xavier666

joined 2 years ago
[–] xavier666@lemm.ee 7 points 1 day ago

What, you didn't know you had to crank the power to high before microwaving your phone? Rookie mistake

[–] xavier666@lemm.ee 2 points 2 days ago

Damn...I've been discovered

[–] xavier666@lemm.ee 5 points 1 week ago

complete with some BS explanation

"For child safety!!!111"

[–] xavier666@lemm.ee 14 points 1 week ago (13 children)

I'm afraid a federated micro-blogging website using ActivityPub doesn't/can't exist ;_;

[–] xavier666@lemm.ee 14 points 2 weeks ago

Doesn't matter at this point. He'll pay Trump another 1 million dollars and this news will simply vanish.

[–] xavier666@lemm.ee 2 points 3 weeks ago

Thanks for this. Got a burst of nostalgia

[–] xavier666@lemm.ee 5 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

but I’ve accepted defeat in trying to understand it

I may have shared the link but even I don't know how it how it works.

It's like admiring the Eiffel Tower; you can understand that it's a marvel of engineering without understanding the underlying engineering concepts. Such experiences are rare but they truly humble you.

Regarding the square root, understand the following concepts

  1. Bit shifting simply shift the bits to a certain side (Left or right) => 0010 << 1 → 0100
  2. Mathematically, it multiplies or divides the input number with a factor of 2, depending upon the type of shift
  3. If you shift the number n with a nice shift amount x (I have greatly greatly over-simplified this), then you can calculate the inverse sq. root since inverse square root is 2^(-1/2)
  4. Calculating the inverse square root manually will take lots of clock cycles, which was not feasible for a FPS game with the limited h/w
  5. Bit shifting is a lot faster since we are not computing, but instead shifting

The resultant shifting gives us an answer which is close enough to the answer, and that is good enough for FPS games for calculation of reflections.

Source for bitshifting

PS: Someone who is more experienced in this domain can correct me if I'm wrong.

[–] xavier666@lemm.ee 39 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

I am still in awe of the fast inverse square root method used in QuakeIII. Good times.

[–] xavier666@lemm.ee 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Next post, AI tells user to "get a job"

[–] xavier666@lemm.ee 3 points 1 month ago
[–] xavier666@lemm.ee 1 points 3 months ago

They also want to doomscroll slop; it’s mindless and mildly entertaining. The same way tabloid newspapers were massively popular before the internet and gossip mags exist despite being utter horseshite. It’s what people want.

The same analogy is applicable to food.

People want to eat fastfood because it's tasty, easily available and cheap. Healthy food is hard to come by, needs time to prepare and might not always be tasty. We have the concepts of nutrition taught at school and people still want to eat fast-food. We have to do the same thing about social/internet literacy at school and I'm not sure whether that will be enough.

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