shock-value

Without commenting on whether this patent should be granted or not, I really don't think it is about ECS in general. The patent has to do with an automated system for organizing component data into arrays and chunks. The key word being "automated". You give it definitions for component data, start creating entities with combinations of those components, and it does all the rest (at runtime).

There might very well be prior art for that as well but any ECS system where the layout scheme has been defined in advance would not be relevant one way or the other. At least that is my read of all of this.

I don't know the details of slab allocators. Though if you are describing an allocator that does not have knowledge of what the memory is being used for (e.g. the difference between asking the allocator for memory for a position component defined as three floats and also a color component also coincidentally defined as three floats, versus asking the allocator for two sets of three floats without regard to their intended usage), then it is not the same.

Not really. To me the novelty in the first claim is that they have a system which automatically determines an optimal memory layout, even in the face of new combinations of components within a newly created entity. A typical hand-crafted ECS system wouldn't likely infringe -- it's more likely that the memory layout was defined in advance.

I guess this will be a major roadblock to Unreal Engine offering such an automated ECS system, which is a real shame. There are certain types of games which do need ECS to make viable use of computing resources (simulations, etc). You don't see many of those on Unreal now and I guess you won't for the foreseeable future if this patent holds.

My read (and from what I know of ECS) is that it's basically claiming a system which automatically organizes the memory layouts of instances of different types of "entities" (i.e. "type" meaning which "components" it includes) in an efficient manner.

Here, an "entity" is just an object identifier (integer, or whatever). A "component" is a specific set of data relevant to some function (e.g. position component would have x, y, z floats, while damage level component might be a single float to represent amount of damage).

ECS generally means laying out all memory for all instances of a given component contiguously, so in the example I gave you'd have one array for all position components in your game world, and one array for all damage level components. The "entities" are just collections of these components from these different arrays. So the "player" entity for example is logically composed of one particular element of the position array and one particular element of the damage array. This is more cache friendly when you have a "system" (say, the physics subsystem) which generally only operates on one or a limited set of types of components across many entities.

There is no way ECS in general is patentable but their system which intelligently and automatically performs the memory layouting for their form of ECS (which also includes the notion of chunking these arrays into finite sized blocks) very well might be.

It’s embarrassing and shameful behavior by the author, and even more embarrassing that he was willing to share it publicly. If it’s the culture of that startup that this kind of stuff is just typical day-to-day employee interaction, I don’t know who would want to work there, especially given how hot the job market is now.

The reason was probably that no one ever needs to delete just a subset of cookies from a site. I certainly never have, and I'm a pretty technically-minded user. (Other than for development, in which case I'm using dev tools anyway.)

Effectively zero. Ridiculous that anyone would think this an issue even worth discussing.

I have never known anyone to need to delete an individual cookie vs all for a site. Certainly I've never needed that.

Only time I have (probably ever) deleted an individual cookie was for testing during development, and in those cases I already use the dev tools to do so.

> Now.. the companies are trying to make remote less appealing ( and trying to argue that you should be paid less ), but, quite frankly, remote is worth a lot to me now.

If remote is itself valuable to you then it would stand that companies could get away with offering a lower salary for remote work, at least in your case.

It can certainly be in violation of an employment contract. What makes you think it would be illegal though?

There's an alternate Wikidata query engine available here: https://qlever.cs.uni-freiburg.de/wikidata (from https://github.com/ad-freiburg/QLever)

Currently it doesn't support some SPARQL features, but I've found it to generally be quite a bit faster for most queries.

Generally Wikidata would definitely be the way to go here, though I just now tried to retrace your graph in Wikidata and it seems to be missing at least one relation (Ada of Holland has no children listed -- https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q16156475).

> There's no difference between TSV and CSV but the separator

This is not true, though almost everyone (understandably) assumes this based on the names.

Despite the similar names, TSV and CSV are very different, in more ways than just the delimiter. In particular, CSV tries to handle escape sequences but its various implementations do so in different ways. TSV just disallows tab characters within fields, so its specification extremely simple: https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/text/tab-separa....

Strong agree. TSV is better than CSV always (unless you need to interface with an external system that doesn't accept it).

For those not aware, TSV and CSV differ by more than just the delimiting character. TSV has a dead-simple specification: https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/text/tab-separa.... CSV does not have a standard spec and implementations differ quite a bit, but often in subtle ways.

TSV is a dead simple and fully-specified format. Here it is: https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/text/tab-separa...

CSV is a mish-mash of different, complicated, and under-specified standards and/or implementations.

Note, this article is from two days ago and references predictions made then for yesterday.

> and they all but stop the original COVID

Would love a citation on that. I think masks definitely help reduce transmission but they are hardly a magic bullet.

Anyway we can reduce R0 to zero in the short term and it wouldn't matter to my thesis. COVID circulates in animals so as soon as we would take our foot off of the brakes it would again start spreading in an unbounded fashion. And the world can't undergo a complete global lockdown while we wait years for vaccine availability. It's just impossible from any point of view: political, economic, social, etc.

The do vastly lower the rate of transmission. That could translate into lower peak hospital utilization (even not accounting for their ability to prevent illness) which is good for everyone.

I do agree that this thing is going to spread in an unbounded manner regardless of what we do now though.

I agree with your criticism but also firmly believe that once COVID started spreading beyond a few handfuls of individuals, its fate as a human endemic disease was locked in. No difference in policy by any or all countries would have changed that eventuality, other than at most modify the timeline slightly.

Whenever a company describes their vision of "the metaverse" (or I guess "reality channels" in this case) it's always exceedingly vague and never really explains in concrete terms what sort of utility or entertainment a person would derive from it.

I guess it's just the latest vehicle to get investors or stockholders excited without needing to rely upon any work or logic beyond the unclear promise of technologies that themselves haven't even been proven out yet. (And this is coming from someone who does think VR is really cool -- with respect to some of the discrete, packaged, and targeted immersive experiences that are already available.)

> Do we actually want emotionally neutral articles?

If they purport to be objective journalism (and not all articles need be that) then yes, definitely.

Seems that Axios plays a little loose with these guidelines outside of politics (their main wheelhouse). I think it's probably a mistake, to the extent that they are interested in keeping their reputation for good journalism.

It's so odd because Postgres generally does everything else so well and is generally very customizable and modular otherwise. Yet the maintainers totally scoff at the idea of query hints even in the face of so many examples of planning failures.

Their arguments are asinine too (from https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/OptimizerHintsDiscussion):

* Poor application code maintainability: hints in queries require massive refactoring.

* Interference with upgrades: today's helpful hints become anti-performance after an upgrade.

* Encouraging bad DBA habits slap a hint on instead of figuring out the real issue.

* Does not scale with data size: the hint that's right when a table is small is likely to be wrong when it gets larger.

* Failure to actually improve query performance: most of the time, the optimizer is actually right.

* Interfering with improving the query planner: people who use hints seldom report the query problem to the project.

Literally all of these are expressions of condescension and distrust of their own users. Anyone who would use hinting would be using it to solve a real issue caused by the shortcomings of the planner -- that much should be self-evident.

I like Postgres but this aspect is one of its shortcomings. In Postgres you usually have to rework your query in weird ways and hope that it's possible to get the optimizer to make the right choice. Even then, due to its usage of statistics, it could switch plans at any time as your data grows/changes.

Unless I'm misreading they didn't add another index. They actually just reduced the original index by removing an indexed expression and excluding rows that didn't match that expression instead.

> Good thing SQL server features plan guides

If only Postgres maintainers got this message.

I am seeing that also. Continuously used ~50% of my 2015 Macbook Pro's discrete GPU and caused the system fans to kick off, just looking at the components on the landing page.

Where are you seeing that there is a labor surplus in Japan in recent years?

https://www.npr.org/2018/12/07/674548447/facing-critical-lab...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-economy-workculture...

> As of 2019 Japan's unemployment rate was the lowest in the G7.

> Japan is now facing a shortage of labor caused by two major demographic problems: shrinking population because of a low fertility rate, which was 1.4 per woman in 2009, and replacement of the postwar generation which is the biggest population range who are now around retirement age.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_market_of_Japan

I tend to think the same. To be clear, I too have an Oculus and I also think VR is really really neat. But this whole pining after "the metaverse" is really silly.

Companies may develop experiences analogous to a Second Life, or Roblox, or World of Warcraft, or any other popular MMO (made more immersive by the VR medium), but I doubt they will have any further reach than those. At least I don't know why they would, anyway. To be fair, those games are successful and make lots of money, but compared to Facebook's current business they are a niche concern. So their enthusiasm seems misplaced to me.

Plus, VRChat already exists.

The issue with Japan is not specifically the decline nor absolute level of overall population. It's rather the demographic makeup which is shifting older. The next few decades will be increasingly difficult for them as their economy will need to support a larger level of retirees. https://www.populationpyramid.net/japan/2019/

China has a similar issue coming down the line. https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2019/

For reference, the U.S. population pyramid looks a bit "healthier" (more balanced), though the retirement of the boomer generation will still pose a challenge. https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2...