The article blew a huge opportunity to showcase the great diversity of “Pioneering Era” 3D accelerators (they weren’t called GPUs until later). But instead they just pretended it was always NVIDIA vs ATI, and threw in a few Voodoos.
It was only 3dfx and NVIDIA (since the TNT) that mattered in the 1990s though. All the other 3D accelerators were only barely better than software rasterization, if at all.
Seeing Quake II run butter smooth on a Riva TNT at 1024x768 for the first time was like witnessing the second coming of Christ ;)
Loads of games from the era roundtripped their textures through lossy S3/DXT compression and then stored them as uncompressed RGB or RGBA.
I know this because I wrote a Unreal Engine texture repacking tool with a "DXT detection" feature so that I wouldn't be responsible for losing DXT compression on a texture which had already paid the price, only to find that this situation was already hyperabundant in the ecosystem.
Many Unreal Engine games of the day could have their size robotically halved just by re-enabling DXT compression in any case where this would cause zero pixel difference. This was at a time before Steam, when game downloads routinely took a day, so I was very excited about this discovery. Unfortunately, the first few developers I emailed all reacted with hostility to an unsolicited tip from what I'm sure they saw as a hacker, so I lost interest in pushing and it went nowhere. Ah well.
Yeah, the chip they used isn't ideal though because it converts DP1.4 (32Gbit) to HDMI 2.1 (48Gbit), so the bandwidth is bottlenecked on the input side. Ideally you'd want a chip which takes DP2.1, which I'm not sure exists yet, and the upcoming Steam Machine only supports DP1.4 so it wouldn't have helped in that case anyway.
The end of ESG investing and, yes, preference falsification and preference cascade. They never believed in it, it was just socially unacceptable to admit it until the pendulum swung back in the other direction.
Hey, sometimes people don't want advice. Sometimes they just want to kvetch.
Secondary: sometimes they've already been offered this advice.
I'm with you that there's a "rubber meets the road" place where you have to put in the work. But there should also be a place where we can offer sympathy and solutions, instead of only focusing on solutions.
i have spent the last couple days responding to hundreds of comments on the substack piece. no new pieces of advice came up on this thread which were not already covered on the substack comments. advice which i have acknowledged. i was already about to do most of the pieces of advice anyways on my own as the next step, such as applying with a normie pseudonym. you don't know me. im not a victim and i don't have victim mindset. i am survivor.
Try not to hold it against people for not also having read hundreds of comments. Most people are going to respond to the just the article, which is going to result in duplicate advice, and that's fine. If you've already taken action for all the advice you consider actionable, great! That doesn't change how much of the advice is actionable in the context of the article though.
I haven’t read most of the comments here and none on substack, but looking at your resume, I’d spend some time making it look slightly warmer, throw some color in there.
I’d also consider re-working your job history, it “looks like a lot of bouncing around” which shouldn’t be a bad thing, but it can be if framed poorly.
Finally, I’d spend a few weeks with c++/java and slap it on the resume as a competency. Can’t hurt, and you’re just learning some syntax at this point.
Best of luck to you. Market is tough, and there are a lot of sw folks looking around right now.
> im not a victim and i don't have victim mindset. i am survivor.
Anyone who uses the kind "labels" to describe themselves probably wouldn't even be considered for a job where I work. It's a massive red flag to most HR departments, especially in tech. Not trying to be offensive, but this has been my experience. You will probably have more success not trying to describe yourself in terms of politically-loaded labels.
It's not political, it's just melodramatic. Some people choose to frame their life as a story about "overcoming adversity". Most of the time the struggles they describe, while genuinely difficult, are things that most people face at some point in their life. But these people seem to expect some sort of social credit for it, as if carrying on makes them a hero.
This is an irritating habit that makes them seem whiny and self-important, but it is unfortunately widespread. Having such a "story" to tell about yourself has become almost fashionable in our modern culture.
To me it suggests that this person might be a bit overly dramatic and ready and willing to compete in the Adversity Olympics at the drop of a hat.
For me, I want to work with people who are just going to get on with their job without harping on about how they've faced this adversity or that adversity and how they're a survivor - just do your job please, I'm genuinely not interested in your personal life. kthx.
I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he calls himself a survivor in response to accusations of having a 'victim mindset,' but not during SWE interviews...
Inertia, layman brand perception, anticompetitive behavior (Intel has been in court for 15+ years about this).
An example in the laptop space, Intel invested a lot in the marketing and designs of the Ultrabook classification. So customers ask for an Ultrabook from Dell, Lenovo, HP, etc. and those are only available with Intel CPUs. It’s taken several years for AMD mobile CPUs to work their way into high end designs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_Texture_Compression
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