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Nvidia DLSS
A while ago Nvidia (And today, in fact, but I didn’t plan to write about that) released a demo for DLSS. It’s a tool that basically paints over frames in the game, and makes them look hyper-realistic (I’m simplifying, and the tech is really cool - but that’s a lot of it).
This has been met with an unimaginable wave of backlash. A lot of people think it’s betraying a lot of the artistic aspects of game design and history.
In fact, it’s a perfect microcosm of a lot of the concerns surrounding AI and its impact on human expression.
I just want to bring up a sobering anecdote.
I had a set of friends in college who weren’t gamers, and the only thing they really played was maybe 2K - and Mortal Kombat.
I showed them Guilty Gear Strive, a new game that’s extremely famous, with a lot of good reviews. They were not impressed. They said the game looked bad. Worse than MK.
This is hilarious to those who are in games who are familiar with how these two franchises are seen in terms of their artistic achievements.
Guilty Gear Strive is seen as one of the greatest accomplishments in 3d animations - in terms of personality, gameplay visibility, performance and more.
Mortal Kombat is seen as less impressive, relying on mostly utilizing motion capture (sometimes to an overwhelming degree) and not going as crazy on the styling compared to other fighting games. (The fatalities are technical masterclasses, make no mistake).
The average person - even those who play games - don’t really care about that.
These people don’t care about the visual art, or the techniques, or the personality. They just want something fits their casual, knee-jerk tastes.
I think that’s why so much AI art is the same.
I wonder how many stylish games will see an uptick in sales because people won’t be put off by the visuals.
- pairmentoring
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2 monitors is the PERFECT way to handle development in the modern age. One main monitor for editing code, one side one for looking at notes/documentation and previews. When I see peoples setups with 5 monitors, I just roll my eyes. There’s no way you can pay close attention to monitor 5 and ignore 1-4. It’s in your vision, taking away your focus. It’s the worst with these people who have their monitors set up unergonomically, where they have to twist their bodies.
I used to be one a 3 monitor guy. My home setup had a very small table, and it was quite awkward. I’m speaking from experience.
I mostly do 2 monitors.
I’m also very frequently a 1-monitor guy as well. There’s a lot of times when you don’t need to have something on the second monitor - and you just need to lock in. For coding, and writing, it’s ideal.
- Rolling my own static site generator
- Google Kaggle challenge =
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CICD painline (as opposed to pipeline).
It’s annoying when you’re working on something, and it seems like it works (or it works on your local) but for some reason it fails in a later deployment step.
But it becomes worse if the iteration times are long. 3 mins editing code → 30 seconds to push to main → 90 seconds for the worker to start → 5 minutes before you can see the result.
And it becomes painful when the error handling logs are incomprehensible. Something fails and you either see a short, pithy and useless "error in service" with no information, or you see an overly verbose stack trace that is somehow just as useless.
The CICD painline.
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Sometimes I feel like I finish one project, and a dozen more catch my attention. I’m always busy.
That’s a good thing, I feel. I’m always learning something. But I don’t ever feel "done".
- Competence and confidence
- Asciidoctor Demo