GPU programming chaos
GPU programming used to be just about rendering graphics. As we’ve moved into bitcoin mining and AI, eisfrosch goes over the current chaotic programming environments for GPUs.
Re-creating PS1 graphics with modern hardware
Acerola has a bunch of great graphics videos. In this one, he talks about why PS1 graphics looked the way it did.
I learned that PS1 actually had realtime camera distance tessellation – something that wasn’t available to desktop GPUs until the introduction of tessellation shaders.
Edge shading
Gamelogic does a decent intro to a few simple edge detection shaders used in toon-style rendering.
2.5D ASCII art concept
8 years ago Tenkai Games Dev Room made a cool ASCII nethack-like prototype, and has only gotten like 60k views. It’s amazing how things like this exist yet nobody has seen them.
Continuous Scene Meshing On Quest 3
The Quest 3 lets you scan a room and build up an internal 3D mesh that represents the world you are in. This can take from 20 seconds to minutes and requires the user walking around the area – and is not able to change dynamically to opening/closing doors/etc.
The Depth API provides live depth frames up to 5 meters in distance – but how to use that to build up the environment in real time?
Julian Triveri‘s multiplayer mixed reality Quest 3 game Lasertag does just this. It takes the live frames and uses an open-source Unity implementation of marching cubes. Apple Vision Pro and Pico 4 Ultra already use this method – but have hardware accelerated depth sensors to help. Quest 3 developers need to do this computation themselves.
See the code on GitHub.
https://www.uploadvr.com/developer-implemented-continuous-scene-meshing-quest-3-lasertag
How cheaters bypass Faceit, ESEA and Vanguard anti-cheats
Unity Research decided to find out how hard it really is to beat modern anti-cheat systems in many FPS games. She deep dives into the history and current state of cheating.
Cheating in CS2
Students find it shockingly easy to create near realtime Facial Recognition Glasses
Kashif Hoda was waiting for a train near Harvard Square when a young man wearing glasses asked him for directions. A few minutes later, as Mr. Hoda’s train was pulling into the station, the young man, who was a junior at Harvard University named AnhPhu Nguyen, approached him again.
“Do you happen to be the person working on minority stuff for Muslims in India?” Mr. Nguyen asked.
Mr. Hoda was shocked. He worked in biotechnology, but had previously been a journalist and had written about marginalized communities in India.
AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio had created glasses that automatically identify people they look at. Nguyen and Ardayfio are both 21 and studying engineering at Harvard. They said in an interview that their system relied on already widely available technologies, including:
- Meta glasses, which livestream video to Instagram.
- Face detection software, which captures faces that appear on the livestream.
- A face search engine called PimEyes, which finds sites on the internet where a person’s face appears.
- A ChatGPT-like tool that was able to parse the results from PimEyes to suggest a person’s name and occupation, as well as look up the name on a people search site to find a home address, a phone number and relatives.
“All the tools were there,” Mr. Nguyen said. “We just had the idea to combine them together.” Nguyen posted a video of it working. Watching it is creepy to say the least. Imagine walking in public and anyone, at any time, can know exactly who you are and anything you’ve ever said or done.
Articles:
USB3 external GPU
I’ve written about connecting an external GPU to your laptop/NUC system before, but now there’s yet another solution from AMD.
The Tiny Corp showed off connecting an AMD GPU over USB3 via libusb. It should work on Windows, Linux, and even Mac systems. They use a user space driver to simplify development and is limited to AMD RDNA 3/4 GPUs.
Github link for the eGPU USB3 feature.
Newbie vibe coded a top-ranked mobile game
Ron decided to learn to code in 2024. He proceed to use AI to vibe-code a game called Letterlike. It’s now one of the top ranked mobile games on Steam and the #1 paid word game on Android.
He tells his story on this reddit post.
Vibe coding is here. People are building viable commercial products with less than a year of coding experience. Sure this isn’t a solution that needs a lot of security like an online service, but here it is.
Install Windows 11 with a local account
Hate that Windows 11 requires an internet connection and registering a Microsoft Account?
The most popular bypass was “oobe\bypassnro” which, when typed into the command prompt (opened with Shift + F10) during the Windows 11 setup experience, would enable a button that let you skip connecting to the internet and the Microsoft account requirement.
@witherornot1337 on X, used “start ms-cxh:localonly” into the command prompt during the Windows 11 setup experience will allow you to create a local account directly without needing to skip connecting to the internet first.