Randall has somehow weaponized my love for the Blue Ball Machine. He is a threat to us all.

Relevant xkcd.

I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Water will reach its own level so to speak, if a developer releases a game that is far too much for a majority of gamers to run, those gamers won’t buy the game and it won’t sell. Obviously that also isn’t always necessarily true, but enough terribly optimized games have released recently to be met with 40% rating on Steam that I’d like to think this is the case. Are some developers going to do it anyway? Absolutely, but that’s true regardless. I think that no matter what, indie developers will always tend to keep their games lightweight either by principle or by design necessity, and bigger game studios would also sorta get the message and keep their games reasonable. With obvious exceptions… goddamn 400 GB games these days.

As much as I really want another Chao Garden, I know the monkey’s paw would love to grant my wish. Imagine:

Chao garden. You get 2 chao to start out with. Want to access another garden? $2.99 each. Want more chao? $4.99 per egg. You could feed them the fruit that grows natively in your garden, which raises their stamina slowly, or buy more fruit at $0.99 each. Or buy a fruit tree seed for $9.99, what a steal! Need a pack of tiny animals? 20 for $8.99!

While I doubt SEGA would stoop this low… it’s not completely off the table.

I think it goes both ways. Sports fans, clueless to the eSports scene, might say, “what’s the fun in watching someone play video games when you could just play them?” And I could say the same, and indeed I regularly say as much: “why watch someone play basketball, let’s just go play a pickup game.”

I don’t watch sports or esports, nor do I watch streamers very often, but I understand in all aspects that it’s for the entertainment value. In picking a team/player, watching their improvement, attending their games, proudly sporting their merch, etc etc.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, don’t let a clueless nobody disparage you doing what you enjoy.

return to your roots: use notepad

As a world leader in cybersecurity, recipient of a nobel prize, liquid billionaire, and hobbiest musician making #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, I agree.

I have no idea why, but convention. And not a thing where nerds like me gather to dork out about something, but a scientific standard. Whenever I’m explaining something, and someone asks why it operates that way, I’m always like, “it’s that way by… uh… y’know, it’s always been that way.” No clue why I always blank on that word specifically.

https://pcpartpicker.com/products/case/#B=1

Can’t believe they actually got Jerry Seinfeld for that episode.

Sucks for you, the geoguessr scene there is crazy!

If I were to guess, OP was a part of a different plan before and is switching to a new one. I think family plans are cheaper overall if you max out the number of people and everyone contributes, so families or groups of friends all link their accounts and pay fair shares? (EG: Nintendo online is $20/yr, but $40/yr for a family plan up to 8 accounts. If you get 8 friends together, that’s $5 per person, significantly cheaper than $20.)

So if I’m understanding the plan and reading the error correctly, I believe OP was on one family plan and wanted to change their family to a different set of accounts, and Google said no. Which is indeed shitty, but it’s likely buried in their fine print somewhere (which doesn’t make it any less shitty).

Or maybe OP wasn’t even a part of a family plan to begin with. OP, feel free to correct me.

Previously, I had never ever seen a movie in theaters twice. If I had seen a movie once and wanted to watch it again, I could wait to buy it for myself. It just didn’t ever make much sense to me as to why anyone would watch the same movie multiple times in like a one-month time span.

And then Everything Everywhere All At Once came out, and I saw it again the week after I saw it the first time, and then I understood. What a fantastic movie.

My notifications jingle (for the rare occasions I turn on notifications) is the Superintendent’s turn-on sound from Halo 3: ODST. (The first two seconds here.) My ringtone is some weeb shit.

the urge to downvote this is very strong, well done

okbuddyphd, shittymobilegameads, pizzacrimes, garfieldwithoutgarfield, just all the really stupid obscure ones that give me a chuckle browsing through.

You know, the more I think about it, the more I realize that osu! was the beginning of things starting to go downhill for me…

Man, no kidding. We’ve got SoCs, we’ve got processors running on the FPGA fabric, we’ve got communications to Ethernet, PCIe, any AXI you like really. They can talk to RAM, storage, other processors, output graphics, kiss me on the forehead, and tuck me in at night. (I think.)

A coworker was telling me about the big shots in New York trading companies that are starting to implement FPGA architectures into their high-frequency trading algorithms, as the blazing high speed and great parallelization helps them squeeze out a couple extra microseconds in their algorithms. I think that’s a good sign of people wising up to this potential here.

I don’t know of any ML training on FPGAs, but I have no doubt that it can be / it is being done.

Edit: I just remembered the other day, I was shown a module that could take in a grey scale image, do edge dection, and output the edges as a new image file. Which isn’t that hard, it’s convolution on a sliding window, but what baffled me is that it was done in fewer cycles than could be compiled through C code, and the pipeline wasn’t even that deep. It’s crazy!

I’m so glad Analog Pocket is popularizing FPGAs, a lot of people are discovering them because of it.

CYCLE ACCURATE HARDWARE RECREATION. IT’S INCREDIBLE.

The “print hello world” equivalent of FPGAs is to make an LED blink. That teaches you how to use an FPGA’s clock, divide it down to a frequency the human eye can actually see, and route it out to a pin (the LED on your board). Then you can experiment with your catalog of digital circuit building blocks using buttons, switches, LEDs, and 7-segment displays. You can make your own custom logic of ANDs and ORs to display different logic.

Some super beginner projects I found fun back in college:

• Create a counter, and increment the counter every time you press a button. That’s the easy part. Then display the value on a 4-digit 7-segment display. It’s harder than it sounds, because you have to learn about time multiplexing! (At any one instance in time, only one digit is on, and the other three are off. Human persistence of vision makes us believe all 4 digits are being shown at once, but in reality, the system cycles through each digit, flashing one on for a few milliseconds, then turning it off and moving to the next one. Implementing this takes effort!)

• Learning Finite State Machines and then implementing your own is fun. I made a “vending machine” state machine once, where different buttons corresponded to inserting different coins, and then once a certain amount of money was put in, you could select which beverage you wanted, the machine would “vend” (an LED would flash), and then change is administered. Another fun and classic FSM is the pattern detector, where you input a series of 1s and 0s, and the machine will blink an LED if it detects a certain pattern in the sequence, say, 11010. This one is a lot harder than it sounds, because it requires a lot of thinking of the different edge cases! If I input 111, for example, the system shouldn’t be like, “well he inputted 111 but I was expecting 110…, so I’m gonna start over”, because I could input “111111010” and the pattern is there, just at the end. This one teaches you how to draw state diagrams and Mealy/Moore machines!

• Then you can get into using peripherals, like RGB LEDs, gyroscopes, graphics on a screen, ethernet connections, etc. You just need to learn the protocols and follow the correct logic in your own logic. It’s a lot of copy and pasting at first, but if you put in the effort to understand what you’re copying, you’ll pick up on it fast.

Really, the world’s your oyster, all you need is a development kit and a program that will synthesize/place&route your Verilog or VHDL.

And if you’d like to start at the very, very beginning, HDLBits is an amazing resource to learn Verilog: https://hdlbits.01xz.net/wiki/Main_Page

Let me know if I can ever be of any assistance :)