Dr Jess Birch

Researcher (program analysis); technical artist turned (sometime graphics) programmer; long-retired game critic; reader of the Local timeline; very tall queer enby.
Paid to do a great many different things over the years.

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Last Notes

2026-10-27 14:14:22 UTC

I'm just not sure how I can find common ground with someone who thinks they are generating a new enforceable copyright by saying "Claude, make me an app" rather than violating the copyrights of everyone whose code was used in the training data (at any point) who didn't explicitly allow such permissive uses in their license.

2026-10-13 20:18:47 UTC

Honestly, "tree puncher" is such a good genre description. Instantly know exactly what that is without having to tie it to a single originator or populariser.

2026-09-23 17:21:41 UTC

One day our long collective flickering nightmare will be over. We do not have to accept the crawling ants along the edges inside our images (to reference a 1970s paper on aliasing). https://youtu.be/-QKUGB8NjKA?t=142

2026-09-22 09:49:26 UTC

Digging holes in the garden is a lot more enjoyable in 3 C cold than 23 C heat.
Unfortunately the time when you want to be digging holes to transplant stuff in the autumn is not compatible with cold weather.
Edit: "Feels like 29 C." Yikes, well that explains a lot.

2026-08-20 11:37:11 UTC

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@nprofile…j05z I always assume that US are using "cups" as a vague measurement meaning "eh, like a 150ml filled small wine glass?" rather than the actual 240ml technical value that always seems to convert into too much water.

2026-08-17 11:56:49 UTC

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@nprofile…29up Or did they "sell" them, just like Sam Altman wrote a letter of intent to buy 40% of the memory chips for server farms he is never going to build funded by paper money that isn't real investments from other AI players (who are all pretending the same dollar bouncing round the corporate bank accounts makes for a trillion dollars of total investment)?
I could see their "already sold out" changing as soon as the AI bubble actually pops and AI datacentres are as popular as superfund sites.

2026-08-17 11:48:12 UTC

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@nprofile…29up My pessimistic outlook is that memory chip vendors have made more money in the last 18 months than they did in the previous 40 years combined & will not want to go back to the previous norm (so want to fix a new higher price, lower volume world of personal computing devices).
My optimistic view is that we can't keep on going like this and the threat of China's Project 2035 smashing into profiteers (+ AI bubble pop) will drive down prices in the next 2-3 years, back to sustainable levels.

2026-08-17 11:30:14 UTC

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@nprofile…29up It seems like a product where the second gen device will be a much better value and all round product that becomes genuinely "good enough" to play most games on a TV. Also should happen after RAM price nonsense ends so will be much better + priced sanely.
(I realise I also said "wait for 2nd gen" about the Steam Deck back in the day and those internals are still basically unchanged today. But I don't think I'm wrong just because Valve have failed to iterate past a new screen.)

2026-08-09 21:46:36 UTC

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@nprofile…nuu0 I lucked out being grandfathered into a Steam copy (from buying the OG Quake digital release all those years ago; back before GOG existed) but older games like that are exactly the sort of game I moved to buying almost exclusively on GOG due to better compatibility/community support and guaranteed removal of any DRM.
Agreed that it almost seems intentional to not be clear about the status of updates on other stores.

2026-08-09 21:45:59 UTC

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@nprofile…nuu0 I lucked out being grandfathered into a Steam copy (from buying the OG Quake digital release all those years ago; back before GOG existed) but older games like that are exactly the sort of game I moved to buying almost exclusively on GOG due to better compatibility/community support and guaranteed removal of any DRM.
Agreed that is almost seems intentional to not be clear about the status of updates on other stores.

2026-08-09 21:32:08 UTC

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@nprofile…nuu0 I really hope this just means no one at MS bothered to submit the patch to the store early (despite going through cert on all the other consoles ahead of time!) and the updates will be coming once approved.
"This message appears because the Dawn of the Machine update is currently available on supported platforms, while the GOG and Epic Games Store versions do not yet include this content." [I'm reading a lot into the word "yet".]

2026-08-09 18:56:21 UTC

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@nprofile…d0yj I wish this was me! 😬
Forecasts just dropped the high chance heavy rain for late August here. Going by current forecast, we could have no rain at all between mid June and early September. Almost apocalyptic for "the rainy island".

2026-08-07 15:51:39 UTC

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@nprofile…29up Even worse, the Netflix deal is something Netflix are paying for a 6 hour exclusivity on. The video will appear on official Rockstar socials six hours later.
If I was a Netflix subscriber, I would be questioning what the recent price hikes went towards buying.

2026-08-04 06:54:51 UTC

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@nprofile…29up So they just implemented their own in-house compatible 5.1 audio solution... right? Right?
Honestly, I'll take a logo (especially in the era of quick resume consoles where you just don't see the opening logos at all when resuming a title) if it means I get access to important tech that I would otherwise have to do without, like spatial audio.

2026-08-01 18:57:53 UTC

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@nprofile…nuu0 I did the same some years ago (including swapping the white goods in my kitchen for new efficient units).
Moved from an average 400W power draw for the flat down to an absolute minimum of ~50W (and now float around 150W average during most months). Even when the aircon is fighting against 40 C outside, I will keep my daily average under that 400W level.

2026-07-29 10:09:25 UTC

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@nprofile…29up Actually quite the opposite. The DLSS (old CNN model because 3050 didn't give much die area up to the matrix units to run the newer 4+ transformer models) is a huge perf multiplier on my low power GPU.
Control at 1440p with all RT on to get that peak visual quality (no screen space/disocclusions issues)? No problem.
Of course, only helps if games use it. Although I'm seeing more and more mods going back and doing major work to integrate new tech (Prey 2017, Mirror's Edge 1).

2026-07-29 10:00:23 UTC

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@nprofile…29up My 3050 laptop GPU only has 4GB and a shocking number of games (in this era of being told 8GB, not even 6GB, is a bare minimum) do not care at all. Really is games that released for PS5 and got ported to PC that seem to cause major issues (which also can have raw perf issues with a 35W smol 3050 anyway, masking slowdown from having to jump to system memory for reads).

2026-07-20 05:56:19 UTC

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@nprofile…0kf8 This is the big questions. Why would Take2/Ubisoft/EA invest heavily on making a "promptable" game when this means that all their customers can just make their own games exactly customised to their desires as long as they also spend the money on cloud AI resources to build it.
The corporate adoption of these tools is a vote for "this stuff will never get cheap enough that we will lose to our own clients cutting us out of the loop".

2026-07-10 16:01:10 UTC

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@nprofile…29up @nprofile…gfdd This is real "insurance company refund all the dues you've paid rather than pay out on your policy when the worst happens" behaviour (should be illegal).

2026-07-10 15:58:43 UTC

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@nprofile…29up Is this the same for other brands (I note that Micron literally no longer have a Crucial brand as they stopped producing RAM for consumer systems - at the time they said they would not longer be shipped RAM to channel after Feb 2026; which would be the longest dotted line).

2026-07-09 19:01:48 UTC

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@nprofile…d0yj Although missing from the new version, the standalone Freedom Cry for the OG Black Flag may be worth picking up. (I can't speak to authenticity but you can look up the writing team yourself and decide is this is also questionable.)

2026-07-09 18:55:35 UTC

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@nprofile…6xt6 I am amazed they tried the annual release cadence for major releases (kinda two around Black Flag actually because they also had Rogue the next year on the older consoles if you wanted to play all the major games as well as next-gen Unity) for so long with this series. Although earlier games were shorter, that was relative and they're all quite impressively open so a world to get lost in and learn.

2026-07-07 06:38:26 UTC

Dealing with a very wet country that doesn't have enough water for four months of the year (due to the water infrastructure being privatised decades ago to "bring in new investment" and then it got stripped for parts by profiteers who didn't invest in new infrastructure) is making me appreciate how much water we could reclaim if we just did things slightly differently.
Of course, much of that is not automated and would require some redesigns to make "easy". But the water is there.

2026-07-06 16:51:41 UTC

A game publisher who has been collecting studios like they were EA in previous decades are slashing 4,800 jobs (including 3,200 game developers) while saying "These changes are about a bigger future for Xbox, not a smaller one".
Meanwhile, the entire consumer computing revolution of the last 40 years is under threat while the profiteers who make memory chips look to make more profit today than they have for the entire history of that 40 year period.
We literally can't keep on going like this.

2026-07-03 18:33:14 UTC

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@nprofile…29up Stuck on a brand new (well, one year on sale) $500 premium console and co-op only. Really hope they take this style and make a solo sequel that you can play everywhere.

2026-07-03 12:27:48 UTC

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@nprofile…wgz8 This stuff is forcing me into early retirement. Not because I can't adapt but because I do not want to be involved in making everything worse and passing that mess on to the next generation to deal with.

2026-06-29 12:09:24 UTC

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@nprofile…5y0h At a guess: Specular was "new" and just like bloom (initially blown out) or color grading (initially "piss filter") is gets overused so everything has that "clingfilm wrap" look as they're covering all surfaces with a cubemap despite many of said surfaces being far less glossy in real life. Also probably didn't help that you'd only have a low resolution gloss map if you had textures at all (rather than doing per model uniform gloss value).

2026-06-27 05:48:18 UTC

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@nprofile…zxj6 Back in possibly 2004 (maybe earlier?) we moved our game project from CVS to SVN because our CVS server exploded and ate the database, and it turned out the backup copy was already also corrupted. So we had to piece the current version together from everyone's local copies and swore to never let that happen again. "Good" times. 😬

2026-06-23 00:14:21 UTC

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@nprofile…d0yj I do wonder what Project Helix actually becomes and if there's some way that a lower end (modernised Series X tier hardware) model also gets released at some point and is open enough that it can be opened up to run Linux. AFAIK you can run Linux on any MS Surface hardware (unless they've locked it all down recently).

2026-06-22 23:17:31 UTC

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@nprofile…nuu0 Every Steam "social feature" makes me want to use Steam less and less. Lack of moderation (or telling devs that they are responsible for moderating these spaces because they are tied to their store pages) and incredibly toxic "user review" culture to name a couple of things. And seemingly Valve don't care to fix this (they could hire eg some people who Elon got rid of at Twitter who at least tried to tamp down the worst toxicity on that platform to help).

2026-06-20 08:34:10 UTC

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@nprofile…nuu0 No, sure thing. Didn't mean to make you feel that way, I totally get it.

2026-06-20 08:15:09 UTC

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@nprofile…nuu0 Ye, the maths here (where electricity is expensive) is they may take 5-10 years to make back the cost based on typical savings.
But if you're just looking to reduce your environmental impact from using aircon, then they're kinda ideal because during those periods of peak heat, that's exactly when the panels will be able to give you 800W of electricity "for free" and that works out to about 2kW of cooling if you're using a EER 2.6 or better aircon unit.

2026-06-20 08:09:27 UTC

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@nprofile…nuu0 We've had about a hundred articles in the various papers, always with a photo of a Balkonkraftwerk to illustrate it, in recent months (up to now, it has been illegal to do this kind of plug-in installation here due to laws designed to avoid setting fire to your socket lines in low quality buildings; but we're told it's all good now and actually there was no real risk before) https://www.theguardian.com/money/2026/jun/16/retail-giants-join-uk-government-drive-to-boost-plug-in-balcony-solar-panels

2026-06-20 08:04:15 UTC

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@nprofile…nuu0 Here in the UK we keep being told that "plug-in solar" (which uses a micro inverter to align the power conversion to the local loop and just allows whatever is on the same plug loop to be powered by that rather than using mains) has taken Germany by storm. For €300-500 for a basic kit (scale up if you add more panels). And obviously you'd have lots of solar energy during the times when you want aircon on.

2026-06-20 07:03:06 UTC

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@nprofile…nuu0 This year was the year that broke me (when it got almost this hot in May!) and I've added a portable aircon unit to my home office so I don't have to take weeks off work because "too hot to think". Had already done stuff like silvering the windows but it wasn't enough to hold the temps down over a sustained heatwave like this. I assume much of Northern Europe is going to adopt aircon (and solar to power it) in the coming years.

2026-06-18 14:33:58 UTC

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@nprofile…6xt6 Especially as it seems a lot of places aren't even pre"orders" for digital. It's pre"purchasing".
When I used to preorder (oof, been a while; GTA V for PS3 I just walked down to the shops on release day) then you'd pay maybe $5 up front and then pay the rest on release day when picking it up. These digital storefronts seem to want to take my money today, in full, for an item they can duplicate infinitely on launch day at no cost. Seems borderline a scam.

2026-06-06 10:45:53 UTC

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@nprofile…29up Give their recent path tracing modes (with hair strands etc), I can believe this may not be real-time capture but would not be at all surprised if this was rendered "in engine". Honestly, some of their maxed out in-engine stuff is clearly ahead of the Resi CGI movies they've been releasing recently (certainly miles ahead of the old cheap CGI movies they did for the series).

2026-05-29 18:41:50 UTC

Highly amusing to me that when Amazon is concerned, most people can agree with comments by Reggie Fils-Aimé about how Nintendo considered Amazon's demand for giving them preferential pricing in order to be allowed on their store as illegal monopolistic crimes Nintendo could not take part in (hence their products not being listed at various times on that store).
Meanwhile, when Valve distorts whole market pricing by making retail price demands on suppliers listed on Steam, it's often crickets.

2026-05-22 21:45:44 UTC

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@nprofile…nuu0 Wait, they remade it for the 3DS? I thought they remastered it? (A remake is like Resident Evil 2/3/4 to Resident Evil 2/3/4, right?)

2026-05-15 20:50:54 UTC

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@nprofile…5y0h Unfortunately so.
But the moment that sentiment turns, this sounds like cause for a shareholder revolt that takes out not just the execs but also the entire board behind them for "terrible things that we just forgot to mention earlier, when we though they might actually end up in our favour".

2026-05-15 20:44:32 UTC

Your CEO wanted to guess what the hot next trend for the company to follow would be. They wanted to get data analysis of your business metrics without paying experts anymore to generate it. They handed all your internal business data over to the companies who spent the last 10 years stealing every scrap of text they could find and then claiming that actually IP theft isn't real if you only feed the data into a Chinese room.
Really sounds to me like grounds for immediate termination.

2026-05-08 19:49:19 UTC

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@nprofile…nz6q How many of these votes are just Tories who are now moving to the "new Tories"? Also the fact that Labour are historically unpopular (yes, Starmer is significantly less popular than Corbyn and can't get out as many voters + everyone with a conscience can see how the fascist press are now doing to the Jewish leader of the Greens what they did to Corbyn and so know where to move their vote).
At this point, Labour are almost working for Farage to push undecided voters away.

2026-04-21 23:52:03 UTC

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@nprofile…d0yj I only saw it when it came to streaming just after release (so almost a decade ago) so don't remember it very well. Beat Takeshi hands in another pretty checked-out performance, Pilou Asbæk seems to be the only actor having any fun, and where it deviated from the original I think they always made a weaker decision. But as I said, all of this is half-remembered vibes of why I didn't enjoy it a decade ago.
I'm looking forward to the new anime, based on the OG manga art style.

2026-04-20 05:07:40 UTC

The mad-libs of Tomodachi Life (mediated through off-screen cameraphone photos because Nintendo have disabled all official sharing tools) sure is something to observe in the era of AI slop and "deepfakes". Obviously no one is going to go after cartoons under likeness rights but it does feel markedly different to see "wow, look at what I made this real human person, who I have recreated in this game, say! lol!" stuff in an age where many people are weaponizing a more realistic version of that.

2026-04-16 21:31:42 UTC

Have any RPG-as-a-service actually gone back to completely rebuild their old content?
I assume that only a successful game would have the budget to even try that and also the incentive to remake their early content (as this is your first impression for new players you need to route through your ever-growing campaign). So far I've only seen games that offer skip-ahead & basic QoL that impacts the entire game.
I can't keep saying "WuWa is amazing... but you need to get to Black Shores first".

2026-04-12 17:59:17 UTC

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@nprofile…d0yj Personally, I have been losing nerve sensitivity over my life and so I may not even notice minor cuts and scrapes anymore. I find this aligns with my memory of elders, who seemed not to realise when they'd injured themself.
At least some of this stuff seems to be well-known but also include various "well, not sure why that works" shrugs from my scan of more recent papers around the topic. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroscience.2021.02.015

2026-04-10 16:50:08 UTC

Amazon busy "doing a Stadia", turning Luna into an ex-store where all the games people purchased are vanishing (also removing the "bring your own games" stuff tied to other stores & subscriptions. The only thing left you will be able to play is if you subscribe to their own monthly package.
> "Previously purchased titles will remain playable through June 10, 2026, after which they will be removed from Luna."
This is teaching players to never buy digital games as they will be taken away.

2026-04-08 14:40:19 UTC

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@nprofile…v4j3 Not only do games scale, but unlike previous generations where "Low" was visibly unrecognisable (all shadows simply cease to exist? distant geometry totally missing? major visual fx from the post processing pipeline totally gone?), today the lower end of the scale is just a less stable and lower res version of the high end in many ways. The details change but the "artistic intent" is far more likely to survive moving from a 600W GPU to a 6W APU.

2026-04-08 14:38:01 UTC

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@nprofile…v4j3 Games today scale from 5090 to SteamDeck/Switch 2 and are pretty incredible considering the massive power and tech gap between the top and bottom.
When Crysis was a brand new game, you would simply not be able to run it on any hardware that was 3 years old. Today with have people with a decade old Pascal GPU expecting the latest games to run on it.

2026-04-08 14:29:46 UTC

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@nprofile…v4j3 Honestly this seems like a bug in the transitions from the baked/cached distant shadows (are they just using CSMs until the nearby geometry is in a local BVH and then swaps to RT reflections? I have not followed FH6 dev super closely to know their tech claims) to the real-time RT ones and something that can be fixed in patches.
The only thing I can think of that TAAU does is mean that you actually have the perf budget for more complex tech? Without it, would be the same just at 15fps?

2026-04-08 14:22:31 UTC

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@nprofile…v4j3 20 years ago the shadows would have first drawn in 20m ahead of the car and we'd have thought nothing of it. Actually Fallout 4 on console still does exactly that and it's got nothing to do with RT or upscaling.
FH5 doesn't have RT (certainly not at launch) and used MSAA not TAAU until a later patch so the main LoD transitions and shadow concerns were not developed with either of those as a primary factor.

2026-04-06 10:30:37 UTC

If we are to believe the AI execs, GenAI for coding provides the work of a team of junior programmers to be deployed when managed by an existing human coder. And this is the promise that mgmt/your execs expect you to live up to when they mandate heavy GenAI use in your coding group.
So why have they not doubled your pay? You used to be a coder, singular, in a team. Maybe you had an intern but not much. Now you are being asked to manage a team of junior coder (AIs). And should be paid as such.

2026-04-03 12:10:57 UTC

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@nprofile…d0yj Comment blocks or added weird nonsense like every thing that isn't the chronological list of videos on the subscription page on YT (or any other webapp that keeps messing with a feed of data I opt into).

2026-04-03 08:37:13 UTC

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@nprofile…29up Valve: data is my passion.
Also Valve:
"Simplified Chinese 22.75% (-31.85%); English 39.09% (+16.82%)"
Sorry, the headline is woefully wrong. As with many previous months, Steam survey is just massively changing their sampling pattern to either include or exclude a lot more Chinese systems and so the huge changes elsewhere are just a result of that. Keeps happening. Does no one at Valve sanity check their numbers each month before publication?!

2026-03-26 10:23:59 UTC

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@nprofile…5y0h A lot of these strategy (and idle) games now have "autoplay" where you let the automatic action ordering take over (as long as your team is strong enough to complete content without optimal action choices always being made). So the game is doing stuff but you can be playing an action game on a different machine at the same time.
Interestingly, if you run several games at once on the same PC, it always works fine with Steam. It's only when you want to have a laptop and desktop both gaming.

2026-03-26 10:14:54 UTC

I'm finding it hard to understand why you'd use Steam for F2P or idle or casual games. Something you might have open while also looking at something on a different screen. How does this work with a Steam Deck?
I am getting "You are logged in on another computer already playing X" when trying to start running Y. And if I proceed, the forced disconnect will terminate plenty of games. So I can be logged into my account in the app on several machines at once, but as soon as you game, no dice?!

2026-03-25 18:36:15 UTC

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@nprofile…zxj6 For me a non-deterministic calculating device is simply a non-starter.
I don't care how convenient it is 99 times out of 100 (compared with requiring more explicit instructions) if 1 time in 100 it just does something entirely different (or subtly different so I may miss it did it wrong). And right now nothing in this stochastic mess is getting anywhere close to that 99 in 100 tier of reliability.

2026-03-05 15:04:15 UTC

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@nprofile…m644 @nprofile…5y0h Also got me thinking of the house system of Battletech (but that's probably also a lot of Dune influencing that setting, along with some Foundation and other epics).

2026-03-04 17:16:45 UTC

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@nprofile…29up I worry that the most (unified) RAM is 8GB when a base Air (smaller volume as thinner, just as light despite a bigger battery) can be configured up to 32GB. Also very poor connectivity with the DP over USB losing DSC (Air is 4K 240Hz, this drops that all the way to 60Hz due to DP1.4 8Gbsp limits) and the second USB port being 480Mbps of USB2.
I get that they're reusing a phone SoC but it seems to cut too hard into PHY/connectivity stuff a laptops wants to keep.

2026-02-27 19:04:54 UTC

You ever think about how they moved the pop-up volume info screen from the top of the desktop to the bottom middle for Windows 11 and then, at the same time, moved the buttons you click to open quick-launch apps from the bottom left corner to also the bottom middle of the desktop. Such that, if you change the volume before opening an app, you have to wait an extra 5 seconds for the volume display to go away (as it sits over the app icon)?
I think about this all the time. I wish I didn't have to.

2026-02-27 11:23:48 UTC

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@nprofile…ezqw @nprofile…j05z Paramount Skydance already did exactly this to CBS News (now running under the leadership of genocidal fascist and anti-queer extremist Bari Weiss, platforming pro-Trump propaganda).

2026-02-26 11:41:25 UTC

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@nprofile…nuu0 I mean, game developers _only_ pay Valve [up to] $5bn a year* to operate Steam. With such a tight revenue stream, surely it would be unreasonable to expect many improvement?
* 30% of estimated platform revenue as given by https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/valve-makes-almost-usd50-million-per-employee-raking-in-more-cash-per-person-than-google-amazon-or-microsoft-gaming-giants-350-employees-on-track-to-generate-usd17-billion-this-year

2026-02-22 21:38:04 UTC

Have absolutely had enough of AI this & AI that. Everywhere I've been looking regarding work is nothing but. Try to relax on a computer, even more & worse AI. "You've got to join us or you'll be left behind!" not just at work but also in technical stuff I do for fun. I'm not dusting off my 15 year old undergrad notes about ML or "learning to vibe code productively".
Been slow-boiling my brain. Especially anyone who thinks pushback is actually oppressing them. You've got billionaires backing you!

2026-02-17 06:13:44 UTC

I cannot think of anything I would like to hear less about in a major 3D engine. This is not advertising the enabling of more people to contribute code via visual programming tools, this is claiming you can fire your entire coding team and dump whatever their copyright-laundering lie-bots spit out as production-ready:
"enable developers to prompt full casual games into existence with natural language only" https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/unity-says-its-ai-tech-will-soon-be-able-to-prompt-full-casual-games-into-existence-

2026-01-20 02:12:36 UTC

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@nprofile…d0yj Yes, the UK has a history of not allowing political speech. You can run this back to hundreds of years of history and court precedent (a judge once said roughly "you may be legally allowed to walk down the street breathing quietly, but I'm not fully convinced about the latter"). But then you can also wrap in more recent draconian "anti-terror" stuff right into the recent memory of the IRA (and co-opting US anti-terror laws since then/adding in digital snooping stuff).

2026-01-16 18:45:45 UTC

Sure seems like the leading executives of high revenue games and other media companies have enjoyed the profits of underpaying for outsourced art from China for years and are only now starting to realise they just trained the next generation of skilled talent in a country where they have very little direct control.
"We need GenAI to compete with China - look at their volume of developers making games now aimed at a global audience!" really is "how dare these contractors work for themselves".

2026-01-14 22:38:14 UTC

The book burners are out in force (look up 1930s Germany and "protecting the people from degenerate media" - check out those armbands for exactly who has been leading this charge for the last century) and their Sauron-like gaze is firmly on gaming.
Even if you don't care for the content being sold, if something passes the legal threshold to be on sale it is not up to American financial institutes or Australian extremists to dictate the global acceptable marketplace standards for content.

2026-01-14 15:01:51 UTC

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@nprofile…2uyx AI bros being so inflamed by "stealing my prompt tips and tricks" as if it's some important proprietary information that can be protected as a trade secret (and if they choose to share it must always reference back to them as the originator) is always the wildest outcome for people operating the copyright laundering machines.

2026-01-09 08:22:49 UTC

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@nprofile…5y0h Although realistically the brands with value (and the staff making those games) are more Tencent than anything else now. Just the family leadership of Ubisoft will do anything to ensure their control of the company rather than selling up.

2025-12-30 13:33:19 UTC

Rounding out the year with some more videos to watch. https://www.youtube.com/@siggraphadvancesinreal-tim4519/videos

2025-12-18 22:20:57 UTC

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@nprofile…xlvy A couple of days ago I realised that Windows auto-ducks the audio from other apps when I chat on my laptop and yet there doesn't seem to be an easy way to make this system engage otherwise. They clearly have the infrastructure there for me to eg say "make the focuses app full volume and auto-duck all other programs to only be 20% volume, without me having to manually mess with any sliders" but there's no way to engage that. I bet a lot of people would love if they added a UI to do that.

2025-12-11 01:04:17 UTC

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@nprofile…4m8e I am still amazed that people are actually buying a $100 VirtualBoy headset (requires existing Switch or S2 hardware) for which you can not legally buy any games at all and is entirely reliant on you renting access to the emulated games on your closed platform hardware.

2025-12-07 08:28:22 UTC

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@nprofile…rtt8 We referenced this heavily back in the day when making our own game with 1-to-1 analogue sword controls (how you move the mouse allows you to swing the sword however you want).

2025-12-05 07:30:02 UTC

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@nprofile…9vka So MGM is Amazon and soon WB will be Netflix. I guess it's nothing that new, Columbia Pictures was picked up by Sony in 1989 (and, even weirder, the Coca-Cola company involvement in TriStar/Colombia the decade before).

2025-12-05 07:29:03 UTC

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@nprofile…9vka So MGM is Amazon and soon WB will be Netflix. I guess it's nothing that new, Columbia Pictures was picked up by Soy in 1989 (and, even weirder, the Coca Cola company involvement in the decade before).

2025-11-28 19:38:44 UTC

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@nprofile…9vka The company is called Stratasys & basically the consumer history of affordable 3D printers (not from China) is the history of the extremely aggressive patenting 30 years ago slowly expiring. Touched on here: https://hackaday.com/2024/11/16/hackers-patents-and-3d-printing/

2025-11-28 19:11:21 UTC

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@nprofile…9vka Hasn't 3D printing been set back 20 years by a set of annoying patents that a few companies took out when it was gaining more widespread industrial support back in the day and are only now expiring? Or have these more industrial scale things not been hit with the same issue that consumer models have (unless you buy from China, where they don't care about Western patents)?
We had a SLS in the lab below me when I did my research (15 years ago). Very cool stuff.

2025-11-27 15:55:42 UTC

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@nprofile…rtt8 I would definitely give the classic "talk-em-up" of the genre a go, **Planescape: Torment**. Same setting as those other games but very much their own take on how to build a game the opposite of IWD's focus on combat.
The other side of that BIS/Interplay era to the Obsidian cohort (who mainly did more SciFi back then) end up at Troika and make **Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura**. Fantasy/steampunk setting and well worth checking out too.

2025-11-24 11:04:23 UTC

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@nprofile…4m8e This is before we get into the absolute nonsense that "Valve do not pay for exclusives and other storefronts do". When Take2 print millions of Civilisation keys into physical boxes that use the Steam CDN to deploy and update, and even get a better (20%) deal on any sales made on Steam, they are being paid (in services rendered) by Valve to make all PC copies of Civ sold into Steam exclusives. And this was locked down 15 years ago when Civ V released, "Steam Powered".

2025-11-24 11:03:15 UTC

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@nprofile…4m8e I have met a surprising number of players who demand Steam Workshop for mods. I get the dev reason to not build an easy-to-use interface for mods but if one exists, players should be happy with any one.
Even worse, Steam Input - we are told that we should tie our very input handling to a storefront API. Imagine! (Luckily MS seem to have given up on making the Xbox controller the only gamepad on PC and now have their new API that supports XInput, DirectInput, & more).

2025-11-24 10:52:18 UTC

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@nprofile…4m8e Something a shocking number of players seem to say is: "How dare you, the creative actually making the things I want, release your game on a platform where you don't have to pay the storefront a 30% cut for little more than handling the card processing fee, which we all know is set at 2.5%".
I sometimes despair that "this is marginally easier for me" is being used to enforce an unfair cost on the actual independent developers.

2025-11-22 15:17:25 UTC

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@nprofile…rtt8 I would say the majority of these have either had sequels/reboots or spiritual successors (many with KickStarter funding) in the last 15 years. Stuff like MoO very much lives on as still guiding the model of that kind of game (without it, Stellaris is probably a very different game if it as ever made at all).

2025-11-12 22:41:28 UTC

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@nprofile…e330 I don't understand the specs being shown here. It doesn't seem like a good box to hook up to a big TV and play modern games with. Unless this radically undercuts the PS5 (now $350 in Japan and traditionally $399 if they can ever cost reduce) and makes it back on the Steam cut of sales, I don't know who this is for.

2025-11-12 22:29:29 UTC

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@nprofile…na7g I've been hearing good things from people on their Android handheld gaming systems with the newer chips like the SD8Elite (Gen 4 basically I think) or even SG8Gen2 and many Steam games.

2025-11-05 17:39:51 UTC

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@nprofile…rtt8 Life is Strange? I mean, I love that game (might argue about which specific game in the series is most cringe but the first one is certainly up there) but the teen drama is so cringe (positive) and on the nose. With the cringe dialogue. And the licensed music breaks. The entire vibe really - it is what makes those games what they are and without that you'd have a totally different series.

2025-10-31 20:49:10 UTC

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@nprofile…9vka While the i5-2500K was a great CPU (ran that thing at 5GHz all-core flat until the mobo eventually cooked itself/died of age), I'm not sure how applicable that sort of scaling will be to modern CPUs with a much higher IPC and... four or even higher times the number of hw threads on a gaming CPU (and a lot lot more cache for serious gaming results).

2025-10-31 11:47:35 UTC

YouTube embeds (in Feedly and elsewhere) have gone from 50% "Error 153: Video player configuration error" to 100%. I assume this is what the exec at Google wants, who is obsessed with adblockers and doesn't care how many legitimate users they hurt to get even one person to see an ad that potentially violates their local laws (as Google ads are extremely poor at respecting local advertising laws).
Please consider this when embedding YT trailers for your own games - they may not work.

2025-10-29 18:11:32 UTC

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@nprofile…4m8e They always seemed like a fast counter-top mini fan oven (with higher speed air making them better at getting the food up to temperature) but I must admit I don't have the counter-top space or desire for a very small oven so had never actually purchased one.
Does it not work as advertised or did you just not find many use cases for it?

2025-10-29 09:45:25 UTC

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@nprofile…rtt8 It tells you roughly how well things had been going there that their first attempt at a Lords of the Rings MMO was cancelled after they couldn't find agreement with Tencent (who would publish it in China and possibly were doing dev support work) so they had to reboot that project. Presumably that was meant to tie into their very expensive TV series based on the books? But the reboot forced it to massively miss.

2025-10-28 11:42:40 UTC

I did kinda think that by next time they remade this campaign, we'd have shadow-casting particle lights. (I assume this is Series X footage because otherwise that foliage shimmer and shader aliasing is a bit rough for a high end PC, but you can easily iterate on that more than majorly upgrading your lighting tech.) Given the move to UE5, this would be an amazing project for Epic to sponsor with tech assist on integrating MegaLights.
https://youtu.be/nwv2G3HEVUI

2025-10-17 04:03:14 UTC

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@nprofile…fnpd It's amazing how unconstrained a lot of these people feel by... the absolutely basic rules of copyright all of us were repeatedly taught to be very careful around when we first started learning to code.

2025-10-14 10:48:08 UTC

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@nprofile…rtt8 I mean, have salaries (and inflation) been trending down or up since 2007? Given dev budget is a proxy for staff costs, modern games are made by many more people getting paid closer to fairly (and in line with increased living expenses).
Honestly, devs like CDPR could get away with massively underpaying staff for Witcher 3 and were less able to keep that going into CP77. And that's a good thing.

2025-10-11 19:05:12 UTC

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@nprofile…gwm4 You alos had fps reusing flightsim engines to try and get the scope in taht era. Project IGI was late 2000 and ran on the 1997's JSF. Lots of scope for long sniper shots and going between distant locations but it was definitely pushing the limits of what was reasonable at the time. See also games using the Comanche voxel engine (Delta Force 1 came out in 1998).

2025-10-05 16:54:53 UTC

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@nprofile…gwm4 I really want to one day know what the Ellison/Mitsoda/Cluney game would have been.
Obviously that version of the project was scrapped and rebooted (twice) so I doubt much of the writing is still there.

2025-10-04 21:02:26 UTC

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@nprofile…39ss A mix of C with raw ASM. Constantly tottering on the edge of collapse but insisted upon by a lot of rhetoric around "return to tradition" and "back when programming was a real man's job with no hand-holding".
Build out the lore about how this ties into an adherence with strict/purity ideology that cannot adapt to the surroundings or work cooperatively with diverse strategies. Definitely got some hooks to hang discussion of fascism on there.

2025-10-03 10:19:30 UTC

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@nprofile…0kgd Yep, my desktop 32" QD-OLED 4K is... not sipping at the power even in SDR mode when the power is a bit lower.
Laptop 16" OLED 4K needs better vision but gives me the same desktop/productivity output. Of course, lighting a quarter of the area has huge savings (and being optimised to sip on a laptop battery for 10-20 hours of light use).

2025-10-03 10:07:55 UTC

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@nprofile…0kgd I did a massive audit of my flat when the war caused energy prices to spike here and it really did seem like moving to a laptop as my daily driver unless I actually needed a desktop (occasionally for the CPU, often meant I needed a 150W GPU to be running for the work) was a significant change that helped fund a more regular update to more current laptop tech. Things like an AM4 mobo with Ryzen desktop processor and desktop SSD are sipping away as much idle power as loaded laptop.

2025-06-18 08:36:17 UTC

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@nprofile…7vxc I still find it amazing that the world looks on as a country talks about the sanctity of their civilians and military being in harm's way half way around the globe (from home) to justify why they should slaughter yet more civilians and military who are sat in their own homes within their own state.
And it's always been this way, Trump is just a lot cruder at saying it out loud.

2025-06-16 19:09:36 UTC

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@nprofile…j2mx It makes a lot more sense with TAAU because you're selecting a "real" resolution (ideally your monitor native) and then tweaking internal res based on your fps needs and tolerance to upscaling.
Far worse to me is when you get SSAA options at 25% increments so 50/75/100/125/150/175/200% and they use a bilinear rescale to really just ruin the pixels rendered (which likely don't have high quality AA applied before the rescale either). 125% lowers fps and can actually increase shimmer.

2025-05-29 09:40:03 UTC

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@nprofile…slxn I feel like "why are we not both intuitively agreeing on this answer before we even need to think further" is still something I struggle with. But also I try to step back and work through the stages with people who are more detail oriented so don't jump steps as often; to understand it on a different level & avoid mistakes. I hope this deepens my understanding of different viable solutions. But I still find myself thinking "why are we not all doing the obviously correct thing?"