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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Ah that’s interesting. If you can swap the devices from one pi to another, try powering it all up on machine A, then swap the devices to machine B and power that on. Might tell you if the issue is with on the pi side or with the devices.

    Is latency higher on the first boot than on subsequent ones? I’d be looking into race conditions if you’re seeing a bit of lag cascade out into bigger problems. Race conditions are the worst, especially when the race most often goes the right way and just occasionally goes the wrong way. Though you can force the wrong way by adding delays in your code, if you have an idea of where the race is happening.


  • Or, after weeks of debugging an issue the user has logs proving they are having weird performance issues despite having a strong GPU, it turns out their parents wouldn’t let them take that GPU out of the family PC so they rigged up a PCIe to USB to wireless transmitter that hooks up to a wireless to USB to serial port that exploits a signal leaking from serial port to PCIe bus bug on the family PC motherboard to act as if the GPU is on their own machine, which both impresses and horrifies you.

    And when you try to get approval to drop the issue as unsupported, your manager gives you shit and it takes another week to convince him that it isn’t a use case that you should support. And they only agreed in the end because a more senior technical person happened to overhear you pleading with your manager one day and only had to say, “that’s crazy!” for your manager to 180 immediately on the issue. But it’s still cited as a negative on your next performance review (“you spent weeks working on something we don’t even support!”).


  • Another angle to try is to set the date one day ahead and see if the bug shows up then. Might need to disconnect from network and set it in the BIOS for the test to work properly.

    I could be wrong, but I figure after being off for an hour, all capacitors should have discharged by then, so it’s probably not based on how long the hardware has been unpowered.

    Though one other angle I just thought of, if you have something that runs periodically, maybe the bug is related to that period being missed once or n times. Or it could be related to something that is meant to wake the computer to run some job and then go back to sleep but instead just sets it in a bad state.




  • Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldtoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlLearn to code
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    4 days ago

    Yeah, that’s something a shitty developer who is bad at debug would say.

    Bugs frustrate me more because I can often guess at why they are happening and how to fix them but can’t just apply the fix myself. Even more frustrating when there’s an update and I’ll think, “oooh maybe they finally fixed that annoying bug!” and then see it again shortly after installing the update.


  • For game streaming itself, there’s always going to be the latency issue that will keep a bunch of gamers away from ever using it. I never bothered even looking at the streaming options when I had game pass because of that.

    GPU drivers have low latency modes for when the timing of a frame update means your current input will come a frame or two later, and a difference of 10ms in frame delivery time can be enough to call something a stuttery mess.

    Now add network latency that is an order of magnitude higher. Streaming video and/or audio is fine because it can buffer enough to absorb typical latency jumps, but games can’t buffer more than the upper bound of input latency, so that brief 1 second network hiccup is a horrible stutter where you can’t even move.

    Though at least game pass works more like Netflix in that you can just pick a game available and try it out if you have a sub. I don’t get the appeal of the ones where you not only subscribe to the service but also need to buy the games you play at full price.




  • I was one of the “got game pass, usually forget to use it” subscribers. I ended up canceling when games I was playing were no longer available when I did remember about it so I couldn’t finish them anyways, plus the price went up.

    Last thing I did was go through their games and add ones that looked interesting to my steam wishlist. And after I cancelled, when one of the games I had been playing went on sale, I realized another thing that I didn’t like about it that I hadn’t even known: they don’t advertise what games use invasive drm or anti-cheat software like steam does.

    Though the main driving factor was wanting to divorce myself from as much reliance on MS/Windows as possible.


  • One part would be to run a shadow client that takes the user’s input and sees how much the game state diverges. There will be a certain amount of it due to network latency, but if there’s some cheater using an engine mod/hack to fly around the map, this will catch that. Though something like that should be caught by a lower level check that makes sure the players are following the laws of physics in the game (like max speed, gravity applies, no teleporting).

    Another one would be to see if the player follows things they shouldn’t be able to see. If a player hides behind something they can shoot through but can’t see through, do they somehow seem to always know they are there? Do they look around at walls and then beeline for an opponent that was hidden by those walls?

    Another one would be if their movement (view angle) changes when they are close to targeting an enemy or if they consistently shoot when the enemy is centre of target, then it’s a sign they are using a device that even kernel mode anti cheat won’t catch to cheat (it plugs in to your input between your mouse and PC, also plugs in to somewhere that would allow it to act as a video capture device, then just watches for enemies to get close and sends movement or clicks to aim or shoot for you). Though this one is pretty difficult to catch, due to network latency. But those mouse movements might defy the laws of physics if the user was already moving. Natural movement is continuous in position and its first derivative (always, by Newton’s f = ma, though sample rate complicates that), and the way we generally move is also continuous in the second derivative, but banging your mouse into your keyboard can defy that and it’s even more sensitive to sample rate.

    Imo these techniques should be combined with a reporting system and manual reviews. Reports would activate the extra checks for specific players (it would be pretty expensive to do it for all players), then positive matches from the extra checks would trigger a manual review and maybe a kick or temp ban, depending on how reliable the checks are.

    That said, I believe there will eventually be AI-based bots where detecting them vs other skilled players will be impossible. And those will be combinable with some infrastructure that allows players to take certain amounts of control, maybe even with an RTS-like interface that could direct the bot to certain areas. Though adding an LLM and speech to text and vice versa could allow it to just respond to voice commands, both from other teammates and from the player.

    I think at that point, preventing cheating in online games will be impossible and in person tournaments will probably involve using computers provided by the organizers (tbh I’m kinda surprised this isn’t already the case and that some people have been caught using cheats during these kinds of tournaments).



  • Not sure I’d call that best on a technical level. It was doing something different: projecting triangles from 3d space to 2d space in real-time.

    Donkey Kong country also did that but just not in real time. It was 3d graphics but pre-rendered and used as sprites. The rendering process would have been at least as technical.

    Mortal Kombat was also around the same time and used sprites that were based on live action captures and involved highly technical stuff in a different direction.

    Though if I had to guess, Doom was probably the most technical at the time, since it did 3d rendering in real time without relying on any 3d-specific hardware.

    Iirc the 3dfx chip in some snes games handled that for games like starfox and the PlayStation had a hardware 3d renderer pipeline. Neither were particularly powerful (which is why early 3d stuff looked like cyber trucks, because polygon count needed to be kept low to hit frame deadlines), but they did offload that from the CPU.

    For Doom, it was all handled on the CPU, which is why it can run on pretty much anything with a CPU and a display. Carmack figured out a lot of cool optimization tricks, like a fast square root approximation, to make it possible.



  • This is different from the old man angry at change meme. The change isn’t the problem; personally I like change and seeing evolutionary and revolutionary improvements.

    The problem is that so many of these changes are for the benefit of the corporations involved in the product at the expense of anyone who ends up using it or is near enough to be affected collaterally.

    The idea of a smart TV is nice. Except they put the underpowered hardware in it that struggles to display a menu. Maybe because of all the data it is gathering and sending home or the time it spends making sure the latest ads are downloaded.

    Smart appliances are also a nice idea. Except most just want to connect to some proprietary web service so they can middle man every interaction to sell your data or a subscription.

    A smart car also sounds cool. Except they are also designed to just make more money either via more expensive repairs, possibly even forced to go through a manufacturer approved mechanic because they use security features to protect them from competition, or by the usual selling your data and ads. Oh and also they can save money by sticking a bunch of controls into the software and not needing to make physical buttons. Also they save even more by also using underpowered hardware and probably not even bothering with UX design. Maybe even deliberately because bad experiences can be upsellers. Oh they also want to sell subscriptions to whatever they can, including to things that don’t even benefit from going through their services.

    It’s all just rent seeking.



  • Yeah I liked the idea of Uber at first because taxis have been shitty for a long time and Uber was shaking up that industry.

    But then I learned that Uber wasn’t making money and immediately realized that they were just looking better than taxis for as long as they needed to to drive them out of business so they can be even worse, while providing even less than taxis companies do. At least taxi companies have a relationship with their drivers while Uber was just a platform for connecting anonymous riders with almost as anonymous drivers and handling the financial aspect of it (so that they control it all as middlemen with control of the wallet).

    So now I just use taxi services when I need a ride (while cursing the state of mass transit in North America and GM plus corrupt politicians for their role in making this like this).

    Similar story with hotels/airbnb, though they’ve made it even worse because they are affecting the housing market itself rather than just the luxury service of staying somewhere while away from home.