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VRay

1,344 karma · joined September 29, 2017

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VRay··on Framework vs. Apple
Yeah, that's kinda how it goes..

At first, "The Open Source Community" looks like a really big deal. Once you dig in a little, though, you realize that Apple has like 50x as many people working on this stuff as the entire linux community does. linux is great, but I don't think you can expect the same level of polish as you'd get on something with the Apple Tax

VRay··on Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard
I, for one, welcome our new gaming overlords
VRay··on Make Front End Shit Again (2018)
Obligatory link to a modern Geocities-esque collection of mini-sites, Neocities: https://marijn.uk/linkroll/
VRay··on Locked out of 'God Mode', runners are hacking their treadmills
In that vein, it might be worth noting that this thing is just a treadmill. There's this whole fancy computer attached probably via just a handful of very simple wires to the actual treadmill part that anyone cares about. If they get too obnoxious about the computer, you can just open the treadmill, yank the computer out, and replace it with something from China that costs $20

Of course, that'll then get attacked via the legal system for violating DRM.. ugh

VRay··on Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard
I dunno, I tried Apple Arcade, and the games on there are decent, but I really didn't feel like I was getting my $5/month's worth

Any random $20 Switch title from the Shovelware Shelf at your local retailer is so much more polished and fun than even the best phone games, it's insane

VRay··on Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard
I agree with you 100%, I've never even heard of or seen a use case for the dual-screen flip smartphone

That said, my friends seem to love their Samsung foldable phones. "Having a tablet available at any time in your pocket is a game changer"

(I don't understand how it's a game changer, but there you go, one counterpoint)

VRay··on Activision Blizzard pushes out dozens of employees over workplace misconduct
haha, yeah, the only reason working in FAANG wasn't my dream is that I never could have dreamed of reaching such lofty heights

Now that I'm here, it's sort of lame, but it's still a lot better than any other jobs I've done..

VRay··on Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies: A story from hell
ugh, that's annoying.. At least you made it onto HackerNews, so your problem might get silently resolved in the shadows

It really sucks that Google can't be bothered to provide 5 minutes of human support despite taking such an enormous cut of all revenue from these apps

VRay··on Shenanigans on Microsoft Feedback Hub
I dunno man, in that context it just felt like friendly internet trolling

TheDonald users were trolling the crap out of spez by pinging his name repeatedly, so he trolled them back by obviously editing in TheDonald mods' names.

Then TheDonald users responded like a bunch of angry children about it

That said, it's good to get the word out that Reddit's always been complete BS through and through. The site was all sock puppets initially, and nowadays every sub with more than 100k users or so is extremely heavily censored and moderated in a completely non-transparent way.

VRay··on Shenanigans on Microsoft Feedback Hub
Internally, Microsoft is chock full of super pissed-off people. Everyone's pissed at everyone else, since everyone there is constantly bombarded by angry friends' and relatives' complaints. A decade under Ballmer of firing anyone who wasn't good enough at weaseling ("unregretted attrition") has resulted in a company full of people who literally don't work at all 90% of the time.

The company does an insane amount of spying ("telemetry") on its users, but all I've ever seen ANY of that data used for was weaseling out of things. "Oh, only 5% of users use that feature" or "Oh, that bug only happens 0.1% of the time". Of course, if you use a product with 1000 bugs and each one of them has a 0.1% chance of occurring on any given month, you're going to run into bugs all the time

VRay··on U.S. surgeons transplant pig heart into human patient
relevant SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/intelligence-2
VRay··on LatencyFleX: A new approach to game latency reduction
It doesn't make any sense to invest much in displays over ~90hz vs just working on adaptive refresh rates

Your eyes really do work at a pretty low speed. At some point it makes more sense to just track the eyeballs and put updated scenery in front of them at the exact instant the game engine produces it, rather than try to run at some insanely high speed generating frames that aren't actually having any effect on the player's brain

90, 144, 240hz, etc all look better than 60hz because there's less random lag between when the game generates a frame and when it appears on the screen. You can't see an 8ms delay, but you CAN see a variable 0-10ms delay that's happening as the game engine and computer monitor drift in and out of sync again and again.

VRay··on Leetcode has taught me that I'm a bad engineer
I think it works to some extent. There's a limit to how much you can get out of yourself, and a lot of dumb luck involved in getting interviewers who are actually reasonable.

In my case, when I grind those dumb problems I quickly go from needing 45+ minutes to implement a working sort function with file I/o to banging it out in 5-10 minutes. I dunno if I'd ever get good enough at those problems to make it into Google unless I got lucky, but I've gotten offers from the other FAANGs over the years

The whole thing is pointless, though. If a junior engineer asked me for advice, I'd tell him to get whatever job he can and work on saving money/building a startup in his spare time.

Grinding for months to get into Google is so soul crushing, and working for any big company is just awful in the long run compared to being independent

VRay··on Why Brahmins lead Western firms but rarely Indian ones
Man, this thing you people have going on is really confusing

You should just discriminate based on something straightforward like car size or hat color

VRay··on Why Brahmins lead Western firms but rarely Indian ones
Yeah, man, the one thing I was really hopeful about with Trump was some serious h1b reform. If a president who hates both tech companies and immigrants didn't do it, I don't think anyone will.. (for the record, I'd prefer to just hand out green cards rather than exploitative work visas..)
VRay··on Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in
A lot of the foreigners living in Tokyo misinterpret tiny bits of nothing as hostility and racism

I'm a big guy, sometimes people make space for me on the train or whatever. It isn't racism. I'm a scary and weird looking guy too by local standards, it isn't racism when people gawk a little sometimes. People talk to me like a kid after I completely botch some basic phrase

The only racist thing that ever happened to me in years living there was this: I went to a bar with my white friend, and they said "No American" and made an x sign at us. I asked in Japanese "sorry, what was that you said?" and suddenly they welcomed us in.. I guess they just didn't want rowdy dudes who can't speak the language. Definitely not acceptable behavior from them, but not too bad IMO. I get way worse treatment in the USA for being Hispanic than I ever do for being a foreigner in Japan

The expat community in Tokyo is kinda obnoxious. There are a lot of lazy, burned out guys who complain about everything

VRay··on Tools to Download Netflix / Disney / Apple TV Content
Yeah, it probably wasn't the most efficient use of my family's limited budget, but that's how it goes

Nowadays I'm a big /r/financialindependence guy, and I was shocked recently to find out that a lot of my lower-middle class friends and family are constantly ordering food with those ripoff delivery apps. It's completely insane IMO to pay $50 for cold, soggy food that should have cost 25, but I guess people do it. They buy new top-end smartphones every year or two, lease cars, and do all sorts of other ridiculous money-wasting stuff.

VRay··on Alexa suggests lethal challenge to child
If they did, it would cost like $200 without the platform or the large install base
VRay··on Tools to Download Netflix / Disney / Apple TV Content
"4K streaming" is such a joke

They compress and screw up the video quality so much that even calling it 1080p is a stretch in my opinion

Most people have houses/screens too small for 4K to be visible anyway, though, so I guess it's easy to get away with providing such a crappy service

VRay··on Tools to Download Netflix / Disney / Apple TV Content
Man, I grew up lower/lower-middle class, about 30-40% of the median family income, and we had the $80/month cable package plus went to Blockbuster for 5+ rentals per week

I don't think that was unusual, either.

VRay··on This year, Oculus has sold more headsets than Microsoft did Xboxes
People say it all the time at my FAANG job. Some whiny loser tried to call in HR and the cancel squad over it on slack, and it went literally nowhere, didn't even get anyone in the "cancel everyone" channel worked up
VRay··on Why Is C Faster Than Java (2009)
> If C is used in 100 years it will only be because of inertia. Today there are better choices in the domain of low level systems programming languages.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but there's effectively zero real kernel work done in anything other than c and c++. Tons of well-known open source Rust/microkernel stuff exists here in public, but behind closed doors is where almost all firmware work is happening. When someone at Microsoft, Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung, etc sits down to code firmware for billions of devices, it happens in c. I've never seen a serious proposal to switch to managed code at any of my jobs, either

I think we'll see more and more complex stuff move out of the kernel, but I don't think c is going the way of COBOL in the next 20 years at least. I'M definitely not going to start using Rust on my own, and it would take a pretty compelling case from management or a junior engineer to make me switch in the future.

VRay··on Ubisoft deleted account with hundreds of dollars’ worth of games for inactivity
a lot of games have actual Steam DRM

You can definitely remove it, but it's not like GOG where the launcher really is 100% optional and you can install and play the games without an internet connection or an account of any sort

VRay··on This year, Oculus has sold more headsets than Microsoft did Xboxes
The only way someone on HackerNews is going to get fired for being a member of the Glorious PC Gaming Master Race[1] is if they work for Sony or maybe Apple

1: https://youtu.be/P0dXtOVi2yo?t=52

VRay··on The carpetbagger’s guide to home ownership
yeah, I wonder if there's anything we can do about this situation

All I can think of is to spread the word about zoning laws, since currently we're still in a situation where renters mostly just get angry at foreigners, rich people, corporations, etc.

Tokyo probably takes things to an extreme that Americans wouldn't like (all the zoning laws are restricted by the national government, as I understand it). I just think it'd be nice if everyone stuck renting overpriced crapholes in the SF Bay Area would start showing up and voting for denser housing

VRay··on The carpetbagger’s guide to home ownership
It's tiny by US standards, but they use different types of furniture, so it's comfortable. They tend to use a lot of wall hooks, tons of tiny drawers, smaller convertible beds, etc.

I was living there with my wife and her two family members and had no trouble at all. That place was about 700 square feet, but it felt like an 1100 square foot place would in the US with giant furniture and large open floor spaces. I had a ~150 square foot room set aside for my office and VR space, the in-laws had a bedroom with tatami mats, there was a large-ish living room/kitchen with a big TV and couch, and then a bedroom for me and the wife

VRay··on This year, Oculus has sold more headsets than Microsoft did Xboxes
yeah, I'm a huge PC Master Race type, and even I'd never recommend to someone to start with PC VR right now. It's a LOT better, but it's not so much better that it's worth paying 3x retail price for a high end GPU right now.

If you can stomach forking over all that tracking data with Mark Zuckerberg's promise that he isn't going to use it to get better at hacking your lizard brain, the Quest 2 is an otherwise unambiguously great product.

My Index is fantastic, but setting it up is usually a 10+ minute process (dig out and hook up the tracking cubes, get Steam and SteamVR patched and working again, clear a space next to my gaming PC). Meanwhile, last time I had a Quest, I could just put it on and use it in my back yard at night, or clear some space anywhere in the house and use it there. Practically no setup or BS involved.

VRay··on The carpetbagger’s guide to home ownership
People are fighting the wrong fight when they attack this guy (or attack the people attacking this guy, for that matter)

It isn't SF Bay Bros'/foreigners'/companies' fault that houses are too expensive. It's because of strict zoning laws and a lack of building enough housing to match supply with demand[1]. Demand keeps going up way faster than supply, nationwide, and we're all feeling the squeeze

[1]: A great example of this is the super low housing costs in Tokyo. My mother in-law and sister in-law are renting a 3 bedroom apartment right now, 20 minutes outside Shinjuku (one of the "Giant Bustling Megacity" parts of Tokyo) for $1300/month, which they can comfortably afford while working part time doing low end janitorial work. More info here: https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-e...

VRay··on The carpetbagger’s guide to home ownership
You're the one ignoring reality. In your defense, basically every clueless voter living in the US and a lot of Europe does it too, though.

In Tokyo, you can work part time as a non-union, non-salaried janitor or a nail stylist and make enough to live within 20 minutes of the bustling heart of downtown. That's due to light zoning restrictions making housing into a depreciating asset for everybody instead of a stupid fucking pyramid scheme

https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-e...

VRay··on How to Set Low Expectations at Your Two Remote Jobs
If you're going to engage in fraud anyway, you can make more than you'd pull in from working two jobs

Hell, with all the crypto madness going on right now, you could probably get ludicrously wealthy just doing freelance black hat security testing.

You aspiring fraudsters should actually read all the paperwork they put in front of you next time you start a job, and tell me if there's no exclusivity at all in it. Just because Jack Dorsey got away with running two companies doesn't mean it's right or just for you to weasel along and lie to two managers forever.

Get your life together and do something meaningful instead of stressing yourself out for the sake of whatever pair of pittances you can earn from this dumb scam.

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