justinplouffe

Disclaimer : I work at Square Enix/Eidos Montreal so this is shameless self-promotion.

The three games in the Tomb Raider reboot trilogy can currently be had for very little money on Steam since they're on sale for the 25th anniversary of the franchise. They all have Linux builds and they'll run great on the RTX 2070 while also using it fully. They're one of the few AAA single player action/adventure titles available on the platform and they're good fun if you enjoy that kind of game.

Use the OBS virtual camera to send whatever image you want over.

I embarrassed myself recently by trying to get the performance of my AMD Zen 3 CPU beyond what precision boost overdrive and the default XMP profile of my memory were able to achieve. The single threaded performance never came close to it with the kind of old school static overclock + overvolt I was running with my previous Skylake Intel chip.

I did end up getting some promising results by using the curve optimizer feature of PBO which allows you to change the voltage/clock curve on a per-core basis but while it was stable at higher clocks, it did have some trouble while idling or performing some tasks that weren't running the CPU 100%. I had to admit that I was doing all of this more for the excitement of seeing high numbers and not for the actual practical benefits. Testing for stability with non-demanding tasks just wasn't exciting enough to justify continuing.

It might not be entirely relevant to your situation since this happened at the start of my career but I somehow ended up going from Ruby on Rails development to working on C++ networking code in the games industry. The way I did it was by starting with backend development on games and eventually getting to work on the internal SDK used by the different projects to communicate with the backends. I now work as the equivalent of a full stack developer where the frontend is a game engine running on a console devkit instead of a JavaScript SPA running in a browser. This might be some form of survivorship bias but getting your foot in the door of a new industry/area with some skills you already have and slowly moving towards what you're actually interested in worked for me.

The CSAM scanning is still troubling because it implies your own device is running software against your own self-interest. If Apple wanted to get out of legal trouble by not hosting illegal content but still make sure iOS is working in the best legal interest of the phone's user, they'd prevent the upload of the tagged pictures and notify that they refuse to host these particular files. Right now, it seems like the phone will actively be snitching on its owner. I somehow don't have the same problem with them running the scan on their servers since it's machines they own but having the owner's own property work against them sets a bad precedent.

I think Apple is clearly overplaying the role that their app store policies like the "nutrition label", reviews and app tracking transparency have in the iOS security model. To me, the security features that matter are from the operating system, its implementation of encryption and the sandboxing model that's enforced by it.

The app store reviews are done by booting up the app for a few seconds and most of the rest is self-reported by the developers which almost qualifies as security theater. They probably also run a static analyzer on the apps but nothing would prevent Apple from offering that on-demand to users opening side-loaded software and letting them choose to run or not after seeing the result.

What bothers me the most about FLOC is that there is no reason or advantage for me as a user to run it unless I'm forced to. Cookies, even if they get hijacked for tracking, are genuinely useful to persist state and having them on results in a better experience. Even in the case of something more invasive like DRM/EME, I might want to turn it on in exchange to be able to watch some new show on a streaming service. Turning on FLOC brings nothing to the user in return and feels like charity towards advertisers.

They talk about respecting their users but I just had to use their legacy site to be able to read this without getting an annoying modal blocking me and asking me to download their mobile app. Very hard to take this seriously.

I’ve managed to get my hands on a 5800x but I think it’s simply because it’s by far the worst value proposition in the new lineup and demand is probably not as high.

There is also the 60hz vs 120hz refresh rate which makes quite a big difference.

I work on console game web services and my guess is that it almost definitely has something to do with the CA certs that expired this weekend.

I’m currently doing a bit of Gameboy Advance programming for fun and I’m actually surprised by how simple most of it is at least for the basics. While some games on the platform do incredibly clever stuff (Super Monkey Ball Jr. being especially impressive), most of the popular titles use the standard tiled sprite rendering mode which is quite easy to understand and fast by default.

The average build for a AAA game coming out in 2020 is barely in playable shape and certainly not ready to be shown at E3. Making one polished enough to show off is both time consuming and not representative of the final product. I really wish people were more open to seeing blocked out levels and unpolished animations to have an idea of where these projects are going but unfortunately even the most pristine presentations get picked apart online so I don’t think that’s happening anytime soon.

I’m in the middle of a project exactly like this one. I purchased a used 5th generation iPod video from eBay and I’m in the process of replacing every external facing part on it. The hard drive is also getting swapped for an sd card and the battery upgraded to a ridiculous 3000mAh which is supposed to give it 150+ hours of music playback on a charge. The aftermarket parts are so good that you can get a back case with 128/256/512gb engraved on it instead of the original sizes.

If I understand this correctly none of these 4 products will allow you to send text based messages to another person on a desktop computer without having to create an entreprise hangout. Is that not a use case worth caring about anymore? You can’t even chat with someone else from Google’s own Chrome OS.