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bob1029 commented on Valve Software handbook for new employees [pdf]   cdn.akamai.steamstatic.co... · Posted by u/Michelangelo11
bob1029 · 21 minutes ago
Valve gets a lot of heat for slowing down on first party gaming content, but I think Steam has been a net positive for the gaming community. There are certainly some cases where the accessibility has created "noise" and other trouble, but overall I think this is a good thing. Their 30% cut is absolutely justified once you start looking into everything they do for you as a developer and the market that you have access to. It is a lot easier to pay that kind of fee when you don't feel like your technology partners actively hate the fact that you merely exist.

Steam is still like what Netflix used to be. You have pretty much everything you care about in one place. Even big monster AAA developers like EA have given up and put their content on the platform. If I had to pick between having HL3 and a coherent gaming ecosystem, I'd pick the latter.

bob1029 commented on Buy a Faster CPU   blog.howardjohn.info/post... · Posted by u/ingve
DrNosferatu · an hour ago
But single core performance has been stagnant for ages!

Considering ‘Geekbench 6’ scores, at least.

So if it’s not a task massively benefiting from parallelization, buying used is still the best value for money.

bob1029 · an hour ago
Single core performance has not been stagnant. We're about double where we were in 2015 for a range of workloads. Branch prediction, OoO execution, SIMD, etc. make a huge difference.

The clock speed of a core is important and we are hitting physical limits there, but we're also getting more done with each clock cycle than ever before.

bob1029 commented on A simple way to generate random points on a sphere   johndcook.com/blog/2025/0... · Posted by u/piinbinary
pavel_lishin · 5 days ago
> First, it’s intuitively plausible that it works.

Maybe; my first instinct is that there'll be some bias somewhere.

Maybe I'll have some time tonight to play with this in p5js.

bob1029 · 14 hours ago
The part that makes this work is the rejection aspect.

What would be biased is if you inscribed a cube in the unit sphere. This would require additional transformations to create a uniform distribution. If you simply "throw away" the extra corner bits that aren't used, it won't affect the distribution.

bob1029 commented on Shader Academy: Learn computer graphics by solving challenges   shaderacademy.com/... · Posted by u/pykello
bob1029 · 15 hours ago
My journey into shaders started in Unity with Shader Graph and I eventually wound up using some much older ideas - Baked GI w/ the standard URP lit shader [0]. The built-in shaders already give you most of what an average gamer could ask for:

> The Lit Shader lets you render real-world surfaces like stone, wood, glass, plastic, and metals in photo-realistic quality. Your light levels and reflections look lifelike and react properly across various lighting conditions, for example bright sunlight, or a dark cave. This Shader uses the most computationally heavy shading model in the Universal Render Pipeline (URP).

If you add on top of this a willingness to bake lights [1] like it's the early 2010s again, you can achieve extremely high quality scenes without getting tied up in distracting code paths and tools. Your time is much better spent out in the field acquiring actual textures, meshes, audio samples, etc. Painting & lighting an exotic texture IRL and then using a depth-sensing camera to capture it can be orders of magnitude more productive.

[0] https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines...

[1] https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines...

bob1029 commented on The issue of anti-cheat on Linux (2024)   tulach.cc/the-issue-of-an... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
jayd16 · a day ago
This isn't exactly wrong but you're not looking at it from a modern perspective.

If you can cheat and get away with it, then you'll see streamers do it. That will tank confidence in your game.

It doesn't matter if cheating doesn't make you top the leaderboard. If you have global leaderboards, they will be dominated by cheaters.

I don't think rootkits are excusable but if the solution was simple they would do that.

bob1029 · a day ago
You are assuming the streaming gamer platforms would tolerate this behavior.

https://safety.twitch.tv/articles/en_US/Knowledge/Community-...

bob1029 commented on The issue of anti-cheat on Linux (2024)   tulach.cc/the-issue-of-an... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
bob1029 · a day ago
Targeting perfect fairness in a multiplayer video game with arbitrary latency between participants is a waste of energy. A much better target is to make it feel like no one is cheating. I don't really care too much if someone is actually better or worse than me at counterstrike. What I mostly care about is wildly implausible gameplay. No one is going to stop the guy who is getting a 5% gain on his ELO by using a 2nd computer, machine vision and a robot to move his mouse ever so slightly faster than he typically can.

However, there are ways to detect when someone is being an absolute madman with the hacks. We're talking head snapping through walls with 100% accuracy and instantaneous displacement across an entire 30 minute match. These people can simply be banned immediately by hardware/steam ID. We can write basic rules to detect stuff like this. There's no "confidence interval" for speed hacking through a map and awping the entire CT team in 3 seconds. You certainly don't need kernel drivers.

bob1029 commented on Does MHz Still Matter?   ubicloud.com/blog/does-mh... · Posted by u/furkansahin
wmf · 2 days ago
If your software can handle machine failures, 20% extra performance is absolutely worth some extra failures.
bob1029 · 2 days ago
I think this is the best path if your problem can support it.

I use a 5950X for running genetic programming and neuroevolution experiments and about once every 100 hours the machine will just not like the state/load it is experiencing and will restart. My approach is to checkpoint as often as possible. I restart the program the next morning and it deserializes the last snapshot from disk. Worst case, I lose 5 minutes of work.

This also helps with Windows updates, power outages, and EM/cosmic radiation.

bob1029 commented on Does MHz Still Matter?   ubicloud.com/blog/does-mh... · Posted by u/furkansahin
bob1029 · 2 days ago
> Once network IO became the main bottleneck, the faster CPU mattered less.

It is surprisingly hard to keep a modern CPU core properly saturated unless you are baking global illumination, searching primes or mining crypto currency. I/O and latency will almost always dominate at scale. Moving information is way more expensive than processing it.

bob1029 commented on Go is still not good   blog.habets.se/2025/07/Go... · Posted by u/ustad
acedTrex · 2 days ago
Java and C# are both languages with A LOT more features and things to learn. Go someone can pick 80% of the language up in a single day.
bob1029 · 2 days ago
Just because you can learn about something doesn't mean you need to. C# now offers top-level programs that are indistinguishable from python scripts at a quick glance. No namespaces, classes or main methods are required. Just the code you want to execute and one simple file.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/fundamentals...

bob1029 commented on Is moderate drinking healthy? Scientists say the idea is outdated   news.stanford.edu/stories... · Posted by u/XzetaU8
RandomLensman · 2 days ago
Avoiding alcohol completely would need to exclude things other than just alcoholic drinks, I think.
bob1029 · 2 days ago
Alcohol is essential in many cooking scenarios. It is a much more powerful solvent than water and can better extract essential oils, fats, etc.

u/bob1029

KarmaCake day19007June 23, 2017
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