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tgtweakon Katamari Damacy but it's The Met collection

>We wanted to do away with the current stereotype that has become the norm in the industry where both the developers and the players have come to accept a set of arbitrary rules as standard, despite the fact that video games are still a very new media. Most importantly, we wanted people to have fun and enjoy their gameplay experience.

Words every game designer should read, even more true today than back then.

tgtweakon Mac at Any Scale

We run lithium ion UPSs in our racks and have for many years - I think you're taking the airline approach here but the reality is the environment inside a datacenter is much more stable than almost everywhere else lithium ion batteries are employed today, and the fire suppression detection and suppression systems add on top of that.

tgtweakon Mac at Any Scale

With that kind of airflow and consistent temperature I would suspect the failure rates to be incredibly small on those batteries - typically what kills them is extreme temperatures and high C charge/discharge at high temperature deltas (as measured from 25'C) which is where the cells have lowest degredation, which they should see very little of in this environment.

What would be more pertinent is changing the charging logic so the packs are held at 50% state of charge vs being always charged up to 100%, that will significantly decrease the chance of pack issues while greatly increasing the longevity of the battery itself. If you hold a lithium ion cell at 50% SOC for years without varying it and keep the temperatures flat, it can last for a very long time without capacity degredation. If you leave it at 100% it will be degrade in a few short years and can swell, at which point it has twice the chemical potential to flame out. Also if it's charged to 100% when the datacenter is at 20'C ambient and datacenter cooling fails and temps go up, having the pack warm up to 40'C can overvolt it and that is usually where they swell/fail.

Also fair to note here that Apple is probably at the frontier in terms of using the highest safety cells and battery management logic so I'd feel better about this than I would putting a lesser brand's lipo pouches in datacenter environment.

tgtweakon Mac at Any Scale

the issue is the internal power supply is not redundant, even if you supply it with an ATS or UPS, that component can still die taking out the entire thing.

tgtweakon Mac at Any Scale

Perfect illustration of plan vs reality in terms of complexity divergence.

tgtweakon Katamari Damacy but it's The Met collection

It's actually quite difficult since it requires many models for each item based on zoom scale progression. Very doable but often skipped, and some are potentially in 5+ zoom levels.

Also hard to reproduce: the selection of objects, the art style (decidedly Japanese) the ambiance (king/prince/planets, the pool table when you lose), music and sounds, and a lot of the little things that make it delightful like things running away, the selection of items - the fact that parts of the world that are not objects become items to pick up at large scales.

tgtweakon elect.horse

Saw your post on Reddit and the positive feedback. Unfortunately in a world of AI, it's trivially easy to copy a game concept.

tgtweakon 5-MeO-DMT sometimes cancels the Ebbinghaus illusion

Very fitting that California be at the forefront of narcotic research

tgtweakon Binance-hacker-1029 – $5.6B stolen from Binance

CZ saying it is confirmed, and that he expects accountholders to be made fully whole... I guess you can do that when 2.8BN is frozen by centralized stablecoins.

[1] https://x.com/CZ_BINANCE/STATUS/2115915423174853077

tgtweakon H.264 Is Magic (2016)

Yeah at this time intel was just releasing their quick sync tech and a few vendors were putting 4 intel cpus on a pcie board and using it for video encoding! Matrox also had a considerable piece of this business doing video compression and editing/compositing using bespoke processors and boards.

Despite being more "power efficient" - both nvidia and intel's hardware solutions left a lot to be desired in terms of final quality for the same bitrate, compared to x264 that seemed to just put out substantially better quality video for the same bitrate even at the same h264 profile levels. There are still lots of x264 design elements, some even verbatim ported, into modern av1 and hevc encoders.

tgtweakon H.264 Is Magic (2016)

There are some interesting advances in neural video encoders and decoders - I suspect it will look a lot like the neural models in DLSS 5 for compression -> decompression/reconstitution. There have been some lossless text-compression neural models built that seem to surpass even high level compression algorithms so with time those could get there.

tgtweakon H.264 Is Magic (2016)

It's still magic

tgtweakon H.264 Is Magic (2016)

Had the pleasure of working with Jason Garrett-Glaser (better known as DarkShikari) circa 2011 on a patch for x264 to better utilize more cores (slice-threaded lookahead). At the time he was working with Sony to optimize their PlayStation game streaming service, and this had the potential to lower encoding latency (critical to game streaming) even on same-core systems by spreading the frame over more cores to do more parallel work, and doing more intelligent scheduling and convergence after that tile-based work was reconverged into a frame. At the time we were using servers with 48 physical cores to do transcoding, a bit of a rarity in a single NUMA space back then and there were no instances to test this on so I flamegraph traced a few encodes at very high thread parallel counts and send back the instrumented profiles (from a custom compiled version) showing the core work being done and he used that to optimize the motion estimation code which worked on the first shot to perfectly level out cpu usage and increase encoding speed across ~24 cores (was previously topping out around 8 and running one core hot iirc). I got a look into how exotic and complex this project was, particularly in terms how low level and advanced things like motion estimation, quantizing and perceptual compression were... it was and still is sort of magic how many smart techniques are baked into something that we barely pay attention to. They were, even at that time, working on x265.

His blog, Diary of an x264 developer, was a great read too for anyone wanting to get a vantage point on how crazy that codebase was.

[1]https://github.com/mstorsjo/x264/blob/master/doc/threads.txt

(edit: was Gaikai that was acquired by Sony in 2012 and is the basis for PlayStation Now)

tgtweakon The Grid, a factory-scale robot in Massachusetts that builds PCBs on demand

Our PCBa manufacturers in Dongguan and Shenzhen are like 2 days end to end for prototypes on small sized boards (40mmx20mm 30 component single layer) and at scale after prototyping is done they're incredibly cost effective.

Do you see these costs coming down further with mature automation or process improvements?

tgtweakon The Grid, a factory-scale robot in Massachusetts that builds PCBs on demand

We need this for fab runs

tgtweakon Formlabs Studio 1 $699 Resin Printer

Resin printing has its place but it's terribly messy and the FDM printers are getting so good these days it's basically trivial to print even complex multi part prints.

tgtweakon Oldest GUI application that still runs on Windows 11

I'm reminded of this amusing and brilliant post: https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/

tgtweakon Cerebras Deploys Trillion-Parameter AI Models

Citing full precision benchmarks then just going with 4 bit quants

tgtweakon Tesla Roadster

honestly both companies are getting good exposure here for relatively low lift on behalf of space-x team (it's a compressed air tank, nozzles and actuator valves).

tgtweakon Tesla Roadster

That is incorrect - there are three versions slated, one with no cold gas nozzles, one with forward-only (the 4 in the rear) and a tank in the rear "acceleration", one with 10 nozzles (4 under, 2 side, 4 rear) and a tank in the rear and passenger seat "flight". None of the variants use rocket fuel or other ignited propellent, they're all just compressed gas release systems.

This is explained in the deep dive video with Lars - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22rvpUecLts

tgtweakon Tesla Roadster

Hagerty has a very good walkthrough video with Lars and it looks pretty real. The thing they failed to mention was that the "flying" version is separate and the entire passenger seat is replaced with a pressure tank.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22rvpUecLts

tgtweakon Do dentists know what they're doing?

Been told for 20 years that my wisdom teeth need to come out and that it's a short matter of time until they caues issues. I now just ask them to look at my xrays from 20 years ago to see how they have progressed (shocker, they haven't moved or changed in 20 years).

Finding a good dentist that you can trust is really difficult.

tgtweakon CFTC Staff Were Told to Retract Analysis of Suspicious Oil Trades

The text readability here is terrible compared to the original formatting... would suggest fixing that if you're pushing this.

tgtweakon An update on Wayback Machine access

Can't wayback machine just offer direct access to the archive for a premium and in doing so, pay for the service?

tgtweakon Patterns and problems in emerging multi-agent systems

Are we surprised? Humans evolved with communal success and collaboration engrained over millennia. Agents are trained as individual "all knowing" single entities, effectively rendering them single person players.

These models all have the same knowledgebase as well and thus see no value in the opposing agents contributions since they are "obvious".

Overall amusing but kind of expected.

tgtweakon 2026 Eclipse Webcams

https://eclipsefan.org/

Posting this from a HN post a few days ago - one of the better "where is the eclipse currently" trackers that isn't currently ddossed.

adding that there are some great webcams in santander on youtube that you can watch as it starts in a few minutes:

https://www.youtube.com/@tendnetworks

tgtweakon Mars Bar from 1991 found – and it's 20g bigger than today's

Check out the post from the family that has been counting Quality Street tin candies every year for the last decade or two... very telling.

tgtweakon 50k Boat Names

It's like vanity license plates but with even less constraints... "Unsinkable II".

tgtweakon Muse Glimmer: 30B-parameter model optimized for always-on local agent workflows

There is definitely an under-served target memory size of 48GB - almost everything aims for: 12, 16, 24, 32, 64, ...) But most dual-gpu setups, 3090/4090 (and some mac configs afaik) have 48GB, and most 64GB systems would do well with the extra 16gb of overhead saved. 48GB is also moderately common in PC memory configurations since 24gb DIMMs are a thing.

tgtweakon Launch HN: ProvenMetal (YC S26) delivers circuit boards in days instead of weeks

Amazing, now if we could just get this for silicon wafers :D All joking aside, would be great to get something like this for shuttle run wafer taping vs the current 6+ month window.