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THS is currently offering an interesting little app on Steam called Lossless Scaling. It proports to triple your frame rate, and actually does so, but with some interesting caveats.

Frame generation isn’t new, there’s a lot of vendor solutions out there like DLSS and FSR already. What lossless scaling does is work on games that do not have those features. It is a purely post-processing effect that works on any game by taking 2 rendered frames and generating up to 2 new in-between frames using an AI trained model.

As you might guess, this has some interesting limitations and artifacts. Firstly, input latency goes up slightly because it relies on 2 fully rendered frames to generate the in-between frames. Also, since lossless scaling is a purely post-process effect, it cannot utilize motion vectors to help calculate in-between frames like FSR/DLSS. This leads to some interesting motion artifacts.

Digital Foundry’s Alex Battaglia did a video on Lossless Scaling and covers all the pros and cons with some great video clips. His takeaway? He really liked it. You should use the much better FSR/DLSS if you have it, but lossless scaling is great for older games that do not have those technologies. It’s also great for increasing frame rates on games that were traditionally locked to lower frame rates (though you want to carefully tune it to a multiple of your monitor refresh rate). It also seems to work ok with some games that have aggressive anti-cheat systems that usually detect frame-rate changing apps.

Singular 9 hopes to launch a crowdfunding campaign for an e-ink console.

Ink Console takes inspiration from choose-your-own-adventure books and retro text-based video games. It lets you play as you read, turning reading into a dynamic and interactive adventure. And the aim is to encourage people to develop their own gamebooks too.

Think Choose Your Own Adventure books were the first? Think again

Consider the Consequences! was an interactive romantic novel published in 1930 – and was made available on the internet archive. There’s even an online game version on itch.io.

Before Netflix’s Bandersnatch, the world’s first interactive movie was a Czech film called Kinoautomat.

If you want some fun, there are a few folks that read/review the books online:

Scientists have used a innovative method to map out the transition of symbols into words. Using an interesting strategy, scientists tracked the how our visual system picks up on the shapes and converts them into symbols, then into concepts.

Over two weeks, the scientists taught made-up words written in two unfamiliar, archaic scripts to 24 native English–speaking adults. The words were assigned the meanings of common nouns, such as lemon or truck. Then the researchers used functional MRI scans to track which tiny chunks of brain in that region became active when participants were shown the words learned in training.

The way letters look — curves or staunch lines — takes hold in the back of the ventral occipitotemporal cortex, the team found. But when sounds and meanings come into play, an area further forward in that brain region that better handles abstract concepts seemed to kick into gear.

Links:

• https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1818575116
• https://www.sciencenews.org/article/imaging-scans-show-where-symbols-turn-letters-brain

From around 2009 to 2013 under the Obama administration, the U.S. intelligence community experienced crippling intelligence failures related to its secret internet-based communications system. Problems originated in Iran and spiderwebbed to other countries, and was left unrepaired — despite warnings about what was happening — until more than two dozen sources died in China in 2011 and 2012 as a result. This had been noticed in the media, and confirmed by 11 former intelligence and national security officials.

The failure? Utilizing a bunch of innocuous looking internet sites – including a fake Star Wars fan site – which were compromised and then patterns figured out on how the CIA ran other sites the same way. It caused a chain reaction of exposing sources – who were promptly arrested or killed.

Reuters report in 2022, America’s Throwaway Spies, which went into further detail on how individual CIA agents were exposed by the Iranians, and included the incredible revelation that the IP addresses for the CIA’s sites were sequential, meaning that once one was identified it was easy to find others that likely belonged to the same network.

Links:

• https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-spies-iran/
• https://www.yahoo.com/news/cias-communications-suffered-catastrophic-compromise-started-iran-090018710.html
• https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/the-cia-operated-a-network-of-gaming-sites-and-even-a-star-wars-fanpage-that-were-part-of-one-of-its-worst-ever-intelligence-catastrophes/

Who knew this would be the hottest item sold out for Christmas everywhere. Originally $398, they’re selling on ebay for almost $1000 now

What a great little game. It tells the story of a family that moves from their home to a new country – and uses a cooking of traditional dish minigame to help tell the story.