So… the article describes that:

… the simplistic nature of the [Houthi Anti Air] systems also helps them to avoid earlier detection by America’s advanced equipment. “Many of the [SAMs] are also improvised, leveraging non-traditional passive infrared sensors and jury-rigged air-to-air missiles that provide little to no early warning of a threat, let alone an incoming attack,”

and:

but the Houthis claim that the Barq-1 and Barq-2 [Iranian AA missle systems] have maximum ranges of 31 miles and 44 miles and can engage targets at altitudes of 49,000 feet and 65,000 feet, respectively.

with some of these missiles being:

capable of firing Taer variants also reportedly have electro-optical and/or infrared camera to aid in target acquisition, identification, and tracking.”

… So I find it rather odd to describe passive IR guided AA missiles as ‘non-traditional’.

I think a better phrase would be ‘novel’ or ‘unaccounted for’.

Passive IR missiles of different exact specifications are… pretty common through the entire history of … just missiles, in general.

Jet engine exhaust is extremely hot, and it would seem the F35 is not actually as good at masking it as previously thought, probably when its flying away from the missile launcher and is thus showing its big hot ass… if passive IR + electro optical missiles can get this close.

(‘electro-optical’ is a fancy term for basically a visual spectrum camera + computer tracking an identified target… you know, like a snapchat face filter…)

At least some of those aircraft appear to be falling into the sea because Aircraft Carriers are having to make rather extreme turns, evasive manuevers, in order to evade other Houthi missiles / drones.

https://www.newsweek.com/satellite-image-shows-us-carrier-that-lost-plane-making-dramatic-turn-2065407

Oh hey, glad the Chinese figured out Starbucks is bad.

I too prefer locally owned coffed stores!

… Too bad I’m from Seattle, and Starbucks pretty much killed them all.

Fuck Starbucks.

They appropriated the ‘chill local coffee shop you can hang out at all day’, ran most of those out of business, first in Seattle, then nationwide, then all over the world, and now they just run a coffee themed fast food empire.

Fuck. Starbucks.

Pork Lattes for the Chinese, coffee flavored milkshakes for Americans.

What a fucking joke.

Oof you really don’t know how any of this works, do you?

Unless we are talking about some kind of… gridded out master texture map that has a whole bunch of textures common to say a particular level, a particular biome or environment’s commonly used asset set, and then the game addresses sections of this one large image as the particular textures of particular objects… and that master file is 4K or larger, and just always kept in memory for say a particular level…

Then uh, no, if you have a 1080p monitor, and your entire screen is filled up in game by say a 4k texture of a wall, or a poster or something…

All you are doing is pushing 4x the pixels through the game and your system to ultimately still render at a maximum of the 1080p your monitor can show you… for every single texture in the game.

This is why it often doesn’t even make sense to run a more modern game at very high or ultra texture settings on a 1080p display… you just literally cannot see the difference, and all it does is slow down the game and your system.

…

You’d get better image quality and performance from having a 1080p texture, Anisotropic Filtering, and perhaps some degree of some kind of Anti Aliasing.

There are a small number of games that allow you to render the entire game at say, 105, 110, 125% your actual display resolution, and use that in lieu of Anti Aliasing… and in those scenarios, having your textures at 125% of 1080p can improve image quality by reducing jaggies in a much more brute force way.

But this is not usually done very often, because while yes, this can provide superior image quality to using many kinds of Anti Aliasing, it is usually massively less performant and will degrade your FPS significantly.

…

There are a myriad of possible scenarios where it could make sense for a certain class of textures in a particular game and engine might be significantly larger than the textures for common objects amd buildings and such… but that would be an extremely in depth, technical, specific and particular, case by case discussion.

melodic woodwind sting

Hah, I too am using Bazzite, at least on a Steam Deck.

And yeah, if… having a propietary hardware tech with proprietary software that utilized it was somehow a legal argument for ‘you are a monopoly’…

Then Nvidia would have a very obvious monopoly on the real time ray tracing tech, and should thus be broken up.

Then MSFT should be broken up for owning DirectX, and not open sourcing it. Proton and Vulkan wouldn’t need to exist.

Uh, for the larger lists at the top of my post:

Yes, that is the point.

A game does not need to have 4K textures, does not need to have super high fidelity, super realistic graphics, to be successful.

…that is the point.

There is absolutely no unbreakable law of gaming that says a game’s success is directly proportional to or reliant on stupendously high res, high fidelity graphics.

Fortnite. Roblox. Minecraft.

Every goddamned Anime Waifu gacha game.

Stupendously successful and popular games.

Cartoony or low fidelity graphics.

…

For MGS V, Alien Isolation, No Mans Sky, SOMA… those are games that have pretty darn high fidelity graphics (No Mans Sky somewhat recently got a 4k texture including, major graphical overhaul update) … not quite as high fidelity as more recent, ‘cutting edge realism graphics’… but their on disk file sizes are in the ballpark of an order of magnitude less.

So uh… that would lend creedence to the idea that yes actually, there are a great number of optimizations and design paradigms that can and have been employed in the past to keep overall disk size of a game down… and those concepts are no longer being utilized by many big name game dev studios.

Yep, 4k textures, very high quality audio files and FMVs are very big and essentially impossible to meaningfully compress.

If you are saying its the art teams that are to blame… uh, they get their budget, headcount, marching orders… from managment, their team leads… right?

You could always have managment hire other artists with different skillsets… make different decisions about what level of resolution, fidelity, overall number of distinct textures, etc, is actually needed…

A video game is the sum of its parts… and there are teamleads in charge of each of those parts departments, who then hire for those departments, and then you have management and/or some kind of overall creative director(s) in charge of the… entire recipe of exactly what is going to be baked into the proverbial cake.

It is these people’s jobs to come up with an overall vision, and then ensure it is implemented on time, within the budget.

You know, ‘manage’ the game’s development.

Their overall ‘recipes’ including stupid huge texture sizes and what not… thats a choice, not some kind of God given or fundamentally unbreakable scientific, natural law of gaming.

…

As of the latest Steam Hardware Survey, about 7% of PC gamers have a 4K monitor.

Far more console players have a 4K capable TV, but it doesn’t really matter because no currently existing, or announced, upcoming console… none of them can actually, truly render anything with detailed, super realistic graphics at 4k 60 fps… to hit that, they have to use checkerboard rendering + frame upscaling tech… which makes the actual render resolution at 2K or less… often even 4K30fps is often still reliant on checkerboard / frame upscaling.

‘4K’ on a gaming console isn’t actually 4K, all that extra detail usually just gets wasted anyway, blurred out or otherwise lost by the checkerboard rendering or frame upscaling.

Generally speaking, the only games on consoles that can actually run at actual 4K are the not hyper realistic graphics games, they are the ones with simplified or stylized art.

…

Acting as if 4k and 8k textures are some kind of mandatory minimum that must be included in all releases of all games is ludicrous.

As Felix points out… just make these high end textures an optional, free DLC.

The AAA gaming industry has largely done the same thing the car and housing industries have done in the last decade: Everything for sale is now a high end luxury item, there are no more economy class cars, no more new, modest apartments.

This is insane and is fundamentally mismatched with the consumer base, especially right now as the US in particular, and broader world economy looks set for a serious downturn, which will obviously see less spending on emtertainment.

…

Also sure, I’ll give you that No Mans Sky is rather stylized, but they also recently released a massive graphical overhaul update that adds in those super high quality textures… and its still just a bit over 20 gigs of on disk space on my system.

If you think MGS V and SOMA and Alien Isolation have ‘highly stylized graphics’, not graphics which basically aim at being very realistic and true to life… with a bit of stylization thrown into character design / world design / etc … I don’t know what to say, I don’t know how you can say those games are ‘highly stylized’ in the way that like… Windwaker or Valheim or Selaco are.

FTL, Valheim, Muck, Brawlhala, Amongus, Lethal Company, Loop Hero, Papers Please, Balatro, Slay the Spire, Undertale, Stardew Valley, Dead Cells, Ion Fury … are all under 1 gig.

Selaco, Prodeus, Ultrakill, Project Warlock, Cultic, DUSK… all between about 2 and 5 gigs.

This is far from an exhaustive list.

You can ship games like these.

People have done it, and made a good chunk of change, with dev teams of between … what, a single person to a max of maybe 10? Less?

You need to wish to work at a different studio, with different management, maybe a different engine, not wish its possible to make a successful game without stupendously huge asset libraries.

Hell, even Alien Isolation, SOMA and No Man’s Sky are just above 20 gigs, MGS V is just under 30 gigs of on disk size.

It is totally possible to do pretty darn good graphics without breaking over 100 gigs of disk space.

Yeah… you can tell this guy ain’t a TNG fan.

“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life.”

• Jean Luc Picard

What is happening here is techbro is now subject to a similar level of ‘trying to find a decent job related bullshit’ that the poors, the formerly middle class, and even the vast majority of other tech workers have been experiencing for… what, at least half a century, if not basically all of the history of capitalism?

His privelege has been nulled, and it affects him personally now, so now its a real problem.

EDIT: oh dear god he used to work at Binance.

Yeah, this guy can fuck all the way up his own ass amd then shit himself out, he gets the pico violin:

Its ok, I don’t think I will actually be running into any female pirates with actual peg legs any time soon.

Also, to reciprocate your knowledge sharing, I also remember now a video of a guy fucking a girl who … basically just had a layer of skin over the part of her skull where her eye would have been… in said psuedo eye socket.

Also a very bad idea.

Yep.

MSFT will continue to enshittify, people who point out this will happen will be poo-poo’d because switching would be complicated and costly…

… But, having to panic switch sometime down the road, because an entire class of software features or pricing models drastically alter with little warning…

… Well then, in the long run, it would have been less costly to start the migration strategy earlier.

I have seen this play out at every single company or non profit I have ever worked at, and I have learned to leave about 6 months after a planned migration/mitigation strategy gets canned as too costly and unnecessary… because usually, 6 months or so after that, every one is now in panic mode, and my workload would triple.

Including literally at MSFT itself.

The managers and corporate don’t know anything other than maximize short term profits, and have astounding levels of normalcy bias; even if you can present a well resesrched, realistic scenario with detailed costs over time for different strategies… they basically always assume things will just be fine, untill its far too late.

Can I pay and/or marry you to take me with you?

You know, in the 70s and 80s we had… fantastical, unrealistic schlock movies like… Deathrace 2000, The Running Man… and these were largely veiwed as entertaining, but campy, implausible, ‘created for hollywood’ world scenarios, designed to just make a high stakes plot…

… based around a high stakes, life and death, reality TV game show … with nationwide audiences, run by the government, used as a national religion style bread and circuses for the masses, in a totalitarian future US.

People seem to have either forgot or just not know the NYT has always had a neocon, jingoist, America BEST superiority complex when it comes to anything approaching ‘foreign policy’.

Does… everyone remember when they spent a whole lot of time amplifying the Bush admin’s bogus claims and outright lies justifying the GWOT, Iraq invasion 2 electric boogaloo?

Hyped up the ‘threat’ from Iran, to functionally make Obama and the Dems seem weak on foreign policy?

And that’s just in my lifetime…

Any whoosie, I’m sure that’s all just a coincidence and is in no way related to the CIA’s vast, documented history of involvement in and manipulation of US domestic media publications.

Yet again, I laugh, and remark ‘People still use Windows? People still use MSFT products?’

Thats a good one, got me to the point of maximal efficiency on my Laffer curve!

I’ve been through a good number of various TTRPG campaigns that lasted 3, or 6 months or more.

I have since learned a good deal of early warning signs of when to bail out fairly early, lol.

Just keep developing with it, you’ll get CTE soon.

I also am not familiar with javascript anymore…precisely because of this, exact, insane bullshit.

B… and/or C… evaluating as FALSE are the only things that… should even kind of make sense, according to my brain.

Though at this point in my life, I have unironically had a good number of concussions and contusions, so … well you’d think that would help with JS development.

Javascript is insanity, and I am still convinced it is at least 40% responsible for Notch losing his goddamned mind.

‘null’ is somehow an object. because fuck you, thats why!

Is… 0 == ‘’ … is that two single quotes ’ ’ ?

Or one double quote " ?

If… it is one double quote… that wouldn’t even evaluate, as it would just be an empty string without a defined end…

But if it was two single quotes… that would just be a proper empty string… and because of forced type coercion, both 0 and ‘’ are FALSE when compared with ==, but not when compared with ===, because that ignores forced type coercion…

https://www.w3docs.com/snippets/javascript/when-to-use-double-or-single-quotes-in-javascript.html

Oh my fucking god WHY?!

Just fucking use one special character to delimit strings!

Don’t have two that don’t work together and also behave differently even when you pick just one of them… GraaaghhH!

brb, figuring out where Larry Ellison lives…