programmers-off-topic

[rotund violet]

Or if they did, that they didn't have actual hair in them.

[sand frost]

Yes

Everything in my apartment statistically has a little hair, since my hair is very long and gets everywhere

But usually not my coffee

[rotund violet]

I like the "usually" qualifier.

[cinder karma]

Of course it does!

Compiled yarn

[sand frost]

Ooooh!

[cinder karma]

The compiler sucks. That took the better part of three weeks

[devout vault]

Maybe it needs optimizing

Have you tried building with -O3

[cinder karma]

I could learn how to knit continental

[worn remnant]

wearing several skeins held on to my body with needles and calling it a JIT

[devout vault]

Wait, I guess that'd be for runtime speed not compilation time

[sand frost]

When the wind blows, you frantically knit?

[worn remnant]

when the yarn breaks, i curse and cast on

[devout vault]

Like that's ever stopped me

Though it does occur to me that having bulk simple dialogue might be tedious with Yarn, needing a title for everything

...I could hybridize it with my SpaceCore content stuff though (especially since I recently separated the non-stardew stuff for it so I could do the language server for VSCode)

Something like:

// dialogue-pool.spacecore
[
  "Hello";
  Yarn( "
Character: meow
  -> A cat!
  -> A kitty!
" );
  Yarn( IncludeString( long-script.yarn ) ); // longer things could go in another file
]

Post processed into

// processed dialogue-pool.spacecore
[
  %( dialogue-pool.Character.1 );
  // I'm not sure if the following is the right Yarn syntax
  Yarn( "
Character: #dialogue-pool.Character.2.Character.1
  -> #dialogue-pool.Character.2.choice.1.1
  -> #dialogue-pool.Character.2.choice.1.2
" );
  Yarn( IncludeString( long-script.yarn ) ); // still in another file
]

[raw pelican]

ok so very dumb question, how do I actually use gitignore? I looked at nuget packages and got the VisualStudio.gitignore and added it to my solution and then... now what.

[pliant snow]

It's just a file that git looks at when it decides which files to consider or not. So each line is just a list of files (typically with wildcards) indicating which things you don't want git to add under any circumstance

So if you run git status you shouldn't see any of the matching files listed, even if they have changes

[raw pelican]

do I need to add a new item to the solution named that way or is it in the background when I use github desktop to upload?

[pliant snow]

I'm not sure about how the Visual Studio editor integrates them, but when you're using github desktop and go to add files to your commit, the gitignore'd files wont allow themselves to be added

[raw pelican]

ah on making a new repo it asks for the git ignore to use and there is not a C# one

[pliant snow]

uh

I assume that's just a template one, there's nothing language-specific about a gitignore. I think that would just add commonly ignored files for you, but idk

[raw pelican]

makes sense

[raw pelican]

found it, it's listed as VisualStudio in the git ignore list.

[raw pelican]

man I do not understand github. How to make a stardewmods repo and then folders inside it for each mod

[rain apex]

You never used git at all before?

[raw pelican]

just to put some R code, but I directly add the files and they're single files, didn't use a gitdesktop interface.

[rain apex]

I just do it on command line

First you create the repo with github web ui or whatever

Then you get a url u can clone

Something like this
https://github.com/Pathoschild/SMAPI.git

After cloning the repo to local u can put your files in there then add + commit

[raw pelican]

ahhhhhhh

I was trying to link an existing local folder to the web ui and it was not recognizing the stuff there

[rain apex]

Yeah u must clone

[raw pelican]

success! Is it better to work locally and then save everything, copy paste to the upload folder, or work off the upload folder?

[rain apex]

You work in the cloned git repo folder from now on

Commit and push whenever u got enough changes

[raw pelican]

will have to remember to not push while the project is bricked from whatever new thing I'm trying to add.

[rain apex]

Well the point of git/vcs is that you can go back to previous not bricked commit

[raw pelican]

that's true. I'm becoming a real programmer...

my org doesn't use git for SQL, they have their own version control.

[rain apex]

Better not be SVN

I had fren who used to work at place where their firmware code is a bunch of timestamped rar files on a ftp

[timid breach]

Just got recognized as a Mod Author on Nexus

[safe dragon]

you're famous

[safe dragon]

not sure this is php but what do I know

[crystal wren]

This is just evil.

[safe dragon]

:gentoo:

[pliant snow]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAlSjtxy5ak

[safe dragon]

but minecraft uses Java 21

wonder if I've ever actually watched a beginner's programming tutorial

[pliant snow]

I guess I have, but its more focused on some engine/platform keeping things very simple

[lethal walrus]

not 1.14.4, that's java 8

[safe dragon]

I guess in that way I have too

random videos about javascript frameworks that were going to change everything that I've never seen again

[rotund violet]

At least the official Rust book and tutorials are good old-fashioned text.

[safe dragon]

text tutorials are just so much nicer

especially when you're in the middle of developing

it's so slow to have to sit through a video version for an answer

[rotund violet]

No question. And with text I can actually search if I already know what I'm looking for.

For things that require interacting with physical objects, video is a godsend. For things that require interacting exclusively with text and symbols, video is a preposterous waste of time.

[cinder karma]

Elizabeth

I accidentally put earl grey in my coffee

I'm not convinced

What black tea did you use

[rotund violet]

You "accidentally" did this exactly one day after it was discussed here? Hmmmm.....

[fleet wren]

every coffee/tea fusion recipes I know of adds a(n un)healthy amount of milk as the great unifier
putting tea bags in coffee doesn't sound very appealing

[sand frost]

Plain black tea

Also I do add both milk and sugar

I think I used English breakfast from Bigelow at the time, because it’s what was in the break room

[cinder karma]

Milk and sugar is probably the secret

Grumbles

I'm using bigelow earl grey because that's what we have

[rotund violet]

I don't drink it anymore, but seems to me that mocha is a tastier choice if you need that extra jolt of caffeine.

Maybe it'd be fun to attempt some unholy abomination of coffee, cocoa, guarana and the inside of a pep capsule.

[cinder karma]

Lol if I actually just wanted caffeine I do have caffeine pills

I'm just amused at this tea in coffee thing

[regal ingot]

idunno about plain black tea and coffee, but "dirty chai" is definitely a thing

[fleet wren]

coffee-flavored boba tea probably doesn't count, but that's a thing as well

now I made myself craving some boba

[cinder karma]

I make a really good earl grey truffle

[fleet wren]

can I have some

[rotund violet]

I don't think of boba as tea even, but you're right, that combination definitely works. Probably partly because of all the milk again.

[raw pelican]

I love chai tea but have not tried dirty chai.

[latent bough]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBUTq762kGs

silly little video

[pliant snow]

I shall treat this video as literal gospel

[latent bough]

maybe give it a watch first lol

[pliant snow]

Dont be silly

[latent bough]

That guy made a couple of videos like that

they give me a little bit of a laugh every time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ugubpl4KwHE

[gaunt wadi]

What a soundtrack

[lethal walrus]

i feel like there's older people that use lua for neovim

[pliant snow]

what do u mean older wtf

[safe dragon]

you're old

or at least older than a literal child

[pliant snow]

citation needed

[supple ether]

AI thumbnail booooo

[pliant snow]

i expected them to make a cat obese in real life for this meme video

[supple ether]

It should be a bad photoshop of a crusty jpeg like god intended

[lethal walrus]

older than

[gaunt wadi]

Babe wake up new crossword just dropped

[safe dragon]

ah they made is especially easy to read

I having to hold my head upside down to read the crossword clues

[pliant snow]

is this regex

is this hell

[safe dragon]

yes

[pliant snow]

i have never seen a backslash in regex before, thats concerning

[safe dragon]

you've definitely seen backslashes in regex

\d

\1 is a backreference where that part has to string has to be the same as the one found by the first capturing group

[pliant snow]

for some reason i thought those were forward slashes

i come from the alternative timeline where those are forward slashes

but everything else is the same

[safe dragon]

you're a regex professional

[gaunt wadi]

I come from the alternate timeline where dogs are all twice as big but everything else is the same

[pliant snow]

theres literally a regex bug in a helper script at work and I havent fixed it because I dont want to dive into what that regex is doing

[safe dragon]

I do not like using regex it is not a healthy relationship

[pliant snow]

I think its something like it needs to match 123 and 12x3 but not 123x, which its doing currently

maybe i'll be a good person and fix that today

[safe dragon]

I can write a regex which does exactly that for those specific 3 strings

[pliant snow]

that wont quite cut it

[gaunt wadi]

That crossword is like that one github project which bootstraps modern Linux by starting with a 512 byte hand written assembly program and no other compiled files ever in 165 steps

I think compilers are neat but 165 steps is crazy

[safe dragon]

165 steps is just enough for it to barely function probably

[supple ether]

Is it not possible to just hardcode the pattern variations with an or pattern?

[safe dragon]

write some code which automatically builds a gigantic regex string with every possible allowed string

[supple ether]

That sounds like a recipe for an O(don't ask) algorithm

[safe dragon]

O(1) but it's a horribly slow O(1)

tangent but gotta love when people treat time complexities like the holy grail of optimization and will not question it

[supple ether]

Yeah for sure

Especially when it's code that's unlikely to scale

[safe dragon]

my super incredible O(n) algorithm that will never be run on a list longer than like 5 elements

[cinder karma]

My code is o(1)

(1 = heat deaths of the universe)

[cinder karma]

I call these O(mfg)

"Oh my fucking god"

[supple ether]

I've also heard of O(no)

[supple ether]

Deferred execution is something that comes to mind. It can reduce the average complexity for some tasks, but usually it just spreads it out over a larger period of time

[safe dragon]

sleep sort

[supple ether]

lol

[safe dragon]

I've been a victim of the time complexity is better so it must be better trap

coping when it only becomes faster at like 100,000 elements

[supple ether]

Lol

[rotund violet]

It might not be the holy grail, but you'll be reminded how important it is every time you run an unindexed SQL query that takes 7 minutes and see that "nested loops" in the explain.

[supple ether]

I just wish there was a better way to attach extra data to existing objects than some form of hashmap. They may be O(1) but doing lots of hashes every frame seems like a bad idea for performance

[safe dragon]

custom specialized hashing functions are sometimes the solution

[rotund violet]

"Use JavaScript"

[supple ether]

IDK what ConditionalWeakTable uses but hopefully it's at least somewhat optimized

[safe dragon]

I have no idea what that is so I'm gonna go with yes it's the fastest ever made

[supple ether]

Javascript did the galaxy brain move of just making everything an object, and making all objects dictionaries

[safe dragon]

everything is an object and when it comes down to it it is also a string

[rotund violet]

It does solve your problem, though. You can just add anything to anything.

And I suppose I mean that in both senses of the word - adding properties and literal addition operators.

[supple ether]

It does do that, but I wouldn't use js for performance sensitive stuff

[safe dragon]

javascript gives you unlimited power to fuck shit up

[safe dragon]

smh it's 2024 we use js for any usecase

[rain apex]

i vote javascript for president

[supple ether]

Can't wait to make games with ReactPyNative in 2026

[safe dragon]

in the eyes of president javascript we are all just objects

I had to look up ReactPyNative just in case it was a real thing

[rotund violet]

I looked up ConditionalWeakTable out of curiosity and it appears to be just hashing.

[supple ether]

The fun thing about arrays also being dictionaries is that you can use them as bidirectional maps if you're a crazy person

[safe dragon]

it doesn't use GetHashCode however according to the docs

[rotund violet]

https://github.com/microsoft/referencesource/blob/master/mscorlib/system/runtime/compilerservices/ConditionalWeakTable.cs#L569

[cinder karma]

Sync key is my guess

[supple ether]

That does make sense, since it would have to be pointer based to interact with the GC the way it does

[rotund violet]

The main reason to use ConditionalWeakTable, I think, is to avoid leaking the objects, not for performance.

[supple ether]

Yeah I mean obviously

[rotund violet]

Unless RuntimeHelpers.GetHashCode has some special optimization but... I doubt it.

[cinder karma]

Yeah, you can't get around it for modding tbh

[safe dragon]

I've long learnt that javascript arrays are all a facade and even ones with very clear specific names like Int16Array do not prevent you in any way from just tacking on whatever you want onto that thing if you wish

[supple ether]

I just wasn't sure if it used an alternate hash method because of the specific nature of the keys

[rotund violet]

Since it's generic on TKey, that would be hard to do, but maybe it's an "identity hash" (i.e. ignores custom GetHashCode and just takes the object hash).

It's a valid way of hashing object identities, to just take the literal pointer.

[cinder karma]

Yeah

Sorta

There is an identifier for the GC

Known as the sync block

[supple ether]

I don't think the architecture of c# allows you associating objects with arbitrary data outside of hashmaps and maybe the DLR

[rotund violet]

Well, I'm just assuming it's analogous to Java's System.identityHashCode

[supple ether]

I suppose that would be one advantage of using an ECS. Would be a lot easier to glue things on

[rotund violet]

It is pretty nice, although believe it or not it's not always entirely free in an ECS either. At least not in every ECS; the strongly-typed ones usually are based on "archetypes", so any time you use a combination of components that hasn't been used before, you incur a penalty.

[supple ether]

Theoretically there's also the secret third option of ilhacking

[cinder karma]

The heck is an ECS

[rotund violet]

Entity Component System - you know, game design?

[cinder karma]

Nope!

[supple ether]

It's a design paradigm that emphasizes composition over inheritance by breaking functionality into groups of components

[rotund violet]

The general idea is not to worry about adding/removing components if it's on a few dozen entities at a time, but dynamically adding/removing components on millions of entities every frame is a recipe for jank.

Yeah, the driving force behind ECS is that systems are almost perfectly parallelizable, and components are generally independent, so overall you get way better performance than uh... well, Stardew.

[cinder karma]

Huh

[rotund violet]

Have you ever noticed how most games just chug along on one thread, missing frames while 99% of your system capacity remains idle?

[cinder karma]

My brain had it categorized as "arena allocator but like how game devs do it"

[cinder karma]

Sudoku never misses frames!

[rotund violet]

The allocator is part of it. The "entity" part of ECS is usually just a generational ID.

(also a really cool concept once I learned about it)

[supple ether]

It's a cool idea, and great for certain types of games, but less good for others

[cinder karma]

There is a talk about a rust UI lib that uses ECS

That I wanted to go through

But it had tree pruning issues

Ie, you could never delete a node in your UI

[supple ether]

Hm

[rotund violet]

I think Bevy UI is trying to be that library.

They may actually succeed, if given a few years and a lot of persistence.

Since they already have a functioning ECS hierarchy model/API.

[cinder karma]

Trees can just be fun and games in Rust in general

[rotund violet]

Having hierarchy in the ECS helps, the main disadvantage is that you can only define one hierarchy.

Which sounds like no big deal, but you'll quickly get into situations where the physical worldspace/geometry hierarchy just doesn't match the "logical" one.

It's not done yet, but they are trying to add "relations" for this purpose and have made some progress.

[supple ether]

Yeah I've had Adventures with trees and rust

[cinder karma]

I learned rust via advent of code

Day 7 nearly killed me

[rotund violet]

When it comes down to it, ECS is kind of just a really fast in-memory database. If you plan around that, it makes sense, and gets around a lot of the irritating Rust-specific issues.

Which year's Advent?

[cinder karma]

2022 I think?

[safe dragon]

advent of code 🙏

[cinder karma]

Day 7 wasn't conceptually hard I was just new to Rust and had to do a tree

[safe dragon]

trees are fairly easy in rust

well

if you only need to traverse downwards...

rust enums are great for that

else you're gonna end up in the land of refcell

[rotund violet]

The canonical solution is just the arena style, no?

Yeah, you want to have any notion of "parent" and it's Arcs all the way down.

The most popular implementation is something they called a slab tree, and I still don't really know what that is. Maybe I thought I understood it at the time, but clearly the knowledge didn't stick.

[safe dragon]

I have no idea

[cinder karma]

I ended up in the land of refcell

On the 7th bit of rust I ever wrote

[safe dragon]

I'm sorry

I tried to write some custom multithreading code in rust as one of my first things and I went nuts with Arcs everywhere

[rotund violet]

I've run into cases legitimately needing refcell but also a lot of cases where I just needed to rethink the problem and didn't actually need it.

We're just used to writing non-rust code where those kinds of references are free and easy.

(My point being, if you try to write OOP in Rust, which literally all of us do when starting out, your life will be hell)

[cinder karma]

(That was the trick to day7)

(You could do it with two vecs)

But I found that out after the refcell hell

[safe dragon]

can't expect some fucked up stuff in AoC till later

[devout vault]

I'm using an ECS for one of my game projects, though it's not doing any threading

This one: https://github.com/genaray/Arch

[safe dragon]

you're using arch

[pliant snow]

btw

[rain apex]

why did they name it that arch could be so many things

[safe dragon]

presumably cause it's an archetype based ecs

I'll take it over calling it cecs or something

[rotund violet]

Haha, I guess it depends how you pronounce the "c" but I read it as "keks" which would be an awesome name.

[sand frost]

Arch is definitely a Linux flavor and not much else to me

[cinder karma]

Arch is a part of a circle

[safe dragon]

it's also usually a build flag for compilers...

[cinder karma]

I really need to get around to telling git some of these file types don't need the lf/crlf right

[latent bough]

I just like it for pretty much no reason

couldn't even try to justify it

[cinder karma]

I have audible tokens to spend

What books should I buy

I like scifi

[marble jewel]

I've been consumed by new hobbies

[sand frost]

Two new hobbies or one interconnected one?

[ivory shadow]

Looks like an expensive hobby

[cinder karma]

Just 3d print at work, ez

[sand frost]

Ez for me lol

Less depending on your job

[marble jewel]

3d printing is one hobby, and rackmounting my pc and networking gear is another

I went from my janky system to a more "proper" one

This is what it was before. Getting everything rackmounted is still a wip. #programmers-off-topic message

The hobbies go hand in hand though because 3d printing (and rackmounting) has helped me achieve my overall goal to get things more organized

[rotund violet]

What kind of home network needs that amount of gear?

Are you running a little side business?

[marble jewel]

Every kind if you try hard enough

Really though, a lot of this stems from an earlier hobby of trying to host my own services at home rather than depend on "the cloud"

[rotund violet]

Ah yes. A noble goal, if you can afford a static IP and redundant internet connections.

[rain apex]

do you need static ip just for intranet stuff?

[marble jewel]

You don't even need a static IP. I use a mesh VPN network

So my devices can all see each other no matter where I'm at, but none of it is visible to the public internet

PROJECT: ORGANIZE - A story in three photos. Shelves, bins, and 3d printed parts.

One upside to self-hosting is that if my home internet is down, and I'm at home, everything still works as intended. One downside is if my home internet is down, and I'm away from home, then nothing works as intended.

[cinder karma]

Lol

I'm a pen and paper person

[rain apex]

sounds like you need a sysadmin at home

[marble jewel]

Really it only goes down if my ISP is down or my house is experiencing a power outage. Otherwise, I'm able to remotely fix issues.

[rotund violet]

Sounds like your next project needs to be a whole-home UPS with a huge battery bank and solar backup.

[marble jewel]

I'm trying to find a way to do a wan cutover to my cell phone service if I ever experience an outage from my primary ISP.

[rain apex]

what kinds of services are you hosting?

[marble jewel]

Oh, I already have everything on UPS, but it really only gives me an hour to shutdown everything properly before they are forced to shut down.

Although, having whole house battery backup and maybe solar would be a nice future project to help save me from that.

[rotund violet]

I did that a few years ago, not really a big deal, just grab an LTE modem and put it behind a router with LB/failover?

[marble jewel]

Yeah, that's what I was thinking of doing. Only problem is my whole network setup is in a middle room in the basement so it's probably the worst room for cellular reception.

[rotund violet]

Time to run some some CAT6.

You might also be able to get away with a really, really long antenna/cable on the LTE router.

[marble jewel]

I have another room that is wired for ethernet which is more ideal, but I just have to figure out how to get it all working when the connection is coming back from the switch.

[rotund violet]

(And by that I mean long enough to end up in a different room entirely)

[marble jewel]

If I had the foresight for wanting to do that, I'd probably have setup an extra ethernet port in one of the upstairs/outer rooms specifically for this purpose, but I only recently wired this house up and only terminated three connections.

[rotund violet]

Home networking would be so much easier without pesky walls and ceilings.

[marble jewel]

I should've gone with the conventional knowledge. Wire every room up because you never know when you'll want it.

[rotund violet]

I don't have this place wired, but if I do, it's definitely going in every room, plus the garage.

[marble jewel]

My house is on the old side, so it wasn't easy to deal with. I hired professionals to do the install, and limited the job to save some money.

Kind of regret not going all out though because I have a feeling that in the next few years I'll probably end up hiring them again to do the rest.

Anyway that's a future me problem.

[marble jewel]

A few things I host myself -
DNS
LanCache
RSS Aggregator
Password Vault
Bookmarks
Document Scanning
Roms
Books
Comics
Movies/TV
Music
Audiobooks/Podcasts
Photo Backup
File storage
Security camera storage
Git Repository
Image Hosting (for sharing)
Game streaming (via Moonlight/Sunlight)
Game servers

And actually, what really started this obsession is that Google discontinued Google Reader, the alternatives didn't meet my needs or were paid for, so I looked into DIY/self-hosted

This website serves as a constant reminder on why I like self-hosting
https://killedbygoogle.com/

[cinder karma]

I kinda want to have solar and go off grid

[marble jewel]

When I was house hunting, I found what could have been the perfect house for that, but it was a bit too off-grid for me

The water supply was provided by a well, it had a septic system so no city sewer. Solar could've made it independent of the electric grid.

But I need my reliable internet connection, and as far as I'm aware the best option for that house would have been satellite.

I guess depending on internet may defeat the purpose of being completely off grid

[fleet wren]

USB drives via carrier pigeons? Depending on where you live that's faster than usual internet speed

though come to think of it I guess you still need people to receive, process and return said drives

[rotund violet]

Off-grid doesn't necessarily mean you forego internet, although satellite is probably more common than wired internet.

[cinder karma]

No internet sounds fun kinda

[magic wind]

It can be, definitely if you organize your affairs for a short while and it's not blindsiding you

I've gone off grid for weeks at a time and it can be so relaxing, being hit by an island wide blackout in the middle of a really busy time however...

[cinder karma]

I've dreamed of hiking one of the long trails one day

Just three months. Alone.

[cinder karma]

I assume whomever programmed kicad's autoplace feature decided on "randomly on board" as the algorithm

Seriously smh

[safe dragon]

is that not desirable

[cinder karma]

Lol

I'm actually giving it a very easy problem but I think it doesn't have an idea of what "ground plane" means

The parts I asked it to place are simple resistors, connected to a pin on one end and disconnected on the other. (I have placed the other parts already.)

(If you want to know why we would do this, it's so we have something to solder to if we want to revise the design. This is common practice.)

So basically just asked the program to vaguely land these resistors near the chip they correspond to

Kicad instead decided to sprinkle them everywhere

[safe dragon]

it's ok, I blindly accept anything that is done in this field cause I know nothing about it

[cinder karma]

Oof, looking at open source software last updated in 2004 lol

[crystal wren]

The new display cometh.

[pliant snow]

woo!

what did you get

[safe dragon]

1 USB port

[lethal walrus]

i assume a display doesnt come with a usb port

[safe dragon]

no

[cinder karma]

Work has spoiled me with giant screens and now I want that setup at home

[safe dragon]

I got that setup at home before work

[cinder karma]

Where I can enjoy raging at the vpn

[crystal wren]

The preorder for that new 2.8k 120Hz screen! It's shipping in the next few days.

[cinder karma]

Is 120hz worthwhile for normies

(I feel like I would rather have 30hz and no lag vs choppy trying to reach 120hz)

But I'm thinking cad software

[crystal wren]

I'm going to be doing nothing but desktop and development stuff on it... hell, that's all I really do on my main system nowadays, and my screens are 144 and 160Hz respectively.

[cinder karma]

Not video game

[crystal wren]

I won't want to go back to 60 now.

[cinder karma]

Oh, wow

[safe dragon]

I don't really care about 120Hz myself but I will still likely get that screen once I order my framework laptop

[cinder karma]

I'm not sure I can reliably tell 30hz from 60hz

[safe dragon]

I cannot tell my 144Hz display and my 60Hz display apart unless I intentionally try to pay attention to it

the 144Hz one is actually the older one. I just didn't care to get another high refresh rate one

it seems to make a big difference to some people though

[crystal wren]

I'll 100% be able to adapt to 60Hz only again fairly quickly if I don't have any exposure to 120+ for sure, but when I'm currently used to higher...

[safe dragon]

yeah you can clearly tell better than I can

[crystal wren]

And that's definitely not a benefit!

[pliant snow]

Nice!

[safe dragon]

from what I understand the 2.8k one is also just more color accurate and generally better quality which I do care about

[crystal wren]

Yeah, just notably higher resolution, better colour, etc.

[pliant snow]

@gaunt wadi The next leap in human evolution

[safe dragon]

I'm waiting to order mine till they hopefully release a new motherboard option with the new ryzen 300 mobile chips

[pliant snow]

its been at least a year since they refreshed the AMD chips right

[safe dragon]

that's around the age of the chip at least

so it can't be more than that

the processor was released in may last year

the ryzen 300 ones are a pretty big step up tho and I am not in a rush at all so I will wait

[sand frost]

I do not parse the refresh rate of monitors ever, at all

Unless I'm working over VM and it's like...5

[safe dragon]

I can deal with 30 as long as it's a stable 30

when I edit photos on my pc I edit my photos through some incredibly slow barely functioning windows vm

[cinder karma]

I've been in CAD land the last two days

[fleet wren]

it's definitely mostly only relevant for Real Esport Gamers like me

[safe dragon]

launches runescape

a game with a tick rate of 100 per minute

[fleet wren]

(or if you have a blinged out Linux desktop with 2000s era desktop effects also like me)

what's that meme about building a $3000 gaming PC only to exclusively play SDV and Terraria

[safe dragon]

that meme would be me if I could ever make myself spend that much money on a pc

if there was anything i'd change rn about my desk setup it's a new chair cause my current chair has the very minor but irritating issue that the seat slowly goes down over the course of a week or so

so I have to readjust the seat

a true first world problem

for all I know I just gotta tighten a screw somewhere

[rotund violet]

120 hz (actually 144) is fairly noticeable, if I pay attention I can tell just by visually tracking the mouse cursor.

It's somewhat less about "frame rate" at that point as it is about "input latency". Your eyes can't easily tell the difference but your limbs can.

But it is mainly a gaming thing, and it's also quite demanding on the CPU, not just the GPU.

[cinder karma]

Yeah, I'm not sure I can tell when it comes to CAD

[rotund violet]

I doubt it. The point of higher frame rates - with the exception of VR which really does need to run at a higher framerate like we were talking about the other day - is that the game loop is per frame, so more frames = more responsive.

[cinder karma]

I can tell when the software degrades to 5hz but like I feel 30 would feel fine to me

I suspect the difference is that I inherently slow down when I need precision

[rotund violet]

30 = minimum to perceive continuous motion
60 = minimum to perceive fluid motion
90 = minimum for accurate head tracking

Everything above that, at least in today's world, is just reducing input latency by adding more message loops. And obviously running a monitor at 144 Hz refresh rate with a game producing only 60 fps output will do absolutely nothing useful, in fact it's actually worse unless you're using adaptive sync.

[cinder karma]

(I suspect Elizabeth, like I, think of computer setups for two conditions: CAD, and simulations)

Maybe I'll play a computer game again in 2026

(Doubts)

[sand frost]

I’m sure I’ll play a computer game before the year is out

But yeah, I care a lot more about CAD and sims

[rotund violet]

Last time I touched CAD was about 20 years ago and we were lucky to get "frame rates" of 2 or 3 per minute.

[tranquil grove]

(same, but also this was the CAD )

[cinder karma]

What is that?

[tranquil grove]

a home building program I had as a kid, win 3.1 I think?

very rudimentary 3d building stuff, just slapping models and textures on a lot

[fleet wren]

semirelated, but here's a fun game for CAD enjoyers who want to feel like they're working while gaming:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/504210/SHENZHEN_IO/

Steam

SHENZHEN I/O

Build circuits using a variety of components from different manufacturers, like microcontrollers, memory, logic gates, and LCD screens. Write code in a compact and powerful assembly language where every instruction can be conditionally executed. Read the included manual, which includes over 30 pages of original datasheets, reference guides, and...

Price

$14.99

Recommendations

3279

▶ Play video

[heavy dagger]

Title result: SHENZHEN I/O on Steam

[tranquil grove]

think I stopped halfway into the endgame/postgame stuff of that one
very fun though

[safe dragon]

for the true shenzhen experience you'd also have to deal with insane housing prices

[fleet wren]

I love the PDF manual, which is utterly realistic, including a full page of untranslated Chinese instructions

[safe dragon]

go be fair... you are in China in this scenario

[cinder karma]

See the problem is that this is exactly what I'm doing for work

[patent skiff]

Same here. I play SDV because my day job isn't farming.

[fleet wren]

lol I get what you mean, the difficult postgame puzzles definitely feel like actual real world projects that you have to build fantasy circuits for
(partly why I like Opus Magnum more, being a fantasy steampunk alchemist > being a rockstar CAD engineer in Shenzhen, China)

(they even have budgets requirements!)

[rotund violet]

Wait, are we talking about LTSpice and the like as being CAD? Which I guess technically does fit the literal definition, I was just thinking of AutoCAD and other mechanical-design type stuff.

If it's CAD for PCBs and stuff, then I think frame rates matter even less, like why would you even care about that.

[sand frost]

To me this is EE, I’ve heard it’s reasonably fun but it’s much more intensive thinking than I usually want from my relaxing entertainment

[cinder karma]

Yeah, layout so not "real" CAD (i don't have to acknowledge the third dimension much)

[safe dragon]

the third dimension isn't real

interstellar made it up

I thought my ipad had suddenly stop recognizing my sdcard but as it turns out I was plugging in the dongle without an sd card in it

being used to linux makes it feel incredibly wrong to just download some random ass exe installer from a website on my windows vm

[rotund violet]

I kind of like the mac model, where you still can download random installers but you get to set permissions on what they can actually do. Though the perm prompts can get excessive sometimes.

[gaunt wadi]

incredible

I just set up my door sensor to turn the lights on now that it works with the new dongle

great minds think alike

[pliant snow]

Oh ho ho

[gaunt wadi]

ive been doing a bunch of HA automation config with all the buttons, and it works but isn't particularly nice to use

i think i finally understand the appeal of node red

assuming it just makes it easier to wire things together

put another way: it's a great ui based tool for configuring automation, but as soon as you have anything non trivial i want a more powerful editor that isn't a straight leap to editing yaml

[pliant snow]

Yeah, last i used it, you had to reboot the whole HA server everytime you made a change

[gaunt wadi]

oh, you don't need to do that anymore

[pliant snow]

Nice

I still much prefer nodered, even if doing simple things like conditionals is a pain

[gaunt wadi]

do you have to use the zigbee + mqtt plugin with it?

it looks like it's a separate service that can be used without HA if you so pleased, and so mqtt is the glue that binds them?

I use zha directly rn

[pliant snow]

Yeah, I dont use zha anymore. The zigbee2mqtt runs as a separate server instance that forwards zigbee signals to MQTT (and a MQTT server is also running). nodered then just listens for MQTT signals and processes those and sends out other MQTT signals if needed. Nodered does have a HA plugin to interface with those items if needed

A lot of stuff goes thru MQTT now

One of these days i should make a diagram...

[pliant snow]

I have made a diagram

[safe dragon]

love me some 433 megahertz

[cinder karma]

Someone make me the "code is compiling" meme but with "SharePoint is loading"

[lethal walrus]

What features does your WiFi enabled vacuum have that need WiFi? Or is it a robot one

[pliant snow]

Its a robot vacuum. Even then, the only feature it really needs wifi for is so i can have node red automatically run it each morning. I could walk over to it and manually start it

[lethal walrus]

Ahh

[safe dragon]

I don't really know what SharePoint actually is and I get the impression it should stay that way

all I know is that it has something to do with file sharing in some way

but presumably offers something beyond that cause else you'd just set up an smb server or something

[lethal walrus]

Some office thing

[pliant snow]

sharepoint is more or less the Microsoft office web

[rotund violet]

I'd probably describe it as "CMS from before developers understood how to do CMS"

Like, think of the worst WordPress installation you can imagine, with a bunch of plugins that are half-broken on a good day and wildly incompatible with every other half-broken plugin, and then take all the problems you'd run into with that and multiply the pain by a factor of 10.

[cinder karma]

I wouldn't hate it so much if the scope was smaller and it bloody worked

My issues with it really stem from it being dysfunctional

[rotund violet]

That's corp life for you. "We spent $4 million on this product and come hell or high water we are going to use it." Everything that possibly could be in SharePoint, shall be in SharePoint.

[pliant snow]

I have never once gone to share a Sharepoint document and had it actually have the right permissions to the people I've sent it to. Even marking things as "anyone in the company can access" it just doesn't listen

[rain apex]

Is sharepoint like google docs

[pliant snow]

basically

[sand frost]

More like google drive but yeah

It has integrated (bad) PowerPoint and (normal?) excel, maybe also word but I haven’t tried. You can also use it to store random other files.

The integrated online PowerPoint cannot handle any kind of slow internet at all

I can type faster than it synchs and I am not a particularly fast typer, and then it glitches and undoes your work

The excel equivalent didn’t do anything terrible to me but I also didn’t use it much

There’s also a government version of sharepoint that’s like if you took away all the UI parts of it

[rotund violet]

Why do C# tuples have to suck so much? I can't believe I still can't write Select((foo, bar) => foo.whatever) after all these years. Even JavaScript can do this.

I understand that maybe they just ran out of time to implement back in 2017, but c'mon, you've had seven years since then...

[pliant snow]

Mine has tripped three times this evening so far when it shouldn't have, this isn't going great

[rain apex]

is the door sensor giving false positives

[pliant snow]

I think? I need to add a debug item to it

[supple ether]

That probably doesn't work because using parentheses like that already indicates lambda parameters. If it allowed decomposition in parameters that would make the syntax ambiguous, which is not something you want in any programming language

Though it might work if you put inside an additional set of parentheses? I've never tried that

[rain apex]

does c# have splat operator

* and **

[supple ether]

splat?

[cinder karma]

No. Yes. Maybe

Kinda

[rain apex]

its a thing in python and ruby for arguments

maybe some other langs too

[cinder karma]

*args and **kwargs no

You do have params

[supple ether]

C# has variadic methods of that's what you're asking?

[rain apex]

ah yea close enough

[cinder karma]

And list deconstruction

https://prographers.com/blog/c-11-list-patterns

Span<> params my beloved

[supple ether]

Yeah newer versions of the language have a spread operator for collections it's fun

It just compiles to addRange but it's still cool

[supple ether]

Have you done anything with string.Create yet? It's very cool and fun

[cinder karma]

Sadly no!

My day to day life is without c# now

[supple ether]

It gives you a writable char span and then turns it into a string in-place after you're done with it

[cinder karma]

I have become "retired modder yells at unnecessary allocations."

[rain apex]

oh is it like fancy string interpolation

[cinder karma]

I saw! I want an excuse to use it.

[supple ether]

And I appreciate you for that atra

[supple ether]

I used it to write a "decrypter" for STS save files

[cinder karma]

What's sts?

[supple ether]

Slay The Spire

[cinder karma]

Ahhh

[supple ether]

The save files are json, converted to base64 and then xor'd with KEY on repeat

[cinder karma]

Tbh I'm sufficiently tired that at this point if I see a video game before the year 2030 it might be too soon lol

[cinder karma]

Lol wut

[rain apex]

why did they do that

r people cheating in sts

[supple ether]

Presumably to prevent people from editing them like I do

IMO you can't cheat on it because it is singleplayer

Tho TBF it is very easy to fuck up save files while editing them manually so it could just be that they don't want people tampering with save files and accidentally corrupting them

[rain apex]

yea i wonder why they went out of their way to make editing harder

when the only place to cheat is like speedruns

[supple ether]

Not a clue honestly

I only edit my save files to fix mod crashes though. I could cheat but like... The fun of a deckbuilder game comes from Building The Deck. If you just cheat everything in, what's the point

[rotund violet]

Yep, that was the first thing I tried, and the thing that works everywhere else. Deconstruction in C# is just so half-baked, the places where it works correctly may as well be random. foreach fine, lambdas nope. var is fine, but don't even think about ref or out.

[supple ether]

Ref and out are completely different things than var

Neither of those makes sense to do inline decomposition

[rotund violet]

In a sense, I guess. You literally have out var.

Why wouldn't it make sense?

[worn remnant]

lmao i messed with this too when i wanted to do sandbox stuff but hadn't gone through the torture of acquiring mods yet

[supple ether]

Var is the same as a type declaration, it's not a parameter modifier

[rotund violet]

And out var is also the same as a type declaration, it replaces out Foo.

[supple ether]

Out and ref use adresses, and not actual value. Decomposition is an implicit method, so you can't really reverse that to get addresses back out of it

[rotund violet]

We're into the territory of nitpicking technical reasons for not implementing a feature people want. I can understand it; I've been there myself more than a few times. But where there's a will, there's a way.

[supple ether]

If you asked it to do a ref decomposed parameter what do you actually expect it to do

[rotund violet]

There's no logical reason why I shouldn't be able to write dict.TryGetValue(key, out var (foo, bar)) until we start getting into the obscure BCL/MSIL stuff behind it.

It's a tuple. C# understands tuples and knows how to deconstruct them. It just doesn't want to do it in that spot.

[supple ether]

that's a good enough reason for me ¯_(ツ)_/¯

[rotund violet]

It could allocate a single tuple object, pass it as a reference, and deconstruct it. It just doesn't want to.

[supple ether]

Computers aren't magic

[rain apex]

but that seems like it would make new tuple

which is with out

[worn remnant]

by the same logic, you could type a few more lines of code, but you don't want to

[rain apex]

idk anything about the internal workings here, just speaking on what the syntax looks like intuitively

[rotund violet]

I'm not buying it. Because it involves boxing, it's not allowed? There is tons of implicit boxing.

[supple ether]

Well, roslyn and the runtime are both open source. Be the change you want to see IG

[rotund violet]

Yes, exactly. More lines of code = harder to read, more maintenance. C# designers generally get that. What else is ArgumentNullException.ThrowIfNull for? It's literally saving one line of code.

[rotund violet]

C# doesn't work like that at all. They don't accept rando PRs. Everything has to go through champions, RFCs, multiple stages of planning, etc.

[worn remnant]

i don't agree with your equivalence. syntactic sugar i often find makes code harder to reason about, hence the big argument we are having about it

[rotund violet]

Much like anything Google puts out, C# is "open source" in a very narrow legalistic sense and not in any meaningful practical sense.

[supple ether]

Right, but nothing is actually stopping you from getting involved in that process

[worn remnant]

(not to mention things supported even in old, barren languages, like nesting ternary operators and other stuff that makes programmers feel smart for writing "one-liners" but makes it difficult for people like me to keep in my head)

[rain apex]

i think this case is bit to ambig to be valid syntatic sugar

maybe if they make up a new keyword

outboxed or something

[supple ether]

Frankly I think it's a solution looking for a problem

[rotund violet]

Yes, having a feature work consistently is a solution looking for a problem.

[supple ether]

I think you just like complaining

[rotund violet]

And as for getting involved, there are already so very many proposals around it, both closed and open, none of them getting any traction: https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/issues?q=is%3Aissue+deconstruct

So what would be the point of adding to to the chorus?

[worn remnant]

to be fair, complaining kicks ass and i also like to do it /lh

[rotund violet]

I don't have this problem in other languages. Deconstruction/destructuring works as expected in Rust, in TypeScript/JS, even Python. Only C# is inconsistent about it. I don't like complaining, I like it when I don't have to do weird hacks to work around language limitations.

I suppose Kotlin's support is about as simplistic as C#. But Kotlin is JVM and doesn't have real tuples.

[supple ether]

"weird hacks to work around language limitations" describes every programming language that ever has and ever will exist. If c# is not a good fit for what you are doing, use something better suited to your project

[gaunt wadi]

Proton added an llm assistant button to their mail app

stop it 😠

[fleet wren]

gotta chase that bag it seems

the crash's coming any time now right

[rain apex]

When are you making your own mail service

Organic 100% llm free

[safe dragon]

at least it kind of makes sense? People do use llms to help them word emails, especially non native speakers

and no one is selling their emails presumably at least

[fleet wren]

brn making a brand new mail service, running straight off the old gaming computer in my basement
the first 5 signups get Early Alpha Access... and Beta, and Release, and Post Release, cuz it's not adding more

[rain apex]

Where's your kickstarter

[fleet wren]

You can put 5 dollar in a bowl and leave it outside overnight

[safe dragon]

the first 5 to do so will get access

for the rest the money will still be taken but no access will be given

[pliant snow]

proton has been going in a lot of random directions lately

[gaunt wadi]

[crystal wren]

That's a weird decision for something like Proton, whose entire business model is privacy.

[safe dragon]

they made sure to only train the model on your private emails

cause that makes it private

[paper sapphire]

okay so what would I do if a python script like, looks for a directory totally unrelated to its intended use that doesn't exist and then refuses to run, I make the directory, and then it just won't run?

[lethal walrus]

is this for ja2conpat

[paper sapphire]

it is, they were kinda busy in the other channel though and I have limited time today

[lethal walrus]

#making-mods-general

that's horrifyingly ontopic for here /hj /lh

[paper sapphire]

Yeah I did uh, post there. It got buried instantly

[rain apex]

people really dont play stardew in this channel

you should just ask again if you feel the question is not answered, nothing wrong with that

[paper sapphire]

people actively participating in the stardew discord don't play stardew?

[lethal walrus]

not in here

[rain apex]

i think this channel is about home automation

[devout vault]

And rust

[rain apex]

and complaining about languages you dont like

[lethal walrus]

and javascript!

[paper sapphire]

oh if that's the case, all of them other than html4

bbcode is okay

[marble jewel]

Speaking of home automation. I have smart blinds now, so my alarm clock is the sun. Which will last for another month or so before the 10 months of doom and gloom hit the pacific northwest.

[cinder karma]

Enjoy

I am considering speed knitting a hat so I don't freeze to death at work

[lethal walrus]

bbcode is probably acceptable, aside from wysibb's jquery functions. very infurating

[paper sapphire]

Ah yes, "rain", the PACNW season other than "skin melting heat",

[cinder karma]

I'm very sorry

Today is a day I hate filesystems

[ivory shadow]

Are there days you don't hate filesystems?

[safe dragon]

every day I use my ipad I hate filesystems more

or at least one specific file system

[cinder karma]

In this case my code just needed to run on my computer but died because I tried a file name with a "<" in it

[safe dragon]

why a <

oh it's a forbidden character on windows

how do you have a file with a < in it

[pliant snow]

<3.txt

[safe dragon]

windows blocking you from having kaomoji file names

[supple ether]

oh I had a bug based on unix/dos file name differences

there was some bit of software I was getting in .zip releases off github and although the zip seemed perfectly valid, extracting it yielded... nothing

I later discovered it was because the filename contained characters that were legal on linux but treated as path/special characters on windows, so when I extracted it the file just... vanished into the ether

[rain apex]

like :?

[supple ether]

I don't remember, let me see if I can find the old bug report I made for it

okay yeah

the file name started with ..\

[rain apex]

that seems kind of illegal on unix too

[supple ether]

are backslashes illegal on unix? since it uses forward slashes for path separation

it could also be whatever utility they were using to zip/unzip the file

[gaunt wadi]

oh wise home automator, tell me your wisdom

which blinds did you get?

also the summer has been long and hot this year imo

very enjoyable

[marble jewel]

I got SmartWings because they're cheaper than other options and completely DIY

[gaunt wadi]

📝

roller? cellular? something else?

[marble jewel]

Had a few hiccups, but mostly due to self-induced problems like not taking precise measurements across my entire window opening

It turns out my house has some slants. Measurements at the top aren't the same at the bottom of some openings.

All of the blinds I'm using are their dual blinds so I have the option of blacking out a room or allowing light in while still having privacy.

Another "automation" I have is when I'm watching a movie the dark blinds automatically close and my lights dim

[cinder karma]

Blinds seem fun

[gaunt wadi]

oh ho ho

that sounds really cool!

I didn't know dual blinds were a thing, I was just going to choose between blackout/non-blackout

my windows are too large in my current apartment, but i plan to do this in my next one

please update us on how you like them as time goes on!

[fleet wren]

no they aren't, but you do need to do extra escaping on the command line like space characters

(in other words, illegal and punishable by jail)

[rain apex]

its the .. that feels weird, cus it's "go 1 level up in folders"

y did they zip this way

[supple ether]

I have no idea

and yeah I think it was the fact that windows interpreted it as directory climbing that made it vanish into thin air when extracted

[cinder karma]

Re: #1279216427529797715

I love inlining

Compiler being tricksy is always fun

(I say this with full sincerity)

[safe dragon]

inlining is some magical stuff

compilers in general are fascinating things

when I check the assembly only to realize it optimized away half of everything I'm doing

[pliant snow]

Time to give Floorp a try

will its stupid name turn off everyone, yes, but ive still heard good things

[safe dragon]

using Floorp on Pop!_OS

the holy combo of terrible naming

[next tulip]

Try Zen instead it's pretty nice

Or just use Brave 🦁

[pliant snow]

idk if I've heard of zen

[lethal walrus]

is zen that browser thats like arc but firefox

[marble jewel]

My browser of choice is Waterfox with the arkenfox user.js

[supple ether]

I use Firefox mainly, but I also have Pale Moon and Min

[lethal walrus]

i really should install a second browser, that isn't edge

[supple ether]

Fuck edge.

[fleet wren]

enough with the twelve thousand forks just use firefox with extensions like normal people raaaah

(for legal reason that was a joke. Use whatever browsers you want)

(as long as it is Firefox)

[floral parcel]

I usually use firefox. I used to use a browser called pale moon a long time ago.

[cinder karma]

Just for you I'll go launch internet Explorer

Also, maybe Opera

[floral parcel]

Internet explorer was like one of the last browsers to support java applets if I recall correctly.

[rotund violet]

Java applets, that takes me back. Arguably set the evolution of web dev back 10 years.

[floral parcel]

Some of the first games I ever made was using Java applets with the swing and AWT libraries.

[worn remnant]

the name "Pop!_OS" is a crime. at least Floorp is wacky

[pliant snow]

I'm somewhat inclined to agree, but the fact I'm still not sure how to pronounce Floorp isn't ideal

[rain apex]

floor p?

[cinder karma]

Help my phone now autocorrects couch to concurrent

[pliant snow]

https://tenor.com/oY4K.gif

[rain apex]

Do u think monogame will obtain vulkan support within this decade

[leaden marsh]

Considering they don't even have a wavebank generator which was a feature requested almost a decade ago, I'm going to say no

But also what are you looking for out of Vulkan support?

Shader wise it's already like HLSL transpiled to GLSL, and it doesn't really expose a lot of that low level internals

[rain apex]

Nothing in particular, I arbitrarily picked vulkan as first foray into low-level graphics and then started wondering which engines use it

[leaden marsh]

Ah fair enough lol

I think it's more likely that we'd see, idk, that new meta graphics backend first

[rain apex]

Going by the monogame github it seems like they r pay a guy to do dx12 but nothing for vulkan

[rotund violet]

Vulkan has more optimization potential but I doubt it matters for a lot of MonoGame's use cases; if you're using sprite-based graphics, then you're not terribly worried about shader compilation times.

[leaden marsh]

Yeah, though I suppose the inclusion of DX12 is interesting, since the jump from DX11 to DX12 is roughly analogous to the jump from OpenGL to Vulkan

More optimization potential & a pretty different API in general

[rotund violet]

It is? Huh, didn't realize DX12 changed that much.

[leaden marsh]

AFAIK yeah, I'm sure there's still a lot more similarities than between OGL and Vulkan, but it was a pretty significant jump in what it allows from what I heard, and from how it's used

I think the general thing about both is that it has more optimization potential, but also a lot more ropes to hang yourself on

[rotund violet]

Bigger than the jump from DX9 to DX11 where they felt the need to skip a version?

[leaden marsh]

So the DX11 versions of games still seem to be more stable for me

DX9 to DX10 was bigger than DX10 to DX11, but I do think DX9 to DX11 might be comparable to the jump from DX11 to DX12

[rotund violet]

Yeah I don't see DX12 that much actually... maybe that's because it's a major change and a lot of the devs decided it'd be more worth it to support Vulkan instead.

[leaden marsh]

DX10 was also just never really used that much because DX11 introduced feature levels

[rotund violet]

Was DX10 a real feature release or did they just smash all the other Direct* stuff into one library and call it an upgrade? I know it wasn't backward compatible, but I never see it used on any game.

Always a choice between DX9 and DX11. Never DX10.

[leaden marsh]

I believe it was a real feature release, they had both DX10 and DX10.1. GTA 5 used both IIRC

[rotund violet]

Guess it just happened at an awkward time, or something.

[leaden marsh]

That's basically it, the version of Windows that only supported DX10 and not DX11 was I think a single release or something

Back in... vista, I think?

And a later service pack introduced DX11 support iirc

So by the time developers would have been able to transition to DX10 from DX9, DX11 was already available, with feature levels that could be used to limit functionality back to the DX9/10/10.1 subsets

The general advice was that there really was no reason to learn DX10 for that reason

[rotund violet]

Being tied up with Vista would definitely explain its unpopularity.

[safe dragon]

I never actually realized that I didn't really see dx10 anywhere

I still remember being excited about the switch from dx9 to dx11 for path of exile

and then eventually vulkan

I think PoE also supports dx12 but I'm on Linux now

even if I did switch to dx12 I'd still be using Vulkan in reality

[safe dragon]

tbh the times I have seen it used it wasn't really in a positive light. It's not uncommon for dx12 to perform worse than dx11 for the same game

I'm guessing cause it gives you more control aka more ways to fuck up

[crystal wren]

Yeah, I also don't think like... 99% of games using MonoGame would see any benefit whatsoever from Vulkan.

That being said, FNA does have Vulkan support already.

[safe dragon]

only really necessary for a theoretical future where opengl is no longer supported

but I really don't see that happening any time soon

other than apple who dislikes supporting nice things

oh I said that more to just take an opportunity to shit on apple and wasn't serious but

Apple already doesn't support opengl anymore on their phones

[leaden marsh]

though for what it's worth, it's not like implementing a Vulkan backend helps on the Apple end either

MoltenVK even is implemented on top of Metal

[safe dragon]

oh yeah it doesn't

might as well use MoltenGL then

[leaden marsh]

Yeah and on MacOS for now, there's still a considerable amount of OpenGL features still useable by default

I think OpenGL 3.3 is fully supported at least

[safe dragon]

up to 4.1 I think

[leaden marsh]

Yeah it'll be a while before OpenGL can really be phased out in favor of Vulkan for sure

If ever

[safe dragon]

in an ideal world at least all major platforms would've supported the same apis

[leaden marsh]

Yeah, I love rewriting graphics code for DirectX/Vulkan/Metal for cross platform support

At least SPIR-V has made the shader situation a little more bearable

GLSL vs HLSL vs whatever metal's shader language is called

[crystal wren]

Obligatory xkcd:

[safe dragon]

always like this

the only thing without competing standards are the things not popular enough to have several people make one

or if it's extremely complicated to make one I suppose though I can't think of any examples

graphics apis are very complicated and we still have 3 modern ones

actually... complicated ones almost always have several cause there's always going to be something missing

[safe apex]

Going to look into seeing if I can get approval to migrate SM's xBRZ and xxhash3 implementations into their own nuget packages.

[safe apex]

I can say with confidence that neither Microsoft nor Khronos expect D3D11 nor OpenGL to ever truly be phased out. I have that from MS in writing. They've considered D3D12 only appropriate for organizations willing/able to invest the time to implement it, otherwise they still suggest using D3D11 (which I still do where it doesn't really matter).

[leaden marsh]

I don't doubt that honestly

[safe apex]

Of course, OpenGL may eventually disappear with less-awful APIs being implemented atop Vulkan.

You can implement D3D11 atop Vulkan, after all.

(Also a rendering engineer. It's in my fancy title!)

[leaden marsh]

I'd love a cool title like that lol

[safe apex]

(My title doesn't mean much. )

I'm effectively the head of rendering. Problem is that rendering is one person: me

[rotund violet]

Haha, I remember that from one of my old jobs, was the "Senior <X> engineer" and also the only engineer of any kind in the entire company.

[safe apex]

I'm the only person on my team who's an "Advanced Software Engineer" let alone a rendering one

My favorite graphics API ever was D3D9X, though, with D3D11X coming a close second.

[rotund violet]

I get the feeling I'm one of the only people who actually likes Vulkan. I mean, kind of. Maybe it's the vague similarity to older display-list APIs.

[safe apex]

Vk and D3D12 are almost identical conceptually.

I implemented a D3D12-like API in D3D11 before 12 came out

[leaden marsh]

I do like vulkan, but I don't feel like I have the capability nor the bandwidth to use it effectively in any personal project

[rotund violet]

Using it directly, maybe not great... it's almost always through something like wgpu.

(I mean, why bother tying yourself to a single API, when there are many decent multitargeting libraries out there... unless, I suppose, you're a rendering engineer)

[crystal wren]

Out of curiosity, does this not cover the reason you were needing to put everything into SM?

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/04/ftc-announces-rule-banning-noncompetes

(Also, welcome back!)

[cinder karma]

(I doubt it. That is about the clause in some contracts that prevent you from even switching to a different job in the same field. Not about at-the-same-time stuff.)

I have a clause like that at current place

[crystal wren]

Oh, I honestly had assumed they were referring to what I meant... well that sucks.

In other news...

[cinder karma]

Nice!

[safe dragon]

nice

hope it's as easy to replace as they claim

[cinder karma]

(For the record, I wouldn't have to get a waiver for stardew mods because it isn't at all similar to what I do for work.)

[cinder karma]

Film the process with your British accent?

[safe dragon]

don't think I have any kind of non compete clause

I could work directly for a competitor after

I don't want to but I could

[cinder karma]

I can work directly for a competitor after

I cannot work directly for a competitor at the same time

[safe dragon]

oh

the idea would've never crossed my mind

workout for 1 of em is already 1 too many

[cinder karma]

I also technically have to get approval in writing if I want a second job.

[dusky gust]

concussed on the c++ recap day

[safe apex]

I've certainly never gotten a concussion from C++; only Java.

Though I've been using C++ for a long time.

[sand frost]

I honestly don't know if I'm allowed to get a second job, but since I don't want one, I haven't really looked into it

[safe dragon]

couldn't think of a worse thing to do with my free time than a second job

[crystal glacier]

It is great if you're into Graphics Programming a whole lot

/low level programming

Although people usually like to release stuff after hard work, I don't see why someone wouldn't wanna dive into graphics like Einstein studying physics.

It's scary for someone who doesn't have a strong mathematical background though.

[rotund violet]

Shaders are very mathy, yes. Canvas and layout, somewhat less so but still a little bit. Though most of the time it's not insanely complex math, just a lot of the stuff I learned and promptly forgot in late high school/early university. I don't know that other aspects of graphics dealing with the rendering pipeline are all that math-intensive, just very low-level? Unless you are talking about working on Vulkan and not working with Vulkan, I can't even guess what's on the inside.

[crystal glacier]

What kind of graphics do you like to fiddle with?

It all depends.

When you go to the depths of low level, strong math concepts are always accepted.

especially graphics

It really depends at which layer you're in.

And sorry for my poor English, I'm from Brazil.

[rotund violet]

Among the projects I can talk about - scene renderer for a modding tool (based on OGL) where I had to do all the lighting and stuff from scratch, that was math-heavy. Effect/transition shaders for a game, not very complex beyond just "polar coordinates". Layout/canvas-like stuff in the Stardew UI. Animations in Mina but those are all pretty high-level aside from simple cubic-bezier math. Etc.

Definitely never written anything below the graphics API level, and don't often write stuff at the graphics API level, but the latter, a few times on a few projects. Mostly just shader and layout implementations.

[crystal glacier]

There is nothing below graphics api level

I mean, there is

Butttttt

Those depths

are too dark

😭

If I remember, there is a group/person who made their own graphics API. They must just want peace now.

No kidding though, I really have an interest to look beyond. Not now though.

[rain apex]

whats the motivation to make your own graphics api?

[crystal glacier]

I don't do graphics like that but I have many friends who does.

[rain apex]

is it custom hardware or specialized usecases

[crystal glacier]

Just think: beach, sand, silicone, restarting human civilization.

That was a joke.

But also not so much

Just the curiosity towards computers.

That's the answer.

[rain apex]

aw i wanted to know about the esoteric usecases

[rotund violet]

You're probably working at least sometimes below the API level if you're working on console emulators and such.

(I don't. But once or twice I've peeked at the source.)

[crystal glacier]

That's actually not true.
Those are just files for devices 😂

When you want to make a console emulator you just use any window kit like gtk

unless you're talking about something else

[rain apex]

i thought we are talking about game console emulators

[rotund violet]

I'm not sure what you mean. Yes, libretro and the like are based on graphics backends like OpenGL, but it wasn't always like that.

[rain apex]

like dolphin (gamecube) and stuff

[crystal glacier]

oh

LMFAo

I'm dumb guys

[rotund violet]

And in any case, even if the "output rendering" part is based on a well-known API backend, you have to deal with the "input rendering", i.e. figuring out what the console code itself is trying to do to the graphics.

[crystal glacier]

I'm very dumb

I don't know anything about this topic

[rain apex]

terminal emulators r so common that i often forget they are emulators

[rotund violet]

Oh, I get it, you thought I was referring to a "terminal emulator"

Haha, yeah, we both caught that at the same time.

[crystal glacier]

Console emulators

That's a cool niche right there

[rain apex]

do game console these days also just use one of the established graphics apis

im too young to know when the shift happened

[rotund violet]

I'm pretty sure Xbox does, but probably not any of Nintendo's consoles.

They always do everything custom.

Sony consoles I'm not sure about, I've kind of ignored that whole branch since the PS2.

[crystal glacier]

😮

[fleet wren]

PS4 (and 5 by extension) seems to use its own thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_4_system_software#GNM

[rotund violet]

Indeed. Well there you have it. There wasn't really a "shift" per se, just Microsoft taking the easy road for their consoles.

[crystal glacier]

It seems like it's inspired by DX

[rotund violet]

Wiki says it's "analogous" but I wouldn't read too much into that.

[rain apex]

its prob as analogous as vulkan to dx12

[crystal glacier]

lmfao

[rotund violet]

Yeah, I'm sure it's a very different API. Technically all graphics API have similar concepts.

[fleet wren]

Xbox also tries to unify their console and PC catalogue, so it's understandable they use something usable on Windows

[rain apex]

i wonder if doing their own graphic api genuinely has great benefit or just more of that "not invented here" stuff

[crystal glacier]

It is a different API ofc. I guess it's just like what linux is to unix.

[rain apex]

it is their own hardware tho

[rotund violet]

I would say less of a "benefit" as the fact that since it's custom hardware, requires custom software.

[crystal glacier]

Could be for legal reasons?

idk

There are many aspects of law in which these companies understands that we don't. Wouldn't surprise me.

[rotund violet]

These consoles start with hardware engineers speccing out what they think is going to work best for the next generation; trying to pigeonhole that into an OpenGL, DirectX or even Vulkan model probably is less cost-effective than just maintaining their own API which has evolved over 20 years already.

"Never say never" but I really, really doubt that it's a legal concern. Maybe for DirectX it could be, but certainly not OGL or VK.

[crystal glacier]

Well

I will take my leave guys. Nice to meet y'all.

Oh, will be releasing a MOD soon too

I came here for this, after many hours playing Stardew vanilla 😭

It's called Tropical Touch

[rain apex]

dangerously ontopic talk like that goes in #making-mods-general

[rotund violet]

Cool, but you should mention it in #modded-stardew or #making-mods-general since mods are generally off-topic for the off-topic channel.

[safe dragon]

ew mods

[crystal glacier]

Nah, it's fine, I got slightly off-topic right there 😂

I deserved what was coming.

[rain apex]

i had weird problem with vscode c++ intellisense, it doesnt like the offsetof macro

there doesnt seem to be way to pass in -Wno-invalid-offsetof tho

[crystal glacier]

yeah vs code has those sometimes

are you in windows?

[rain apex]

no

[crystal glacier]

Well, then ok.

You got the fix?

[rain apex]

i just added the macro even though it was building fine without it

[crystal glacier]

vs code and its intricacies

idk how lsp works in vs code

[grizzled oxide]

need help
making a minecraft mod in MC

[safe dragon]

ur capybara is broken

[grizzled oxide]

It is

[lethal walrus]

did you do an oopsie with the animations

[safe dragon]

accidentally inverted all the vertices

[lethal walrus]

well the legs are fine

and im not sure blockbench lets you do that (invert all vertices)

[safe dragon]

oh yeah I have no idea how minecraft's animation system even works

or what blockbench is

[lethal walrus]

blockbench is voxel modelling thing

but it's mainly used for minecraft

[supple ether]

it was originally made for minecraft but it can export to standard model formats, so in theory you can use it for any kind of low-poly modeling/animation

it makes it very easy to create and texture models, but it's mostly limited to rectangular prisms and quads

[leaden marsh]

low-poly/cuboid modeling is how I'd refer to it as well, I don't really think it quite fits the definition of a voxel modelling thing in the way that Magica would

i actually quite like the aesthetic; checking out the scenes for Blockbench submission competitions is always really cool

[supple ether]

yeah it's a neat style. It's grown on me a lot

it's interesting because it's not really the minecraft style, so much as minecraft-adjacent, but there is something very cute and appealing about it.

[safe apex]

I'm not sure I can answer this due to NDAs.

[safe dragon]

I'll go with whichever answer I find more interesting then

idk yet which answer that is

[leaden marsh]

Depends on the console but a lot of them have their own

Tho often they'll implement some level of like OpenGL on top of their own API

[supple ether]

Xbox has been directx-based for a long time but idk about the others

[leaden marsh]

Switch definitely has it's own but there's also OGL & VK support iirc

[safe dragon]

isn't the xbox called an xbox because of directx

that's where they got the x from

When Microsoft later set out to develop a gaming console, the X was used as the basis of the name Xbox to indicate that the console was based on DirectX technology.

probably the last logical decision microsoft ever made with the xbox naming scheme

[fleet wren]

next Xbox will be Xbox One X Series X

[cinder karma]

Single Language

For Families

[grizzled oxide]

probably
dunno how to fix it tho

[rotund violet]

Xbox Xtra Xtreme, aka XboXXX

[safe apex]

We used PSGL... once. It was a mistake.

[safe apex]

The D3D on Xboxes is somewhat different than that of PC.

[safe apex]

It's mostly linear algebra. More advanced algorithms require a basic understanding of calculus to understand but the implementation is linear algebra usually.

[rotund violet]

To which part are you referring?

[safe apex]

Shaders. The GPU is optimized for (read: has instructions for) linear algebra and matrix math.

Basically all shaders end up written in those terms.

The original algorithms often involve calculus, though.

[sand frost]

(unrelated) glad you're back around, Ameise—I recall you had some health issues, I hope you're feeling better now!

You might have been around and I just didn't notice, I've been busy this summer

[safe apex]

Delayed my surgery, once that happens I will be outright gone from everything for a while.

I've been busy with work

[rotund violet]

Shaders are pretty diverse IME, but definitely lots of those.

[regal ingot]

Welcome back, even if it's just for a little while!

[sand frost]

most of applied math is just linear algebra 😛

the bits that aren't linear algebra are just pretending everything is 2nd order linear systems

[safe apex]

Right, but the math expressed in the shaders ends up as procedural linear algebra and matrix transformations as that's what the GPU understands.

[sand frost]

(I know nothing about shaders)

(but I do know a bit of math!)

(but mostly I don't use any "higher" math)

[safe apex]

Right, though the research papers are a pain to understand because they rely on calculus.

[leaden marsh]

light transport equations my beloved

[safe apex]

It's just... they get implemented in the end as usually fairly-simple transforms and vector math.

Most calculus can get turned into for loops and approximations :P

[sand frost]

I actually really enjoy vector math tbh

don't love calculus but don't hate it either

[rotund violet]

Yes, 100% right. I've always described it as "backward", as it always feels like I'm having to work backward when I write one.

But stuff like lighting is just vectors and reflections and incident angles and so on.

"Linear algebra" just sounds super advanced for some of the grug shader code I've written.

[sand frost]

I like drawing pictures and then I like having equations come out of them

it's kind of soothing

[safe apex]

A lot of algorithms, like steep parallax mapping, are oddly "obvious" but awkward (I implemented it on VR once. Never again - it was pointless and painful.)

[indigo mist]

@safe apex You leveled up to Cropmaster. That's level 500! The deepening purple represents your mad descent into the server.

[sand frost]

woah!!

[rotund violet]

Never tried parallax. Definitely one of those things that seems straightforward when I just look at the effect itself, but every time I looked at the implementations I got scared away.

[sand frost]

purpler and purpler

[safe apex]

Steep parallax emulates stereoscopic vision on the surface with a single camera. Since VR uses two cameras, it looks identical to regular parallax mapping or even normal mapping.

You also have to change the progressive step interval into a float to prevent each eye from being on a different integer value and then getting sick.

It was highly nauseating until I fixed that...

As to how to accommodate a float: you must perform partial steps.

My favorite yet surprisingly simple effect I made was a dithered distance-based fade-out for VR.

The hardest part was making a valid noise texture for it - I had to write a tool just to generate it and the MIPS since point nor bilinear filtering worked.

Had to basically be a weighted point algorithm otherwise objects would disappear randomly.

[rotund violet]

Dithering on the GPU is a huge challenge. What did you end up using?

Blue noise?

[safe apex]

Triplanar mapping of the custom noise texture, discarding based on a comparison of the noise value sampled to some factor of distance to eye.

[regal ingot]

out of idle curiosity, is a float actually required, or would a fixed-precision decimal also work?

[rotund violet]

Ok, I have no idea what any of that means, sounds impressive though.

I mean except for the "custom noise texture" part.

[safe apex]

It'd work except that the GPU has effectively zero accommodations for that.

[safe apex]

Triplanar mapping is my favorite algorithm in that field.

Basically regenerates synthetic UV coordinates based on arbitrary yet coherent XYZ coordinates to let you apply a 2D surface onto arbitrary shapes.

[regal ingot]

gotcha. GPUs these days can deal with floats, though? (You can tell how long it's been since my one graphics class in grad school... that I dropped.)

[rotund violet]

Eh? GPU deal almost exclusively with floats.

[safe apex]

GPUs could always deal with floats. Integer support is (relatively) new.

Unless you go back to, say, early 2D accelerators.

Then it was largely fixed-point.

[rotund violet]

I think double precision floats are still pretty uncommon, though not sure if that's because GPUs can't handle them or just because they're slower/unnecessary most of the time.

[safe apex]

NVidia halves/quarters the performance of double-precision on non-Quadros

Historically, GPUs preferred half-precision for various reasons. I believe that it's still usually marginally faster but I haven't tested that recently.

[rotund violet]

Trying to remember the last time I saw a half. I know I did see one. I think it was in some of the Bethesda stuff.

[safe apex]

while the shader languages have half, usually, you usually specify half-precision operations using a pragma.

[rotund violet]

I remember it sticking out because there was no easy way to bind that half-precision data from the code, it involved some funny hacks.

Unlike an integer, you can't just lop off half the bits.

[safe apex]

Well, you can - you have to implement a custom 16-bit IEEE wrapper

Truncating floats isn't too hard - I wrote a templated implementation of it for GCC once so I could implement arbitrary-sized floats.

[rotund violet]

I can see why that'd be easy in your book. For me it was a pain to figure out. (This was also in C#, not C++)

[safe apex]

Usually you don't throw halves at the GPU - only fixed-point or singles, and just have the GPU use half-precision ops.

[rotund violet]

Definitely is a lot more sensible that way. I think it was a uniform half.

[safe apex]

Ah, on current GPUs, 16-bit ops have twice the throughput.

[rotund violet]

(Which still could have been done at the GPU level)

[safe apex]

The GPU is capable of decomposing any data types you throw at it anyways. The texture units spit out float4s for any texture format, even 565 and such.

(It's been about 10 years since I've created a 565 render target...)

[rotund violet]

Decomposing still requires the same amount of data, doesn't it? It's just being processed in smaller chunks, as opposed to e.g. actually reducing the precision.

[safe apex]

If we're talking textures, no.

565 data is half the size of RGB8. Block-compressed formats go even smaller.

That applies to the GPU's caches as well - they're faster to sample.

[rotund violet]

Huh. So a single color is represented as a float4?

I didn't know you could do that with any kind of float, never mind a float4.

[safe apex]

Yes. Depends on the specific format. R8 will usually populate RGB with R, and A with 1.

The GPU only has vector registers anyways.

[rotund violet]

But float4 is the entire color? Not just one channel.

How do you split it up?

[safe apex]

Right: xyzw and rgba are the same.

[rotund violet]

Well, I guess the hardware does it. Somehow.

[safe apex]

Thus, texture2d/sample/etc return float4

For things like constant buffer data, you can usually specify if you want it to be normalized somehow.

[rotund violet]

I know these are all vectors, just didn't realize it was represented as a float, or even that you could effectively convert between the two (I think of a vector as being 4 floats...)

[safe apex]

It is four floats. Doesn't mean that you have to use them all, or that you can't convert between 'em.

The texture units just do that for you.

[rotund violet]

Oh, now I get it. I thought you were saying that all 4 color values were represented in a single float4. But you mean a 16-bit type with four float4s. Right?

[safe apex]

GPUs are basically just... logic instructions and SIMD instructions.

No

A single color value is represented basically everywhere unless you do it yourself as a float4

It's just r, g, b, a

[rotund violet]

What is the conversion between that scalar float4 and the vec4 that we normally understand in shader languages?

[safe apex]

HLSL and GLSL both let you swizzle with xyzw and rgba actually

float4 is HLSL, vec4 is GLSL.

[rotund violet]

Right, and when I think of swizzles I think of swapping vector components (of a 16, 32 or 64 bit type).

[safe apex]

They're the same thing.

[rotund violet]

...ok, haha, then that means I completely misunderstood the past 15 minutes.

[safe apex]

:)

[rotund violet]

I thought a float4 was some sort of quarter-precision floating point scalar.

[safe apex]

I'm not sure how I'd use an 8-bit float