Don't forget the coastal geography.
Iran's coastline in the Persian gulf is longer than California's coastline, and they can do drone attacks anywhere in the Gulf, not just the narrow strait portion that everyone seems to focus on.
Cuba allying with Iran is pure fantasy though. There's no logistical connection between the two nations. It would be as irrelevant as Greenland allying with Antarctica.
The world has seen this play out before. Launch a service, sell it at a loss to achieve hypergrowth, raise prices add ads and enshittify.
The thing that is difference is the scale and the hardware. When Britain underwent its rail building boom in the 1850s, the bubble bursting left the kingdom with 150 years worth of infrastructure. Unless we invest in energy buildouts, we will be left with billions in rapidly depreciating GPUs
Yes, id invented it, but I think they published one slightly earlier game which also had texture streaming. The technique (virtual textures) would not become ubiquitous in most engines until the PS4 era though.
Unfortunately nowadays id Software doesn't seem to be at the cutting edge of engine technology anymore. Most interesting new developments now come from Unreal Engine as far as I can tell. Like virtual geometry (Nanite) or efficient ray traced direct illumination (MegaLights).
The id tech 8 engine is a whole lot more performant than the unreal 5 engine and absolutely does what it needs to, fantastically, I would add for the game it was made for.
No, they are only using ray traced global illumination, which Unreal Engine already had several years prior (Lumen). They are not second place either, because several other engines also had it before id Tech.
> They ripped our Carmacks texture streaming stuff outta the engine years,ago though
I'm pretty sure they are still using texture streaming. There is no alternative to that.
I actually used similar camera draw distance trick in my game Rogue Stargun.
The real way to optimize this stuff really well is for the artist to spend a lot of time making LODS for the distant objects. For the really distant objects, esp for a platform like n64, you can replace the distant objects with billboard imposters which are basically just flat poster textures that swap perspectives at certain angles.
GTA V does this extremely well with many manually made LODs and its very costly
Another game that I find has very impressive draw distance is Just Cause 2. You can see objects very far away when flying etc, but they look very detailed and do not change when moving closer. Definitely blew me away the first time playing it.
There's an obvious difference between the two in that Blue Origin is the gateway to multibillion dollar prospective markets that current have virtually no incumbents (other than one very big obvious one). Whereas the WP does not have any prospective future growth trajectory whatsoever b/c it's competing with the endless turd spigot that is social media.
The WP is his propaganda tool contributing to maintaining this billionaire-friendly environment. Trump gave the bourgeoisie trillions in tax cuts last year, and Bezos is a major receiver of this present himself. It's hard to quantify, but these captured media together are much more valuable to oligarchs than any other ventures of theirs, certainly more than their space toys. Hence why Ellison would spend $100B of his personal wealth to add CNN to his catalogue, or why Musk spent so much on X and doesn't seem to care too much about making it profitable.
One of the big lessons of the last decade is that media can have billionaires as their primary market. The Free Press got huge because of infusions of cash from the rich. Media that flatters the opinions of billionaires and projects their propaganda into the world can be enormously valuable even if it isn't making traditional cash. It is a return to a patronage model.
Garry Tan has even said this expressly. That the rich should simply own their own parallel media so they can project their will against the will of the people.
Here's a controversial opinion -- it's actually always been this way.
Hearst used his newspapers to manipulate the American public into war against the Spanish Empire.
Government lies (babies in incubators, yellow cake...) were used to push two Iraq wars on the American public by the media.
The abnormal thing is that we had maybe 10-15 years where the press put up at least a pretense of acting impartial as power shifted from pineapple and arms companies to tech monopolies.
I think the bigger change is that wealth is continuing to concentrate. The more wealth accrues under a few hands the more these people are able to exploit disproportionate control over the information environment.
That has been a thing forever, many "Python" libraries, are actually bindings to C, C++ and Fortran.
The culture of calling them "Python" is one reason why JITs are so hard to gain adoption in Python, the problem isn't the dynamism (see Smalltalk, SELF, Ruby,...), rather the culture to rewrite code in C, C++ and Fortran code and still call it Python.
Go and Java/C# (if you forgo all the OOP nonsense) aren't much harder to write than Python, and you get far better performance. Not all the way to Rust level, bur close enough for most things with far less complexity.
As an AI engineer I kinda wish the community had landed on Go or something in the early days. C# would also be great, although it tends to be pretty verbose.
Python just has too strong network effects. In the early days it was between python and lua (anyone remember torchlua?). GoLang was very much still getting traction and in development.
Theres also the strong association of golang to google, c# to microsoft, and java to oracle...
Yeah that bothers me too, but it's damn hard to get away from these days. Most language projects have significant corporate involvement one way or the other.
Go is criminally underrated in my opinion. It ticks so many boxes I'm surprised it hasn't seen more adoption.
It ticks many boxes for me on the surface, but I've read a few articles that critique some of its design choices.
Rust really ticks the "it got all the design choices right" boxes, but fighting the borrow checker and understand smart pointers, lifetimes, and dispatch can be a serious cognitive handicap for me.
No languages are perfect, they all make tradeoffs. I just like a lot of the ones Go made.
Go and Rust try to solve very different problems. Rust takes on a lot of complexity to provide memory safety without a garbage collector, which is fine, but also unnecessary for a lot of problems.
Why go? That language has absolutely no expressive power, while you surely at least want to add together two vectors/matrices in AI with the + operator.
Maybe with LLM/Code Assistance this effort reduces? Since we're mostly talking mathematics here, you have well defined algorithms that don't need to be "vibed". The codegen, hopefully, is consistent.
The issue is... I barely know the language. There are vast gaps in my knowledge (e.g. lifetimes, lifetime elison, dynamic dispatch, Box, Ref, Arc, all that)
Nor do I know much of anything about the 6502 microprocessor. I know even less from having the LLM one shot most of the project rather than grinding through it myself.
So in the age of AI, the question of how easy it is to write with a language may be less important than the question of how we should go about reading code.
Quite honestly, I don't really know why I wouldn't use Rust for a wide variety of projects with AI other than the compile/iteration time for larger projects. The compiler and static typing provide tremendously useful feedback and guardrails for LLM based programming. The use of structs and traits rather than OOP prevent a lot of long term architectural disasters by design. Deployment on the web can be done with WASM. Performance is out-of-the-box?
Writing Rust by hand though? I'm still terrible at it.
Cuba allying with Iran is pure fantasy though. There's no logistical connection between the two nations. It would be as irrelevant as Greenland allying with Antarctica.
reply