indigoabstract

Yeah, that seems very likely. I just hope it will be them, instead of somebody else, as it sometimes happens when we're making plans and life is also making plans, but different plans.

Looking at the posted pictures, it seems like they're living in heaven. Good to know the panels will be good for at least 40 years.

Still, I'm kind of left wondering, where will they be in 40 years. Can life really be so predictable?

It starts out as a typical programmer rant these days about AI assistants and LLM fine tuning and then goes on to complain how sadly, they don't work for this game yet. So he's forced to play it manually. How old fashioned.

I find that pretty amusing.

Lol. My parser failed at this step, so I had to look it up:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

Aha, I see. Line segments from quads suffer from all the issues mentioned in the article as well, especially in the distance, but I didn't quite understand in what context is the grid shader applicable. Thank you for clearing this up.

I've tried this in Shadertoy and it looks pretty good.

Can this be adapted to work with classic line segments made from quads or is it just for drawing grids in screen space?

Why not get a PC from the '90s with CRT monitor and everything?

If you like playing old games in their natural environment, then you can't beat that in authenticity.

Nice one. This confirms my long held suspicion that German contains a lot of badly spelled Englisch words. Or maybe, it's the other way around?

It looks impressive, yet I'm not feeling very impressed. If only I could get as high as you do from watching those demo reels.

Out of curiosity, what is it that people do with these things? Do they put them on TikTok?

Well, I guess you've caught me then. Naturally, adults would be more preoccupied with how they can use AI to improve their lives and get ahead, instead of playing Minecraft.

I will be glad to see the day when LLMs will be able to play Minecraft, so I won't have to. Then I can just relax and watch someone else do everything for me without lifting a single finger.

Won't that be fun.

I haven't seen the movie. It looks great (especially the BH), but the plot makes no sense to me and I didn't feel like watching it.

It's clickbait, but I'm amused since it implies the blackhole is the main star of the movie.

Hi Nick,

I'm probably not in the target audience, but still, it looks lovely, I've enjoyed exploring the 3d part.

As a suggestion, a full screen button for the 3d scene would be nice, as I don't have VR, just a regular monitor. And if you're feeling adventurous, you could maybe even add WASD support for greater immersion. But that's a bit of work, as you would probably also have to include a physics lib for dealing with collisions.

Also, I almost didn't see the "try it out" link.

All the best with your project!

Yes, programmers typically like to do that. Btw, how about using colors?

I've been getting a similar feeling lately, in that if a thing has been done before and knowledge is publicly available, asking the "AI" (the LLMs) first about it is the best place to start. It looks like that's how things are going to be from now on and it's only going to amplify.

But as the AI gets increasingly competent at showing us how to do things, knowing what task is worth doing and what not is still a task for the one who asks, not the AI.

Edit: One type of question I've found interesting is to make it speculate, that is asking questions that it doesn't know the answer to, but still is able to speculate because they involve combining things it does know about in novel (though not necessarily valid) ways.

I quite liked your licking metaphor/symbolism. In fact, if I find out that something tastes good after licking it, I'll go even further. I swallow it. Ha ha.

My intuition is that creativity is a more of a feeling one has, rather than the result of some teaching method or cultural background. It seems very closely related to one's interests and also the novelty effect. Just think about the first time you experienced something, like a great song or your first love. The mind is just bubbling with thoughts. How can that feeling be experienced again with the same object like it was the first time? It can't. It's never the same as the first time. Even if we can mentally forget, the subconscious somehow remembers it's had that experience, so it isn't fresh anymore.

So, yes, you need to make connections between existing things to come up with something new, but once the fascination with a thing dissipates and it becomes familiar, any further creativity in that area quickly dies off. Our interest just moves on.

Perhaps the really creative people are just the ones who have this ability to see familiar things with ever fresh eyes?

Not the OP, but that was a wonderful read, thanks for sharing.

It follows that, maybe we programmers should see ourselves as working class poets or writers.

Weaving our magic words like wizards casting their spells, with every line written, we watch as our work of fantasy hardens into reality.

Our faithful computer always does our will.

With infinite patience, it takes our every instruction until each one has been precisely executed, down to the last word.

A bit idyllic, true, because there is always the dark side, the bugs. But otherwise, pure magic.

And, nothing wrong with other professions, but, more that 20 years after starting out, I can still remember why I wanted to be a programmer.

Oh well, I guess we'll never get there then.

At least not until we invent time travel.

Too bad.

> and points to the possibility that one day we might be able, in any given situation, to ask a computer, “What would Aristotle have said?”—and get an answer.

Steve Jobs predicts ChatGPT. Off by 40 years, but nobody's perfect.

I wonder who decides which humans are needed and which ones are not (whom you call pets) and will it be someone other in the future than who has made those decisions today and in the past?

What exactly will be different in the future from the current situation?

I haven't really studied this either so I could be mistaken, but I think it's because OpenGL does the perspective divide between the vertex and fragment shaders, going from clip space to NDC space (which is in the [-1,1] interval and can only be changed by glClipControl()).

The value in gl_FragDepth, if written to, is final, but gl_Position is not and will go through the clip/NDC transformation and since the trick to get the extra precision is to put the depth range into [0,1] instead of [-1,1], this would fail.

So my guess is, it probably wouldn't work on WebGL/OpenGLES without also setting gl_FragDepth, which is, as you mentioned, impractical performance-wise.

Yeah, I agree, but I guess it's fine for a demo, which otherwise would not have been possible.

I wasn't aware that logarithmic depth buffer could be implemented in WebGL since it lacks glClipControl(). It's cool that someone found a way to do it eventually (apparently by writing to gl_FragDepth).

I'm not the author, sorry to disappoint. I also find this project very interesting and wanted to share it.

> This particular aspect is the only feature that the authors' libriscv usage and the Lua VM have in common - but that doesn't make it scripting.

Maybe I'm nitpicking, but to me scripting is just programming/extending a certain fixed piece of software to execute instructions not already programmed into it without having to modify that software itself. Usually using an API. Not unlike computer programming, which aims to make a piece of hardware execute some instructions without needing to alter the said hardware. The main difference is conceptual (the platform targeted: hardware or software). If the script happens to be run by a VM emulating a real processor because your software includes such a thing, I think the distinction becomes purely conceptual.

Now, the technology is obviously super cool, but what I don't quite understand yet is what is the best use case for this? Is it really game scripting? Or compiling C++ on the fly?

It's not exactly a simple drop in replacement for a Lua interpreter.

It looks like third time's a charm. I for one think it's a feature to have stories competing for the reader's attention and just take their time to bubble up to the front page.

And this is quite an interesting story. Since the Sierra games' source code was never publicly released, it makes me think how radical id were to open source their games at the time, in the 90's.

Is it too much to believe that both hardware (built-in) and software (flexible) parts are employed in nature?

In C++, when you copy a struct instance to another instance, the runtime knows if any fields (to whatever depth) have manually defined assignment or move operators and will call them in the proper order. So it's a deep copy. The same information is used for calling any field constructors and destructors that are user defined.

Introspection (reflection) would go even further and provide at runtime all the information that you have at compile time about an object. But that's not required for assignment and destruction operations to work.

C doesn't have any of that, so a struct copy is just a shallow copy, a bit by bit copy of the entire struct contents. Which works pretty well, except for pointers/references.

Yes, it meanders to much to get to the point. Which is that RAII doesn't work in C because unlike C++, which has a comprehensive type system mandated by a standard, a C program doesn't "know" at runtime that a struct is composed of other (typed) fields so it can do a proper deep field copy (or destruction). And implementing that type system in C doesn't seem feasible for practical and political reasons.

I think the actual question should be "can C get automatic memory management like in C++ without having the equivalent of C++'s type system"?

Though I can't put my finger on it, my intuition says it can, if the interested people are willing to look deep enough.