It's funny that his expected answer was "Google it". In most cases when people answer with that (it could be the answer for any tech interview question...) you get encouraged to actually do the problem, so it's a time waster. For the interviewer it gives them no signal outside of you having the ability and awareness of the existence of search engines, although there could be some vague behavioral signal that shows you have a stronger urge to find existing solutions rather than waste time creating your own. This is a really toxic interview because you're basically expected to read the interviewer's mind. I've had a couple of these with peak Silicon Valley companies. At pre-IPO Zynga I was asked by a GM "what the most important number in game design is", at River Studios (Mike Rothenberg's company...) the entire interview was basically this style of question.
This app is a perfect example of why you shouldn't show "raw" GPT-X output to users. "No" produced some great stuff like " No, I must not attend the meeting because the children cannot witness its nature." The site works as a machine learning joke, but its not clear if that's what the creator is going for...
Edit: I read the disclaimer at the bottom, there is some filtering (which explains why I was getting only casually racist, violent and anti-muslim answers and not blatantly offensive content :)). Also it's a one day hack project, so it is basically an ML joke.
None of this is a problem for immersive theater experiences. I think in this case you build a product that doesn't scale. This way you don't have to think about children playing games because you can enforce 18+. The cost per sessions doesn't matter if you find product market fit with your experiences. I know that SV startup types see games as disposable time wasters to sell microtransactions to whales, but if you think of it at ondemand high quality TTRPG sessions or scalable immersive theater I think there is a profitable business with a good sized market. Matching actors don't matter because you can do short form content and sessions, etc. The last point #5 puts the business in an even better position. If you can eventually automate the product you can scale parts of it much better. Also remember players aren't paying for voice actors to read lines, they're paying for someone that can react and be improvisational. If you play AI Dungeon (which is state of the art), you'll see that AI is still a ways off from this.
I've seen working demos of this in early stage stealth format. I'm a pretty strong believer that it will happen. It requires some cultural shifts and won't be a big market instantly. We'll probably see a few players try and fail at first
Yeah... The unsafe keyword is not unique to Rust either and exist in C# with similar semantics (although slightly different due to gc vs borrow checker memory management). One way to think of it is unsafe blocks effectively let you write C, with pointers and other memory unsafe operations inside of an otherwise safe language. This can be used for performance critical code (in a similar, but higher level, way as inline asm) but is primarily used to interface with unsafe C APIs (OS APIs, graphics APIs, etc) and libraries. Entirely agree that this is a misunderstanding.
While the story is Palmer founded Oculus (and he was the original founder, so there is truth there), really Brendan Iribe, Michael Antonov and Nate Mitchell (Scaleform Mafia, all serial founders) negotiated the Facebook acquisition. Palmer was pushed out first after acquisition. He's a nice marketing story (nerdy young white boy reinvents VR) but he wasn't the driving force behind the business success (Brendan and Nate) or technical success (Carmack, Antonov, Abrash and many others like Dean Beeler and Volga Askoy).
We're also in a world where all the founders of Oculus have quit and no longer have a say in decisions like this. Facebook foundational employees and recent hires are running the show and the end game for Oculus is to give Facebook a platform that they control that is as pervasive as iOS or Android (or at least Xbox or PlayStation).
As a former Oculus and Facebook employee I'm torn by this. I always understood how a none trivial portion of the Oculus user base is extremely anti-Facebook, or even how people with Facebook accounts didn't want their Facebook account tied to Oculus. At the same time it would seriously reduce technical friction around using Facebook backend features in Oculus products. I know some folks would see this as a complete negative and I understand where you are coming from, but there are some interesting positive use cases as well.
This would be great. I also think there is the issue of HTTP being a good protocol and the web being a good distribution platform, and as a result browsers have to be complex because they are everything to everyone. It'd be cool to have a really optimized browser/game engine with WebGPU, WebXR, Gamepad API, audio and Wasm, and no or minimal HTML support as an application platform, for example. Or a browser that has a unified fixed UI for streaming video. I understand these aren't perfect examples and can be nitpicked and might not work in practice, but I strongly agree with this idea in a general sense.
I've heard, and the art director on the game followed the same philosophy, that art directors tend to make future tech look worse\glitchy on purpose so it's very clear to the audience that it's "tech". Technology that for all intents and purposes works mostly flawlessly looks a little too much like magic to audiences I guess? Like really you'd just want to have a person show up and look like they were there, but that might not read clearly as a hologram to a 20th or early 21st century movie goer so they're monochrome blue, flickering and noisy with clear projector rays. I'd like to see a sci-fi game or movie where all of the tech mostly worked flawlessly except maybe in some exceptional situations.
Yes, I worked on a video game that was in the near future and had transparent and semi-transparent screens everywhere. I spent a lot of time adding new rendering features to the engine that did proper transparency sorting, blur/darkening passes and helping artists tweak materials to make them more readable. At multiple points in the project I wanted the art direction to switch to opaque screens. Not only because of the technical effort (in many ways that was fun) but just because how impractical they were in many scenarios.
Rule 5 (data dominates) is exactly the same as lie 3 (code is more important than data) of Mike Acton's Three Big Lies (https://cellperformance.beyond3d.com/articles/2008/03/three-...). Rob Pike's rule 3 (don't use fancy algorithms) is closely related to Mike Acton's lie 1 (software is a platform) as well.
A part of me wonders if Mike was influenced by Rob Pike's rules directly or indirectly. It's also something that an experienced programmer can discover independently easily enough. Mike Acton was clearly heavily influenced by some of the failures of classic OOP design (lie 2 of Three Big lies).
When I was at Facebook the majority of employees used Mac Book Pros for work (I was an exception because I worked on VR stuff which was Windows only). It seems like the majority of Silicon Valley big tech and unicorn startups have a large (if not majority) population of employees using Apple products for development. I understand that many employees prefer or need Linux or Windows, however.
I pitched a similar idea in an interview years ago in an interview (http://www.wearegamedevs.com/2016/01/20/scott-anderson-rende...) with the added complexity of forward simulating past events with different choices. I was asked what I would do with infinite time and money though. To this day my elderly parents tell me to quit my job and work on this idea :-D.
I do believe that past time travel to reconstructed and recorded events will be one of the stickiest use cases for VR.
The return of the audio jack is great news. I spent years hoarding 3.5mm to USB-C convertors and fight audio issues, including months without USB-C audio working for no apparent reason, and having to work around it with blue tooth headphones, which are ok when I remember to charge them...
I really want access to the API but I have no immediate use case and I'm not "AI community famous". I have vague ideas about prompting it to create 3D models (I work in games\graphics), but I have no idea if that will actually work given the data set.
Tangentially related random connection. This quote
In the 1980s, the physician Robert Goldman famously found that more than half of aspiring athletes would be willing to take a drug that would kill them in five years in exchange for winning every competition they entered today
If you have examples of AAA game developers that have moved their entire studio (not individuals using Blender, or outsourced contractors making one off assets) to Blender I'd like to hear it. I'm aware that indies, including many successful ones, and potentially some mid-tier or AA studios, widely use Blender. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about Naughty Dog, Blizzard, Treyarch, DICE, etc. I keep very close tabs on industry practices and work for a major game engine company. You yourself said "I can't say it's supplanted Maya yet by any means", I'm not talking about potential future growth, I'm talking about the current state of the industry in a very specific product category.
Yes, and the article states that. My response is specifically talking about games, because OP addressed Microsoft Game Studios. Microsoft Research and Microsoft Game Studios are different groups. Folks are acting like I said "Blender sux lol". Simply stating facts about usage.
I never said that Blender is not used in game development, I specifically said Blender is not widely used in AAA (Microsoft Game Studios) game productions, and that Microsoft Game Studios is not the driving force for this donation (which is stated in the origin post!). This should not be a controversial statement.
I doubt any of Microsoft Game Studios seriously use Blender, although I'm sure some individuals might use it for specific workflows. AAA games almost universally use Maya (and ZBrush, Substance and Houdini), for example this presentation on Gears 5 workflow specifically mentions Maya and Houdini (https://cdn.gearsofwar.com/thecoalition/publications/The%20V...). This donation specifically mentions digital humans created for Microsoft Research, and MS Research as the user, not Microsoft Game Studios.
There is a lot of implied ill-will on HN, I'm guessing the phrase "embrace extend extinguish" in Microsoft related threads gets upvoted? From the post I see that many Microsoft employees (at least in research) use Blender. Microsoft decided to pay for the software their employees are using, which happens to be open source, so the best way to do that is to donate to their foundation. Epic Games, Google, Nvidia, Valve, AMD, Intel, Ubisoft and others have done this (looking at the list of corporate sponsors is easy). This isn't a plot to take over Blender and destroy it from within...
One question is, if someone is doing elaborate deceptive work like this, gets hired and has no problems performing the job, does it actually matter? Some people mostly or entirely code at work, so this looks like a legitimate way to get a "good" project in GitHub that he knew well. It sucks that it's deceptive (which could be a major red flag), but it's also clear enough that he understood a large codebase well enough to explain it and modify and/or refactor it, which is honestly the majority of a SWE job. A lot of people are concerned about the "purity" of how someone solves an interview challenge, and outside of potential ethical red flags, people that "cheat" the system are often putting in a lot of work, and are as likely as anyone else to be capable of doing the work.
You're better than me at the game. I have close to as many hours and attempts and I've only ascended once. Although probably should be at ~3 ascensions and made a couple blatant tactical mistakes fighting bosses with The Silent.
GPU hardware is varied and changes frequently. Many API features are partially or entirely implemented in software (drivers or API runtime) complicating things. Console, mobile and desktop parts are different in terms of functionality. OpenGL is probably the closest to runs on everything. BGFX, sokol, WebGPU and other abstraction layers might be good fits as well. I think options are pretty good if you just want rasterized triangles, vertex and fragment shaders (and maybe compute). As you start to need better performance or other parts of the pipeline options are less clear cut.
Yes, every HN graphics thread has a group of people that complain that Vulkan isn't used everywhere. Most of them have not written any Vulkan because many HN graphics threads complain about the amount of boilerplate required to get a triangle onscreen in higher level APIs like OpenGL. I can't find a Vulkan C API hello triangle that is less than 1000 LOC, although Vulkan-hpp reduces that significantly, and many of the examples are OpenGL size.