NEO//LIX 🔊

Finally watched Project Hail Mary. Actually didn't know what to expect; kept myself spoiler free. The verdict: Entirely predictable, but absolutely lovely. The "science" hurts, but the feels are good.

It's time for #Wagnerfestspiele again in Germany, where the nobility meets to look down on us peasants. Like literally.

Olé! 🇪🇸🇪🇸🇪🇸

I heard a lot of criticism about the term "centrist politics". I can't see the problem with it. The natural state of every somewhat decent person seems to be being hated by the right for being too left, and at the same time being hated by the left for being not left enough. Having personal opinions that don't align perfectly with whatever dogma is en vogue at the moment seems to be treated like a sin. I hate purity debates. You call me a sinner? Well then I am a sinner, fuck you very much! 😘

While the Fediverse hacker elite is busy convincing each other that LLMs are completely useless and somehow at the same time will also destroy all our jobs, Donald E. Knuth (yes, THE Donald E. Knuth) had fun with Claude Opus 4.6, and wrote a paper about how it helped him to solve a complex problem he worked on for weeks: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/claude-cycles.pdf

Maybe we all should stop bitching around for a a moment and acknowledge that computers are friggin' cool. The Knuth did it too.

I can't believe that. Started #HaloCampaignEvolved, and the intro video stutters. For some reason the game wants to draw 33 fps, but the video obviously has only 30, so you get doubled frames. It looks terrible. Unreal Engine traditionally is bad at rendering FMV for some reason, but this is exceptionally awful. And that's not just some game, it's a Halo ffs! What the fuck is going on at Microsoft?

Successfully survived the launch of Conan Exiles Enhanced. \o/
It was cool to hang around in a studio war room, like a real game developer. xD
Already found two bugs in the new UE5 server, but well, that's expected.

Well done Funcom! The game may not be my personal cup of tea, but that's the type of post-launch support I like. Basically a remaster, for free, with the legacy / UE4 version continuing to be available on private servers.

Memory shortage?
Just allocate ✨virtual memory✨
Apparently you can have as much of it as you want.

A significant amount of social media seems to be people reposting obvious troll posts while pretending they are real.

I really wonder how many people for example in flat earths groups are actually flat earthers, and how many are just there pretending to in order to make fun of flat earthers. I bet there are whole flat earth groups without a single genuine flat earther in them. It's a form of interactive theater.

Technically all energy we use comes from nuclear fusion, just with a couple of extra steps. Even Uranium is just a battery storing energy from a supernova billions of years ago.

Playing Directive 2080, which oddly enough is the first UE5 game I got hands on with path traced Lumen (didn't know that even existed). Visuals are gorgeous. The game manages very well to deliver this polished pre-rendered cutscene look, even though animations are a bit lackluster and very AA. Performance is ... fine, I guess? More or less exactly what one would expect from path tracing. Image quality and stability is excellent thanks to Ray Reconstruction.

I wish I had never learned how the news cycle works, the attention economy, human biases, and so on. Knowing the mechanisms makes watching it going on even more painful. On the other hand people with less awareness of those mechanisms seem to perceive much more things as a threat, so I guess there's a downside in ignorance too. :-/

Tomorrow #FiveM Enhanced for GTA V Enhanced will be released, and we got zero information about the new server so far, with the exception that the main binary will be renamed. I hope that when we finally get the server files tomorrow, everything will just magically work. Not exactly how I imagined working with Rockstar Games, but well, here we are.