shaggie76

We've tried PGO with the Evolution engine every major Visual Studio release for as long as I can remember and each time we fail to measure a significant performance increase -- certainly not anything worth the substantial time and effort required to do it regularly.

Our most recent test of LTCG was actually interesting because it seemed to move the needle enough to measure (but not enough to suffer). It appeared as though it optimized the vast majority of the code for size (inlining sparingly) and we speculate that the improvements to cache usage were the reason we saw improvements.

I can't help but feel disappointed that after 35 years the first thing they're talking about is an SVG logo. I mean, there's a certain novelty that it was made on a laptop running Hurd itself, but still I was left with a sense that progress is meandering and whimsical.

I remember being excited by Hurd's ambitions after studying Tanenbaum's OS book in university and drinking the microkernel kool-aid; now I'm too old and jaded to believe it'll be a viable alternative.

This post immediately reminded me of the Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff (a charming introduction to Taoism). I think it's one of the rare books I've read more than twice and I highly recommend it.

While I'm a fan of unsigned (size_t mostly) there have been a few times when the tax for converting them to float was shockingly high:

https://godbolt.org/z/96T4jTshc

1-2 instructions for signed vs 11 including a branch for unsigned.

(in times like these I found casting to signed first preferable)

ICC profiles present a similar problem and remarkably Instagram, ostensibly a photo-sharing web-site, does not respect them when scaling images (or at least it didn't a few years ago when I started posting photos to it from my PC); when I uploaded full-resolution SLR-resolution originals the skin-tones would get all screwed up. If I exported at the final resolution, even with the same ICC profile, they were fine.

Not only is LEA more flexible I believe it's preferred to SHL even for simple operations because it doesn't modify the flags register which can make it easier to schedule.

His point is well taken but I find the reverse helpful when you're shooting in some sort of official capacity: subjects are willing to put up with a lot more fuss and bother when staring down the barrel of a girthy lens.

We've quite enjoyed Linode (Akamai) for some custom servers (not http) over the last few years because they include DDOS scrubbing; it's not clear to what extent they'll defend us but our last partner would routinely null-route our servers when attacked and we haven't had any problems since we switched.

Evidently it's not all Steam Deck either; I checked our internal stats and on PC yesterday 1.24% of Warframe players were using WINE and another 0.76% were playing on Deck!

My first thought was this blog article I saw on HN a while back:

https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/should-we-use-llms-for-ch...

He argued, persuasively I thought, that "this is an area where truthfulness is of paramount importance" and consequently would be extremely ill-suited to AI.

This reminds me of the PlayStation/2 developer manual which, when describing the complicated features of system, said something like "there is no profit in making it easy to extract the most performance from the system."

When cameras became more affordable to the middle class did painters furrow their brows in disapproval at the unwashed masses breaking the rules with a carefree click of the shutter?

My Windows 7 laptop still seems to want security updates about once a week; maybe it's just Windows Defender and not kernel bugs but I find it interesting that MS still bothers.

I get just as many likes from spam bots than real people and it makes me wonder how the numbers would be skewed if the AI-scrapers dropped a like when they absorbed my content.

One alternative that many games choose is to do it on-demand which is felt as micro-stutters while you play but this is a poor choice for a competitive game like CoD.

We take a slightly different approach: we don't do any up-front in the launcher but do as much as possible on the level loading screen; it's not perfect though: due to the way some legacy code works we can't always anticipate all permutations ahead of time so you get the occasional micro-stutter as missing shaders are sent to the driver.

You can get away with being lazier with modern drivers because they will cache the compiled result for you (if you don't cache the pipeline state object yourself in DirectX 12) but on older DirectX drivers for Intel IGPs there wasn't a cache at all so the first 30 seconds after loading into a level would be very busy.

While reading this article it occurred to me to wonder if the CPU CRC32C instruction would be good for hash functions; I think the latency is about the same as an integer multiply.

Our game (also on Steam) hasn't discontinued support for 7 yet and our usage stats from last Saturday Feb 8th 2025 are roughly:

  53.6% Windows 11
  43.8% Windows 10
   1.59% WINE
   0.79% Steamdeck
   0.13% Windows 7
   0.03% Windows 8

I was thinking how this article claims that people crave the authenticity of live music and that bullshit-generators will never be able to supply that. At first, I saw this as a reason for optimism, but then I got to thinking about evidence that people may not necessarily want authenticity after all.

Organic produce was the first metaphor the came to mind: it's probably more healthy for you even if it isn't as pretty, but many people aren't willing to pay a premium it and I suspect economics isn't often the reason. Is that a straw-man for live music? I don't know that it is because plenty of people are content to listen to recorded music -- sure, they might enjoy going to a live concert but they'll still listen to the radio on the drive to work.

Then I got to thinking about something more crass: while breast implants and other cosmetic body surgery may be as much for the benefit of the subject self-image I imagine there are plenty of people that find it very attractive despite what is often obviously fake.

So do we crave authenticity? I think I do but I'm not sure if that's a safe generalization to make.

I started playing a week ago having letting it "cellar" for a few years; I was quite enjoying it but today, after downloading 20GB of free update, I reliably crash on boot :(

Edit: deleted C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\No Man's Sky\Binaries\SETTINGS and I can boot again.

Edit 2: crashed again after playing for a bit; back in the cellar it goes -- needs a bit more time to mature I think.

We had a similar CDN problem with releasing major Warframe updates: our CDN partner would inadvertently DDoS our origin servers when we launched an update because thousands of cold edges would call home simultaneously when all players players relogged at the same time.

One CDN vendor didn't even offer a tiered distribution system so every edge called home at the same time, another vendor did have a tiered distribution system designed to avoid this problem but it was overwhelmed by the absurd number of files we'd serve multiplied by the large user count and so we'd still end up with too much traffic hitting the origin.

The interesting thing was that no vendor we evaluated offered a robust preheating solution if they offered one at all. One vendor even went so far as to say that they wouldn't allow it because it would let customers unfairly dominate the shared storage cache at the edge (which sort of felt like airlines overbooking seats on a flight to me).

These days we run an army of VMs that fetch all assets from every point of presence we can cover right before launching an update.

Another thing we've had to deal with mentioned in the article is overloading back-end nodes; our solution is somewhat ham-fisted but works quite well for us: we cap the connection counts to the back end and return 503s when we saturate. The trick, however, is getting your load-balancer to leave the client connection open when this happens -- by default multiple LBs we've used would slam the connection closed so that when you're serving up 50K 503s a second the firewall would buckle under the runaway connection pool lingering in TIME_WAIT. Good times.

I'd love to go back to 1974 to experience the Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_of_Sound_(Grateful_Dead)

The inventor of the Aeropress believed that over the last century there was a trend towards shorter and shorter brews and that if you left the beans in water for too long it extracted unpleasant sour flavours. I know it's a matter of taste but I'm inclined to agree: I'd rather a faster brew with an Aeropress or an espresso-Americano than a pour-over.

Again, it's a matter of taste, but I was an espresso bar a few weeks ago and had the worst coffee I've had in many years because I decided to wait for pour-over (and they roasted the beans in-house so I assume they were fresh!)

FWIW I had Clover coffee once and I hated it too; maybe I just have bad taste in coffee.

I wonder how much of a difference our ad-blockers made to their revenue; I always liked AnandTech and now I'll feel guilty about leaving my blocker enabled.

When I visited New York on vacation I was delighted to spot the fallout-shelter signs posted around the city and it makes wonder what what extent economies of scale make communal shelters advantageous as opposed to every family fending for themselves.

> It is tempting to build a math library around SIMD hoping to get some performance gains. However, it often has no proven benefit ... For example, game play programmers often do a lot of piecemeal vector math. They are not chopping 8 carrots at once

Her point is well taken however we beat the odds on the PlayStation/3: I don't trust my memory to give a frame-time percentage but switching our "one carrot at a time" libraries from scalar to AltiVec made a measurable impact for not a lot of work.

We originally ported it all to SSE2 so that we'd hit GPFs for misaligned when testing on PC but whenever I compare with the Scalar version it's marginally better too so it's held up over time.

Conversely, we've recently found on the Nintendo Switch that NEON isn't a clear win; I suspect that the in addition to shuffling overhead you don't quite get "4 for the price of 1" like you seem to elsewhere, ie: if you're doing a 3D vectors or matrices padded into 4-float registers unused calculations in the fourth component have a cost.

So she's right -- chop 8 carrots at once if you can -- but sometimes (but not always) you can chop just 1 carrot faster with SIMD.

I wonder if the ritual of taking the cartridge out and re-inserting it scraped a bit of dirt or corrosion off of the contacts which was actually what made it work.

I've never known someone so mindful of the weather forecast as my uncle the farmer: is it too soon to plant? Should I irrigate or wait just a few days longer? If I don't harvest now will my fields get too muddy for the tractor?