Matt's Homepage

Covid has changed things. Even in 2023, international travel still muted and people have been doing more domestic travel. That means open US attractions are somewhat overrun. There’s been a lot of bad press that Disney theme parks are terribly overcrowded, dropping the annual pass and switching to a much maligned Genie Pass system (dropping a functional but much mutated Fastpass) and have gigantic wait times (with averages for some rides over 130 minutes).

All of this has caused lawsuits and the ousting of previous Disney president Bob Chapek who is largely seen as badly handling most of these problems. It appears that the new/returning Disney president Bob Iger is restoring annual passes and seen as righting the struggling Disney ship.

Now what about avoiding those 2 hour wait lines? Filming is still allowed in the parks and Youtube channels like Attractions 360, DocumentDisney, WDW and others have created amazing 4k ride videos of just about every ride at every single Disney park – in the world. Many even have multiple copies that include seasonal theming. So now only can visit and ride your favorite ride whenever you want – and each of the other versions in other countries. Though some of those other countries have modified the rides in interesting cultural ways.

Here’s a good example. The Haunted Mansion (a personal favorite) is in 4 different locations: California Disneyland, Florida Disneyworld, Tokyo Disneyland, and Paris Disneyland. I prefer these because there is no commentary or cheesy music. You hear everything including everyone is saying – which is just about the same experience as being there.

Not that one? How about the one in Florida.

Not that? How about the Tokyo Disney Haunted Mansion.

Oh, not that one? Then How about the Paris Haunted Mansion?

While world class buildings aren’t being built in the US at the rate they used to be, they are still being built in Dubai, Saudi Arabia, and China. Buildings such as Atlantis the Royal.

How are they opening these creations? How about paying for high class stars like Beyoncé and Swedish House Mafia to perform in customized shows. They also invite various movie, music, and other stars to be seen there in red carpet like events. They also bring in high-class influencers as well as having outrageous fireworks displays. In short, they create world class see-and-be-seen events like used to happen in New York and other cities.

See a tour of the final project here:

The 90’s Demoscene subculture was famous for building incredible visual demos in astoundingly small executables sizes. Many demo scene gatherings had maximum size requirements – often in just a few hundred, or even a few DOZEN, kilobytes. Figuring out how to get the most amazing tech in the smallest size was one of the great innovation points for these contests.

Once developers had exhausted their technical chops on generating amazing art with miniscule code (using all the tricks in the book they could think of), they quickly found that hand-tuned compression became far too tedious and brittle. So, they started building tools to do this compression for them.

I wrote about a more modern take on this where MattKC tried to fit an entire game into a QR code. Part of his adventure was compressing the executable using an old demoscene tool called Crinkler.

There were others, one of which was called lekktor which was used first on their .kkrieger demo. The story behind the development is a fun read as is an interview he did in 2005.

Apparently it used a form of code coverage as part of the analysis which ran while you ran the application. This had the dubious effect of allowing people to use the down arrow down on menus but not the up arrow – because nobody ever pressed the up arrow when training the compressor.

Links:

• .kkrieger
• Metaprogramming for madmen | The ryg blog (wordpress.com)
• Interview: Frugal Fragging with.kkrieger (gamedeveloper.com)

Having trouble understanding all the knobs in stable diffusion’s webui interface? This is a great website on github that shows what each feature does and gives some examples and tips on getting the most out of the features.

It covers all the big features like outpainting, inpainting, prompt matrix, AI upscaling, attention, loopback, X/Y plot, textual inversion, resizing, sampling method selection, seed resize, variations, and a whole host of all the other options along with before/after pictures to help you understand the features better.

Links:

• https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui-feature-showcase

Sever Part Deals is a website that offers high quality, manufacture refurbished, and warrantied enterprise hard drives. Many of them come with 2 year warranties and come in gigantic capacities from 10-20TB.

While I would never trust a refurbished single drive with my critical data, I run a RAID 5 system with redundancy and find these drives to have been very good in such a setup. If one dies, I can hot swap a spare in and keep going.

I recently did this with some 8TB drives, and they have been working great for the last 3 years without a single hiccup, heat issue, or SMART error. You want to make sure you’re buying reliable drives to begin with (cough cough: massive and long-standing history of high failure rates with Seagate) – but baring that – my HGST’s have been amazing.

“Rest and Vest” is a term that describes some senior engineers at big tech companies. The joke even showed up in HBO’s series Silicon Valley. But with the recent decimation of stock prices, rising competition and rapidly shrinking revenues, those days may be over.

But how does one tackle the issue without alienating the workforce and driving good talent to competitors? Carefully, it turns out – because the best way involves a cultural shift of the company. Implementing draconian and invasive tracking on knowledge workers is not helpful. It alienates workers as well can actually stifle creativity.

Instead, managers can use 2 different social pressures for those in a ‘rest and vest’ mode:

• Reminding a person that their subpar contribution is inequitable may motivate them to pull their weight. We have a deep-wired aversion to being perceived by others as a cheat or defector.
• Second, it’s about belonging. We’re humans at the end of the day. No person wants to be a social pariah, even one who’s talented. Contributing, belonging, building alongside your fellow creators — this can be a strong motivator to get people involved more evenly.

Link:

• https://www.inc.com/nick-hobson/googles-rest-vest-days-for-sr-employees-are-over-says-ceo-its-a-brilliant-idea.html

MSI Afterburner is probably the best known graphics card overclocking software. Unfortunately, it may be dead due to the war in the Ukraine.

The original developer of graphics card overclocking utility MSI Afterburner has warned that the software is “semi abandoned” and “probably dead”. The dev, Russian national Alexey ‘Unwinder’ Nicolaychuk, posted on the Guru3D forums (good spot by TechPowerUp) that due to economic sanctions imposed on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine, MSI haven’t paid him for his work on Afterburner in nearly a year.

Link:

• https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/msi-afterburner-dev-says-the-overclocking-app-is-probably-dead

John Carmack has quit Meta and their Meta VR efforts. I think that this is a perfect example of how visionary people get sucked in and are often ill equipped to the workings of large corporate machinations. The very things that make big corporations hugely successful (ability to work at scale, massive market share, highly disciplined and tracked execution) can ultimately be the reason they struggle with prototype development, innovation, or innovative people.

Some clues are in some of the interesting things Carmack says,

Carmack complained that it has been a “struggle” for him to influence Meta’s overall direction and that he’s “wearied of the fight.” Despite his high-ranking “consulting CTO / executive advisor” title, Carmack complained that he is “evidently not persuasive enough” to change Meta’s VR efforts for the better.

“We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort. There is no way to sugar coat this,” he wrote. “I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy.”

There he talked about his internal efforts to push for the development of a “super cheap, super lightweight” Meta VR headset that could come in at “$250 and 250 grams.” Instead, Meta has put its recent VR hardware efforts behind the heavily overdesigned and $1,500 Quest Pro. In his October keynote Carmack told Meta that “the basic usability of Quest really does need to get better” and that “our app startup times are slow, our transitions are glitchy… We need to make it a whole lot better… much, much faster to get into.”

I think Carmack is a skunkworks technical leader. He’s used to working with a small team of extremely talented engineers on rapid development of extraordinary projects. Skunkworks and vision projects like this get crushed when you try to scale too quickly to dozens of interconnected teams. Instead, one must develop the solid core of the idea and prove it 100% – then scale to production. If you try to scale without 100% coherent vision and the issues sorted out, you’ll end up bleeding money, vision, and worst of all: time and energy switching direction. I think that’s why he feels exhausted and only sees people being 50% effective.

It’s the common case of agility vs scale. Big organizations with skilled but compartmentalized development teams often fail slowly after wasting tons of people’s time. Not because they are bad teams, but because they are often given delivery goals and usually do not have the power to switch direction on their own or often see the bigger picture to ensure the solution works properly across groups. This costs a lot in money, management time, and possibly reworks. Instead of one person failing, approaching the lead with alternatives and then re-thinking the approach at a higher level, the team continues to try to meet the goal without the ability to see the bigger picture or make better wholistic changes.

Anyway – the article is a fascinating read.