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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • Realistically no. The support needed to manage the devices we all use is just insane, and I think a lot of people take for granted how the x86 platform has evolved over the last few decades. The ARM landscape does not have the standards set that x86 does and that will always hold it back. Qualcomm learned long ago that it’s within their best interest to be constantly changing the SoCs and never really documenting/supporting them very well because it forces all of the downstream vendors to do constant refreshes. Toss in the development hellscape my fellow programmers created ourselves and we get the vicious cycle we’re in today where Google saying they’ll support a device for longer than a few years was the headline sales pitch

    -typed on a Pixel 8 which was purchased due to that sales pitch


  • In a round about way, it probably is geographically related. So few people live there due to the land being pretty useless, but not so useless that the people there are spread out and when county lines were drawn they followed county sizes similar to Midwestern states. More western states drew larger counties but had similar population density averages so the number of people per county are high enough that there are enough suicides that someone may actually be tracking that on an annual basis

    Arbitrarily cherry picking that squished pentagon county in northern Nebraska, there are only 769 people living in the entire county . If just one of them committed suicide that county would be off the charts lethal at 137. So when you take the US average suicide rate per year it could take up to ten years for someone in the county to commit suicide. So there probably isn’t anyone keeping real statistics in that county

    Realistically I think this is a bad map since counties with lower populations get disproportionately amplified suicide rates




  • For graphics, the problem to be solved is that the N64 compiled code is expecting that if it puts value X at memory address Y it will draw a particular pixel in a particular way.

    Emulators solve this problem by having a virtual CPU execute the game code (kinda difficult), and then emulator code reads the virtual memory space the game code is interacting with (easy), interprets those values (stupid crazy hard), and replicates the graphical effects using custom code/modern graphics API (kinda difficult).

    This program is decompiling the N64 code (easy), searches for known function calls that interact with the N64 GPU (easy), swaps them with known valid modern graphics API calls (easy), then compiles for local machine (easy). Knowing what function signatures to look for and what to replace them with in the general case is basically downright impossible, but because a lot of N64 games used common code, if you go through the laborious process for one game, you get a bunch extra for free or way less effort.

    As one of my favorite engineering phrases goes: the devil is in the details