Would you mind checking again? I haven't found any new comments that note the spliced video and old ones I have replied to as well got removed.
If someone knows a way to unremove comments, this is the link to one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiDhbZ8-BZI&lc=UgzCu8FPM4CtR...
The comments on this site (HN) may be what most people are talking about. Youtube comments are too easily censored, so they probably will never manage to stick around.
I have years of experience, but I never had the time (or will) to take on some _very minor nuisances_ or different areas of dev far from my day job expertise.
LLMs solved this. I produced about 12 different things that "I needed" to improve aspects of my life.
Each single took between a few hours to 3 days, and most of them I use daily, they are the most used applications (mobile, desktop and web) for my family.
It is a game changer.
Personalized custom software would never really reach critical mass, LLM enabled it, this is the age of personalized software, egosoftware, llmware.
> Each single took between a few hours to 3 days, and most of them I use daily, they are the most used applications (mobile, desktop and web) for my family.
How have you done distribution and auth? I'm interested in doing something similar but not sure of the best way to approach that part, especially with the family/multiplatform angle as well.
"deployed on TailScale" is going to be quite the hit in this age!
I do think it is a bit scary to imagine software devolving into an unconnected / less connected state. Lots of apps but less protocols, everyone kind of frontiersing their own stuff has enticement and I love the can do itiveness. But I am scared for a major regression, of disconnection.
I do think atproto is an enormously positive hope here. I used to be super thrilled by platform as a service stuff, works like Apache UserGrid that gave a wide range of basic compute platform stuff, accounts, data stores, etc. Letting devs focus on the core competencies, on their value add rather than building boring account systems and what not felt like a huge win back then & expected to see soar.
I think atproto is a very interesting resurgence of something similar-ish, where users have their own Personal Data Stores that your app can read and write records from. And which serves as an auth system for your app! It makes social app building incredibly simple, and there's been so many neat simple apps people have booked up with so much less ceremony than what doing connected stuff used to require. Atproto creating a platform as a service (PaaS) is super cool & may really enable awesome new ways of building.
The group that insists on keeping a community or software project 'non-political' often fails to recognize that this stance is itself a political position. They claim to want a neutral space, but what they really mean is that the existing political view does not align with their own. By dismissing other perspectives as 'political' while treating their own as neutral, they end up being both hypocritical and unwilling (or unable) to acknowledge that their opinions are political too.
Yes! 3bit maybe 4bit can also fit! llama.cpp has MoE offloading so your GPU holds the active experts and non MoE layers, thus you only need 16GB to 24GB of VRAM! I wrote about how to do in this section: https://docs.unsloth.ai/basics/qwen3-coder#improving-generat...
The link is long dead and the Wayback machine doesn’t have a copy.
But in 2001 ATI was caught applying optimizations to Quake 3 when someone realized if you renamed the executable from “quake” to “quack” the score dropped a ton. It was a big scandal.
I know that’s common now but that wasn’t a thing that was done at the time.
Was it a scandal at the time? My understanding of how per-game card-driver optimizations work today is:
1. AAAA Game Studio shits out another unoptimized clunker
2. nvidia considers it a reputational risk if games run at 30 FPS on a 5090
3. They go in, look at the perverse ways the game misuses rendering primitives, and then hacks shit in to make whatever bad things they're doing less bad.
As a gamer, this seems fine to me and i generally blame the AAAA devs for being bad at their jobs or AAAA studio leads for being ok shipping unoptimized messes.
As a software developer, it almost certainly has a bad effect on the ecosystem long term. "Hacks shit in" is the very definition of technical debt, and that has a cost that someone, somewhere is going to have to pay in some form.
I can't reply to the person that replied to you, so
> You’re looking as a dev, but the reality is that a consumer cannot see technical debt.
The consumer can't _see_ technical debt, but they sure as heck can be impacted by it.
- Technical debt means the code base is harder to work with later. So fixes/enhancements take longer to make it into the code (and sometimes never can)
- This particular type of technical debt means the code by the game developers sets precedent, and the next developer may us it as an example. So the amount of code incorrectly using the api grows faster over time
The way the API was used incorrectly "worked", and the game didn't see the negative impact of it because it was "fixed away". And then the incorrect usage is used again on another game and doesn't get the "fixed away" benefit. And the same incorrect usage could happen over and over because "it works".
The next developer at that company that uses or references the crappy code for another project would still have the issue, but not get the benefit of the down-stream GPU vendor hacks to fix the buggy game.
Does anyone talk about how technical debt often just gets thrown into the garbage so we can buy fancy new technical crap, and its what pays for most of yalls jobs.
> technical debt, and that has a cost that someone, somewhere is going to have to pay in some form
There is no reason anyone has to pay each and every iota of technical debt. Plenty of things with technical debt hit end of life and no one ever looks in that code again. I suspect most technical debt goes this way - in program, program never updates (or minor updates), then dies.
Your claim would require every piece of technical debt in anything ever (code, buildings, cars, anywhere) has to be removed before the thing goes end of life or goes into a mode where it never is changed. That seems ludicrous to me.
You’re looking as a dev, but the reality is that a consumer cannot see technical debt. If the studio churns out a game, the vendor sprinkles on some optimizations, people play it and move on, then the tech debt just vaporizes into the void. It’s not real at that point.
Just because a consumer can't see technical debt doesn't mean they aren't paying for it. Most game studios continue to re-use code, so it doesn't just "vaporize" into the void.
Yes. My understanding was it was optimized by reducing precision or something to a visibly apparent degree.
It's different if the driver changes things in ways such that rendered output is the same or at least imperceptibly different. I think there's also a lot more communication between gpu makers and game/engine developers these days; plus a lot more frequent updates.
> My understanding was it was optimized by reducing precision or something to a visibly apparent degree.
If only we had that sort of a control over rendering for every game ourselves - since projects like OptiScaler at least let us claw back control over sometimes proprietary upscaling and even framegen, but it's not quite enough: https://github.com/optiscaler/OptiScaler
I want to be able to freely toggle between different types of AA and SSAO and reflections and lighting and LOD systems and various shader effects (especially things like chromatic aberration or motion blur) and ray tracing and all that, instead of having to hope that the console port that's offered to me has those abilities in the graphics menu and that whoever is making the decisions hasn't decided that actually "low" graphics (that would at least run smoothly) would look too bad for the game's brand image or something.
I was surprised to see “AAAA”. I didn’t know there were 4 As now.
“AAAA Game Studio shits out another unoptimized clunker” seems a paradoxical statement to me. I would have thought “AAAA” meant “highly resourced” game company. Does it just mean high revenue? Lots of players?
AAA/AAAA just means "how much money was spent developing the game". High cost doesn't automatically equal high quality. In fact, it seems after a certain point to mean the opposite.
A friend of mine developed his own game engine, and what he said is you need to bargain with the nVidia driver, because hardware doesn't perform at its peak when you write everything honoring the spec, and driver feels free to ignore your commands about how you want to do some things (e.g. memory transfers).
Like board manufacturers, the game developers also need to please the drivers and do the way driver silently dictates to them (regardless of what DirectX, OpenGL or Vulkan says), otherwise all bets are off.
Except that if a developer has that kind of market pull, nVidida will gladly help those devs with getting it right. They are excellent at maintaining developer relations.
In at least one past version of Windows (circa 1990s), if you tried to replace the default web browser of IE with another choice you were given an Open File dialog window to choose the executable.
Funny quirk, though: that particular window wouldn't show files named firefox.exe. It would accept that as typed input, if you were at the correct folder, but the file listing omitted that particular file.
Maybe it was mozilla.exe; it was a long time ago. But that was the discovery that pushed me off IE forever.
I vaguely remember that being the start of the browser prompts to set your current browser as the default. It was so hard to just configure that they had to build a way to set it within the browser.
You saw that again in more modern times when Microsoft removed support for the APIs they provided to set browser defaults, forcing browser makers to write step by step instructions on what to click to set the default browser.
I believe they walked that back, but it left such a bad taste that I switched my installation of Windows from default mode to EU mode in order to avoid it. And come to think of it, I haven’t used my windows machine for much outside of AI in about 6 months.
But Microsoft is not alone in these sort of defaults games - every OS or browser maker, Apple, Google, Firefox, wants to create moats so they can more easily monetize your usage of a product. I never thought I’d prefer the business model of free to play games, where they just outright ask you for money and have to keep finding new ways to entertain instead of relying on hard to change defaults and selling your data.
An app being able to see itself as the default browser sounds like such a dangerous API, especially if it can be done silently without the user realizing it.
There are bugs that certain games rely on and features that some don’t use. I’m currently trying to optimize a library out of spite. (I want it to work better than the competitor that caused me a lot of problems on a recent project). The amount of conditional logic around what is essentially a function to increment a value is breathtaking.
A simple example would be that the function glGetString(GL_EXTENSIONS) crashes the original Quake engine and many licensees, because it's expecting no more than a 256 character string.
The driver looks to see if a known old game is calling it, and if it's one known to crash, it returns no more than 256 characters, and likely also puts all the _old_ extensions that the game is likely to know and react to in the string.
There are also all sorts of games that called APIs in a particular order or set particular options, because they represented a "fast path" at the time, and now they don't, but if you're that program, then yes they do.
Ultimately, this clutter is what let do the development of the Vulcan API, to stop games second-guessing graphics APIs which themselves second-guess the games.
To avoid doxxing myself: In a deep call stack it’s possible to end up sanitizing inputs multiple times and in different ways.
A frequent example I’ve encountered is web frameworks that have to keep checking for escaped text because they didn’t write it in horizontal layers where you know for sure that all inputs have been scrubbed when they reach this function but not that one. So the same functions get called with data that comes from your team and from customers. Reuse is tricky.
- Unescape, sanitize or validate at all entry points.
- Escape all outputs (this includes the database queries).
If you follow those simple rules, you never have to check once you are past a controller. And you should fuzz your controllers to make sure no unexpected data makes it past there.
I was pretty young at the time, but I recall the market for graphics being a lot wider open at the time Quake was released. Remember 3dfx? They produced the Voodoo series of graphics cards. They're barely a distant memory now.
Quake was also the standard for a game that was willing to fully exploit the hardware of the time.
I didn't mention one or two people, I mentioned a theoretical strategy that is also employed by non-unionized bureaucracies. And I admitted that the strategy is impeded by the fact that many software developers are self-loathing people with no spine.
It is possible that obedient people need highly paid union bosses, i.e., new leaders they can follow.
why do you need a union? everyone should just set their personal standards for what they accept/demand, and then let the market sort it out? someone wants to work for $20/hour programming, in a fashion that can satisfy some demand? great, then I will simply NOT be doing that job. Everyone wins even though I do not get that particular job. Someone is willing to work 7 days a week as they prefer to grind to earn more money? good on them. Its not gonna be me, They win the job, I dont.
Nobody wants to inhale toxic fumes in some factory? well then the company had better invest in safety equipment, or work dont get done. We dont need a union for this
History, especially the industrial age, says that attitude leads to a race to the bottom. There's always someone who's willing to work for a little less, in a little shittier conditions, to pack a few more family members into a shitty apartment to make do.
If you leave it up to each worker to fend for himself with no negotiating power beyond his personal freedom to walk out, you get sweatshops and poorhouses in any industry where labor is fungible. If you want nice societies where average people can live in good homes with yards and nearby playgrounds and go to work at jobs that don't destroy their bodies and souls, then something has to keep wages at a level to support all that.
I'm not necessarily a fan of unions; I think in many cases you end up with the union screwing you from one side while the corporation screws you from the other. And the public sector unions we have today team up with the state to screw everyone else. But workers at least need the freedom to organize, or all the pressure on wages and conditions will be downward for any job that most people can do. The alternative is to have government try to keep wages and conditions up, and it's not good at that, so it just creates inflation with wages trailing behind.
Employees also face an enormous propaganda machine constantly telling them unions are bad, they just take your dues, you'll never do better negotiating together, and so on. The usual techie arrogance also plays a role: "Unions benefit common workers, but I am the one uniquely well-paid hard worker that is skilled at negotiaton who would not be advantaged by a union. Therefore unions are useless!" Every tech worker thinks that they alone are the captain of their industry and couldn't possibly benefit from coordinating with everyone else.
> Nobody wants to inhale toxic fumes in some factory? well then the company had better invest in safety equipment, or work dont get done. We dont need a union for this
We tried that in the past. The work still got done, and workers just died more often. If you want to live in that reality move to a developing country with poor labor protections.
Actors. directors, writers, and professional athletes are in unions. How much do movie stars or first-pick quarterbacks make?
How many retail workers are in unions? Is the compensation higher than industries/sectors with high union membership?
The extent of unionization in a field is irrelevant to how much top performers make in that field. Unions establish a floor for employment conditions and compensation. Market demand determines the top end.
