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smallstepforman

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smallstepforman
·vor 9 Tagen·discuss
The thing about custom engines is that by the time it supports all the features you need, you’ve worked your mindset into optimal engine usage, so you end up being more performant on a hacked engine vs suboptimal code on commercial engine. Home grown always has some unique flavour.
smallstepforman
·vor 10 Tagen·discuss
The rushed clinical trials were only done with 122 people and a control group. During the very short trial, 1 person died in the first group, 2 in the other. The “conclusion” was its better to be vaccinated and it protects you better. 12 months later AstraZenica vaccine pulled from market everywhere ….
smallstepforman
·vor 16 Tagen·discuss
Doormen keep vagrants away and prevent dirty things from accumulating in front of the venue. Plus the social benefits of interaction. It is a cost but offers not immediately obvious benefits.
smallstepforman
·vor 16 Tagen·discuss
Mate, you have to revise your stance on Russia, more people are imprisoned annually in the UK for speaking than people in Russia in a decade. The UK banned RT while you can access any western propaganda outpost from within Russia.

You’re on Hacker News, this website is known for attracting open minded free thinkers that do not fall under the influence of government financed propaganda. Learn and reassess your thoughts.
smallstepforman
·vor 17 Tagen·discuss
Today I asked Gemini to extract a table from an PDF appendix and create C++ data table with its contents. After 15 or so iterations with corrections and new mistakes, it eventually gave up. I was floored when it said “I’m sorry, I cannot do this simple task, I’ve exceeded my error threshold and cannot do this task for you. My LLM prediction engine invents data instead of doing a simple data copy/reformat”.

Stunned to see that Gemini threw its digital arms in the air and gave up.
smallstepforman
·vor 17 Tagen·discuss
This is insane. So I need to work 5 years on site in Germany as a contractor being paid by foreign parent company, why should the company be liable to be registered and pay taxes in germany. Eg Microsoft sends tech to fix Azure system fir Mercedes.
smallstepforman
·vor 18 Tagen·discuss
New platforms were 68000, old platforms with legacy code just wanted access to more memory, so 8086 segments allowed 64kb chunks. A hack only usable by folks that still wanted to run their old 64kb programs.

It would be a piece of trivia today if motorola were not 6 months late which forced IBM in frustration to change tracks to Intel and MS DOS instead (which worked on 8086). That 6 month drlay created WinTel of today.
smallstepforman
·vor 24 Tagen·discuss
My mistake. I remember reading the C= book “on the edge” and there was a chapter about how 3 chip designers at motorola couldnt get management to pursue low cost version of 6800, so they made 6502 in a startup called MOS in 1975.
smallstepforman
·vor 25 Tagen·discuss
While I’m on alternative histories, if Jack Tramiel didn’t piss off Chuck Peddle, it would be MOS/C= in Intels pisition today.
smallstepforman
·vor 25 Tagen·discuss
The 6809 (and its clone the 6502) would also be strong contendors. And if Motorola were 6 months faster with the successor 68000 compared to Intels 8086, the IBM PC would be 68000 based and Intel would today be known as a memory chip company. We’d be big endian with no legacy in 2026 of segmented memory architecture in mainstream processors. And with big 3 companies using 68000 (IBM, Apple and C=), we definately wouldnt have WinTel.
smallstepforman
·vor 25 Tagen·discuss
The driver switched to lower mipmapped texture and got caught. There is a ton of that out there for popular benchmark ready games. Run pro drivers instead of adrenaline to run generic baseline real driver.
smallstepforman
·vor 25 Tagen·discuss
Half the compute and reduce memory by factor of x4 and in a decade we’ll have double the performance we have now.

I do old school embedded, the amount of desktop bloat is insane. Any function I really need to refactor, I can reduce size and improve performance. And there are better engineers out there that are more efficient than me.
smallstepforman
·vor 25 Tagen·discuss
Find an itch, then scratch it. If many people have the same itch and can use your solution, you win.

Simple as that.
smallstepforman
·letzten Monat·discuss
The GPU loves arrays of structures AoS, since all vertex data fits in its triangle assembly cache. Once given to the GPU, the software side doesnt really care for all vertex parameters so this optimisation is pointless. Only relavent when you have instance rendering (leaves, grass) but then you only need an array of vec3’s, not the other parameters so back to normal arrays.

Meanwhile, game engines need operator overloading for adding/multiplying vectors (spatial transforms, lighting, physics) and core zig design philosophy prevents operator overloading.

Blind leading the blind. Disclaimer - I do professional rendering engines.
smallstepforman
·letzten Monat·discuss
I had a C++ actor model which required an Api like the following (std::function):

child->Async(&ChildActor::Method, child, args);

Refactored it to use small buffer optimisation and std::move_only_function)

child<&ChildActor::Method>(args);

And saw a performance jump since no more malloc in std::function.

It also helped me decipher an animation bug in gtlf importer.

Productivity is x4 or higher.
smallstepforman
·letzten Monat·discuss
The other day I just wanted to loop through characters in a std::string to copy data to a new string with a few escape characters (sending to peripheral device). Simple enough task for AI. I got a coroutine monstrocity back, with copies to std::array and a range based iterator, since I specified C++23. If I specified C++11, I would have received a: char p = src.data(); while (p) { … p++; }

I had the experience to keep calling out AI to simplify and downgrade the solution to something primitive, which ended up smaller, faster, easier to maintain. Juniors with real world experience would not bother, they’ll take the first working AI result.
smallstepforman
·letzten Monat·discuss
BeOS API is based on pixel centers, not that anyone cares anymore …
smallstepforman
·letzten Monat·discuss
In non free countries it wont show up since the ISP will block the domain (eg. Oz). Free countries show it …
smallstepforman
·letzten Monat·discuss
[flagged]
smallstepforman
·vor 2 Monaten·discuss
c++ uses rich type system to avoid aliasing when it can, as well as template meta programming.

Eg: delete_scene(void *arg) vs delete_scene<T>(T *arg)