECAUSE perfectly valid reason". Maybe that pointless paperwork is needed for some compliance documents I'm not aware of; maybe what seems like pointless busywork in preparation is actually essential for one of our biggest customers.

    Alas, at my work, it's quite often BECAUSE someone tangentially related to the project likes a certain output, and we can never go and speak to them to confirm, nor ask if maybe there's something else we could get them that could be even better.

  • Russia has the world's fourth-largest reserves of rare earth metals, which they're struggling to exploit due to lack of technology. China is the number one global supplier, and has all of the tech. I think they would very much like control of all their mines.

    Actually taking the territory? Well, then you'd just have to look after tens of millions of poverty-stricken, barely-literate russians in the east of the country. Seeing russia reduced to economic ruin by the war in Ukraine, and then taking control of all their industry and being able to operate russia as a puppet state? Well, that sounds more like a long-term plan.

    https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/latest-news-headlines/russia-struggling-to-capitalize-on-rare-earth-reserves-52525919

  • Well, we've a single cable coming over from France that makes up about 3% (I think) of our total electricity supply. So "French Nuclear" should be a bigger entry in that table than coal, solar, hydro or bio. That's not the only import, either, so it's not completely impractical for the missing percentages to be imports.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HVDC_Cross-Channel

  • Well, we've a minimum pricing per unit on alcohol, any kind of multipack deal is forbidden, and the licensing hours are such that it's easier to get yourself some bennies than it is to get a drink before lunchtime; need to plan your day around getting some booze in the house.

    National drug policy should really be about minimising harm, with treatment and rehabilitation for addicts, but any kind of talk that isn't about stringing them all up is anathema to our circus of bawbags in Westminster.

  • You can only store rational numbers as a ratio of two numbers, and there's infinitely times more irrational numbers than rational ones - as soon as you took (almost any) root or did (most) trigonometry, then your accurate ratio would count for nothing. Hardcore maths libraries get around this by keeping the "value in progress" as an expression for as long as possible, but working with expressions is exceptionally slow by computer standards - takes quite a long time to keep them in their simplest form whenever you manipulate them.

  • If it's a Robin Hood story, then presumably it's full of gold coins rather than dollar bills. Bag's about the size of his head, call it four litres. Gold has a density about 20 kg / litre and is worth about $100 / gram, so ignoring the fact that you'd struggle to lift that bag, especially in one hand, it would be worth about $8M.

    Still works out to about 0% of their wealth. Time to start taxing the rich.