erik

I made a few small contributions to this a long time ago. Nice to see that the website is still up!

Probably the most interesting feature of this project was how it handled memory. The DS only has 4mb of ram. And there is no MMU, so swap isn't an option. But the gameboy cartridge port has 32mb of address space mapped to the bus. And there are homebrew/piracy cartridges that fill that space with 32mb of ram. Which is great, except that the DS can only write to the cartridge port on 16-bit aligned addresses. And almost all software will assume that 8-bit aligned writes will work. To make use of the expansion memory the developers ended up creating a patched GCC that would convert any writes to unaligned locations to an appropriate read, 16-bit write, and set of shift operations.

This story is fascinating, weird, and entertaining. But most surprisingly, I found it kind of uplifting and inspirational! Not what I expected from a story so intertwined with a major corporate brand and their marketing agencies.

Is it just me, or is this applying a very different standard to influencers compared to traditional media?

> The new guidance makes it clear reviewers and other media creators should clearly disclose when they receive free products or other perks from a company, even if they aren’t specifically asked to mention those products.

...

> The FTC says disclosures should be kept simple, such as “This is an ad for BRAND”, and should be prominent on each piece of media which contains that product.

By this standard, if a movie critic for a newspaper watches a pre-release screening of a movie for free, then their review article should state "This is an ad for Paramount Pictures"?

Free copies of games / albums / books / etc for reviewers has been a standard practice for ages as far as I know. Is the FTC challenging this generally? Or is this somehow specific to reviews done via social media?

There is a slow motion view from the side at 4:13.

https://youtu.be/11da-YAOXBI?t=253

This isn't Godot specific at all is it? A very large amount of game modding involves running unrestricted code.

It looks like they are doing some sort of dynamic text justification. If I change the text width by resizing the window it dynamically inserts hyphens at line breaks. Presumably via some javascript library.

"On Package" isn't the same thing as on die. Apple's M1 LPDDR memory setup isn't really any different from what you would find in a normal PC laptop. By putting the memory as close as possible to the CPU it makes it easier to maintain signal integrity, but it's not really any different from anyone else's approach.

Apple's wide ram interface is an advantage. But they aren't doing anything exotic to achieve it. AMD & Intel could offer consumer cpus with more memory channels but they choose not to, likely for cost and market-segmentation reasons.

The focus of the event is a big part of it. GDC is a developer conference, and showcasing games in development is very small part of it. PAX is an event for gamers and while a lot of games do get showcased, it's not the main purpose of the event.

Traditionally E3 was about developers showcasing games for the press. But that's always been a bit of a tough sell for a major event, and I'm not surprised it's struggling given the current media landscape.

How do the cheap disablers work if the protocol isn't broken? Is someone signing devices that they aren't supposed to?

My impression is that the mac app store is pretty low traffic. The opportunity may be pretty small.

> It’s a mix of a simpler ISA, good core design, and small process nodes.

It's also a design that prioritizes perf/watt, whereas CPU vendors tend to prioritize perf/area. (aka perf/$)

> It's the web's destiny anyway.

I hope that you're wrong! Google already has a tremendous amount of influence, and a Blink monoculture would give them near complete control of the future of the web. (And I think Google have been poor stewards of the web. But that's an entirely different conversation.)

Blink being open source is better than the alternative. Internet Explorer achieving total dominance would have been even worse. But it doesn't buy you that much. Under a monoculture, your fork of Blink could never deviate from the original meaningfully because sites wouldn't be built to standards, they would be built to work on Blink.

Google not being able to unilaterally dictate web standards is a good thing. For example, I'm glad we have WASM and not Google Native Client.

> You mean Google will deliver a better browser than what currently iOS users have to the point that iOS users will decide to move away from the default

No, I mean that Google will use their search monopoly, along with their dominant position across other product areas to undercut the market share of any competing browser. Any merit Chrome has is dwarfed by the strength of Google’s ability to push it on users.

I have many complaints about Apple’s handling of iOS. But it seems to me that their stance on iOS browsers is the only thing preventing the web from becoming a Blink rendering engine monoculture.

I don’t like Apple’s approach. But I’m also concerned about the prospect of a Blink-only future.

> Personally, I’m more concerned about Chrome than iOS.

Agreed. If the doors open, then Google will fight for the iOS browser space. And their ability to leverage all of their properties is pretty powerful here.

If Chrome takes over iOS, then that's it. No one will bother with site compatibility for anything else. Firefox's chances to stay relevant in that world will be slim.

I do know what you mean. I grew up in northern Canada where seeing -40 was an annual occurrence. But when I've traveled to warmer places I've often found that I can be colder indoors than I ever would be at home.

When it's the difference between life and death then buildings have central heating. But if it's a matter of comfort, central heating seems to be relatively rare. Even in the wealthiest countries.

While I don't disagree with your general point, central heating/cooling is more about climate than wealth. New Zealand is pretty temperate.

Also, don't people walk around barefoot because they prefer to and it is accepted?

Last I read, Hacker News was still running on one big machine. And still uses text files as its database.

If P == NP, then it could be possible that a proof would show that an algorithm must exist without providing such an algorithm. But that approach wouldn't be necessary, actually showing an algorithm would of course also be a proof.

> To rephrase if this is not the case - what value does solving P = NP provide?

P vs NP is a question of enormous practical interest. But it's also a very interesting question of pure mathematics. A proof that P != NP, or a proof of P == NP that didn't provide an algorithm would still be a huge deal in the math and computer science world.

Valve doesn't really do "exclusives" with Steam the way other platforms have exclusives. If a game is only available on Steam, it's not because their was a contract signed or money paid to enforce that. It's because the developer or publisher has decided not to make the game available elsewhere for their own reasons.

I hadn't read that before, thanks for sharing it!

I had expected your link to be the classic Steve, Don't Eat It! Prison wine story. So here is the obligatory link to that: http://www.thesneeze.com/2005/steve-dont-eat-it-vol-8.php

Has anyone tried using software to measure bit-flip rates on non-ECC systems? It seems like a pretty easy task. Turn off swap. Fill a bunch of memory with a known pattern. Every few hours read all the memory and verify that no bits were flipped. If the 2009 result holds on modern systems and a gigabyte of DRAM flips a bit every few hours, then evidence should show up pretty quickly.

SpaceX aims to reduce that by two orders of magnitude with Starship. It will be a big deal if they can achieve it.

NTSC television video is interlaced. First you draw the even lines of the image, then you draw the odd lines. Each set of lines is called a field.

Originally NTSC was 60 fields per second, based on the 60hz frequency of the North American power grid. 60 interlaced fields per second is pretty similar to 30 frames per second, but is not the same thing. The interlaced signal refreshes twice as quickly, but with half the vertical resolution per refresh.

When colour was added to NTSC, the frequency was shifted to 59.94 fields per second.

Movies shot on film are filmed at 24 frames per second. To convert a 24fps film to 60 field per second video, something called a 2:3 pulldown is used. The wiki explanation for how this works is pretty good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecine#2:3_pulldown

A 2:3 pulldown on 24fps film matches the 60 fields per second of the original black and white NTSC signal, but is slightly off for colour NTSC. The original article talks about how this can lead to problems like audio desync in production workflows.

Digital cameras offer the option to capture at 23.976fps. When you apply a 3:2 pulldown to 23.976fps video, you get an interlaced 59.94 fields per second video.

Sonic Colors: Ultimate is the highest profile title to date. (Though Godot is only used as an interface layer, the gameplay isn't built in the engine.)

Cruelty Squad and Luck Be a Landlord are both respectable indie successes.

There are probably some successful mobile titles. And it's also used in slot machines and gambling games.

> Zen4 is supposed to be a monster and I’m kinda waiting to see how that looks, but I’m always looking for a bargain: does AMD sell a “gaming” chip competitive with the Alder Lake stuff?

The Ryzen 7 5800x3d trades blows with Intel's top chip, with many games benefiting enormously from its monster 96mb L3 cache. It will be superseded by the upcoming Zen4 chips, but the nice thing about the 5800x3d is that it's a drop in upgrade for most AM4 motherboards.

> The lack of console support comes especially from the fact that there's no company behind godot itself that can become a licensed Nintendo developer for example.

The lack of commercial entity isn't the problem. The problem is that adding any sort of platform support to an open source engine is completely incompatible with the license terms of the console SDKs.

> There are other companies that can port your godot games to consoles and publish them, but in the stores the games will be listed as theirs not yours.

Why would this be the case? You can contract with a company that has experience porting Godot games to Switch to do the technical work. But you would have your own distribution agreement with Nintendo and you would certify and publish the game yourself.

> What about LPDDR (low-power DDR) allows it to be faster? And, by faster, do you mean lower latency? higher clock rates -> higher throughput? This is unintuitive to me.

By faster I mean higher throughput at similar latency, achieved by higher clock rates. And it is indeed unintuitive as to how this can be done while using less power than standard DDR.

My understanding is that it's down to two major factors:

1. JEDEC has iterated on the LPDDR standards much more rapidly. DDR4 and LPDDR3 both hit the market in 2012. But then LPDDR3e, LPDDR4, LPDDR4x, and LPDDR5 were all introduced before DDR5 was.

2. LPDDR isn't available on DIMMs, it's soldered only.

So given that most laptops sold by companies like Dell and Lenovo use soldered ram anyway, and that Intel and AMD both support LPDDR, then why are PC laptops with faster RAM so rare? I have no idea, maybe it costs a bit more and the manufacturers don't think they can market it as a benefit?

The M1's bandwidth is possible because Apple uses high end LPDDR ram and a memory controller with a lot of channels. They aren't doing anything exotic.

Consumer PCs don't match this bandwidth because DDR DIMMs generally aren't as fast as LPDDR. Plus AMD & Intel limit their mainstream consumer CPUs to two memory channels, both for cost savings and to segment the market.

Celeste uses high resolution dialogue text, but its gameplay is strict about the pixel grid.

Loop Hero is strict about its pixel art and uses a fixed 16-colour palette that is reminiscent of the Commodore 64.

Baba Is You has visuals that you could basically render on a ZX Spectrum.

And in addition to doing pixel art well, these are all pretty great games.