kbity

joined 2 years ago
[–] kbity@kbin.social 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Funnily enough, one of the few legitimately impactful non-enterprise uses of AVX512 I'm aware of is that it does a really good job of accelerating emulation of the Cell SPUs in RPCS3. But you're absolutely right, those things are very funky and implementing their functions is by far the most difficult part of PS3 emulation.

Luckily, I think most games either didn't do much with them or left programming for them to middleware, so it would mostly be first- and second-party games that would need super-extensive customisation and testing. Sony could probably figure it out, if they were convinced there was sufficient demand and potential profit on the other side.

[–] kbity@kbin.social 62 points 2 years ago (12 children)

There's even rumours that the next version of Windows is going to inject a bunch of AI buzzword stuff into the operating system. Like, how is that going to make the user experience any more intuitive? Sounds like you're just going to have to fight an overconfident ChatGPT wannabe that thinks it knows what you want to do better than you do, every time you try opening a program or saving a document.

[–] kbity@kbin.social 14 points 2 years ago (2 children)

The Xbox 360 was based on the same weird, in-order PowerPC 970 derived CPU as the PS3, it just had three of them stuck together instead of one of them tied to seven weird Cell units. The TL;DR of how Xbox backwards compatibility has been achieved is that Microsoft's whole approach with the Xbox has always been to create a PC-like environment which makes porting games to or from the Xbox simpler.

The real star of the show here is the Windows NT kernel and DirectX. Microsoft's core APIs have been designed to be portable and platform-agnostic since the beginning of the NT days (of course, that isn't necessarily true of the rest of the Windows operating system we use on our PCs). Developers could still program their games mostly as though they were targeting a Windows PC using DirectX since all the same high-level APIs worked in basically the same way, just with less memory and some platform-specific optimisations to keep in mind (stuff like the 10MB of eDRAM, or that you could always assume three 3.2GHz in-order CPU cores with 2-way SMT).

Xbox 360 games on the Xbox One seem to be run through something akin to Dolphin's "Übershaders" - in this case, per-game optimised modifications of an entire Xenon GPU stack implemented in software running alongside the entire Xbox 360 operating environment in a hypervisor. This is aided by the integration of hardware-level support for certain texture and audio formats common in Xbox 360 games into the Xbox One's CPU design, similarly to how Apple's M-series SoCs integrate support for x86-style memory ordering to greatly accelerate Rosetta 2.

Microsoft's APIs for developers to target tend to be fairly platform-agnostic - see Windows CE, which could run on anything from ARM handhelds to the Hitachi SH-4 powered Sega Dreamcast. This enables developers who are mostly experienced in coding for x86 PCs running Windows to relatively easily start writing programs (or games) for other platforms using those APIs. This also has the beneficial side-effect of allowing Microsoft to, with their collective first-hand knowledge of those APIs, create compatibility layers on an x86 system that can run code targeted at a different platform.

[–] kbity@kbin.social 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

The biggest problem people have with systemd is that it's constantly growing, taking on more functions and becoming a dependency of more software. People joke that some day you won't be using Linux anymore, but GNU/systemd, (or as they've taken to calling it, GNU plus systemd) because it's ever-growing from a simple init daemon into a significant percentage of an entire operating system.

People worry that some day, you won't be able to run a Linux system that's compatible with much of the software developed for Linux without using systemd. Whether that's a realistic worry or not I don't know, and I don't really have a horse in the systemd VS not-systemd race, but I can appreciate being worried that systemd might end up becoming a hard requirement for a Linux system in a way that nothing else really is - you can substitute GNOME for KDE, X11 for Wayland (or Mir, I guess), PulseAudio for PipeWire and most stuff will still work, so the idea that systemd could become as non-negotiable an element of a Linux system as the Linux kernel itself rubs people the wrong way, as it functionally makes Linux with systemd a different target platform entirely to Linux with another init daemon.

[–] kbity@kbin.social 12 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Well, technically atheist extremists would uphold Soviet-style "state atheism" where religious groups are repressed violently and religious affiliation is outlawed. Killing and repressing people for being Christian or Buddhist or whatever would be just as bad as doing the same thing to people for being atheist. Of course, unless you live somewhere like Xinjiang Province or North Korea, you're very unlikely to encounter any significant organisation which seeks to actively force people to abandon their religions.

Basically, unless someone is running a scam like Scientology, promoting a violent extremist sect like Wahhabi Islam, shunning "apostates" like Mormons or just running a flat-out doomsday cult or something, people should be allowed to practice a religion, own a holy book and convene in a designated place of worship with peers of their faith. They just shouldn't be allowed to compel others to join that faith, or enjoy privileges from the state such as a blanket tax-free status.

[–] kbity@kbin.social 19 points 2 years ago

We've gone from "work from home" back to "live from work" at an astounding pace. That's... good? No, wait, the opposite. Fuck this society and the parasitic husks who direct it in this manner.

[–] kbity@kbin.social 15 points 2 years ago

At this point they've literally just developed a carcinogenic spray that happens to be a hydrocarbon. What the fuck. This cannot be allowed to reach the market.

[–] kbity@kbin.social 4 points 2 years ago

Peter Thiel is interested.

[–] kbity@kbin.social 11 points 2 years ago

Works pretty well. Reader Mode is great at unfucking user-hostile site designs like this.

[–] kbity@kbin.social 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Yeah, Windows' bullshit is what drove me to Linux in the first place. I only have it on my gaming system, and only because Discord's stupid screensharing doesn't transmit audio on Linux, NVIDIA's drivers for Linux suck balls (going AMD next time now that their cards are good again) and there are a couple of games my friends play that have issues on Linux. I've never run into a game on my everyday laptop that Linux couldn't run, and the Steam Deck will take basically whatever you throw at it.

Windows is a barely-functional rat's nest of code spaghetti that falls apart at complete random. Sometimes your audio drivers will just stop working for no apparent reason. Sometimes your computer will just refuse to connect to the internet until you do a clean install. Windows Update apparently runs Prime95 in its spare time and so does the Antimalware Service Executable. I hate using it so much. I wish Windows would just curl up and die.

[–] kbity@kbin.social 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

A Libertarian candidate for the US Senate back in 2018 proposed giving shotguns to homeless people for self-defence.

[–] kbity@kbin.social 11 points 2 years ago

You say that now, but next they'll be coming for premarital cohabitation and eventually we'll be back to fathers literally selling their daughters as brides as chattels through the mechanism of arranged marriages they can't terminate.

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