I’ve heard of people doing ambient performance profiling by instrumenting their code to insert clicks into an audio buffer based on a high precision clock and piping it out a speaker.
You get to learn the sound of your code at 44.1KHz
I really appreciate that he is up-front about "Yes. Vibe coding has lots of dangerous problems that you must learn to control if you are to go whole-hog like this."
Has anyone read his Vibe Coding book? The Amazon reviews make it sound like it's heavy on inspiration but light on techniques.
Lots of good stuff in /newest gets missed. So, HN has an algo that selects some posts for a second chance. Looks like your post was selected for resurrection.
Back in the days of the PS2, you’d just take a couple of long triangle strips, give them a twist or two, then UV-animate a static texture up through them.
A trope in the first season of HBO’s Silicon Valley is literally every company other than the main characters professing their mission statement to be “Making the world a better place through (technobabble)”
The subtle running joke was that while the main characters technobabble was fake, every other background SV startup was “Making the world a better place through Paxos-based distributed consensus” and other real world serious tech.
There are definitely athletes who spend their entire prime years working in the minor leagues trying to get their big shot in the majors and never quite getting there.
It’s a life of constant travel, crazy hours and very little money.
Having grown up playing these games, I was a bit taken aback when folks online sometimes called me out for using ellipses "wrong". I had assumed it was common practice...
Having spent a couple decades making engines that did ship games, now I spend a fair bit of free time helping noobs make engines even though statistically nearly none of them end up shipping games.
Making a game engine is a fun and highly-engaging means to learning high-performance programming. Yes, it would be better if you also were able to invest enough to ship a game. But, don't let the infeasibility of that goal stop you from learning and having fun.
>At what point of optimization does it turn into 'real' high performance programming?
somewhat past optimizing the frame count of an entirely empty scene.
on that matter : is it a game engine if there isn't a game?
I totally agree with other comments though -- if there is no pressure to meet specific metrics or accomplish certain things with the product then there is no real pressure to improve past a window or framebuffer drawn to video, just declare it's a game engine that makes a million FPS and throw it on the portfolio.
game engine work gets tough (and rewarding) with 1) goals and 2) constraints -- without those two it's more or less just spherical-cow style work that is too ambiguous or vague for real application.
When the goals are defined. What happens here is you make your cool particle System which is 10x faster than Ue5 but ignore that it uses all the ram or whatever.
I knew a guy who would brag that he used Outlook as his build system 20 years ago. Builds would take 9 to 24 months depending on the complexity of the project. But, as the CTO of a mid-sized software company, it worked for him.
Other than the theme, what's the difference between typing what you want into Slack and maybe getting it can typing it into ChatGPT and maybe getting it?
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