TomF

TomF, 4 months ago to random

People keep asking me for advice on fitness for us professional keyboard abusers, so I wrote it down in one place. Part 1 of "Exercise for nerds who hate exercise":
https://cohost.org/tomforsyth/post/4111638-exercise-for-nerds-w

TomF, 6 months ago to random

Me after reading 50 hours of Nanite docs and tech talks: "yeah, neat tech, but is it really that much of an advance?"

Me after playing Talos Principle 2 for 6.2 hours: "holy fucking shit"

Great job @BrianKaris and team.

TomF, 3 months ago to random

If your debug build is faster than 25% the speed of your release build, you're not doing enough debug checking. Buy your devs faster computers.

TomF, 7 months ago to random

German speakers! So we all know (we do, right?) that Arnold Schwarzenegger didn't do his own German dubs - because he sounds like a yokel. They were done by Thomas Danneberg (who died a few weeks ago - RIP).

BUT what I want to know is - do Arnie's catchphrases have the same recognizability in German as they do in English? If you say to someone in a menacing tone "Ich komme wieder" do they smile and laugh knowingly, or just look at you oddly?

TomF, 6 months ago to random

Socks are so odd. Why don't trousers just keep going and go around the feet? You could still put shoes on over them. But no - we have chosen to have a few inches of drafty unprotected ankle.

TomF, 10 months ago to racing

#Caterham #Racing Just got some gorgeous pictures back from a few weekends ago, and I know this is a nerdy crowd maybe not into cars, but I need to share them with you. I know some of you have gimpsuits and fursuits - well this is my petrolsuit, so indulge me. I'm #42 in the white+cyan. Yes, that is a HHGTTG reference :-)

TomF, 11 months ago to random

I keep forgetting that the familiar Mandelbrot set is just one 2D slice (at the origin) through the 4D Julia set. If you take parallel slices through other places, you can find some really fucked-up little goblin fellahs.

TomF, 6 months ago to random

Here's a picture. Quickly count how many players are on each of the two teams, then answer the poll in the following comment.

TomF, 3 months ago to random

Oh that's a fun bug! So Unity has both Matrix4x4 and float4x4, and the have slightly different syntax, but close enough. The big difference is float4x4 is significantly faster. So a lot of people replace one with the other - happy.

BUT....

To do matrix multiplication with Matrix4x4, you do a = b*c.

To do it with float4x4 you have to do a = math.mul(b,c)

OK whatever. The problem is that a=b*c COMPILES FINE. It just does the componentwise multiply is all.

W
T
F
people.

TomF, 3 months ago to random

TIL - the sugar "galactose" sounds really awesome because GALACTIC amirite? But it's actually called that because it's "ga lactose" - which just means "from milk" in Greek. Because it's one of the sugars in milk.

...which had me thinking wait so where does "galaxy" come from anyway oh no it's not just Greek for... yes, yes it is. "Galaxy" is literally just "milky way" in Greek.

TomF, 9 months ago to random

Remember - code is for PEOPLE to read, not machines. If the only reason we wrote code was to get machines to do stuff, we'd still be writing assembly. Languages were invented so that PEOPLE could read the code too. Never forget that's who you're writing code for.

TomF, 7 months ago to random

My technogrudging parent needs an E-book of some sort. What should she get that won't bind her soul into an eternity of torment in quarterly payments, or become a useless brick in a year?

TomF, 1 month ago to random

Computers like the ZX Spectrum had each 8x8 block have 1 bit per pixel, and that 1 bit selects between two colours chosen by an 8-bit attribute. For the Spectrum the attribute had 3 bits for colour 0, 3 bits for colour 1, 1 bit to make them bright, and a completely pointless "flash" attribute.

But what if you had twice as many bits?

Well, you'd have four colours per pixel to choose from, and a 16-bit attribute chunk. So 16/4 = 4 bits per colour. Same as the Speecy. Buuuut....

TomF, 1 year ago to random

#mega68k is a powerful beast! Aliens & player done by blitter, parallax background layers with streaming tileplanes, and bullets & sparks done with sprites.

Almost runs at 60fps, but drops during hectic stuff, so will be a VERY solid 30fps even with extra fripperies.

(and yes, all the graphics are ahem borrowed placeholder right now - will be replaced in due course)

TomF, 5 months ago to random

Musical Wikipedia spelunking again, so brace yourselves! (thread...)

TomF, 4 months ago to random

I know it sounds odd for a cutting-edge person like me, but my personal home PC was so old it didn't even have an SSD - not even a small one. And I really noticed this in game load times. They didn't just get bad, they got ATROCIOUS. Everything else was fine - even a potato CPU and GPU can run new games, but the load times are AGONISING.

TomF, 3 months ago to random

"If the candidates were Biden and Hitler, who would you vote for?"

"Well not Hitler obviously."

"OK, but if 40 percent of people were going to vote Hitler, who would you vote for?"

"I guess maybe Biden."

"OK, so you understand the principle of voting for the least terrible outcome..."

TomF, 3 months ago to random

@aras Getting a shitload of identical spam postings in Japanese (I think?) from random alphanumeric address at m.mxin.moe

TomF, 10 months ago to random

I'm finally biting the bullet and doing Boss Fights. The thing is, I want each boss fight to be a unique thing with custom code to show new and fun things to the player, and so I can just throw Cool Stuff in there to show off, but without breaking the rest of the game.

Buuuuut that means they're full of strange exceptions and hacks and stuff. And that offends my OCD coder "elegance" sensibilities. Even though I actually WANT them to be that way.

Left brain vs right brain - FIGHT!

TomF, 1 month ago to random

WTF is an "AI-capable chip". It's either Turing-Compatible or it's not. Everything else is just a question of performance.

TomF, 1 year ago to random

Ahhhh... the feeling when a simple typo costs you three hours of screaming "what the fuck" as your meticulous debugging continues to insist everything is working perfectly, despite the cold hard truth that it is not.

TomF, 4 months ago to random

Someone reminded me that my absolute favourite UK-vs-US phrase is "boob tube". It means such utterly different things. Well done English.

TomF, 6 months ago to random

I wish the GPU teams at Apple nothing but the best - they've made an amazing bit of hardware.

But it can only be "game-changing" if Apple gave a shit about games. And they don't. And they never have.

Maybe a good GPU and a decent HMD can change this? But right now Apple's history means nobody in the game industry trusts them at all. It's going to take a decade of work to undo that damage. And it's going to require going against everything Steve believed in. Not sure Apple can do that.

TomF, 7 months ago to random

Gaussian Splatting is basically three phases:

1. Capture with photogrammetry. This is pretty standard "where is the camera" followed by stuff like Bundle Adjustment.

2. Cull redundant points by growing gaussians to cover the culled ones.

3. Render them.

TomF, 8 months ago to random

Wife and I just standing in the supermarket gobsmacked at the amount of bullshit you can fit in one small label.