PurpleMind goes over the Miller-Rabin Primality Test that can determine primes very quickly – but only with a non-100% probability. This test, combined with other prime principles, are how modern huge prime numbers are generated.
IBM has a good video on what vector databases are and how they’re used by AI systems.
Windows Developer does a decent job of covering different Windows UI frameworks such as WinUI, WPF, WinForms, .NET MAUI, Uno Platform, Avalonia, React Native, and Progressive Web Apps.
Nathan Baggs wanted to play a retro version of Jurassic Park, but found it was busted due to DRM. He then proceeds to walk through how to hack it with a debugger and binary/disassembly tools such as Ghidra, x64dbg, CFF Explorer, and PE Bear.
It’s a great video on how people go about hacking old programs.
I wrote previously about Acerolas ASCII shader, here’s another method by Useless Game Dev.
Kevin Bentley, a programmer who worked on Descent 3 way back in the ’90s, has released most of the original source code for the game on GitHub under the GPL 3 license.
In 2017, there was a contest to design the worst possible volume control. It goes to show you that just because you make something look cool – it could be the worst design ever.
Even more can be found here.
I had forgotten the rules for the levels of database normalization. Not surprising since I last had the class over 20 years ago. Those problem sets immediately came back to me.
The 90’s were an amazing time to learn to code. Especially in Europe, hundreds and even thousands of people would gather for weekend-long, round-the-clock caffeine fueled coding sessions to flex their latest graphics programming tricks on Amigas, Commodores, PC’s, and other hardware.
Imphobia was the leading PC demoscene diskmag of the first half of the 1990s. Founded in 1992, it issued until 1996. In that period, 12 issues were released.
Early issues of Imphobia run in DOSBox except issues 6 and beyond where the graphics are not displayed correctly, probably because of the use of an obscure video mode. Nevertheless it’s possible to read the articles. All Imphobia issues are available at scene.org and can be seen at Demozoo.
AMD researchers have published a VRAM-saving technique that leverages procedural generation techniques to eliminate the need for sending the GPU 3D geometry altogether. The GPU utilizes work graphs and mesh nodes to produce 3D-rendered trees on the fly at the LOD (Level of Detail) required for the current frame.
Instead of requiring massive amounts of geometry, the only thing transferred is the code needed to generate the trees in the scene – code that is only a few kilobytes instead of megabytes or even gigabytes.
Read the paper here.