Portland parody
citiesbydiana does some hilarious parodies of various city stereotypes. Here’s the one for Portland and it’s pretty accurate.
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Dark Realities of Buying Crunch overseas
As Nike and Apple learned the hard way, outsourcing your work overseas can have serious ethical concerns.
Sadly, workplace abuse (both mental and physical) is a reality in many low-cost countries. People Make Games reveals some highly disturbing cases of abuse and punishments that are subjected to game dev workers at these outsourced locations. In one case, a young developer is told to record slapping herself in the face 100 times as punishment.
It’s disturbing, but definitely something people should be aware is happening when companies outsource to low cost geos.
Ooof – that’s brutal
Boy, this video didn’t hold back on his opinions of Back4Blood’s Turtle Rock Studios compared to Left4dead.
Google report on using AI for internal code migrations
Google published a report on it’s effort to migrate code to the latest dependencies – an often thankless task fraught with risk. Google’s code migrations involved: changing 32-bit IDs in the 500-plus-million-line codebase for Google Ads to 64-bit IDs; converting its old JUnit3 testing library to JUnit4; and replacing the Joda time library with Java’s standard java.time package. The 32-bit ID’s were particularly rough because they were often generically defined types that were not easily searchable.
They used a collection of AI tools as well as manual code reviews and touch-ups to achieve their goal. They emphasize that LLMs should be viewed as complementary to traditional migration techniques that rely on Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs), grep-like searches, Kythe, and custom scripts because LLMs can be very expensive.
The results?
With LLM assistance, it took just three months to migrate 5,359 files and modify 149,000 lines of code to complete the JUnit3-JUnit4 transition. Approximately 87 percent of the code generated by AI ended up being committed with no changes. For the Joda-Java time framework switch, the authors estimate a time saving of 89 percent compared to the projected manual change time.
Links:
Installing Flux.1 with stability matrix
I already had a more in-depth article, but here’s a bit faster one.
AI still having trouble with gymnastics
I have written about the difficulty AI had in generating gymnastic videos. It appears it hasn’t gotten any better.
AI Chip design now surpassing human efforts
Artificial intelligence has already been being used for chip design. During it’s first integrations, it generated a lot of acadmic controversy. Despite the early pushback from the entrenched chip design players, new developments are showing that AI silicon development is here to stay by dramatically speeding up design and creating better chips than traditional methods.
Most recently, we see that AI is revolutionizing wireless chip design. It is dramatically reducing costs by cutting design times from weeks to hours, and it’s also generating unconventional designs that are faster and have unexpected circuitry patterns that are significantly outperforming traditional chip designs. Even the researchers aren’t sure how they are so much better.
We are coming up with structures that are complex and look random shaped and when connected with circuits, they create previously unachievable performance. Humans cannot really understand them, but they can work better.
lead researcher Kaushik Sengupta
Circuits are engineered to be more energy-efficient or operable across wider frequencies. Conventional algorithms sometimes take weeks to solve the complex and opposing structures. Some combinations do not have traditional solutions. Yet, new AI methods are solving these structures in minutes – and even solving problems that have previously been impossible.
This work presents a compelling vision of the future. AI powers not just the acceleration of time-consuming electromagnetic simulations, but also enables exploration into a hitherto unexplored design space and delivers stunning high-performance devices that run counter to the usual rules of thumb and human intuition.
Uday Khankhoje – associate professor of electrical engineering at IIT Madras
They also have discovered that AI started generating complex electromagnetic structures that are co-designed with circuits to create broadband amplifiers in a unique discovery. Beyond discovering new patterns, these tools are also improving designer’s lives by removing the more mudane, utilitarian work.
The researchers note that like many AI algorithms – they aren’t perfect. The AI often hallucinates faulty elements that don’t work are very inefficient and require human intervention. But the time saved far outweighs the cost.
Articles:
- Deep-learning enabled generalized inverse design of multi-port radio-frequency and sub-terahertz passives and integrated circuits” by Emir Ali Karahan, Zheng Liu, Aggraj Gupta, Zijian Shao, Jonathan Zhou, Uday Khankhoje and Kaushik Sengupta, 30 December 2024, Nature Communications.
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-54178-1 - https://scitechdaily.com/ais-strange-chip-designs-are-faster-smarter-and-game-changing/
When to make your own tools
Mr-Figs asked a great question on the reddit gamedev forum: how do you handle making your own tools needed to make a game?
It used to be that building a game also meant building all the authoring tools to go along with it. With the advent and spread of game engines like Unity, Unreal, Godot (and literally hundreds of others) along with amazing tools like Photoshop and Blender, the need to make your own tooling has dramatically decreased. Almost to the point that in a majority of cases, you probably don’t need to write tools.
Even if you do find you can’t use an existing tool, others suggest using chatGPT to either extend an existing tool or a tool in the engine you’re using via their SDK. Let AI do the work for you since tools are not shipping code nor need to be overly performant.
Strict_Bench_6264 wrote up a whole blog article to describe what he learned:
3D CPU rendering with AVX-512
AVX-512 was created as part of the Intel Larrabee project that I worked on and has made its way into client and high-end desktop systems.
Dannotech demonstrates it for some hard-core CPU graphics rendering – albeit on a 36 core Xeon W9-3475X. He also has other videos that are interesting experiments.
Or how about some AVX-512 ray marching?
More Hacking attacks on Developers
A new campaign tracked as “Dev Popper” is a sophisticated, multi-stage infection chain based on social engineering. Attackers target software developers with fake job interviews in an attempt to trick them into installing a Python remote access trojan.
The target developers are asked to perform tasks supposedly related to the interview by downloading and running code for the interview. The code is infected with obfuscated code/packages that downloads additional binaries that complete the infection. The threat actor’s goal is make their targets download malicious software that gathers system information and enables remote access to the host.
According to Securonix analys of Dev Popper, the campaign is likely orchestrated by North Korean threat actors based on the observed tactics. The connections are not strong enough for attribution, though.
Articles: