With my ‘security hat’ on, I’d have to say you shouldn’t use anything that’s no longer receiving updates. But that would create a lot of e-waste for no reason.

To see if your phone’s browser is still receiving updates, you can browse to:

https://emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com/

That has a grid showing whether your browser was willing to connect to sites using the compromised keys. If your browser is using its own cert style and still receiving updates, should be all green ticks. If so, then you can still use the phone for browsing internet. Be aware that using other apps on your phone (like eg. your email app) could be read easily by third parties, especially if you’re connected to unfamiliar wifi.

If it’s all red, maybe try another browser? Or relegate that device to being a dumb phone - switch off its data connection, phone calls only.

Assuming that the device hasn’t been updated yet, yeah, this is what it allows you to do.

If you connect your device to a ‘fake’ router that’s completely under your control, then when the device attempts to connect to its remote server, you pretend to be it, and provide a certificate signed by this ‘trusted’ authority. Device will accept it. Make another connection to the real remote server. Decrypt what the device sends you, and send it on to the remote server; it’ll believe that you’re the android device, and respond with a message that you can decrypt, store, reencrypt with your fake key, and send it to the device. Repeat.

You’ll only be able to impersonate the API until the keys are revoked by an update. That’s maybe not so useful. However, any other connection that can be MITM’d and include other personal information - your bank card details, say - can be read, too.

As regards the data centre equipment; the SSDs and hard drives used for storage would be reusable by regular people. Those will be nice to have.

The memory is the high-bandwidth kind that is not be usable on consumer motherboards. The ‘graphics cards’ are the size of filling cabinets, require external power supplies and cooling, don’t have video outputs, don’t have drivers for graphics output. If you don’t have a requirement for serious parallel computation with a very high uptime, then it’s not worth the cost of powering them up. If/when the bubble bursts, all that shit is going to landfill.

Latest version of Unreal engine plus a fully slop game on top? Reckon you might get 13 fps to go with those 13 fingers.

It’s correct if they’re talking about multiple different kinds of psychological harm - depression and psychosis, say. Much like if I go and buy both full-fat and semi-skimmed, then I’m buying milks; or if I’m checking the hardness of river and tap samples, then I’m testing waters.

Yeah, it’s strange that way. Was playing through Heavenly Sword on it; hard lock three times in the prologue, and then no issues for the rest of the game. PS3 seems a harder thing to emulate than the PS4, must be that crazy CPU.

Yeah, it does help to hide low frame rates.

Also, Temporal Anti Aliasing (and TAA-on-steroids, aka. DLSS) work by jiggling the camera by less than a pixel every frame, and blending the results of previous frames into the new one. If things were on-screen before, but have moved, can use its colour from its old position - computer knows where things used to be. Cheaper than other AA methods, good results if there’s little movement on screen, and handles deferred lighting and transparency well, which other AA can struggle with.

If there is a lot of movement on screen? Big motion blur in post-processing to hide the fact there’s no AA till it can build back up again.

Indeed. Don’t comment “what”, only comment “why”. If you’ve written code that looks like a mistake but is there for a reason - poor algorithm, not idiomatic, etc. - then the proper “comment” is a unit test that exercises the business logic behind it, but a one-liner to stop someone from “fixing” it is maybe polite too. Don’t write an essay for private functions; rename them so they’re obvious.

If you’ve eg. a system service that allocated a whole pile of memory on startup, but hasn’t read or wrote it since, then copying it to swap during idle disk time is a good thing. If it does get used, then it’s still in RAM, and if memory pressure increases, then you can reuse it immediately because it’s already on disk, don’t have to wait to swap it out. You could give this functionality a catchy name like ‘swappiness’ so you could fine-tune how aggressively it’s done by setting the value in a file, too.

Doesn’t stop Windows being a trash OS, of course, but if I’ve allocated swap then I want it to be used for best system performance.

PS5 has ‘unified’ memory - the CPU and the GPU both read from the same location. Normal desktop PCs have separate memory for the CPU and GPU. That’s incredibly problematic for emulation - you have to keep track of the CPU preparing drawlists and be sure to transfer them to the GPU before issuing draw calls, and conversely, you may have to copy frame buffer data back to main memory if the CPU is used for calculating tone mapping. That’s incredibly slow if you do it naively, and likely to cause crashes and corruption if you don’t have the timing right.

The reason that RPCS3 and ShadPS4 run faster than a couple of frames per second is that they’ve put huge effort into optimising this, and you still have to disable tone mapping on eg. Demon’s Souls, as it brings a game you could otherwise run at 4K/120 to a standstill.

Yes, you wouldn’t have to translate the x64 bytecode into the platform-native equivalent, although dynamic recompilers are pretty good at that. Lots of high-end emulators will include something like Clang’s LLVM and call it a day. But you still have to emulate the platform, and that’s pretty painful.

Conversely, the reason why a lot of console conversions suck, even on powerful PCs, is because they were optimised around GPU memory updates being cheap. Something like the new Doom engine, that has separate paths and doesn’t make those assumptions, runs amazingly on all platforms.

I think that Unreal’s real advantage is its ubiquity - all the tools that you might want to use for game creation, from mocap to modelling, with with it; and there’s a near-endless supply of programmers and artists that know how to use it. The licensing is just a bonus. idTech is infamous for its bad tool support; Raven software basically needed a whole pile of direct contacts in id in order to develop games on that engine. But yes - Unreal 5 basically means that you’ll struggle to hold 30 fps even with framegen and upscaling, whereas idTech is silky smooth and efficient.

Carmack was at his best working near-solo, solving some tricky optimisation problem and getting Mike Abrash to tweak up the resulting assembly. Some of the comments that came out of Meta suggest to me that he finds large teams frustrating and stilting. Can’t blame him there, really. Am not sure he’s the man for modern AAAA+ gaming, with huge teams and massive pipelines. Besides, he’s more interested in messing about with AGI now; best leave him to that.

It is. Oldest part of my computing setup by decades, and still working perfectly. Also robust enough to withstand ‘cat typing’ - the ThinkPad next to it that I use for work is missing a couple of keycaps

Your standard-issue cat may be able to work a mouse, but mine can do a keyboard…

Might be a controversial take, but Raspberry Pi’s are pure ass as media servers. They’re profoundly i/o limited, which extends to access to external USB devices as well as ethernet, and lack the oomph required to decode hi-res video streams locally. 1080p can be choppy, forget about 4K.

Pi5 occupies the unhappy spot where it’s too expensive for enthusiast and hobby applications, but inadequate as a desktop PC which benefit from a bit more power.

A mini-PC is a much better fit. An N100 might even be overkill - mine has a Skylake from a decade ago in it, and it crushes ‘media’ activities while gently sipping at electricity.

Yeah. Throw litterboxes away, buy a general storage box that’s much taller and wider, problem solved. Ours is about 18" x 24" and 6" deep, only needs a thin layer of litter in the bottom, all cats happy. Probably cheaper than a dedicated litter tray, too.

Hey! Mine not only tells the time, but also the day of the week and month, and has an integrated alarm clock and stopwatch. Battery lasts for seven years, keeps time to within a few minutes per year, is cheap enough so that I don’t mind wearing it when I’m cycling as I can just replace it if I break it, and it has a celebrity endorsement. Of sorts, anyway.

If the lesson is “just let Ubisoft die, and support their former workers if they want to produce labour-of-love games in small indie studios”, then we could be in for great things. E33 is possibly the French-est game ever made and has brought French culture around the globe, in the way that “yet another Rainbow 6 sequel” certainly does not.

Trying to out-jank Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, eh? I didn’t see any game-breaking bugs in that 14-minute longplay, must try harder.

I don’t think that being a vampire hunting people down in a maze of streets is necessarily a bad idea. If they’d gone for a stealthier, keep-out-of-sight and strike from the shadows approach, like perhaps a vampire might do, then they could have had something. The original Castle Wolfenstein was released in '81 for inspiration, and this does have ‘better’ graphics - more stuff moving, more detail, more colour. In fact, probably looks better than most versions of Metal Gear, from '87. You’d obviously want to keep it quick so that people keep putting money in, but I don’t think ‘arcade sneaking game’ is exactly an over-done genre, even now.

It’s one of the best ones, get playing it. Lots of shooting up Nazis, zombies and death robots; a little bit of stealth, lots of Quake 3 bunny hopping, plenty of action.

Not like the new ones, which make you watch 45 minutes of torture porn before letting you do five minutes of corridor shooting, and which just can’t commit to deciding whether killing Nazis is bad.

Java dev in charge of a $100M product here. Can’t actually compile it with less than 32 GB of RAM.

My old job working with a hydraulic analysis firm, needed 256 GB to run the product it in local development mode; to run customer models in production was a mainframe job - typically multi-terabytes. Computational fluid dynamics eats all your memory and asks for more. My work computer would have been pretty shitty as a gaming desktop, but did have every memory slot maxed out.

Yes, you might be working on something more lightweight, and that is fine. That doesn’t mean that your requirements are the be all and end all.