Aceticon
@Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on What's up with the sudden increase in AI slop? 2 days ago:
Because shit like that has been called “Pathing AI” for ages.
Also I’m very familiar with Machine Learning having actually learned it 3 decades ago when it was mainly just Neural Networks (there were other techniques but ultimately NNs became dominant and is most of what we today call Machine Learning) and its most advanced commercial use was to read postal codes in mail envelopes for automated mail sorting.
The acronym AI has been thrown around for decades, even before Neurap Networks were invented and well before Machine Learning was even called “Machine Learning”.
- Comment on What's up with the sudden increase in AI slop? 2 days ago:
I work in Game Making.
There’s a ton of stuff in it which has been called “AI” for literally decades and almost none of it is Machine Learnrning: for example the A* pathing algorithm for characters in a game is called “AI”, as are Steering Behaviours that can be used in things like simulating bird flocks, and both are entirelly algorithmic, not ML.
In fact ML is seldom useful in games.
You’re confusing use of “AI” in the Marketing of the present day tech bros trying to make money pumping up a Tech Bubble on top of certain very specific forms of Machine Learning, with the actual general meaning of the acronym.
- Comment on I require nothing more 5 days ago:
Nah, low ceilings are horrible and oppressive.
The rest is fine.
- Comment on Bitch shape attack 6 days ago:
They’re like an origami figure folded wrongly that causes any properly folded origami figures to become misfolded when it comes in contact with them.
- Comment on The driver for my mouse occupies over 1 gb 6 days ago:
The actual driver for an HID USB device, even on WIndows, is still just a few KB.
Worse, the default driver for HID devices like mice, keyboards, joysticks, gamepads and so on is part of Windows since Windows 7 and all you had to do was give it an INF file that really just associated USB hardware devices that sent the PC a specific identifier (made up of a VID and a PID value) on USB protocol initialization, with that built-in driver - and that file is maybe 100 bytes. Even better, that INF file is not even needed anymore since Windows 10.
A driver for a mouse (pretty much the simplest Human Interface Device there is) that in addition to the normal mouse thing also supports setting the RGB color of some lights is stupidly simple because the needed functionality is already in the protocol.
Remember, modern digital electronics still uses really tiny processors sometimes with less than 32KB flash memory (and way less than that in RAM) only they’re microcontrollers rather than microprocessors now, hence the protocols are designed so that they can be handled by processing hardware with little memory (after all, many USB Hosts aren’t PCs but instead are things like USB HUDs which have microcontrollers not microprocessors)
I have no doubt in my mind whatsoever that almost the entirety of that 1GB is bloatware.
- Comment on The driver for my mouse occupies over 1 gb 6 days ago:
Or you can use qbittorrent-nox and just interact with it via its the web interface.
- Comment on Virgin Physicists 6 days ago:
Well, just think “How would I do this cheaply and get away with it” for a good enough “Engineering” approach for this case.
The really expert “Engineering” stuff related to things like maintenability, reliability, robustness and so on (which I myself am not qualified to talk about, as even though I have an EE degree, that’s not actually the domain of Engineering I ended up working in), isn’t, IMHO, really necessary to understand to explain why those designing circuits commercially would chose the commonly available and cheaper components if they can.
- Comment on Virgin Physicists 6 days ago:
More seriously, if you order it from an Electronics supplier, you can get a 6.2 Ohm resistor with a mere 1% tolerance (in some cases, even 0.5%).
That said an EE and unless in very specific cases (such as reference resistors) would generally use a 10 or 5 Ohm one with 10% tolerance for any circuit that was supposed to be mass produced since it’s far cheaper and much more easy to source in the size you require.
- Comment on Virgin Physicists 6 days ago:
This is EXACTLY how it went for me when I moved from a Physics to an Electronics Engineering degree at University.
Also, the trying to understand how the various circuits worked from the point of view of “electrons moving” was a hard to overcome early tendency (even simple things like LC circuits, for example, are only really understandable as ressonant stable states and for complex circuits you really have to go higher levels than “electrons” to be able to understand then in any reasonable amount of time).
On the upside when we got to things like how tunnel effect diodes worked, the whole thing was just obvious because of having had an introduction to Quantum Mechanics in the Physics degree.
- Comment on We really don't want to talk about our problems 6 days ago:
Theraphy, when it works, only solves internal causes of one’s pain.
29 days away from present day society, will for a while suspend the external causes of one’s pain.
(Which is why the former usually doesn’t fully solve everything: the external shit, which often is what created much of the internal shit, is still there and pushing you)
- Comment on When you work for a company owned by a A..hole 1 week ago:
Best start having takeaway cups at home next time somebody comes by to install something, just in case they need to take the gift which is my offering of coffee or tea, to their bosses…
- Comment on When you work for a company owned by a A..hole 1 week ago:
Let’s be fair: by that stage you should probably also draw some blood and leave it there.
Wouldn’t want to be unwittingly keeping from the boss the nutrients from that free meal.
- Comment on When you work for a company owned by a A..hole 1 week ago:
The whole story just warms my heart.
- Comment on Arts & STEM 2 weeks ago:
GNU is not umanities.
- Comment on spicy one 2 weeks ago:
Peace of the grave.
- Comment on spicy one 2 weeks ago:
If we want to be realistic, then if there was a nuclear explosion that big on planet Earth all the nations around it would be nuclear wastelands from the shockwave and fallout and the rest of the planet would probably be covered in ice from the nuclear winter.
Most nation states on that side of the planet would be gone and the ones on the other side of the planet would at the very least be collapsing from the fall in agricultural production and subsequent wars of desperation.
- Comment on spicy one 2 weeks ago:
The toddlers were terrifying the poor IDF soldiers, hence they were terrorists.
- Comment on Anon turns on raytracing 2 weeks ago:
That’s the thing: Ray Tracing as implemented on Graphics Cards (which is a subset of what’s done in offline rendering for things like Film) only makes 3D rendering environments a bit more realisting in this domain along, not even the same as reality, and this domain is only a small part of the big fucking pile of shortcuts use for realtime 3D rendering, leaving all other ways a game space diverges from reality the same.
Mind you, this partial Ray Tracing thing would be great if one didn’t have to actually upgrade one’s hardware and the performance loss was small, but that’s not the case yet.
- Comment on Anon turns on raytracing 2 weeks ago:
From an article about it:
Now, it should be stressed that this is a build of The Witcher 4 specifically designed to show off Unreal Engine’s features. Yes, it’s running on a standard PS5, but it’s not necessarily indicative of the finished product.
So that’s like saying “under laboratory conditions it has been demonstrated to work”.
When most games with RT in them deliver that performance on one generation old hardware, then you will have proven the point that for most gamers it has no significant negative impact on performance.
- Comment on Anon turns on raytracing 2 weeks ago:
Games visuals are riddled with shortcuts and simplification.
You don’t think the way the water moves when your characters steps on a puddle, the smoke rises from fires or the damage on the walls are Physics Simulations, do you?!
It’s all a variation o procedural noise such as Perkin Noise, particle effects to at best (for example, ocean simulation) some formulas that turn out to look good enough.
(Want to see Physics Simulations in 3D generated worlds, look at Special Effects in Films).
Improving one element of game space visual fidelity - reflections - is nice but it’s unclear that it’s worth its downsides (more expensive hardware, slower performance) given how everything else is still one big pile of “good enough” shortcuts.
- Comment on Anon turns on raytracing 2 weeks ago:
That’s like saying that “physics simulation is the only technique that produces accurately shaped water streams” - technically true but generally not a sufficient improvement over the shortcuts currently in use to make up for the downside that the technically most precise method is slow as fuck.
Game making is at all levels finding shortcuts and simplifications (even games about the real world are riddled with simplifications, if only the gameplay rules being a simplified version of real world interactions because otherwise it would be boring as shit) and in the visual side of things those are all over the place even with RT (the damage on the walls, the clouds in the sky, the smoke rising from fires or the running water on the streams aren’t the product of Physics Simulations but, most likely, the use of something like Perkin Noise or even good old particle effects to fake it well enough to deceive human perception).
Yeah, sure RT is technically speaking better than the usual tricks (say, using an extra rendering step for the viewpoint of the main reflective surfaces such as mirrors). Is the higher fidelity (in, remember, a game space which is in many other ways riddled with shortcuts and simplifications) sufficient to overcome its downsides for most people? So far the market seems to be saying that it’s not.
- Comment on So um, america just started another war in the middle east. We're going to need a shit ton more memes to distract americans from the nightmare they are enduring. Thanks in advance... 2 weeks ago:
It pisses me off this, for political point scoring, abusive misapplication of this specific philosophical question to a situation which does not at all match the criteria for it.
This is not a trolley problem because:
- It’s not a single decision after which there is no walking back on it, rather it’s a cyclical choice which happens every 4 years and a lot of what was done by the candidate elected in once cycle can be undone in the next (as the Republicans frequently demonstrate when one of their gets elected after a Democrat).
- It’s not a single person making a decision, it’s millions of people all at the same time and it’s not even the average of their choices that gets executed (that would require Proportional Vote) but it’s done using a weird mathematical formula, so there are tons of situations were no matter what one’s choice is (or even not choosing at all) it makes no difference whatsoever.
Portraying this as a trolley problem is misleading and manipulative.
The closest philosophical or game theory example to an election is a cyclical “Ultimatum Game” between voters and politicians only it’s in the best interest of politicians that people don’t see it that way (as they would start punishing politicians for not dividing the pie in a way that favors people enough) so instead their propaganda has pushed for decades this falacy that it’s an “trolley problem” (and it’s companion, the idea that people must “chose the lesser evil”).
- Comment on Innövative sölutiön 4 weeks ago:
I mean, defining the cheat sheet limitation in such a way for Math students is really just asking for it …
- Comment on The Long Dark gets a big free visual enhancement update out now 5 weeks ago:
It’s a great game with great gameplay and which is surprisingly replayable in survival mode if you go a year or two between plays.
It’s also one which, IMHO, doesn’t need visual enhancements - their choice of visual style was masterful (it works and is a lot cheaper in terms of 3D modelling costs that something more realistic would have been) and it’s the gameplay (which is pretty much all emergent gameplay in survival mode with no fixed set-pieces) that makes it a great game.
- Comment on Gives a mom a reason to live 5/5 5 weeks ago:
Sometimes you win by coming second.
- Comment on If they where only reprogrammable.... 5 weeks ago:
Short datasheet for the curious.
- Comment on Hot in the car today 1 month ago:
It was supposed to be a fart but it came with friends.
- Comment on Anon makes a modern game 1 month ago:
I’m actually making a computer game that takes place in space, within solar systems and is in 3D with a (somewhat) realistic style - a big mistake given the time I’m having to spend in 3D modelling even though it’s mostly empty space :/
It would be near unusable with realistic lighting, especially further away from the system’s sun, because in most places there’s just this one decent light source which is the sun and this extremelly weak “lighting” from the background which is mainly black with stars (since it doesn’t take place near the center of a galaxy, that background has about the same star density as the night sky on Earth). If I was doing realistic lighting only near planets would it look good and that only on the sunny side of the planet (because of the indirect light from the planet), not the dark side.
To I’m having to fake it using ambient light, otherwise most objects would just be entirelly dark most of the time (it would be that or putting lots of little lights on them).
Anyways, the point being that most space scenes in Sci-Fi films are also total complete bollocks for similar reasons: almost everything would be pretty much black almost all of the time or at best have very sharp shadows everywhere but near the illuminated side of large stellar objects. (There’s actually a scene in Star Wars - Rogue One where they purposefully use realistic illumination for effect and the scene starts with a stary dark background and suddenly a star destroyer stars em«erges from the total darkness as more and more of it comes out from the shadow of a bigger body).
In all fairness, in my journey learning game making, lighting turned out to be an unexpectedly interesting subject and actually fun, though it’s unusual to have the change to really use it for effect (well, the rings around the planets in my game do look pretty stunning merely from the interplay of light and shadow as long as I don’t align them in the same axis as the sun).
- Comment on Yes 1 month ago:
My mother used to work for a company that made magnetic core memory.
That’s the kind of memory that predates semiconductors and it was assembled by hand using gold wire and tiny ferrite rings.
She does know how to use a PC and has a tablet, though 😀
- Comment on Anon makes a modern game 1 month ago:
The top right image is at sunrise or sunset, and if the game is going for natural illumination (rather than the so-called “Ambient lighting” which isn’t at all realistic) low-light times will look pretty bad because most light will be coming from indirect lighting so amongst other things the colors you will see are affected by the illumination being just light reflected by nearby objects which themselves have color and thus don’t reflect the full light spectrum.
The top left image is with the sun high in the sky so most things are being illuminated by direct light. Further it like it’s relying on the Ambient Lighting trick, which means shadows too will be better illuminated (and hence not realistic) because even though they’re not hit by direct light, that ambient light makes everything look like it’s getting light by a weaker light that is unaffected by shadows (and also projects no shadows) coming from all around.