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Agentlien

2,962 karma · joined July 27, 2015

Senior Software Engineer at 505 Games.

My main interests and experience are in graphics programming and performance optimization.

https://agentlien.github.io

submissionscomments
Agentlien··on Mario Meets Pareto
I think what I am saying is more that "easy" is too broad a vector to optimize along because it combines too much - both good and bad. I don't want a job without challenges of any kind.

But I definitely want a job without stress, danger, or physical strain on my body. Perhaps I am just looking for a similar word which doesn't imply anything about the complexity of the task at hand.

Agentlien··on Mario Meets Pareto
On a tangent, I was a bit confused by the everyday examples given in this article.

"We're often faced with similar trade-offs. You want a meal that's both cheap and delicious? A job that's both well-paid, easy, and fulfilling?"

I really don't feel like "easy" is a dimension I wish to optimize for in a job. It almost feels opposite to what I've actually optimized for - since for me a fulfilling job usually means full of deep technical challenges. I want a job without unnecessary friction, without interpersonal drama, even one that's low stress. But definitely not easy.

Agentlien··on Ray tracing massive amounts of animated geometry using tetrahedral cages
This reminds me of when I worked on surgical training simulations back in 2011-2015.

In some exercises most of the scene was made up of soft body objects containing millions of triangles which could be deformed and even destroyed - cutting any random edges.

The simulation was handled by creating a coarser mesh of tetrahedra which were treated as deformable physical objects and skinning the triangles to these. Cutting simply removed entire tetrahedra and the triangles were reskinned to the nearest one or simply removed if none were close enough.

Agentlien··on The arguments against open source AI are bad
Another possibility is of course that Hugging Face legitimately were attacked and wrote a completely honest response - but OpenAI instructed their AI to attack their servers and the breaking of containment is fiction.

I'm not convinced in any direction, really. But what makes me cautious is that there have been extraordinary claims from both OpenAI and especially Anthropic of their models breaking containment, hacking the host, etc. for several iterations of their products and I have only heard of this type of behavior from their own blog posts about how powerful and dangerous their upcoming models are. Never from anyone having it accidentally happen in production once they are released. It seems unlikely to me that the final post-training and safeguards are that bulletproof given how much use these tools are seeing.

Agentlien··on The arguments against open source AI are bad
I would rather say that many details of the supposed attack were published by Hugging face before it was publicly announced that OpenAI were involved.

Both are big actors in the AI space who arguably benefit from increasing the perceived capabilities of AI models. If one suspects OpenAI of lying it isn't such a stretch to think this was a coordinated PR campaign between them and Hugging face.

Agentlien··on Cursed circuits #6: reverse avalanche oscillator
This is amazing. Now I'm even more upset he scored so low on Eurovision.
Agentlien··on What to learn to be a graphics programmer
I agree with this. I've identified as a graphics programmer for a long time because it's a passion of mine and the fact that it's my profession seems almost like a happy accident.
Agentlien··on Underarm bowling incident of 1981
Unlike the rules for Quidditch I had to reread parts of this to understand it.
Agentlien··on Blogging can just be stating the obvious
This, coupled with fear of making mistakes in public, was the thinking which for years kept me from writing about my work. Until a comment here on HN encouraged me to just do it.

I am so happy that I listened because it seems the few people who have checked it out generally enjoy it. Most commenters have positive things to say and some have stated they learned things.

Agentlien··on How I play video games with spinal muscular atrophy
When I saw the title I immediately thought of Xbox Adaptive Controller. It's such a cool initiative.

Microsoft has a lot of really cool accessibility tools and services. For example their extensive usability guidelines, which is a massive set of documentation for how to make games more widely accessible. [0]

They also have a great service where you can submit your games to get a report with feedback how to improve accessibility.[1] I read through one we got at my last job and it was really impressive. Very thoughtful and comprehensive.

There's a hub with links to a lot more accessibility services as well. [2] Microsoft is one of the companies which really does a lot of great things in this space.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/accessibility/guide...

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/accessibility/mgats

[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/accessibility/acces...

Agentlien··on When I reject AI code even if it works
On the teams where I've worked which had a proper code review policy not understanding has been explicitly stated as a reason to pause and ask for clarification. You cannot give a pass for code you don't understand.
Agentlien··on Windows 11 users are tired of MS account requirements creeping into everything
That doesn't seem to address my comment. I was specifically asking why esalman wrote

> In the last couple of weeks there's been some good news coming through for Xbox

Since I wasn't sure what good news they were referring to.

Agentlien··on Windows 11 users are tired of MS account requirements creeping into everything
What news are you referring to? The only news about Xbox I've caught is that it's declining in profit because they removed Xbox exclusives.
Agentlien··on How we made hit video game Prince of Persia
> The Apple II was dying as a platform by the time the game came out [...] it was rereleased on PC in the US and sales picked up. You wouldn’t get that second chance today.

On a much smaller scale, I was actually part of something similar a few years ago. The game Wavetale was originally a Stadia exclusive but launched just before the platform shut down. We were allowed by Google to port it and release it for every other platform, and I ended up being one of four programmers doing that work; I mainly focused on optimizing the switch version.

The Stadia version barely got noticed, but the other versions, especially Switch, did quite well. The game was even featured on AGDQ, which was really cool.

Agentlien··on Making Graphics Like it's 1993
This is a cool project and I really like the author's technical and aesthetic choices of how to limit themselves.

But what really stood out to me is this line.

> a linear frame buffer where each pixel was represented by a single byte indexing into a palette of 256 colors.

Of course this is nothing new, but it just really struck me because I've been working on a blog post about texture representation on modern consoles and it is crazy how complex it has gotten: texture tiles, block compression, non-linear texel ordering (e.g. Morton order), ...

Agentlien··on GTA 6 Developers Unionize
This is why, after spending my whole youth learning programming to become a game developer I had a crisis of faith and spent a few years working on something else (surgical training simulations) after graduating. I had done summer jobs at a game studio and all I saw was the leadership treating people like shit, paying almost nothing, and then laughing about how easy it was to got away with - they even did so towards me in one breath then offered me a full time contract in the next.

However, I joined EA in 2015 and have been in game development since. They offered really good pay and now at my current job I even get great pay and no overtime.

Agentlien··on GTA 6 Developers Unionize
When I worked for EA (2015-2019) it was better than some horror stories I've heard, but still way too much overtime and many weekends spent at the office. The worst part that it was unpaid in exchange for an extra vacation week and then they had the gall to ask us to please not take our vacation because "don't you care about the game?".

Since then I've worked at Thunderful and now 505 Games. I haven't done overtime since I quit EA and I've been very efficient because I'm not too tired and I get peace of mind working from home.

Agentlien··on PS3 Emulator Devs Politely Ask That People Stop Flooding It with AI PRs
Exactly. And it shows. It knows all the sayings, the expressions, etc. But shows very little actual practical understanding of them. Especially how to apply the knowledge it simulates.
Agentlien··on The locals don't know
I have a lot of friends from other countries so I've ended up doing a lot of tourist stuff together with them when they've been visiting.

It has been great, gave me another layer of appreciation for my hometown Gothenburg, Sweden.

Agentlien··on PS3 Emulator Devs Politely Ask That People Stop Flooding It with AI PRs
I have had the same result when trying similar things for graphics on modern consoles. I hear so much great stuff about AI coding but in my niche it just seems to fall flat. Even just rubber ducking around graphics and performance they sound like a beginner who has read a lot of good blogs but with no practical experience.
Agentlien··on Show HN: Hallucinopedia
Checking the link again half a day later and now I get the original text I first saw. Very strange.
Agentlien··on Show HN: Hallucinopedia
It's working now and I have to say I love this. The whole project is whimsical and gives me a strong SCP vibe but (sometimes) without the creepypasta aspect. I was very pleased to see that articles generated from links retain the context of the page that created the link - and even refer back to the original page.

For example, the article from my original comment: https://halupedia.com/the-alien-wizard-war-of-1425 mentions the conflict arose due to https://halupedia.com/treaty-of-the-silent-orbit . The second page, once generated, mentions the significance this treaty had for the war from the first page.

update: Well, this was quite disappointing. I loaded the original site again to show a friend and it generated a completely new text with a completely different story and no reference to the second article. Would have been nice if these were permanent as I had originally assumed.

Agentlien··on Show HN: Hallucinopedia
I tried it myself but I only get page generation failures

https://halupedia.com/the-alien-wizard-war-of-1425

Agentlien··on Why I Write (1946)
This resonates so strongly with me. Everything he wrote about how he wrote in his youth and the analysis of motivations to write is so spot on. It's also really interesting to know that he was actutely aware of the tendency to let the political propaganda weaken the storytelling, because that was something which surprised me when reading Nineteen Eighty-four. It was great, but there were moments when it felt like he dropped the pretense of telling a story and momentarily slipped into overt lecturing.
Agentlien··on Investigating How Long-Distance Couples Use Digital Games to Facilitate Intimacy
I met my wife through Dungeon Siege back in 2003. We were both teenagers and had a long distance relationship throughout our student years - meeting for a few weeks every holiday - before moving in together in our twenties.

After we both got jobs and bought a house, we decided to get Elder Scrolls Online to have an online game to play together while physically sitting next to each other. It was an obvious choice since we're both big elder scrolls fans. It was a wonderful experience and really echoed the way we met in a beautiful way.

Agentlien··on A compelling title that is cryptic enough to get you to take action on it
A personal anecdote which was on my mind as soon as I read the title but doesn't relate to the actual topic at hand.
Agentlien··on Neovim 0.12.0
Regex search and replace is definitely among my most used features and the preview in NeoVim is amazing

That said, I do find myself using recursive macros quite often. They're an easy way to make a set of random little changes which would be hard to put into a solid regex. Especially when filtering and formatting logs to produce a list of error messages on a condensed format for review. It doesn't happen as often, but I also find them incredible when doing more complex substitution across a project.

Agentlien··on Neovim 0.12.0
> kernel panics are part of life with consumer hardware.

This isn't right. It was certainly true in the nineties, but I haven't seen one in years on Windows and I spend many hours a day in it both for work and play.

Agentlien··on Neovim 0.12.0
I've been using Vim daily for 13 years and switched to NeoVim about a year of two ago. For me the main advantages over Vim are just the Lua scripting instead of Vimscript, its support for language servers, and better handling of terminals windows running inside Vim.

However, I do still run visual studio in parallel for debugging. It's basically essential when dealing with console game development.

Agentlien··on Games with loot boxes to get minimum 16 age rating across Europe
I'm skeptical because this is not a new system part of those lobbyist agendas. This is a recommendation system which has been in effect for over 20 years. And this is a tweak to how they update recommendations.
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