In other news today...
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@Erufael Or "Fun is over" in case of @Polygeekery.
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@hungrier said in In other news today...:
@jinpa Even if it's not natively supported, I'm sure there's no shortage of heavy Javascript frameworks that you could pull in to approximate this critical functionality.
CSS has a
text-decoration: blink;which is effectively supported by all browsers, though that support is in terms of "doesn't cause an error" rather than "actually makes it blink."I have considered writing a JavaScript thing to find every element styled with that and manually apply the effect, but so far
was been in the way.
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@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
@remi said in In other news today...:
Americans see it as the quintessential French book,
I'd think more Americans would consider Les Miserables as the quintessential French book, or not unlikely, any of several books set in France but written by non-Frenchmen, but
; I'm not necessarily a typical American.Le Petit Prince is more my speed.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/15/us/politics/bernie-sanders-taxes.html
Is anyone surprised by this?
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@PleegWat said in In other news today...:
@dcon I remember reading the three musketeers and thinking it read strangely, with weird alternations between high-detail sections and large skips. I later heard the theory (though never researched to confirm) it was likely initially published episodically in a newspaper or magazine, and the book is basically an extract of that.
It was indeed published episodically initially, like I think many works from Dumas (but I've never heard that it was significantly altered for book publishing, although that may very well be the case). Several other authors of the time did publish most of their works this way, quite often writing their story day-by-day, and with lesser writers it sometimes really can be felt in the style, with lengthy parts that were clearly stretched just to fill their column, or artificial cliffhangers based on nothing, or funny wordings due to not even proof-reading what they wrote.
One such author, Ponson du Terrail, is known for a single work "Rocambole" (which was such a success that it is the origin of the word "rocambolesque" and is basically a never-ending suite of improbable and fantastic adventures and coincidences). It includes gems such as:
"He wore velvet trousers and a waistcoat of the same colour."
[Someone blindfolds someone else and tells them] "Watch carefully where you go! Keep your eyes on my every sign!"
"Right! Right!" he grumbled in silence and in Britton.
And a bonus one from Dumas, showing even good writers weren't immune to it:
"Ha!" said Don Manoel in Portuguese.
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I said earlier that fund-raising wouldn't be an issue: the fire isn't even entirely put out yet and two French billionaires have already announced they're going to give respectively €100 and €200 millions. I can foresee a race to who's going to be the most generous... not that it's a bad thing in this case!
(and the Paris region has also announced the immediate release of 10 millions, but that's public money and it's probably just some stop-gap measure to pay for immediate costs such as protecting what's left etc.)
(source, in French)
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@remi said in In other news today...:
"Ha!" said Don Manoel in Portuguese.
Thanks for that. I needed a laugh.
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@Zecc You're welcome.
Dumas was also quite lax with verses, such as in his famous Cyrano de Bergerac, entirely written in "alexandrins" (12 syllables verses), where he sometimes used some tricks such as (in a dialogue between a barmaid and a client):
Orangeade ?
Fi !
Lait ?
Pouah !
Rivesalte ?
Halte !
Je reste encore un peu. – Voyons ce rivesalte ?("orange juice?" "no!" "milk?" "ew!" "Wine?" "Stop! I'm staying a bit more, let's see this wine?")
That's two "perfects" alexandrins, ryhming.
There is at least another one where some people are laughing and the required number of syllables for an alexandrin is reached... by adding more "ha!" (6 or 7 in total).
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@remi said in In other news today...:
"ew!"
I get the feeling that's not a fully proper translation of "Pouah !"
Some things sound much better in French.
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@remi said in In other news today...:
Several other authors of the time did publish most of their works this way, quite often writing their story day-by-day, and with lesser writers it sometimes really can be felt in the style, with lengthy parts that were clearly stretched just to fill their column, or artificial cliffhangers based on nothing, or funny wordings due to not even proof-reading what they wrote.
I've read fifty million words of fanfiction and can confirm. It's even more silly when authors artificially constrain themselves to a specific word count per chapter.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in In other news today...:
@remi said in In other news today...:
Several other authors of the time did publish most of their works this way, quite often writing their story day-by-day, and with lesser writers it sometimes really can be felt in the style, with lengthy parts that were clearly stretched just to fill their column, or artificial cliffhangers based on nothing, or funny wordings due to not even proof-reading what they wrote.
I've read fifty million words of fanfiction and can confirm. It's even more silly when authors artificially constrain themselves to a specific word count per chapter.
So that's how games get their manuscripts. Learned something new again, yay!
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@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/15/us/politics/bernie-sanders-taxes.html
Is anyone surprised by this?
What's to be surprised about?
You seem to be insinuating some kind of non-existing hypocrisy there. Then you might be even more surprised by this:
Bill Gates suggests higher taxes on the rich—the current system is 'not progressive enough,' he says
"There's no doubt that what we want government to do in terms of better education and better health care means that we need to collect more in taxes. And there's no doubt that, as we raise taxes, we can have most of that additional money come from those who are better off," billionaire Bill Gates...
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@remi said in In other news today...:
One such author, Ponson du Terrail, is known for a single work "Rocambole"
Is that about a kicking in the nuts competition?
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RIP Google Fiber Louisville
Edit:
Looks like they tried to compete with AT&T in the market by using a seat-of-the-pants construction style so they could offset the time advantage AT&T had from starting first, but the rush job didn't work as expected (shocker, I know)...
SUNDAY EDITION | Where is Google Fiber? Mostly in the Highlands, records show
Nearly a year since launching service in Louisville, Google Fiber has mainly focused on higher-income neighborhoods like Belknap and Deer Park.
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Amazon to introduce free music service
Could be exclusive to Echo speakers initially. According to new reports, Amazon is planning to launch a free alternative to its music streaming service in...
Amazon's music offerings are already kind of a mess:
- normal Amazon Prime music, free with an Amazon Prime account
- premium version which is more better, but you have to pay extra on top of Amazon Prime, or even more extra if you don't have Prime
Now they're adding another option:
- another free one, not as good as the Amazon Prime one, but you have to have an Amazon
Always On Audio Recording Surveillance DeviceEcho
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@HardwareGeek If you're posting this then I guess posting something about "Freeze Peach" is only fair game:
I co-founded the BDS movement. Why was I denied entry to the US? | Omar Barghouti
With this denial of entry, Israel appears to have once again enlisted the Trump administration to do its bidding
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https://unv.is/wired.com/story/exclusive-sony-next-gen-console
This whole announcement seems to be a whole lot of Sony being Sony. Highlights:
The GPU, a custom variant of Radeon’s Navi family, will support ray tracing, a technique that models the travel of light to simulate complex interactions in 3D environments.
Ok, that's an up-and-coming technology, fair enough.
According to Cerny, the applications go beyond graphic implications. “If you wanted to run tests to see if the player can hear certain audio sources or if the enemies can hear the players’ footsteps, ray tracing is useful for that,” he says. “It's all the same thing as taking a ray through the environment.”
Maybe, but those things can and have already been done without the need for real time ray tracing.
The AMD chip also includes a custom unit for 3D audio that Cerny thinks will redefine what sound can do in a videogame.
3D audio also already exists.
the [3D audio] effect will require no external hardware—it will work through TV speakers and visual surround sound
Yes, I'm sure downward- or backward-firing TV speakers will do a great job simulating surround sound.
That’s all great, but there’s something else that excites Cerny even more. Something that he calls “a true game changer,” something that more than anything else is “the key to the next generation.”
Wow, that sounds amazing! It must be even better than that surround sound thing! What could it possibly be?
It’s a hard drive.
TLDR: it's an SSD, apparently one that's light years beyond anything available now
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@Zecc Maybe it means it'll display
(behind you)on the screen when you hear the footsteps
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@remi said in In other news today...:
two French billionaires have already announced they're going to give respectively €100 and €200 millions.
As of this morning (UTC-7), funds pledged are already up to €600 million.
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Here's one for
:
Winters Are Only Going to Get Worse, So Researchers Invented a Way to Generate Electricity from Snowfall
The farther you get from the equator, the less effective solar panels become at reliably generating power all year round. And it’s not just the shorter spans of sunlight during the winter months that are a problem; even a light dusting of snow can render solar panels ineffective. As a result of...
TL;DR: A quick skim seems to indicate they're collecting the static electric charge that snowflakes acquire as they fall.
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@HardwareGeek There's no need to read that even
aside. I assume the efficiency of "generating electricity" like that is on par with collecting the kinetic energy of your keyboard to power your laptop. 
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Meanwhile in B*****m:
Belgian twins freed by court amid confusion over identity
The men became involved in a fracas in Belgium but police and witnesses could not tell them apart.
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Also this NSFW news article:
Mainly due to the "special" "easter egg" hunt's onebox image
More than 10,000 people search for sex toys in Walloon field
An adult version of the “egg roll” in which children search for eggs that have been hidden by the organisers took place in Wépion in Namur Province on Sunday.
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@hungrier said in In other news today...:
@Zecc Maybe it means it'll display
(behind you)on the screen when you hear the footstepsOr display the direction of the sound next to the subtitles, for deaf players.
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The onebox in @izzion 's post in In other news today... said:
the tech company has agreed to pay Metro government $3.84 million to fix damage to city streets, Mayor
Ouch, at least the mayor is getting something for their pain.
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@hungrier said in In other news today...:
https://unv.is/wired.com/story/exclusive-sony-next-gen-console
This whole announcement seems to be a whole lot of Sony being Sony. Highlights:
The GPU, a custom variant of Radeon’s Navi family, will support ray tracing, a technique that models the travel of light to simulate complex interactions in 3D environments.
Ok, that's an up-and-coming technology, fair enough.
According to Cerny, the applications go beyond graphic implications. “If you wanted to run tests to see if the player can hear certain audio sources or if the enemies can hear the players’ footsteps, ray tracing is useful for that,” he says. “It's all the same thing as taking a ray through the environment.”
Maybe, but those things can and have already been done without the need for real time ray tracing.
The AMD chip also includes a custom unit for 3D audio that Cerny thinks will redefine what sound can do in a videogame.
3D audio also already exists.
the [3D audio] effect will require no external hardware—it will work through TV speakers and visual surround sound
Yes, I'm sure downward- or backward-firing TV speakers will do a great job simulating surround sound.
That’s all great, but there’s something else that excites Cerny even more. Something that he calls “a true game changer,” something that more than anything else is “the key to the next generation.”
Wow, that sounds amazing! It must be even better than that surround sound thing! What could it possibly be?
It’s a hard drive.
TLDR: it's an SSD, apparently one that's light years beyond anything available now
I'm not an expert on these kinds of things, but I had thought that GPUs that supported ray tracing came out about 15 years ago. BMTTJ.
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@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
@remi said in In other news today...:
two French billionaires have already announced they're going to give respectively €100 and €200 millions.
As of this morning (UTC-7), funds pledged are already up to €600 million.
For that kind of money, they could probably make a new cathedral that would be equally impressive throughout the centuries, though not as old.
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@jinpa 15 years ago I was rendering 3d models with a raytracer, but it took several minutes per frame, rather than real-time.
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@jinpa said in In other news today...:
I'm not an expert on these kinds of things, but I had thought that GPUs that supported ray tracing came out about 15 years ago. BMTTJ.
I hadn't heard about any, and real time ray tracing is the biggest headline feature of the newest generation of NVidia cards, so I figured it wasn't a thing until recently.
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@jinpa said in In other news today...:
@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
@remi said in In other news today...:
two French billionaires have already announced they're going to give respectively €100 and €200 millions.
As of this morning (UTC-7), funds pledged are already up to €600 million.
For that kind of money, they could probably make a new cathedral that would be equally impressive throughout the centuries, though not as old.
I think that people in Spain would be somewhat envious if all that fresh capital is going to a new construction.
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@TimeBandit said in In other news today...:
@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
Winters Are Only Going to Get Worse
As long as it keeps coming, I'm sure we'll be fine...
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Apple, Qualcomm Reach Courthouse-Steps Settlement to Suits
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
@HardwareGeek There's no need to read that even
aside. I assume the efficiency of "generating electricity" like that is on par with collecting the kinetic energy of your keyboard to power your laptop. Yeah, but when you get 500 billion tonnes of it dumped on you, even inefficient collection has a lot of potential.
Besides, actually reading the article, it seems like they're proposing this mostly for small-scale generation for things like remote weather stations that would be powered by a couple square meters of solar panels in climates where there is enough sunlight.
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@hungrier said in In other news today...:
I hadn't heard about any, and real time ray tracing is the biggest headline feature of the newest generation of NVidia cards, so I figured it wasn't a thing until recently.
People have tried to do various types of ray tracing on commodity GPUs for a long time - for sure as long as there have been minimally programmable shader things. It only ever took off in very limited scenarious for real-time stuff, to the point where it's debatable whether or not you'd really want to call it "ray-tracing" or just saying that you're using a ray-optics model for something (rendering eyes is one of the examples that I remember off the top of my head).
There have been tons of attempts at building dedicated hardware for ray tracing, those just never really took off either.
Doing ray tracing on modern GPUs has been possible for a while, even at real-time-ish frame rates. Ray-tracing-based techniques have been creeping into real-time engines for some time as well. It's just always been somewhat limited. Even with RTX in HW, you probably wouldn't build a pure ray-tracer (path tracer, whatever) for now.
From my POV, the headline was big because a lot of people tried to do HW ray tracing and mostly didn't succeed very well. It being pushed by a big company as a prime-time feature is ... interesting. (Not having to write my own GPU ray tracing infrastructure [again] is also pretty sweet.)
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
There have been tons of attempts at building dedicated hardware for ray tracing, those just never really took off either.
About 10 years ago, I interviewed for a job with a startup doing a ray-tracing chip. Unfortunately, I didn't get beyond the initial phone interview, because I was really excited about that job. Or maybe fortunately, because I never heard of them again. I don't remember the name of the company, and if they'd ever brought a product to market, I'd probably remember them.
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@jinpa said in In other news today...:
BMTTJ
Bees must travel to Japan?
Bite my tiny tiny john?
"Bah! Me Thinks: This? Jactitation!"
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@HardwareGeek There's probably been a few, even a few big names (PowerVR/Imaginagtion Technologies is one of them IIRC)
A bit more than 10 years ago, I worked with a few people from a pre-startup that wanted to use a special propritary FPGA-infrastructure for ray tracing. They never qualified for proper funding. But it wasn't really a new idea even then.
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@Zecc said in In other news today...:
@jinpa said in In other news today...:
BMTTJ
Bees must travel to Japan?
Bite my tiny tiny john?
"Bah! Me Thinks: This? Jactitation!"
But Maybe That Truly Jank.
Boy Mother Trans Transformation Justification.
Become More Than The Jaguar.
Bring My Top Take Jacky.
Before My Time That Jizz.
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
From my POV, the headline was big because a lot of people tried to do HW ray tracing and mostly didn't succeed very well.
The problem is that doing raytracing well requires branching — rays do not always hit the same sort of surface, after all — and that doesn't fit well with how most people have been trying to build hardware accelerators in recent years (the SIMD model can't really branch well, but is much easier otherwise, both in hardware and software). That means that architectures to support raytracing have to be more like true manycore systems (where current research chips are looking at well over a hundred independent CPUs per chip) and that sort of thing is definitely cutting edge, especially in terms of programming model. It's really hard to write code that uses thousands of threads, or to design a comms stack that works efficiently in such a situation.
My wild-ass guess is that nVidia has built hardware that could theoretically work in that way, but they forgot to sort out the software side before doing an announcement. The software engineers might've got their stuff up to being one-off demo-ware, but there's a hell of a long way from there to production-grade code and management are getting a nasty demonstration that when programmers say code isn't ready they really mean it. There's a lot of managers who really don't seem to get the difference between those two TRLs.
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@dkf said in In other news today...:
The problem is that doing raytracing well requires branching — rays do not always hit the same sort of surface, after all — and that doesn't fit well with how most people have been trying to build hardware accelerators in recent years (the SIMD model can't really branch well, but is much easier otherwise, both in hardware and software). That means that architectures to support raytracing have to be more like true manycore systems (where current research chips are looking at well over a hundred independent CPUs per chip) and that sort of thing is definitely cutting edge, especially in terms of programming model. It's really hard to write code that uses thousands of threads, or to design a comms stack that works efficiently in such a situation.
Sort of. Branching shading code has been a problem to varying degrees for some time. The term that people use is "divergence", and it tends to crop up in a lot of places. Übershaders, especially when doing deferred shading, struggle with it.
The problem is much more fundamental for efficient ray tracing. Finding the actual ray intersections has terrible memory access patterns. The underlying problem is the same that you mention - you don't know what surface your rays will intersect. To find that, you have an acceleration structure (typically a tree of sorts, AABB hierarchies are rather popular). Traversing that hierarchy can end up touching memory all over the place. Doing many rays in parallel either makes the problem a bit easier (very coherent rays) or much much much worse (incoherent rays, which unfortunately are the more interesting rays).
From what I gather, the RTX hardware mainly accelerates the ray traversal part (and possibly the final intersection tests). The people behind that hardware have a long track record of papers related to the topic, so one can guess what's going on, but I don't think the details are public yet.
The programmer still writes shaders that do the shading, so in the end, dealing with divergence is left to them. The implementation is probably doing something smart with batching and grouping shader invocations of the same kind (but none of the examples I've seen use the RTX API in a way that would allow utilizing that -- not that the shaders are particularly complex either).
(Now that I write this, I think I also figured out what those "callable shaders" are all about. Documentation is a bit lacking at the moment.)
My wild-ass guess is that nVidia has built hardware that could theoretically work in that way, but they forgot to sort out the software side before doing an announcement.
No, the programmable hardware that you use for shading stuff hasn't changed drastically, as far as I can tell. More iterative changes. But, you're still executing "warps" of 32 threads, that are grouped into "blocks" of which many make a "grid". Multiple blocks are simultaneously resident and executing on a single multiprocessor (for a total of up to ~1k-2k threads), and you have multiple MPs (~15 for a discrete GPU). The rule is roughly that warps can diverge freely. Divergence within a warp is allowed but costly. (We've been dealing with around 20k simultaneous threads for a while now.)
There are some indications that you group threads within a block ... differently, haven't played around with that, though. But that's not new for this generation.
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@Zecc said in In other news today...:
@jinpa said in In other news today...:
BMTTJ
Bees must travel to Japan?
Yes, Bees must travel to Japan is correct. (I seem to recall there's been a discussion on Japanese wasps before, and the bees felt left out.) I was thinking it meant But Maybe That's The Joke, but I was wrong.
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@hungrier That's actually pretty cool.
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TFLA:
Yet the damage wrought by the Notre Dame fire has also raised important questions about the cathedral’s symbolic significance in an increasingly divided France, and how to rebuild (or which version of the cathedral should be rebuilt) going forward — and in some ways, these questions are one and the same.
"What, no version control?"
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Creuzot says he'll decline to prosecute theft of personal items worth less than $750 unless the theft was for financial gain.
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
Traversing that hierarchy can end up touching memory all over the place.
But if your group of traces is fairly dense, wouldn't consecutively calculated traces get good cache hit percentage? I mean, two traces next to each other would mostly hit the same surfaces, right?
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@hungrier Ubisoft is now giving away Assassin's Creed Unity for free.
They've also donated half a million Euros.
Rolling Stone on Twitter
