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>And the game is even on an off-the-shelf game engine, they possibly don't even employ game engine experts at Embark Studios.

Perhaps, but they also turned off Nanite, Lumen and virtual shadow maps. I'm not a UE5 hater but using its main features does currently come at a cost. I think these issues will eventually be fixed in newer versions and with better hardware, and at that point Nanite and VSM will become a no-brainer as they do solve real problems in game development.

I think this almost has to be the future if most compute development goes to AI in the next decade or so, beyond the fact that the proposed API is much cleaner. Vendors will stop caring about maintaining complex fixed function hardware and drivers for increasingly complex graphics APIs when they can get 3x the return from AI without losing any potential sales, especially in the current day where compute seems to be more supply limited. Game engines can (and I assume already do) benefit from general purpose compute anyway for things like physics, and even for things that it wouldn't matter in itself for performance or would be slower, doing more on the GPU can be faster if your data is already on the GPU, which becomes more true the more things are done on the GPU. And as the author says, it would be great to have an open source equivalent to CUDA's ecosystem that could be leveraged by games in a cross platform way.

>subsequent removal to obtain the supposed "original, non-derived" form

Also called a "back-formation". FWIF I don't think the existence of corrupted words automatically justifies more corruptions nor does the fact that it is a corruption automatically invalidate it. When language among a group evolves, everyone speaking that language is affected, which is why written language reads pretty differently looking back every 50 years or so, in both formal and informal writing. Therefore language changes should have buy-in from all users.

Yeah, I saw this critique show up a few months ago and now I'm seeing it everywhere, even in major financial news sites like Bloomberg.[0] It's certainly worth discussing, but people are taking it as a gotcha to prove the AI boom is fake. However, all the AI companies have to buy from Nvidia anyway. And Nvidia has tons of cash, in fact it has 4x the cash on hand now than it did in 2023, despite all the investments.[1] So yes, if they think the AI market will grow then of course they will buy into it. If all of Nvidia's deals went bad, their stock would plummet, but not because they lost a few tens of billions, rather because that would mean the AI market is going down in general. There is a great counterexample to the "AI is propped up by circular funding" argument in Google, which uses its own TPUs and builds its own AI, and integrates it into it's own end-user products, no circular deals needed. If AI is propped up by anything it is investors and companies thinking it will give them a huge return. Circular deals are a result of that: cash is going everywhere into that market, it's that simple. The AI boom may be a bubble, but not due to circular deals in particular.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-10-07/openai-s-...

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/04/nvidia-has-a-cash-problem-to... -- Actually "Cash and short-term investments", not sure what is included in that, but I don't think it includes these major deals.

These OCR improvements will almost certainly be brought to google books, which is great. Long term it can enable compressing all non-digital rare books into a manageable size that can be stored for less than $5,000.[0] It would also be great for archive.org to move to this from Tesseract. I wonder what the cost would be, both in raw cost to run, and via a paid API, to do that.

[0] https://annas-archive.org/blog/critical-window.html

>what's really funny here is how absolutely horrified people are by the suggestion a single company which has a monopoly shouldn't also define the web platform

They don't. In general browser specs are defined via various standards groups like WHATWG. As far as I know there is no standard for what image formats must be supported on a web browser,[0] which is why in this one case any browser can decide to support an image format or not.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

>They barely have their toes in the middleware game anymore.

Well they do have Steam Audio but yeah I agree. I think Epic is much better in this space, even though its only source available in practice they do a lot to support engine modifications and also accept external PRs. I think Valve has a lot to gain from open sourcing Source 2 and they should realize how important modding was to their initial success. The issue is now they can just print money with Steam so there is no need to invest in modding support.

I don't think China wants to go to war with Japan. I just mean to explain why people are focusing on geopolitical tensions. And the answer is that those tensions do exist, and is partly why some countries are trying to become more self-sufficient to begin with. So discussion of it is valid, that is my main point. Now once we get into those discussions, they might not be as high quality or informed as in let's say a pure technology article, but that is to be expected.

The weighting of this study is strange. The difference of number of years of education maxes out at 1 point, while being raised in different locations and different school types are each given also 1 point. It seems unreasonable that going to school in London vs New York should be given a point here despite the average educational quality in both cities potentially being the same. This also means that someone with 4 years more education but from the same city is considered educationally similar, and it is impossible to achieve the "educationally dissimilar" metric (ED DIFF > 2) without one of the other two points. I feel therefore like there is some wordplay being done here by the term "educational differences." I think some readers will assume that "educational differences" means "educational quality," but only one metric out of the 3 is directly correlated to this. This said there does seem to be some correlation and that is interesting, as we would expect no difference between location, yet there does seem to be one. In my opinion the different location variable is likely to be measuring something aside from/in addition to education. Some education types would seem to be better than others eg. boarding school. Also worth noting that the "very educationally dissimilar" group is n = 10. This said, the authors do admit that "certain level of inference is involved with comparing pedagogies and curriculum" and "Readers are encouraged to re-score and re-analyze the data in additional ways not done here." I would try weighting location much less and not cap number of years of education at all, instead studying how the differences change as the number of years increases.

More like a new plant in Iceland, after the PM of Iceland said any attack on Greenland would be a survival-threatening situation for Iceland.

To be clear I think the comments about "geopolitical stability" or whatever term we use are not as interesting as new chip plants itself. Or at least they are a bit tired by now. I also wish Japan the best and I think they are fully capable of building such a factory and I hope they do so. But to claim that the geopolitical considerations are invented is wrong. And in fact one of the reasons the Japanese government is investing in local fabs to begin with is due to national security, as mentioned in the article:

>Securing control over chip manufacturing is being seen as a national security priority, both in Japan and elsewhere, as recent trade frictions and geopolitical tensions between China and Taiwan raise concerns around the risks of relying on foreign suppliers.

So yes, viewing the entire story through a geopolitical lens is understandable.

Because commenters outside Japan may end up buying products containing chips made in Japan. If it was built in let's say France people would be thinking less about potential invasions. Just as "obviously Japan is going to want to develop lucrative manufacturing within Japan," obviously people outside of Japan are going to want manufacturing that is not liable to be shut down or taken over in some way. Not that I think Japan and China will actually go to war any time soon myself.

>geopolitical narrative fed to them by the US state department

Just this week Japan and China have been getting into a fight over the current PM's comments over Taiwan. China has canceled some flights to Japan and complained to the UN, announcing it will defend itself from Japan.[0][1] I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here. Are you saying major disputes between China and Japan don't exist and are invented by the US state department? Or that thinking about it in this context is the result of the commenters being fed by the US state department?

[0] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/3333992/china-blasts...

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-takes-spat-with-ja...

The built in Steam DRM is very weak. Of course that can change at any time, but at least the current catalog of Steam DRM-only games are not really tied down to steam except via law/licensing.

In any interactive environment you have to upload to the GPU on each frame to output to a display, right? Or maybe integrated SoCs can skip that? Of course you only need to upload the dirty rects, but in the worst case the full image.

>geometry on CPU but the pixel painting on GPU

Wow. Is this akin to running just the vertex shader on the CPU?

Fascinating project. Based on section 3.9, it seems the output is in the form of a bitmap. So I assume you have to do a full memory copy to the GPU to display the image in the end. With skia moving to WebGPU[0] and with WebGPU supporting compute shaders, I feel that 2D graphics is slowly becoming a solved problem in terms of portability and performance. Of course there are cases where you would a want a CPU renderer. Interestingly the web is sort of one of them because you have to compile shaders at runtime on page load. I wonder if it could make sense in theory to have multiple stages to this, sort of like how JS JITs work, were you would start with a CPU renderer while the GPU compiles its shaders. Another benefit, as the author mentions, is binary size. WebGPU (via dawn at least) is rather large.

[0] https://blog.chromium.org/2025/07/introducing-skia-graphite-...

I've found the built in gitk is pretty good for some GUI tasks. If I want to view the sate of some file at a given commit, it's easier to navigate using that rather than going through git log, find and copy the commit, git show, paste, copy the file path. GitHub desktop didn't seem to have this feature last I checked, even though the GitHub web viewer does.

>Yes, lots of people have immigrated, but they're a tiny fraction of those who wanted to immigrate

What point are you making here specifically? Are you saying the law is considered broken unless all or most people that want to come to the US can come? If so, the citizens (or at least the government) of the country are the ones that decide its laws, not people who want to immigrate to that country.

>H-1B is a good example, it counts as immigration but it is really not

The fist link I gave only includes green cards issued, it doesn't include H-1B visas to begin with. In any case, H-1B is not that significant a source of immigration, it seems to account for less than 1 million people in the US.[0] And it pays better than immigrating illegally in 99% of cases, most people would take that. Also by your own metric immigrating illegally isn't immigration either. I don't see what specific point you are making. Are you saying people come here illegally because they don't want to come via an H-1B visa, or are you just making a general point that immigration is not that high?

>The comparison with EU is not meaningful, especially since it isn't even a country

Then why does the worldbank include it? And why use OECD as a metric for anything if it isn't a country?

>population growth of the US and the world

The "highest in 100 years" statistic is in terms of percentage, so that shouldn't be relevant.

[0] https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/reports/U... "As of September 30, 2019, the H-1B authorized-to-work population is approximately 583,420."

Hundreds of thousands to millions of people have come to the US legally each year for the last thirty years.[0] How is that impractical? In fact the share of immigrants in the US has increased significantly (by 3 times) in the last 50 years, and is above the level of the EU, and is at the highest level in the last 100 years in the US.[1][2] Even if legal immigration was set to zero, that shouldn't give people the right to come here illegally.

To be clear I am not making an argument that mass surveillance is needed to solve any problem.

[0] https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/green-card-holders-a...

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2024... via https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/27/u-s-immig...

[2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SM.POP.TOTL.ZS?most_rec...

US vs EU vs OECD: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SM.POP.TOTL.ZS?most_rec... - I'm pretty sure the values here include illegal immigration as well, so if you factor that in the US may be lower than the EU, but again still at historically very high levels.

I don't think this is true. Many video game companies pay for DRM protection only for the first few months to a year, then remove it after most of the sales are generated. And before the current mostly uncrackable DRMs came out (denuvo) they would still use DRM that they knew would be cracked eventually as long as it wouldn't be cracked in the first few months. They are not simply blindly acting out of fear, they are estimating the actual cost of piracy. In fact someone recently did an analysis of this and came that conclusion.[0] The companies likely have much better data than this external researcher.

>"Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem."

It is true that how good the service is is an important factor and can be more important than lets say a $10 difference in price. I think that is what is meant by this quote. However if piracy was easy and legal much fewer people pay for it. Assuming that "piracy is a service problem not a pricing problem" if anything would prove that there are a significant number of people who pay for something if it is easier than pirating. Usually people that claim that anti-piracy measures have no effect say something like "people that can afford to pay for a given media will always pay for it, and people that cannot will always not" or "people who are going to pirate something will never pay for it even if it becomes impossible to pirate." But if pricing is not actually the main issue at hand here then this not correct.

>"Game of Thrones being the most pirated show in the world? That's better than an Emmy."

This doesn't say anything about income generated. He's basically remarking about how successful the show was.

>Radiohead

This is a special case where consumers have a special attachment to the producers of their entertainment and buy their products specifically to support them. You can see a similar idea with YouTubers that sell everyday items (eg. coffee) with their name on it and people buy it mainly to support them, and this is even how the sales pitch is phrased. So if you are (at least partially) selling the ability to support the creator, then it is impossible to pirate that, as piracy (obviously) does not support the creator.

>act out of fear of losing control

Even after now 20 years of digital media existing?

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S18759...

Why do companies attempt to prevent piracy if it doesn't hurt sales?

The two extreme outliers I see are labeled "aead/clx192q/opt,-O3" and "aead/schwaemm128128v2/opt,-Os" according to clicking on the points with devtools. aead/schwaemm128128v2/opt,-Os looks like it is almost at 0x. 1x is at about y = 659 and that test is at 769 out of I guess 780 based on the graph.

Is there a reason that some of the linked benchmarks, if I'm reading it right, have Fil-C running faster than C?[0] I assume it's just due to micro-benchmark variability but I'm curious. Some of them seem impossibly fast compared to C so I wonder if there are some correctness issue there.

[0] https://cr.yp.to/2025/20251028-filcc-vs-clang.html

You can run adb from the phone itself via wireless debugging. From what I understand, you can do this via Shizuku or Termux, and there are apps that can give you a user interface for this. What changes is that users have to enable developer mode to get this, which adds another warning label. Although admittedly they may remove this feature or add more hoops to jump through to use it.

`abd install` will still work as per[0] so to me sideloading is still possible, so the statement 'Google’s message that “Sideloading is Not Going Away” is clear, concise, and false' is not correct.

I think users should be able to install whatever software they want, without any charge or other external permissions, but at the same time device and OS makers should be able to make it difficult to do so, within reason. Apparently scam apps are more common in some countries than others and is actually a problem in some countries, although I'm not sure.[1] Google did cite that as the reason for the change.[2] However, combined with the way Google has been locking down Android APIs more and more, (eg. the file system, but other APIs as well) it is concerning. At the same time those changes were also about security. I think every phone should be able to have full root permissions if you go through enough hoops without having to install another ROM. That seems to solve most of the issues here.

[0] https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/09/lets-talk-...

[1] see eg. https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/07/google-starts-blocking-use... at the end of the article for some examples

[2] https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/08/elevating-...

This is from 2020. Valve wanted to be smart and invented a new "subtick" system in 2023 which isn't as good as 128 tick. To make things worse, CS is a paid game, not free like Valorant, and makes probably much more money. They seemingly just don't care enough about the problem to solve it correctly. That or there is more work to be done on subtick to make it work better than 128.

It doesn't depend on the outcome. If a bank only does prime loans and spreads out it's loans multiple borrowers, has a good reserve ratio etc. and still loses it all, that still wasn't gambling. This is more clear if you consider that storing value in money is also risky. When you get paid in a currency, you automatically begin investing in it at the same time. This is even more clear with foreign currencies. If you got paid $1 million in Turkish Lyra and do not store that value somewhere else, that is more gambling-like than putting it in the S&P. I guess you can say that any time you increase the amount of risk in an investment to get more reward you are gambling. But you can invest in something other than USD with the same risk but with greater reward. For example you can invest it in US bonds (over multiple issues) which has a similar risk to the USD but a greater reward. Still, under such a definition, any business is gambling. We can accept that, but then we have no word that differentiates owning a grocery store from betting all your money on a coin flip, so then the word "gambling" becomes much less useful or really useless in my opinion.

By this definition prime loans are also gambling. When you bet on something risky then you are gambling. When you bet on something not risky you are not gambling. Also consider that not investing will generally lose money over time due to things like inflation. If we define the goal to be holding as much value as we can, holding dollars is more risky than investing in many stocks (or bonds, which also have a risk of defaulting). A better definition of gambling is something like "taking unnecessary and unproductive risks."

From what I have heard, forward is still used for games that are developed especially for VR. Unreal docs:

>there are some trade-offs in using the Deferred Renderer that might not be right for all VR experiences. Forward Rendering provides a faster baseline, with faster rendering passes, which may lead to better performance on VR platforms. Not only is Forward Rendering faster, it also provides better anti-aliasing options than the Deferred Renderer, which may lead to better visuals[0]

This page is fairly old now, so I don't know if this is still the case. I think many competitive FPS titles use forward.

>"forward+" methods.

Can you expound on this?

[0] https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/...

Unreal has plugins to support other AA including DLSS and FSR (which can both be used just for AA IIRC). I tried FSR and it didn't work as well as the default TAA for certain cases, but I'm pretty sure I just had some flickering issue in my project that I was trying to use TAA to solve as a band aid so maybe not a great example of which AA methods are good. I'm not an expert and only use Unreal in my spare time.

I have always heard that MSAA doesn't work well with deferred rendering which is why it is not longer used[0] which is a shame. Unreal TAA can be good in certain cases but breaks down if both the character and background are in motion, at least from my testing. I wish there was a way to remove certain objects from TAA. I assume this could be done by rendering the frame both with the object and without it there but that seems wasteful. Rendering at a higher resolution seems like a good idea only when you already have a high end card.

[0] eg https://docs.nvidia.com/gameworks/content/gameworkslibrary/g...

Ah, I did wonder how state level taxes were being accounted for, seems like the answer is they aren't. I guess I could have looked that up before posting. The values here[0] are markedly different. It shows Germany at 45%, France at 51.53%, US at 29.21% and Denmark at 50%. So I was way off the mark there, although I did think something seemed very off with those numbers. France is the 10th highest in the world, with many of the countries above it being tiny island countries or countries with vast oil reveres relative to their size like Norway and Kuwait. With this being the case, it does seem hard to imagine that more taxes will fix everything.

[0] Government revenue, percent of GDP - https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/rev@FPP/

Also relevant: Government expenditure, percent of GDP - https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/