It's a shame 538 aren't covering the GOP shenanigans as they stab enough other in the back to be house speaker, but the Washington Post are doing a liveblog. Get your popcorn ready!
washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/… Amazingly, some of the Democrats actually have big bags of popcorn with them in the chamber! Currently the person with the most votes is Hakeem Jeffries - who is a Democrat. Sadly that's not how it works - but it's still funny!

Recent mention of Zardoz reminds me of when I first saw that film. Well, the second half anyway. I saw the second half of a LOT of weird films. Let me explain. 1/n In 1983 I had a ZX Spectrum - one of the first popular home computers in the UK. I was ten. And my parents indulged my coding hobby, so just outside my bedroom was the Speccy and crappy (but colour!) TV that the Speccy plugged into all set up in a sort of alcove in the room. 2/n

I had a dream last night about watching a movie starring Ryan Reynolds. This movie doesn't exist - but in my dream I watched it, and remembered it. It wasn't even a particularly good movie. But my imagination went to all that trouble to invent it, so I thought I should share. /1 In this movie that doesn't exist, Ryan Reynolds plays a killer robot infiltrating Earth to prepare to do something bad - it was not specified what. But since he's a killer robot, it's probably to kill people. Like the Terminator, he wears a human skin (mostly). /2

People are getting hung up on the Nanite software rasteriser thing. Pretty sure it's not because the HWrast is slow, it's because the input to the HWrast has a limit to how compressed it can be, so it gets memory-BW-limited there. Whereas you can run a CS that decompressed/LODs and *right there and then* does the SWrast. I am intimately familiar with how fast (or not) you can make a SWrast (remember Larrabee) - the key here is the input doesn't go through memory.

When adding VR to HL2, it meant the rendering code needed changing, but we didn't dare touch the gameplay code of course. It was all working well (though the code to compensate for vehicle motion took a lot of iterations to prevent people getting too sick). /1 Getting very close to ready to ship, and I thought I'd do a full playthrough, rather than just cheating our way to specific levels to test them. I hadn't done so in years and hey why not now in wonderful VR? /2

Thinking about how I'd do a SW-only renderer today. So in 1995 or so, we didn't have GPUs, so everything was on the CPU. It was a challenging time - we did lots of clever tricks. These days CPU perf has gone through the roof, resolutions have also. So what would change? First, floating point is MUCH faster (and in 1995 many CPUs simply didn't have it). And we have SIMD. So the computing power we have is more "even" - you don't have to play as many tricks packing data into integers and avoiding divides like the plague.

The new Volta thread scheduling in Nvidia GPUs is sadly less interesting than some think. In a rather shocking turn of events, Nvidia have actually documented how it works:
devblogs.nvidia.com/inside-volta/ (search for "Independent Thread Scheduling"). The two important diagrams for most of us in graphics and games are these two. For some reason my browser made them different scales. I tried to resize the second one to make the timelines agree - it's just diagrammatic anyway.

In 2010 I was in my third year at Intel and Larrabee was well under way. Knights Ferry had been designed, built, debugged and was finally shipping to folks. I was finishing up on the features of the next one in the series, Knights Corner, /1 and I think even as early as 2010 we were discussing where the next part - Knights Landing - would go. The design and manufacture of these chips is a massively pipelined process. /2

The fundamental problem of sport is it has an open category ("men, any age") and a bunch of arbitrarily defined ones (age barriers, gender barriers). From what we know medically about gender, the gender barrier is *fundamentally arbitrary*. It is there so that 49% of the world can compete "fairly" with each other without another 49% of the world kicking in their door and stealing all the prizes. And that leaves 2% of the world (or whatever number it actually is) unable to compete because they're in the grey area.