71–80 of 113 posts
Fun little format to mess with if you find the docs for it - surprisingly not that difficult to implement (there used to be a wiki with the spec on it, might be gone now?)
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And IRC was even better at it.
I don't think so. I know everybody loves to say that IRC is better than [insert commercial chat application] but in this particular use case discord is superior to irc imo because of the voice/video chat features and greater convenience.
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Compilers beat hand written Assembly for the general use cases. Now beating special use cases, like using vector instructions to parallel process video decoding streams is another matter. It is no accident that after all the efforts improving Java and .NET JITs for auto-vectorization across various vendors, both platforms now expose SIMD intrinsics as well.
The choices and resulting codegen are fairly different. Only one of them works "properly" as of today. Though I'm open to be proven wrong once Panama vectors get stable in the Java land.
Then there is the whole issue when will they reach other implementations beyond OpenJDK, specially a very important alternative implementation running on many phones across the globe.
Nevertheless the need to explicitly being allowed to write vector code is there.
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There was Intel VTune, which I heard was good, though I haven't used it myself. One difficulty is that there are many non-obvious and hard-to-predict factors that interact to produce pipeline stalls. Instructions had specified throughputs and latencies (throughout being the number of cycles before another independent instruction of that type could be initiated; latency being the number of cycles before its output cou…
VTune still exists and is free since a few years. Neat thing with VTune is that it has support for a few runtimes, so it understands for example CPython internals to the point that stack-traces can be a mixture of languages. That's something only becoming available just now outside of VTune, like Python 3.12 has some hooks for Linux perf. A purely pen-and-paper tool was IACA; you simply inserted some macros around a…
> A key speedup technique AoE used was realized during discussions I had with iD software programmer and optimization guru Michael Abrash over lunch at Tia's Mexican Restaurant in Mesquite, TX. How many freeform interactions like this did we lose because of the Internet's illusion of being connected?
I think we've lost some and gained other. People may say that Discord and similar will compensate, greatly, as the number of interactions can grow a lot. On the other hand, I don't think the experience is comparable to fully focusing on the person you're eating in person with.
I worked on port of a Konami game from PSX to PC, that was 1999-2000 - the code (C) had lots of #ifdefs like where inline assembly was placed, and the original "C" code was kept. It seemed all done by one specific programmer, and what really saved us (in porting) the game was the originallly kept "C" code. My mips knowledge was never as good as x86. So yes, it was the norm back then. My second job (1998), was working…
Imagine reading this as a layman
> A key speedup technique AoE used was realized during discussions I had with iD software programmer and optimization guru Michael Abrash over lunch at Tia's Mexican Restaurant in Mesquite, TX. How many freeform interactions like this did we lose because of the Internet's illusion of being connected?
NEVER FORGET WHAT THEY HAVE TAKEN FROM US. WE WERE ONCE A CULTURE. NOW WE ARE LOST, FOREVER. WHITHER OUR SENSE OF BEAUTY. (etc., etc., insert architecture pics to taste) C'mon dude. The opportunity for people to talk to one another about this stuff is unimaginably better than it was back then. Like, here we are, right now, me telling you you're full of shit. What are the chances of us being able to do that in 1999? (…
OOO maybe this is my chance to figure out why the newest "definitive addition" runs so much worse in Wine.
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Well, in certain online games the balancing can't just stay static. But update sizes really are quite insane. One Baldur's Gate 3 update had 100GB and of course that required 100GB additional free space. At that point it was easier to just reinstall the whole game.
The balancing in AoE2:DE can't stay static either - and the pathing seems to have a different bug every other patch. Still a fun game though.