magic_lobster_party

Fun fact: New Super Mario Bros turns 19 this year.

Yes, that means we’re close to the turning point where New Super Mario Bros gets older than what Super Mario Bros was when it was released.

What’s the point of having a congress if the president just signs executive orders?

Windows might be a habit, but Microsoft is doing a pretty good job in breaking this habit. Many rather jump ship than make the move to Windows 11.

Then there’s the Mega Drive game Alien Soldier that comes with two difficulties: ”Super Easy” and ”Super Hard”. The ”Super Easy” difficulty is actually quite difficult.

This is only a dip if Trump somehow start to make sane decisions for the economy. So far he has only been doubling down on his insanity.

Most of that cost was unlikely for the hardware itself, but rather Nintendo greed. Most of it was probably for the early access to Nintendo’s next console and possibly support from Nintendo directly.

Interesting paper. I skimmed through it quickly, but it seems like they wanted to avoid relying on ray tracing.

Minimal ray tracing. Many non-local lighting effects can be approximated with texture maps. Few objects in natural scenes would seem to require ray tracing. Accordingly, we consider it more important to optimize the architecture for complex geometries and large models than for the non-local lighting effects accounted for by ray tracing or radiosity.

Most of the paper is way above my understanding, so I’m not qualified.

They used top of the line hardware specialized for 3D rendering. Seems like they used Silicon Graphics workstations, which costed more than $10k back in the day. Not something the typical consumer would buy. The calculations are probably a bit off with this taken into account.

Then they likely relied on rendering techniques optimized for the hardware they had. I suspect modern GPUs aren’t exactly compatible with these old rendering pipelines.

So multiply with 10ish and I think we have a more accurate number.

Did Toy Story use ray tracing back then?

AFAIK, A Bug’s Life is the first Pixar movie that used ray tracing to some extent, and that was for a few reflections. Monster’s University is the first Pixar movie that was fully ray traced.

There’s that subgroup of Holocaust deniers (or skeptics). I’m not sure how many Trump supporters are Holocaust deniers, but most Holocaust deniers are probably Trump leaning.

I’m sure there are some who think Hitler did nothing wrong.

I remember Crazy Rich Asians was a great offender of this. The main character is a teacher in game theory, which naturally makes her great at any game (which also becomes an important plot point later in the movie).

There’s also a similar trope with the Rubiks Cube.

Bonus points is when there’s a game theory department in a movie. Then they all will be masters in any game.

I think the big problem is when companies apply for patents but never utilize them. In my ideal world, patents should quickly expire and opened to the public if they aren’t being used. Like, what’s the point of protecting your idea if you have no intention to use it anytime soon?

That could deal with the patent troll problem as well.

I agree.

Here’s what this agreement taught me about b2b sales:

Truly the art of the deal

China has everything to gain from a weakened America. These tariffs will hurt China short term. Long term it’s America that will be hurt the most.

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake

That one was more complex. Lehman brothers didn’t publicly tell everybody that they were going to do a bad thing, then proceed to do the bad thing despite everyone telling them it’s a very bad idea, and then everything turns into shit just like everyone had predicted.

The difference now is that this one was completely preventable. Not that it makes it any better.

Original PlayStation for not shipping with dual analog sticks from the start. Almost all games had to be playable with non-analog controllers. As a result, dual shock support was mostly an afterthought. Especially FPS games were awful to play.

Imagine the games that could’ve been possible if all games were designed with two analog sticks in mind. We would certainly have fewer games with tank controls.

I think this is also the main reason why it didn’t take until PlayStation 2 for developers to realize that the second analog stick is awesome for camera movement (instead of awkwardly mapping camera motion to the shoulder buttons).