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marta_morena_25

80 karma · joined July 7, 2020

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marta_morena_25··on rg3d: Rust 3D game engine with an FPS demo game and scene editor
Not really... All great game engines were spawned out of AAA titles. You should never try to build an engine without a set of games that stretch its limits in all directions, otherwise something will always go wrong. There isn't a single person alive who can manage the complexity of a game engine. As soon as you start splitting things up, you run into problems of distributed development. Getting this right without eating your own dog food is unlikely, at best, no matter how experienced your team is...

What makes the difference between an experienced engine developer, like CryTek and Unreal, and a hobbyist or a company who does it for the first time, is mostly that while both of them will definitely build a game with the engine while creating the engine, the experienced team will actually produce a re-usable, well designed engine, while the inexperienced team will produce a hunk of junk that doesn't fit together and doesn't extend past the game they were trying to develop.

marta_morena_25··on Secrets of Elite College Admissions
US universities are always amusing to me. You pay about 100 times more than for a German university and end up with an education where you have trouble understanding the content they teach in Germany after graduation, unless you come from an elite university. But hey, it's really easy to find Standford equivalents in Germany as long as you search for a good university for your major, instead of just searching for a university. Of course it doesn't come with the prestige and the network, but honestly is that really worth a quarter million dollars? In the end, if you are smart and willing to learn, the only thing you really get from US elite university is prestige and better equipment and research opportunities. However, all of that isn't really relevant for a whole lot of people.
marta_morena_25··on Ethereum Is a Dark Forest
I would say its a measure of maturity as a developer if you have no interest in touching something that has no use and is 99% hype. I would not have a problem of working on a useful blockchain in my job, however it remains to be seen if there is such a thing.

Blockchain is like a solution without a problem. The only thing that can be done with blockchain that can't be done without (i.e. decentralization) is something that mostly has no application in the real world. And there is no need for it because the technology for that exists since over 2000 years. If it was needed, someone would have done it already long ago.

But who knows, perhaps at some point in the future a use case will emerge.

marta_morena_25··on A fleet of computers helps settle a 90-year-old math problem
Interesting. I hope what the author says isn't actually done. So the computers generated a proof nobody can understand, but fret not, a second computer program can assure us of its validity. Well that's heartwarming. I hope they are not building the foundations of future math on this house of cards.
marta_morena_25··on Motoko, a programming language for building directly on the internet
That sounds more like clickbait. Just as if someone took the latest marketing buzzwords and somehow tried to make a product out of it. If there was any meat to this, they would lead with the use case and say "Hey here: This is the problem the world has. Here is how we solved it". But anything blockchain related already went more like "Uhh look, here is a blockchain. Enjoy". This is worse...

This seems to be just like Ethereum without the blockchain. What does "building directly on the internet" even mean? What do I ever need distributed, cryptographic consensus for? The use-case escapes me completely, this even seems more useless than Ethereum, where I can see at least some applications thanks to the blockchain. But that thing without the blockchain just doesn't make any sense. But hey, it got WASM, so must be cool.

marta_morena_25··on Why Epic can’t afford to lose the Unreal Engine in its fight with Apple
I don't know. For me Apple has lost major brownie points here. I will be looking for option of a non-iPhone when next time I switch. It remains to be seen how this hits Apple regardless of the outcome, but I think generally Epic will be in a tight spot, should they lose the trial... Which makes it a battle of survival for Epic and a minor bump on the road for Apple. And unequal court case to be sure.
marta_morena_25··on Beating Google ReCaptcha and the funCaptcha using AWS Rekognition
It will be inadmissable because of the psychological effects. Imagine having someone claim you murdered someone. Also you happened to drive by that park where the person was murdered at the same time.

Now someone wants to frame you, perhaps because you are a celebrity or a person with money to extort from. So they claim that they saw you murder this person.

Normally, this wouldn't hold any water and no jury would convict you, we are not in the medieval ages anymore. There would be no evidence of you around the crime scene, because of course, you weren't there.

Now imagine that they are able to produce audio recordings of a conversation you had with the victim, screaming at them and saying "you are gonna pay for this". And then they also happen to have video evidence of a smart phone camera that happened to capture you stabbing the victim.

Now tell me, if the jury sees all this and then it gets dismissed, because of "deepfake" claims or whatever, how will it affect the outcome of this trial?

If you are truly innocent, this might still work out alright, unless you are not white. But imagine there is even the SLIGHTEST connection to the real world. It doesn't have to be completely fake. Maybe you had some fight with that victim earlier, or there are witnesses who testify under oath that you had several heated arguments with them, etc.

Deepfakes can change the entire outcome of trials, by biasing the jury and proceedings against you. That's why any audio and video evidence essentially needs to be rejected without a very very thorough forensic analysis of its authenticity. And even then you would still not know for sure.

marta_morena_25··on But I was helping the compiler
You really don't need to read assembly for any but the most rare cases. What you need is a profiler to give you the hotspots and you need to stop prematurely optimizing on a line-by-line basis. Just stop it. Optimize O(n) performance (but also don't go wild, unless there is a business reason), keep your fingers off micro-optimizations, unless so indicated by the profiler and only if there is a business reason as well...
marta_morena_25··on Lightroom app update wipes users' photos and presets, Adobe says not recoverable
Would it? Great. Let's just all applaud, justify and support what is best for all corporations and see where we get with that, nay?
marta_morena_25··on Google Has a Plan to Disrupt the College Degree
This sounds fascinating. Why didn't we have Google much earlier to teach us all how to replace a 3-4 year degree with 6 months of online course work.

Oh and they accept it for their own hiring. That's really good, except that Google, like many other big companies never gave a damn about education anyways. And that's a good thing, to be sure. But they still care about technical skill. So unless they are aiming the shotgun at their feet and teach people how to game their own interview process (which at least in case of Google is doubtful, since their process was quite elaborate a few years back), I just hope they offer these courses for free, because you ain't gonna get hired at Google with this. Seems more like a marketing stunt.

marta_morena_25··on S&P 500 Return Attribution: Its 1% economy
Yeah, except that when you pick a company to invest in you are not just picking randomly. Just because most companies perform poorly, says nothing about the ability to single out high performing companies. This advise is completely flawed. Of course if you don't want to spend time on picking the right companies to invest in, an index will likely be a better and safer choice. But with an index, your gains will always be excessively capped. It's trading gains for effort spend. Not even risk. If there is a crash, indices will go down as well. By picking your companies wisely, you can run circles around any index.
marta_morena_25··on Magnetoplasma drive could make Mars transit take 39 days?
Yeah this sounds cool. Essentially you could design a large spacecraft and put a fusion reactor in it (we will have viable, positive yield reactors soonish). It should be possible then to power a fusion drive as well by building a sort of "half-open" fusion reactor chamber into which we dispense some of the plasma without any pressurization. It should essentially cause a massive explosion, that if somehow controlled by magnetic fields, should yield an enormous forward thrust.

Technically, does it even matter how fast we eject? Shouldn't relativity allow us to reach speed of light with any positive thrust velocity? If the speed of the shuttle was of any concern, that should directly invalidate relativity, since passengers would suddenly not perceive any acceleration anymore, even though nothing about the spaceship and its physical reaction has changed.

marta_morena_25··on Satellite warfare: An arms race is brewing in orbit
"I wish that wasn't the case, but as long as there exist major powers that challenge the United States and our allies the all-domain arms race will never end."

LOL there we go again. The US is the center of the universe. I mean there are actual reasons why you don't want China or Russia dominate the world (well, in times of Trump that is actually questionable what is the bigger evil here), but you have to bring the most ridiculous one: We are the US, and someone is challenging us, can't have that.

marta_morena_25··on New Toyotas will upload data to AWS to help create custom insurance premiums
I wonder how many people complaining here take their phone into the vehicle, or use Google Maps. Sure, the data from the car (whatever is included there) might give some additional insights, but these are very local (i.e. status of the car and perhaps lane assist) compared to what Google/Apple already collect anyway (i.e. the "big picture", which is far more valuable). At least here you get something tangible out of it: Lower insurance premiums (if they were higher, nobody would buy the freakin cars and I am pretty sure using this data for insurance quotes must be an opt-in anyway)
marta_morena_25··on My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I
"seem perfectly capable at getting at least that across" yeah, that's part of the problem. They already know that 1+1=2, or so you'd think. But you would be hard pressed to find a teacher who can actually explain WHY 1+1=2 (which is based in how our number system was created and using proof by induction). Anyway, that is besides the point, since you won't teach children math with college approaches, but the important thing is that most teachers don't understand what they teach, they just "say what they remember".

And that doesn't pair well with children's insatiable "why" requests, even if they don't utter them. Teaching children is actually harder than teaching adults, because most adults largely gave up on the "why" and just settle on "I gotta remember that, if I want to pass the next exam" (school did a good job with them I guess).

So why 1+1=2? There is a lot of depth in that that is left unanswered and children are forced to memorize the answer. From then on, a sharp decline of cognitive ability follows as they "graduate" through our excellent school systems...

marta_morena_25··on My kid can’t handle a virtual education, and neither can I
Here is a crazy idea that needs to come before this: What if we taught our adult population to process their difficult emotions instead of suppressing them and stay active and move freely while working and studying.

Actually, this already falls flat in the first section. At least 90% of adult fail on that one. How are they supposed to teach something to their children that they themselves don't even understand? And teaching is usually much more difficult than understanding something yourself.

Which brings us to "school should teach that". But schools are not designed for that and teachers are not qualified for that. Hell, it's already an exception to meet a teacher who can properly convey the meaning of "1+1=2", not to mention a teacher who can teach children, who are not their own, how to process difficult emotions. Good luck with that

marta_morena_25··on Germany begins 3-year universal-basic-income trial
"No, they prove that people who are in a program that is very clearly temporary will not end their careers for a short pilot program. This means nothing."

This is a really good point. But it will apply to the government program as well. Just because we have such a program at full scale, doesn't guarantee anything.

* The UBI might not always be above the poverty line

* The UBI might be terminated at any time, or after an election (That can be partly covered with proper laws, but nobody would go that far without trying it out in the first place)

* The UBI might get strings attached, like "needs to work parttime", etc.

All in all, it's a chicken egg problem. The thing is: If I have saved maybe a million in cash, UBI would encourage me to just stop working. Period. UBI will cover a good chunk of the basic living expenses (especially if you don't have to live near hotspots due to work anymore) and then the investment winnings of my savings would cover me for life.

That of course is still possible without UBI, but UBI just makes it that much more approachable, since you don't depend on investment to stay afloat. I.e. "I need to win with my investments for this to work" becomes "If I want to buy me something besides food and rent, I need to make good investments". Those two are like day and night.

I am not convinced that UBI will result in overall improvements. I would love UBI and it would enable me to stop working more quickly. Will I still provide value to humanity? Very likely, I have lots of ideas for what to do. Will I still provide value to the economy? Not nearly as much as before. That alone tells me that UBI is probably not a good idea, because it empowers the middle-class to retire early, doesn't do much for the poor (instead of a shitty job, they can now do nothing, except paint and sing perhaps, i.e. being creative; but they will still be poor nontheless) . It also doesn't do anything for the rich.

marta_morena_25··on What's the future of Servo?
No it really wasn't. Nobody except tech geeks care about Servo. What Mozilla needs to do is to provide a privacy aware browser that doesn't inform Google (and everyone else) about everything we do online. They can easily go the path Microsoft took and use Chromium as engine. Had they focused on that, I think they would be in a much better position than they are now (wasting millions on projects like Servo and Rust). Don't get me wrong... I love Servo and Rust, but from a business perspective it's suicide.
marta_morena_25··on Epic direct payment on mobile
It's not. That only applies to the US & Canada. In a lot of other countries it can be extremely difficult to impossible to do something in case of credit card fraud.

Besides that, entering card info is a chore. Same as I don't want to signup for every app (which is solved by apple login mostly), I don't want to enter payment info for every app (and update it whenever the card expires lol).

marta_morena_25··on Bertrand Russell's argument for idleness is more relevant than ever
Isn't that exactly the point? It's just extended a little, with "legitimate hobbies" and "normal socializing" not available. So take that away and then they are domesticated livestock? If you don't have the ability to do something with your time outside of your normal environment, that is definitely an indicator that something is really off. There is SOOOO much you can do. I wouldn't even know where to start even if I didn't have my job and was locked in a room.
marta_morena_25··on How to stop procrastinating by using the Fogg Behavior Model
Oh cool, so basically this is about finding a way to cheat your brain into doing things it doesn't want to do. Maybe a good approach would be to find something you actually like to do instead and reflect on your choices and priorities in life?

It's amusing that you need a professor to tell you how to convince yourself that your life doesn't suck. A more natural approach might be to change what you are trying to do in the first place...

Guess what, the brain was not made to earn money.

marta_morena_25··on Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
Why does Mozilla even develop their own browser? There is inherently nothing wrong with everyone using Chromium as a foundation. Mozilla could use Chromium as renderer while still doing all the privacy preserving stuff they do. There is absolutely no correlation between the rendering engine and privacy. And they few interlinks (fingerprinting, etc.) can very likely be addressed through patches that are rebased over Chromium.

Firefox with its own renderer is dead anyway on iOS already, where everyone is forced into Webkit. It seems like a loosing battle to spend so much money on something that doesn't give the average user ANY benefit whatsoever. Yes, Chrome will be a monopoly, but Microsoft already bought into that monopoly. What's the point of fighting a loosing battle? Focus on integrating Chromium and make it into a rock solid privacy-first browser.

marta_morena_25··on The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility
Anyway, there are bigger problems in the world than Google. While I am not sure payment processing is more urgent that regulating Google, there are many other things that are orders of magnitudes more important to tackle than regulating Google.
marta_morena_25··on GraalVM
> This lets it greatly outperform the JVM, at the expense of some rarely used functionality.

Outperform in what metric? Startup time? Granted. Anything else? Not so much.

>Basically, it’s like switching from the JIT to a C compiler’s -O3.

Yeah and that would be pretty bad (it's not a good analogy to begin with). "-O3" doesn't have anything that a JIT couldn't have. The only advantage is again, startup time. JIT compilation has otherwise only advantages over static compilcation, especially in highly polymorphic code, such as java. Static compilation for polymorphic code is a joke in terms of performance... And every C++ programmer should know that.

I didn't look at the spec, but I would assume that AOT is only the bootup and then the JIT will take over anyway. This means, they'd do some basic precompilation for fat bootup and then use JIT again to optimize the code further based on runtime analysis. Everything else would be a ridicolous step backwards in time and make AOT completely useless, except for some niche scenarios.

marta_morena_25··on 51% Attack Bleeds More Than $5M from Ethereum Classic
> Whose agenda?

Governments generally have no interest in alternate currency systems that are not under their control, taking off. So far, crypto currency has been flying under the radar and the ones that have broad support from financial institutions go against the very idea of Bitcoin and Etherum, i.e. they are not providing much of the benefit that supporters of crypto currencies are interested in.

marta_morena_25··on 51% Attack Bleeds More Than $5M from Ethereum Classic
Is this actually illegal? And if so, how would a court proceeding look like? I am pretty sure especially in the US, if you have money for a good lawyer, you can wiggle yourself out of this one pretty easily. Just imagining the jury overseeing this... Who is even the defendant? And what is the crime?

I imagine if such a case ever goes to court its going to be very interesting, because for the government, this should be like being stuck between a rock and a hard place. Acknowledging this as "theft" kindof undermines their agenda to kill off alternative currency.

There is also another dimension to it. "Double spending" conceptually seems very similar to the government printing money, devaluing the dollar.

marta_morena_25··on Apple says game streaming services violate App Store policies
You must be mad a lot. This is how the world works and Apple is nothing to single out here.
marta_morena_25··on Facebook Fired Employee Who Collected Evidence of Potential Political Bias
Re-evaluate life choices if a 400k salary makes you commit suicide? He should have had enough money to do whatever for quite some time. Its tragic that he didn't but there are literally billions of people worse off all around the world and nobody talks about them.
marta_morena_25··on Are Humans Intelligent? An AI Op-Ed
You may be right, I honestly don't know how this particular algorithm works. We may be closer to true AI intelligence than I think, but I am not sure anyone should wish for that. I am certain that we are still decades away from true human intelligence (Einstein level), and maybe a few years to a decade away from fully replacing the cognitive abilities of an average human. But it will come. And I am not sure the human race will be able to survive it.
marta_morena_25··on Are Humans Intelligent? An AI Op-Ed
I honestly don't think consciousness is necessary for AI. Consciousness is more like an "invention" of humans to make themselves feel special. If an AI can understand consciousness and simulate it, that will be sufficient. It doesn't have to be conscious to be intelligent.
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