flipgimble

This is an unquestionable technical achievement, but its important to keep in mind that the AI view of the world is through the bot API. This is compared to a human that decodes game state from observing the monitor. Not being an avid DOTA2 player I marvel at skilled players that can follow the game based on what looks like a very busy and colorful mess to me.

At the same time most of the deep learning field has been focusing on implementing super-human perceptual abilities (vision, hearing, translation) that come instinctually to humans. The higher level reasoning and memory/attention augmented machine learning is still cutting edge research. I think DeepMind and OpenAI are driving research towards that end.

so antifa = anti-fascists, right?

By fascists we are talking about the white supremacists fascists with Nazi flags and salutes that staged violence in Charlottesville last weekend?

If you openly glorify Nazi-ism then I'm going to assume that you would kill a few million people you don't like, given any political power. Incidentally a person was killed by fascists.

Given that background, whats wrong with being against fascists?

Now that you mention it, I am an anti-fascist and still firmly committed to non-violence.

Is there a parallel here to what Putin has done to Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Khodorkovsky) ?

For Trump, Bezos represents a powerful potential rich adversary and owner of Washington Post.

" 2017, the year GPU’s finally begin to permanently displace the venerated x86 based CPU"

he never specifies what he means by displace exactly, and follows up with vacuous statements like "x86 party ends in 2017". The entire thing sounds like trying to manufacture a momentous event out of a gradual shift of market profits and priorities over time. Best you could hope for is to state that Intel has failed to take a significant market in high end throughput computing (ie. desktop and HPC GPUs), but its doing quite well with integrated GPUs.

Don't forget this is the same visionary that wrote the game industry playbook on how to hire and exploit developers: https://www.kotaku.com.au/2016/04/alex-st-johns-ideas-about-...

That sounds like you are making engineering decisions by superstition. Unless you have some source of data to back it up, please don't spread your subjective misinformation.

why would I entrust the future of my company or game project to a closed source server and SDK?

I've seen several MMO middleware companies announce revolutionary new technology with outdated closed source business models only to fold couple of years layer. Badumna Network suite was the last well funded one I remember closed a while back. And it started by Australian academics with decent technology.

Not FUD. Backup: take a look at the number of outside contributors in Unreal engine release notes for each release. Its not FOSS, but still commercial licensed visible source. People can find and fix the bugs they encounter. Then take a look at commercial middleware vendors that can integrate with Unreal on their own, without having to involve Epic. Take a look at the list of companies committing development time to Blender because the see their effort improving the ecosystem instead of just adding to Unity own IP.

Also take a look at the ancient .NET integration in Unity that has been strangled by licensing problems with Xamarin. Even though Microsoft has re-licensed .NET recently, it doesn't look like Unity will have an upgrade anytime soon. The only development environment for Unity is C#. Look at the numerous VMs and language integration in Unreal, in addition to any language that links with C++.

Answering your own questions is obnoxious. Public API documentation for software only available behind a commercial subscription is completely irrelevant when integrating with open source.

your cynicism and the oh so impressive "I've seen it all attitude" adds nothing constructive to the conversation. You try to belittle valid concern over corporate lobbyists taking over the agencies that are supposed to keep them in check. If I were a corporation trying to control the message on social media I would use pretty much the same language.

Resistance to the slowly creeping dismantling of consumer rights and freedoms will require frequent hyperventilation and the ability to be outraged. Having grown up in a totalitarian state, it all felt banal and common place. I'm not saying this one piece of news indicates that's the future in the US, but we will get there with hundreds of compromises like it.

I fully agree with the author about the risk of Unity as a closed source engine.

Unity isn't just closed source, but your main access to the engine is through an ancient Mono .NET environment that hasn't been updated in years due to licensing issues. The latest re-licensing of Xamarin should help here, but as with many other features Unity will be afraid to make upgrades for fear of braking compatibility.

This means that most of the Unity game code that will set your game apart has to be written in C# 3.0, and your memory use and performance is heavily taxed, unless you resort to platform specific native plugins. As a game developer this scales down your ambition down to mostly casual games. The type of AAA games that Unity advertises are mostly distinguished by large amount of content, but nothing innovative in gameplay or technology besides what the engine provides. I can't imagine anyone starting a No Man's Sky or even a next Minecraft in Unity.

This is sad, because about 5 years ago I was cheering for Unity and having a lot of fun with some prototypes. They know they are a mill for casual clone games too, since they are shifting their business focus to online developer services like advertising and multiplayer hosting with per-player fees.

I don't believe that complexity or size of code really affects the difficulty of open sourcing a project. Its more likely the culture and daily development practices that are difficult to change, but probably not as difficult as the business strategy we're all wondering about.

Realm has excellent marketing, but being a closed source third party SDK disqualifies it as anything I would recommend for my company to use.

I've had to deal with enough pain from closed source libraries from the likes of Google and others. Closed-source prevents me from adopting a new platform until the vendor gets around to porting it, and only if it fits with their strategy. Also a middleware-only company is liable to be bought out, and then closed. Example: Parse.

And its completely fine to be the developer who uses pre-made algorithmic block for their specific problem. However you will always be several years behind the current state of art.

For example deep-learning really revolutionized the state of the art in image recognition in 2012 by winning academic competitions. It took about 3-5 years for those deep learning algorithms to get productized into packages like tensorflow, with high production tutorials and videos, so it was accessible to non-academics.

I don't think people that know the underlying principles of machine learning are threatened (Thats sounds like pretty insecure world view on your part). They operate in a different context where you want to push the state of the art in machine learning algorithms, instead of just applying existing best-practices to your specific problem.

That is not my experience at all using Xcode professionally for the past 3+ years, and Visual Studio for over 7 years. Most of the complaints I've heard from colleagues about Xcode seemed from using unofficial 3rd party plugins, or Xcode's inferior c++ support for massive projects haphazardly ported form windows.

Xcode for iOS and Mac development has been the most productive IDE I've used professionally, not without its flaws, and unintuitive nuances, but continually improving. Yearly major ticket feature additions like UI Unit testing shows me Apple is still heavily investing in developer tools.

> Apple had to remain the jerks they are and not support Vulcan natively

Thats a rather immature view of the technology world that smacks of the tired old tribal warfare notions that only internet forums believe in.

Apple had a technical problem of slow, bloated and battery-draining OpenGL API and they solved it using Metal more than 18 months ago, when no other viable alternative was on the horizon. Are they jerks because they didn't saddle their users with a technically inferior solution for even longer?

Khronos has let OpenGL evolve into a byzantine beast of an API with GPU vendors effectively segmenting it into multiple complicated variants of best practices (like AZDO and others). Vulkan was announced more than two years ago, but unless you were in a select inner circle of developers, there was no actionable information available, until today.

In the meantime, major commercial engines already have official support for Metal (or Unity will have it soon). Popular games like World of Warcraft already have betas using Metal. I can download free IDE, documentation, sample profiling and debugging tools for developing Metal applications.

Sad truth is that Kronos and the Vulkan group took too long to evolve OpenGL and to give developers any actionable specifications for Vulkan.

Whats the benefit of this compared to using https://github.com/kripken/emscripten ?

Willowtree • www.willowtreeapps.com • Charlottesville, VA || Research Triangle, NC • ONSITE

We are looking for iOS, Android, Web Apps and Full Stack Developers (full list http://willowtreeapps.com/careers/). We also have openings for Ux Designer and Ux Strategist positions, along with Project Managers. I come from the engineering side, so I will describe that better:

Willowtree is a small but fast growing company that works with the world biggest brands to build them the best possible mobile experience. I've been here 3 years and came from a stereotypical large inflexible software shop in a big city. In contrast Willowtree is strange and unusual in the best possible way:

1) Organized into small, fast teams, with extremely disciplined software development process. This is the place develop and perfect your ideal work process.

2) Located outside overcrowded metro areas (my commute to work is 10min!)

3) Has a crazy amount of trust in each employee so you get to own and drive the product you are working on, even visit clients and tell them how your work can solve all their problems :-)

4) Large variety of projects and cutting edge technology to explore or research (I shipped 9+ major apps I'm very proud of in past 3 years or so).

5) Contagious enthusiasm. This is what you get where everyone is on top of their game and doing their best work. If there are problems, they get quickly identified and fixed without too much ceremony.

If this is the type of place you'd enjoy working at take a closer look at http://willowtreeapps.com

Not surprised at all that this trend is starting to get big enough for news outlets to finally notice.

Only once I moved to small town did I realize how much my quality of life was degraded by the long commutes, the over crowding, and the general scramble for access. Now I have 10min commute, up to 20min driving for any errands or shopping, and can't imagine moving back to the traffic jungles of a major city anytime soon. Especially since an average large townhouse in my neighborhood goes for $250K compared to $400-600K in Chicago.

It used to be that in small town America the only decent technology job you could get is by working remotely, or through the local university. Perhaps I got very lucky, but my current company[1] works with the biggest global companies, and I get to ship more software and work with much more diverse technology (most in the mobile space) than in my previous 10 years combined.

All I'm saying is that if are frustrated with Silicon Valley, or any other big city, don't assume that is your only option. I was pleasantly surprised when I landed in Charlottesville, VA.

[1] Its called Willowtree, and we are hiring, but I don't mean this to be recruiting spam, so look it up if you're interested.

Even if you cancel your subscription you are obligated by the original agreement to give Epic a royalty that is %5 of gross revenue.

I believe the EULA of the subscription forbids sharing of the source code with non-licensees. So whoever publicly shared the code has violated the EULA, after presumably having given EPic their credit card and personal info. I think this will be taken down shortly. Someone using this code would have to contend with Epic's lawyers. I hope this doesn't ruin the very liberal UE4 licensing for those who abide by the agreement.

I came to Unity from a background as a professional engine and graphics programmer, and initially I also twisted my nose, always muttering 'i could do this better if i had the time'. But once I got over that and realized I'll never have the time by myself, I found Unity to be actually well designed, embracing the component based organization that has become an industry standard, with a well thought out API. Its not without bugs, but nothing I would call amateurish or embarrassing. These days they have (IMHO) some of the best engineers in the industry improving their engine. Thats how they extract money from mostly satisfied customers ever couple of years for upgrades.

There is good bit of overhead from the Mono .NET scripting runtime, which is never going to be as optimal as (hard to write correctly) native code, but then again its light years compared to most game scripting designs. I've also seen some in-house AAA engines, and expensive licensed engines with the same performance and memory issues. Thats why they hire people like AO to beat an engine into shape.

Do you have any links or references to substantiate "amateur mistakes, awful design choices and some truly embarrassing bugs"?

Granted, one embarrassing thing about Unity is the infamous and prolonged lack of any viable built-in UI solution.

> Kudos to the OP...I wish more graphics programmers did this.

In my experience this mostly happens when a game programmers are switching jobs. Compared to the open source community, or indie community, console game developers rarely publicize their work. To be fair, most of them are under NDA and under a time crunch.

> what is the equivalent to "Rails"

Unity... its "Rails" for game development in general. You can do simple things quickly, and you can dig deeper into shaders and (if you have the commercial version) some advanced visual effects. Of course its not a substitute for writing your own, but unlike writing your own engine, you might actually finish a project with Unity :-)

Except with one intractable draw back that shadow volumes could eat up an unbounded amount of GPU fill rate, based on shadow caster geometry and your camera position. As a thought experiment, imagine trying to use stencil shadows in a jungle scene, something Crysis does just fine with shadow maps. Everything is a tradeoff, smoke and mirrors, tons of bullshit and often due to schedule pressure, a lot of takesybacksies.

I'm a big fan of the paper you cite and Crassin's work in general. However that algorithm is only viable in my opinion on current high-end PC GPUs and it remains to be seen how useful it can be on the latest console that also want to support large dynamic worlds.

The original article describes the careful technical tradeoffs and mixing/matching of techniques that is required to pull off a game like Bioshock Infinite on ancient hardware (at least as relative to current PCs and high-end GPUs).

Interestingly when Unreal Engine 3 was first being demonstrated to potential licensees and in the media, it was using a very high quality and elegant one-pass per light rendering algorithm. The demo scenes were basically a room or hallway with several colored lights, and the resulting multicolored shadows cast by an animated character. In 2004/5 this blew people away and a lot of game executives signed expensive licensing deals with Epic. No games to my knowledge actually shipped with that type of lighting, at least on a console. Then Epic and engineers like the author of the article spend the next several years (an entire console generation really) retrofitting UE3 with actually practical rendering technology that involved a lot of sacrifices, careful balancing, and artist headaches.

This generation Epic is showing a mind blowing UE4 demo with Voxel Cone Tracing and the cycle starts again.

One thing is very clear to me, Irrational threw out a ton of invaluable institutional knowledge when they laid off that team. I suspect competing studios, especially those using Unreal, are scrambling and having a bidding war trying to hire them.

It should be discussed as long as its new or interesting to someone so people can form their own opinion of a potentially important security issue. Your statement is suspiciously close to trying force a consensus opinion that there is nothing to see here. While I give you the benefit of the doubt, this type of steering of online discussion that benefits those that would like to weaken internet security. It might help linking to the previous discussion as well.

This format isn't really that relevant to Unity or WebGL (as othrs have also pointed out).

But you might want to keep an eye out for (Open Game Engine Exchange format) (http://www.opengex.org) which is supposed to be the result of this IndieGoGo campaign: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/open-3d-model-exchange-for...

It remains to be seen OpenDDL or OpenGEX will ever become more than a single vendor format.

While I'm familiar with everything you described from previous experience I have to say that was masterfully described. I've found that meditation has so much cultural and 'religious' sounding baggage attached to it that people who would benefit most dismiss it out of hand. Your post cut through that.

When I started meditation I thought it would give me some sort of mental superpowers (Tibetan Buddhist IMO are quick to sell you on those). However in my experience the benefit is more like developing resilience against all the drama and bullshit that life or your own mind throws at you. A potential downside is that I notice more clearly how other around me are swept up into unnecessary frustration or anger. Of course it would be overstating to say I'm a competent meditator, but on some days I consider meditation the most valuable thing I do for myself.

I'm motivated now to try the guided meditation your linked above. Thanks!

"He betrayed the privacy of us all. If federal security agencies can’t do vast data sweeps, they will inevitably revert to the older, more intrusive eavesdropping methods."

Wow, the mental contortions that were undertaken to produce this sentence are just astounding.

Hi, I'd like an invite if you still have one (my email is on my account page). What is the history of https://lobste.rs ? Or maybe how would you describe the focus and character of the community?

While its very interesting to explore and write about the implications of Larry Page's idea of experimentation unfettered by government laws, this reads like a poorly written sci-fi story by someone interested by technology, but not knowledgeable enough to write something remotely credible. It lost me at Google Being, 'stitched from photographs'. It focuses mostly on unfettered data collection, which is the main fear of journalists writing about Google.

You are thinking about languages that are targeting a single machine at a time. That's the way Microsoft thinks with their history in client-side software.

The implication of the quote is that Google attempts to implement the seemingly intractable algorithms by running them on huge clusters, and returning the results to a large audience that makes the computation worth it. If your language targets a data center then having a language support Bayesian inference might be useful.