Unexpected downside to studying/having an interest in computer graphics - it's not that widespread a field so not many of the books have local editions. Which means I need to spend like $60+ for the good books (Real-time Rendering, Physically Based Rendering, etc.) (and sometimes international shipping too), which is a pretty large amount for a student here. It's sad because local editions of technical books rarely go above $20 (heck, above $15 is rare too).

Still worth it though, those books are easily good enough that the return on investment in knowledge/future prospects will be massive (highly recommend those two if you're into graphics btw, two of the best technical books I have).

I play guitar so...
Sticker was given to me by @ceee, who seems to have an endless supply of them.

Got a Radeon RX 570 to complete my light gaming and rendering setup. This is easily the most powerful GPU I have ever owned, super hyped to try out all my games on this now. Works great after it crashed under Linux a few times for god knows what reasons but hey, not disappointed at all so far.

All AMD setup here (Ryzen + Radeon), feels good to be back on AMD after a long Intel/Nvidia stint.

*me switching from computer science to electrical engineering for masters*

ceee:

So I gave i3 a try today via Manjaro i3 (don't have time to get a config of my own from scratch, would rather have a working setup which I can fiddle around with).

It's pretty...good actually. Doesn't work quite as well as I'd hoped because of my laptop's small screen, but still nice. Works well with my Blender and editing workflow too, so that's a plus.

After I'd spent an hour fixing audio and WiFi issues, of course, because Linux, but then that's just part of the fun amirite

MY MECHANICAL KEYBOARD IS BROKEN :'(

Late night + Stellardrone + Haskell = bliss

I'm working on a programming language with a "bytecode" interpreter and a compiler that translates source code to said bytecode and... it sort of actually works!

I want to recreate an Erlang-style environment, currently you can write functions, call C++ functions via wrappers, have immutable-only values, and it has no explicit control structure apart from statement sequencing and the if-expression because I want to make it as functional as possible. Next thing on the list is to add a green threads implementation and ability to spawn and send messages to processes.

Still a WIP and heck even design-in-progress.

Now for the rant:
I'm using CMake for building C++ (interpreter) and Stack for Haskell (compiler) and I've been trying to get them to talk to each other for hours because I want CMake to manage the Stack build too and shove all the executables into one place. CMake documentation is weird and Stack isn't too helpful either, so I guess I'll just spend another few hours trying to get Stack to fuckin reveal its build directory to CMake and/or build to a given directory. Ugh.

That moment when you thought you've fortified yourself with enough RAM for the future (32GB) and Blender fails to work with a large project because...it runs out of memory (just in the loading phase, building them intermediate data structures pushes it over the edge I guess).

Fml.

It was kind of fascinating to watch the memory usage indicator creep up though. Morbid fascination.

I can't login ffs
I don't care that it shows an impossible number of characters honestly, but I don't get why that should prevent me from logging in to any of these servers

For that matter, why the fuck is number of characters a signed int?

Trying to install Fedora to use some Linux stuff

- have to try booting up 3 times to boot into the live env successfully

- keyboard doesn't work, try booting up again

- installer crashes

Yeah fuck this back to Windows it is.

This is the most impressive testing document I have ever read. Props to the SQLite devs for doing things so thoroughly.

https://www.sqlite.org/testing.html

Was going through old photos from university time and...I present to you the result of deadline + lack of sleep + boredom + shitty university project because somebody decided that CS folks needed to learn webdev in old ASP.NET.

Yes that is one query. I wrote the entire thing out as a string in my C# program in one go and tested it by running it from the program. Must've worked properly because I got them grades so eh. I recall I had one nested seven levels too (this is just 5) but I can't find a photo of it. These two queries did all the business logic. Yeah.

Apologies for the poor quality photo of the screen, I don't have the code so no screenshot, this is just from my photos archive

Came across a player called Root in Overwatch today, would that be you, @Root, by any chance? It's not exactly a common name.

Been going through the family stash of old Wild West type novels (you know, cowboys and cattle drives and six shooters and gunmen and rivalries and all), from authors like Louis L'Amour, JT Edson, and Oliver Strange. Because Texas appears so frequently in these books, in my mind's eye the protagonist often looks suspiciously like AleCx04's avatar with a hat and gun rig. And horse, of course. And speaks like McCree from Overwatch.

*shrug*

In competitive games in which team composition matters and you have different playable classes and/or roles (tank, area damage, point damage, various kinds of healing, buffs/debuffs, etc) what kind of character do you like to play?

I guess this would apply to stuff like MMOs, Overwatch, TF2, DOTA, Diablo/PoE, and so on.

Overwatch is on sale right now, if anyone's interested.

Been really bored with programming-as-a-hobby lately, so I decided to give that a break and switch to physics for a while.

Man I've forgotten so much, time to revisit the Feynman Lectures books.

Eyyy @Elyz thanks for the ++ bomb. I'll return the favour when I'm not running face first into deadlines.

If you're working on close to hardware things, make sure you run static analysis, and manually inspect the output of your compiler if you feel something's off - it may be doing something totally different from what you expect, because of optimization and what not. Also, optimizations don't always trigger as expected. Also, sometimes abstractions can cost a fair amount too (C++ std::string c/dtor, for example, dtors in general), more than you'd expect, and in those cases you might want to re-examine your need for them.

Having said all that, also know how to get the compiler to work for you, hand-optimization at the assembly level isn't usually ideal. I've often been surprised by just how well compilers figure out ways to speed up / compactify code, especially when given hints, and it's way better than having a blob of assembly that's totally unmaintainable.

Learnt this from programming MCUs and stuff for hobby/college team/venture, and from messing around with the Haskell compiler and LLVM optimization passes.

- Install Overwatch via Lutris on Linux.
- Get absolutely terrible performance and rendering bugs.
- Disable DXVK.
- Get slightly better performance (wtf?).
- Still runs at like 20% of potential performance.
- Give up and try to install Windows.
- Windows install fails.

Aaand so I spent my weekend configuring shit instead of relaxing/gaming. Ugh.

Oh my fucking god I deserve to be shot for my stupidity.
I spent an hour in absolute fear trying to figure out what was wrong with my PC - it would boot but the monitor wouldn't show anything.

I'd forgotten that I'd changed to monitor to show HDMI input - but I was using a HDMI-to-VGA converter so the monitor should have been set to VGA input :/

#require "A rant from a few days ago in which some guy actually did this";;

Current fantasy: I wish the two assholes sitting at the table next to mine in the cafe and being super loud and obnoxious were discussing a business idea so that I could buy their domain name and put a large "eat a bag of dicks" type picture on it.

Relatives: You're a computer guy, right, what are you working on these days?
Me: *should I bother explaining, should I not* Oh, just some stuff.
R: Oh come on, tell us, how difficult can it be?
M: *sigh* I'm working on a custom garbage collector for-
R: !!

They're now under the impression that I'm involved in collecting rubbish from bins. Sigh. My hair doesn't help here, either, lol (I have one of those tangled, unruly mops of hair)

This will take time to explain.

Planning on building a Ryzen 5 2400G setup for light gaming/home lab stuff, I need it to run a bunch of VMs and have passable frame rates in games on Linux (I hardly play AAA hard to port games, so should be okay there).

Planning on going full Linux for this, you guys got any tips/warnings/gotchas? Also, have any of you encountered issues with using NVMe SSDs on Linux?

Certified Enganeers: 0, Internet Connectivity Issues: 1

Those idiots couldn't even understand why I'd connected a second router (a DLink DIR 816) for better WiFi than their default garbage modem/router. And one of them told me that he'd login to the router by "putting the address in Google" (and proceeded to type 192.168.1.251 in the search bar, after I explained to him that Firefox was a browser too, just like Chrome -.-)

And they didn't even fix the problem, which is most probably on their end since everything checks out here. Brilliant. More shitty 3G/4G for me.

YOU CERTIFIED PIECES OF CRAP

I feel like distro-hopping again.

I was thinking of trying Gentoo (Arch is too mainstream, meh), but I came across an article on FreeBSD and realized that I'd never tried a BSD.

Any of you use BSD as a desktop OS? If so, which one? The laptop I'll be running it on is about four years old now, and there's no nVuDiA shit there, so hardware compatibility shouldn't be an issue.

RememberMe's relatives' guide to raising a kid:
1. Enroll kid in school IT course - Java/SQL.
2. Let kid be useless on Facebook all day. Kid doesn't write a line of code unless it's for exams.
3. Realize that kid need to do a project for 12th grade (final year in school).
4. Complain loudly to everyone in the vicinity.
5. Let kid choose a project waaay above her skill level.
6. Have some other relative mention that RememberMe is a "computer waala" (computer person).
7. Ask poor RememberMe to do the kid's project.
8. Use typical family blackmail ("oh you can't have that much work, do something for your family for once").

Yeah, nope. Get lost. I don't mind teaching, but I'm not doing your work for you.

Good ol' WanBLowS, powerin' the Delhi Metro.

IntelliJ Rust is fucking awesome.