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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I installed arch “from scratch” for the first time after installing it with archinstall like 4+ times previously, and yes it definitely somewhat did this, but honestly not quite to the extent that I expected. I feel like most of my system’s configuration was determined for me by the KDE plasma dependencies and defaults lol

    My bootloader configuration is definitely one of the parts that I was more exposed to with a manual install, but honestly I don’t really see how what I learned would help me fix issues like that in the future, more about how I could customize the boot screen and extend my configuration with more boot options

    idk it was a good experience to have but I think it brought more personal satisfaction than real practical benefit



  • We should all be using animated avifs anyways as the only decent format with good animation support (aka actually compressing it like a video) (yes, for some reason, animated webp, despite being based on a video format, compresses animations like a series of separate pictures…)

    And then we can put this debate behind us


  • lol I randomly searched for a page from collabora about how they reverse engineer GPU drivers (since I’ve seen that they’ve done that for other GPUs) and the very first page I went to was written by this person. Apparently this was a side project while she did fairly similar work on Mali GPUs at Collabora.

    Anyways, here’s what she said about the process:

    Typically, for Linux or Android driver reverse-engineering, a small wrap library will be written to inject into a test application via LD_PRELOAD that hooks key system calls like ioctl and mmap in order to analyze user-kernel interactions. Once the “submit command buffer” call is issued, the library can dump all (mapped) shared memory for offline analysis…

    it took some elbow grease to identify the three critical calls: memory allocation, command buffer creation, and command buffer submission…

    With those obstacles cleared, we can finally get to the shader binaries, black boxes in themselves. However, the process from here on out is standard: start with the simplest fragment or compute shader possible, make a small change in the input source code, and compare the output binaries. Iterating on this process is tedious but will quickly reveal key structures, including opcode numbers.

    From https://alyssarosenzweig.ca/blog/asahi-gpu-part-1.html , there’s a lot more details about the subsequent parts of the process in the next articles but they’re harder to summarize





  • I think it’s supposed to be that how AI turns high level instructions into code is compared to how compilers turn code into assembly. Implying that using AI is just a natural extension of the handing off work to the computers that we’ve already been doing.

    I wonder if you gave different AI models some c++ or something and told them to write assembly based on it how well they would do compared to an actual compiler







  • That isn’t the first impression that I got, although of course I’m just one data-point. The composition, lighting, and post-processing of the stills are really good which is not common for games that are actually lazily thrown together assets. Looking a bit closer though, I do see what you mean and I think the main problem is that the level of quality doesn’t seem that consistent. IDK what’s going on on that 13th still with the monitor. A lot of the scenery in the trailer looks worse that the scenery in the stills, and some of the UI stuff seems a bit meh. I get that as an indie dev it takes forever to do this sort of stuff, and definitely there’s very little that looks outright bad, the problem is mostly the inconsistency in quality. People only have so much time to play games, and it’s not that easy to judge how fun a game is from it’s trailers and description, so they look for any clues they can of less than complete effort, as any inattention to detail could indicate a lack of attention to the actual gameplay parts as well. Unfortunately for both gamers and developers, how fun or engaging your game is doesn’t necessarily correspond that well with how appealing it is to people who see the trailer.

    IDK, this is all kind of unfounded speculation from someone who really doesn’t have much personal experience in the area, so take it with a grain of salt


  • I think the money accumulates over time, so you’ll eventually get a payment once you have $100 at the start of a month after fees. But there’s also the $100 up front cost to list a game, so even after the first payment you haven’t really made money

    You’d probably have to get like $200 in sales from a game before you have actually started to make money (from taxes and steam’s 30% cut)

    Idk this is just what I’ve heard on the internet, I haven’t experienced it myself