Some industries go ‘we have to do [blank] because that’s the most popular thing’ and some industries go ‘we can’t do [blank] because everyone else is doing [blank].’ Inevitably the latter get infected with executives from the former.

I think broadcasters are legally required to announce who’s broadcasting, at some minimum interval. I know it affects ham radio - because slow-scan image transmissions worked around it by watermarking their callsign in the image. It’d also explain why Sirius XM does it so goddamn often when every receiver already has a screen.

More directly, 18 is not the moment you take the shrink-wrap off your genitals. It’s when you get thrown to the wolves. It’s the point where you’re assumed to already know enough that all your future decisions are your own fault.

Drives me up the wall when fandoms are like ‘You can’t show that seventeen-year-old having impure thoughts about a close friend! It’s still six months until they can get facefucked on camera for money.’ If y’all can’t handle that for fictional characters, the unrefined horniness of actual pubescent humans is going to obliterate your psyche.

Tom Cardy with the musical version.

Deus Ex, if you ignore that it really is ugly as sin. Sounds amazing! Plays beautifully! But yeesh, Unreal Engine 1 humans.

Most immersive sims are arguably in the same boat. The people involved had enormous ideas. As commercial products, they were woefully underappreciated, until years later. And quite frankly they do look like shit compared to much simpler contemporaries. Some NoClip documentary about Looking Glass could show a major artist had muscular dystrophy that makes his shoulders work wrong, and I’d be like, oh, that explains things.

how many ways can you really communicate with a cell tower?

Analog encoding assigns each device in a cell its own frequency range.

Time-domain multiplexing assigns each device a fraction of a second to transmit.

Quadrature phase-shift keying alters the timing of a signal to convey data.

Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing has each device transmit the same signal over P out of Q bands, such that each device’s signal can be reconstructed by knowing which bands it transmitted on.

There’s a fucking reason your phone is faster now than in 2010.

How cell phones work is ridiculously complicated. Going from analog, to time-domain shenanigans, to binary wizard math, is why you can watch 720p video and whine that it’s not 1080p.

Calm down, Roko.

Yeah, adoption’s not a feature you can design.

The general idea may show up in any extensible format. Like a PNG encoder that only does Sub filter can encounter each pixel once.

… wait, PNG filtering is byte-level? It doesn’t change with bit depth? Christ.

Possibly the final version. Quite Okay Imaging (QOI) achieved similar compression with none of the complexity. Lossy + difference = lossless formats are surely the better option where performance is not crucial. Even the fact they fffucking finally made APNG official is decades late to replace GIF, since several image formats are now literally video formats.

The future is webp. And telling software patents to burn in hell.

Would we say a megahertz-pulsed laser fires a million rounds per minute?

Because if that drum is full of bullets it has less staying power than Juicy Fruit gum.

Less “electric rifle,” more “optical flamethrower.”

To see how far rasterization has been stretched, and how that holds back development - Path of Exile 2 has a tech talk about their bare minimum settings. Artists weren’t allowed to rely on anything that could be turned off. They begged the programmers for specific gimmicks, and turned that cheap nonsense into a million blades of grass, raymarched cracks in translucent ice, and soft shadows with no Peter Panning.

Or, picking one specific trick: ambient occlusion was half of why Crysis humbled $5,000 PCs. There’s a slide deck for how a superior version of the same effect was achieved in Toy Story 3 on the Wii.

Real-time raytracing was unobtanium for decades because we kept moving the goalposts. The entire 3D games industry is built on cheating around simple parallel techniques being too expensive. By the time hardware catches up to where doing something the simple way is feasible, complex software has faked a wild variety of other effects. Meanwhile: games are designed to rely on what’s available. All of the tells for proper path-traced lighting have either been faked or avoided. Games don’t even do mirrors, anymore.

There’s a reason RTX shows off games from the late 1900s.

Careful with that, it’s an antique.

/b/ was never good.

rs.4chan.org was fucking awesome, though.

Yeah that’s plainly worse than everything that’s happened because of this.

We have allowed intolerable evil in the name of profits for sportsball.

… I hope you keep good backups, if you think it takes a hammer-blow to kill a hard drive. The heads float half a dick-hair above spinning metal. They’re good at pulling away when it seems like they might get bumped together - but all it takes is one miss.

Absolutely no reason to put one in a new laptop.

But not all computers are new.

What, like the head crashed by sheer coincidence, after eight hours of rattling?