vikingerik (u/vikingerik)

vikingerik commented on Valve Software handbook for new employees [pdf] (2012) cdn.akamai.steamstatic.co... · Posted by u/Michelangelo11

AddLightness · 4 days ago

I'm very scared about the future though. What happens when Gabe is gone? The entire PC Gaming industry is essentially locked in to a single platform. If Steam decided to charge $10/mo people have so much invested into their libraries they would likely do it. What about $20 or $30 per month?

I'm not sure why Steam always seems to be exempt from the "perils of digital ownership" arguments

vikingerik · 4 days ago

It's not exempt. I don't trust Steam long term and so don't spend any significant money on it. I only ever buy cheap games for like $8 or less, where I know I'll get that much worth of gameplay in a short time frame and it won't bother me if the platform ever later enshittifies.

Gabe says that the platform will fail-open if ever necessary, that it would revert to offline DRMless functionality. I believe that he has that intention, but the realities of operating from receivership or assimilation by Microsoft would likely be very different.

vikingerik commented on A candidate giant planet imaged in the habitable zone of α Cen A arxiv.org/abs/2508.03814... · Posted by u/pinewurst

TMEHpodcast · 21 days ago

The detection of a potential giant planet in the habitable zone of Alpha Centauri A is compelling, not because we could live on the planet (likely a gas giant), but because it could host moons with the right conditions for life. If even one of those moons is Earth-sized and water-rich, it might be our nearest shot at finding another habitable world.

Still, getting there with something like David Kipping’s proposed TARS propulsion system (a solar-powered launcher that can fling tiny probes at ~40 km/s) we’d be looking at 30,000+ years to reach the star system. It’s a step forward, but for now, our best hope is to keep watching. Until someone develops fusion propulsion…

vikingerik · 21 days ago

Note that the "Earth-sized" condition in there is doing some heavy lifting. Earth is a factor of 40x more massive than the largest moon in our solar system. A body needs to be fairly close to Earth's mass to have enough gravity to retain liquid water on its surface. Not that it couldn't happen, but we currently don't have any known precedent for a moon that large.

vikingerik commented on First Hubble telescope images of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS bsky.app/profile/astrafox... · Posted by u/jandrewrogers

amrrs · a month ago

Noob Q: How do they know it's an interstellar comet? With the speed of movement between two frames?

vikingerik · a month ago

Short answer, yes. But it's many frames, and over a time span of many nights and now weeks.

vikingerik commented on The Game Genie Generation tedium.co/2025/07/21/the-... · Posted by u/coloneltcb

grepfru_it · a month ago

The game genie did not give you a menu, you inputed codes which would persistently modify the memory map of the cartridge allowing for things like 99 lives or max Hp. The “menu” you describe was a booklet containing every game and a list of code changes.

Of course you could write in your own codes and make your own hacks but a lot of the time you ended up with garbled graphics or an unbootable game. They did keep this developer documentation to a minimum and this was before the internet. Although my local BBS had an ascii document detailing game genie’s internals and how to write your own codes, it was far from the reach of most 10 year olds

The game genie knockoff clone (I forget the name but remember the ads lol) had all of the codes in memory and as such gave you a menu to choose from

vikingerik · a month ago

I managed to figure out hacking NES Game Genie codes pretty well at about 14, even without any documentation besides the Genie book itself.

I'd read enough library books about computers to understand binary and hexadecimal. So from the existing codes in the Genie book (like 5 lives / 99 lives / etc), I figured out how those values were coming from some of the letters defining binary/hex values. So I could extrapolate to more codes for different values. And from there I realized the other letters must specify the memory location, so I could bump that too and change some different stats that weren't in the book. I particularly had fun with Final Fantasy 1, where I figured out how to set inventory values and even tried out-of-range values and got items that didn't exist.

What I didn't know until years later was the difference between 6-letter (3 byte) and 8-letter (4-byte) codes. The additional byte in the longer code specifies a value such that the override takes place only if the memory location already equals that value. The purpose is to handle bankswitching (memory mappers), to have the code active only when the correct memory bank is. In practice, what this meant was that randomly trying 8-letter codes almost never did anything (1/256 that you happen to hit the right value) and so I only tried the shorter ones, and found a few weird effects from them.

vikingerik commented on My Family and the Flood texasmonthly.com/news-pol... · Posted by u/herbertl

sokoloff · a month ago

There are over 2000 watersheds in the US. It would be unusual if we didn’t see around 20 100-year floods every year.

vikingerik · a month ago

Right. It's the multiple-endpoints principle. The extreme events feel overly frequent because we cherry-pick and only notice them. We never notice the other 99/100 of places that don't have a hundred-year flood in a year.

vikingerik commented on The fish kick may be the fastest subsurface swim stroke yet (2015) nautil.us/is-this-new-swi... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

foobarbecue · 2 months ago

Middle lanes are faster, and for some reason swimmer with the fastest record gets the middle in most events, which always seemed weird to me -- it's a positive feedback system. Seems like you should give the advantage to the people who are behind, not ahead... but that's common in sports and in modern society for some reason.

vikingerik · 2 months ago

If slower qualifiers got better position, then what you'd get would be qualifiers deliberately trying to sandbag themselves for that. Such an incentive is never a good look for sports.

vikingerik commented on Astronomers discover 3I/ATLAS – Third interstellar object to visit Solar System abc.net.au/news/science/2... · Posted by u/gammarator

belter · 2 months ago

What is easier? Not mess up this planet, or Terraform Mars?

vikingerik · 2 months ago

The best way I heard this put: Before we worry about terraforming Mars, maybe first we should stop Venusforming Terra.

vikingerik commented on A brief history of hardware epidemics eclecticlight.co/2025/06/... · Posted by u/ingve

jcalx · 2 months ago

From the title I was expecting some hardware faults that were transmissible (as opposed to merely widespread), like the classic "hardware virus" story from The Daily WTF: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the-hardware-virus

vikingerik · 2 months ago

Yeah, the headline is using "epidemic" clickbaitly just to mean widespread, not transmissible.

The classic real example of actual transmissibility was the Zip drive click of death. A bad drive would damage disks, which would in turn damage another drive they were put in. The case was rarer than people thought but did happen. https://www.grc.com/tip/codfaq4.htm

vikingerik commented on 2048 with only 64 bits of state github.com/izabera/bitwis... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

charcircuit · 2 months ago

>a cell has 12 possible states

There is 18 states. The final possible board state is 16 increasing power of 2s starting at 4, since it's possible for a tile to spawn in as 4. Then you also need states for 2 and empty making for a total of 18.

vikingerik · 2 months ago

This is correct (if cells higher than 2048 are allowed, which varies by implementation.) But the game can still be represented in fewer than 16×18 bits, because not every board state is reachable. There can't be more than one cell with the maximum value. And if that is present, then there can't be more than one cell with the next-highest value, and so on. So you could devise some scheme to enumerate all reachable states and skip unreachable ones, and it would take fewer than 16×18 bits to indicate which one. The upper bound is at least bounded by ignoring representing the maximum value and then using 4 bits to indicate its necessarily singular position. There are also some other unreachable configurations, like if many copies of the same value are touching each other, since at least one pair of them would have been combined on the previous move.

vikingerik commented on Why JPEGs still rule the web (2024) spectrum.ieee.org/jpeg-im... · Posted by u/purpleko

addaon · 2 months ago

> if I recall correctly JPEG as a format can encode an image with a higher fidelity than PNG, at least in some circumstances

24-bit color PNGs are lossless, to the extent that the input image is encodable in 24 bits of RGB (which is pretty much everything that's not HDR). There's no higher fidelity available for normal input images. If file size limits would force palettized PNGs, it's quite possible for a JPEG at the same file size to have higher fidelity (since it makes a different set of trade-offs, keeping color resolution but giving up spatial resolution instead); but this isn't really a common or particularly valid comparison in the PNG era, was more of an issue when comparing to GIFs.

tl;dr: Nope, PNG is perfect. JPEG can approach perfect, but never get there. Comparison is only interesting with external (e.g. file size) constraints.

vikingerik · 2 months ago

There is a lossless JPEG spec and format, though use of it never caught on much: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless_JPEG