Sidney

TIL that the Discovery tab is just a feed that can be unsubscribed from. Afterwards it no longer hangs around the tab area of the Home page. Dunno about everyone else but mine was an absolute train wreck of terrible hot takes, NSFW content and AI evangelists. Bsky is a lot more peaceful without it.

Not me over here taking screenshots of everything to OCR them like a caveman. That said, my counter counter reminder: Windows PowerToys (excellent in general) has a built in tool to extract text via OCR from the screen for the times when apps hate you for no reason.

I used to live close to 3 wind turbines and I kinda miss it. They are super cool.

From a graphics programmer standpoint, Liquid Glass is so cool. Doing this effect in real time on a consumer phone is so cool. As a phone user though, what the actual fuck? Why are they shipping me a cool tech demo?

Yyyyeah, Android is a different thing entirely. I actually had to bring back our render pass code to make mobile work again. Just in general an absolute pain if you start with a Vulkan 1.3 codebase and suddenly find 1.1 as the common denominator.

Wait is that true? We ship with only dynamic rendering on Desktop and no one has had any issues with it. Second gen Maxwell+, Intel ARC and GCN whatever we have as min spec all support it.

Why not go for 6 A’s, it’s GTA 6 after all. Are they all lazy over at Rockstar or what?

Until then, the difference in the clouds and general lighting is even more noticeable at dawn/dusk. I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but compute, yo, it's crazy powerful!

(Once more v12, v11 and v10)

Can't wait to look at this again in 5 years time and go "Wow, this looked horrible, how did I ever think this was passable?"

X-Plane 12

X-Plane 11

X-Plane 10

Sometimes it's easy to forget how far things have come. I'm putting some screenshots of various X-Plane versions together for no particular reason and the difference between v12 and v11 is wild. The v11 to v10 difference is a lot harder to see in this view but still there.

Needs to be on spinning rust and with random access though to keep it interesting.

May I interest you in a bit of malloc() in the hot path? All the stutter of PSO compilation without all that stupid API overhead

The trick is to find a local dairy that sells fresh cheese curds and then make it yourself. Shout out to Grass Roots Dairy in Salmon Arm, my preferred cheese curd dealer.

I too used to be young and dumb. Now I'm just dumb. Although I have weirdly fond memories of working late and unnecessary hours, if nothing else it was a tremendous learning experience. I wouldn't want to do it anymore, but I also don't regret having done it.

We have a quarterly user survey about feature requests and issues they would like to see fixed (it's always better AA and more perf), but this time around there apparently was a large enough crowd to get "AMD CrossFire support" on the board. I have extremely bad news for those users...

We maintain our own engine over at Laminar Research for X-Plane. Just to throw a smaller fish in here as well, I’m actually really proud of what we are doing with 3 engine/graphics programmers. It’s definitely a dying art and I don’t think that’s a good thing.

Oh noooooooooo 😂

This is me as well. Sometimes the late hours when everyone is in bed already and it’s quiet are really nice to be productive. But not after a regular 9-5, that’s a “I make my own hours working from home” exclusive.

My hot take here is that this is fundamentally how LLMs work and also exactly why I wouldn’t touch them for development work. I have tried a few times with Vulkan questions that I knew the answer to and my heart goes out to anyone who listens to Claude instead of reading the spec.

Amazing, thank you so much for the tip! This is now a must have extension together with Sponsor Block to make Youtube usable.

Flight sims are super fascinating projects (citation needed, author is heavily biased). One extremely large level, the main character is crazy fast and there are tons of mods/plugins/scenery add-ons. Should be fun, I hope 😄

Looks like I’ll be giving a talk about working on X-Plane at GPC 🥳. Covering how we went from a GL 2.1(!) codebase to a modern Vulkan/Metal one and the challenges and advantages of working on a single product for 30 years, with an eye on the unique challenges of a small studio working on flight sims

I’ve been enjoying doing CAD work on the Surface with a pen, but the keyboard has been incredibly awkward. Figured this was a good opportunity to finally use one of the Pico Pis collecting dust and make a macro pad thingy. Quite pleased with how it turned out.

Made the mistake of looking at the Hacker News comments on the preliminary report of the Air India crash. People who regularly rant about managers demanding features with no understanding of the problem space are now seriously saying “planes should just not allow actions that can crash it” 🙄

Be still, my beating heart <3

Before that they were actually floppy too!

They are growing up so fast 🥹

Still no way to query hardware features and limits programmatically though. Just that one PDF that we all get to hardcode into our games and apps. It’s my biggest gripe and annoyance with Metal and I can’t believe it’s still like this.

Yeah, the 900 series is just at the edge of our support matrix. It’s the one odd one out in a few other ways, like no async compute, no Aftermath support (just don’t crash, duh). It’s a step up though, our previous major version supported down to the 6xx gen and those are rough these days.

Also when I wrote first gen I really meant second gen. First gen might do this too though, but thankfully it’s out of the support matrix and thus not my problem anymore.