It's strange to read so many countries listed in an article about deliberate internet shutdowns, and even India called out as the world's shutdown capitol, and not one mention of China. Internet shutdowns during important political events, or even just national holidays, are common practice in China, have been for decades, and this is widely known. How is it not China that wins the great prize here?
The N64's CPU, with pretty much every single game released on the platform, is just sitting there idling along at maybe 30% load tops, and usually less than that. It's a 64 bit CPU, but Nintendo's official SDK doesn't even support doubles or uint64!
Of course, Nintendo clearly cared about the CPU a lot for marketing purposes (it's in the console's name), but from a purely technological perspective, it is wasteful. Most of the actual compute is done on the RSP anyway. So, getting a much smaller CPU would have been a big corner to cut, that could have saved enough resources to increase the texture cache to a useful resolution like 128x128 or so.
It should be noted, though, that the N64 was designed with multitexturing capabilities, which would have helped with the mushy colors had games actually taken advantage of it (but they didn't, which here again, the Nintendo SDK is to blame for).
Only really in the marketing material. It's a bit like calling a 386 with an arithmetic co-processor an 80 bit machine, when it was still clearly a 32 bit machine by all metrics that matter.
However, I agree in general that the N64 CPU sits idle a lot of the time. It's overspecced compared to the rest of the system.
Yes. Although people like to point out that on the N64's CPU the external data bus is restricted to 32 bits, that's irrelevant in practice. The real limitation is the RDRAM's data bus, which is only 9 bits wide (of which the CPU uses 8 bits). The problem is that the rest of the system simply cannot match the overspecced CPU.
I wonder what the maximum addressable memory of the N64 is?
Of course, even 32 bit are massively more than they actually need for the paltry amount of memory they actually get, even if you map ROM and various devices into the same virtual address space.
> So, getting a much smaller CPU would have been a big corner to cut, that could have saved enough resources to increase the texture cache to a useful resolution like 128x128 or so.
How? The texture RAM (TMEM) is in the RSP, not in the CPU.
How is that relevant? "Resources" really just means money, which can be allocated between different items on the BoM at-will. The N64's chips are all (more or less) bespoke, so the functionality of each individual part is completely under Nintendo's control. Spend less on the CPU, and you suddenly have money left to spend on the RSP. (And on the RDP, which contains the TMEM -- it lives on the same chip as the RSP, but is a distinct thing. I assume you know this, but just to add to the discussion for readers - the RSP is the N64's SIMD coprocessing unit, which most games use to perform vertex shading, whereas the RDP is the actual rasterization and texturing hardware.)
Realistically it wasn't even "We only have X dollars to spend". They needed the console to have a final budget and they really could have "just" added more transistors dedicated to that texture unit without significantly altering prices or profit.
But hardware was actively transitioning and what we "knew" one year was gone the next and Nintendo was lucky to have made enough right choices to support enough good games to survive the transition. They just got some bets wrong and calculated some tradeoffs poorly.
For example, almost everything Kaze is showing off, all the optimizations were technically doable on original hardware, but devs were crunching to meet deadlines and nobody even thought to wonder whether "lets put a texture on this cube" needed another ten hours of engineering time to optimize. Cartridges needed to be constructed by Christmas. A lot of games made optimization tradeoffs that were just wrong, and didn't test them to find out. Like the HellDivers 2 game size issue.
Sega meanwhile flubbed the transition like four different ways and died. Now they have the blue hedgehog hooked up to a milking machine. Their various transition consoles are hilariously bad. "Our cpu and rasterizer can't actually do real polygon rendering and can't fake it fast enough to do 3D graphics anyway. Oh, well what about two of them?"
You are right about the RSP/RDP distinction. My point is that removing transistors from one chip doesn't magically let you add more transistors to another chip, that's not how IC fabrication works. And the CPU was not a custom design, it was a VR4300 licensed by NEC from the original R4300.
Anyway, the real problem is that TMEM was not a hardware-managed cache, but a scratchpad RAM fully under the control of the programmer, which meant that the whole texture had to fit under a meagre 4 kB of RAM! It is the same mistake that Sony and IBM later made with the Cell.
"Ask HN: How do you prevent ad-injection in AR glasses", comments:
visual_noise_complaint 7 hours ago
Is anyone else experiencing the 'Hot Singles in Your Area' glitch where it projects
avatars onto stray cats? It's terrifying.
cat_lady_2035 6 hours ago
Yes! My tabby cat is currently labeled as 'Tiffany, 24, looking for fun'. I can't
turn it off.
"Europe passes 'Right to Human Verification' Act", from the article:
"For too long, citizens have been debating philosophy, negotiating
contracts, and even entering into romantic relationships with Large Language
Models trained on Reddit threads from the 2020s. Today, we say: enough. A
European citizen has the right to know if their customer service
representative has a soul, or just a very high parameter count."
— Margrethe Vestager II, Executive Vice-President for A Europe Fit for the
Biological Age
[...]
Ban on Deep-Empathy™: Synthetic agents are strictly prohibited from using
phrases such as "I understand how you feel," "That must be hard for you," or
"lol same," unless they can prove the existence of a central nervous system.
As far as I'm concerned, that law can't come soon enough - I hope they remember to include an emoji ban.
For "Visualizing 5D with WebGPU 2.0", the link actually has a working demo [1].
I'm sad to say it, but this is actually witty, funny and creative. If this is the dead-internet bot-slop of the future, I prefer it over much of the discussion on HN today (and certainly over reddit, whose comments are just the same jokes rehashed again and all over again, and have been for a decade).
Hostname is not the issue, it can connect and then fails some handshake or whatever. Adding verbosity just seems to hexdump the packets in addition to logging an error.
[2025.11.26-09:10:21.460] [FINE ] got server SSH_MSG_KEX_ECDH_INIT
sending: length = 48
0000 00 00 00 2C 06 1E 00 00 00 20 D0 91 2C 8F 57 AF ...,..... ..,.W.
Tibet, too, was only part of the tributary system. Even during the Qing dynasty, the Chinese imperial state had no effective control over central Tibet - all local rulers and judges were Tibetan, and they employed Tibetan, not Chinese, law. Outside of diplomatic circles, Tibetans at the time weren't paying any attention to Chinese culture and politics.
Claims to the contrary are largely historical revisionism. (As are the various claims that Tibet was culturally influenced by China - the story of Princess Wencheng bringing agricultural technologies to uncultured Tibet, as it is often taught in Chinese schools and portrayed in period dramas, is a myth that only came to popularity during the Chinese Civil War.)
Remember also that until 1951, Tibet occupied Chinese territories more often than vice versa - although given the case of Manchuria, China might actually see this as an argument in favor of Tibet being Chinese.
MeBoy brings back some memories. I used it to catch so many Pokémon in middle school.
What's really cool about that emulator is the way its sound emulation works. Instead of emulating the Gameboy's synthesizer synchronously and outputting a PCM waveform to a buffer, which is probably impossible on J2ME due to hardware and platform constraints, it uses the phone's own MIDI (or square wave) synthesizer to play whatever the GameBoy synthesizer should be playing. This gives the video game music a very idiosyncratic sound when played back in MeBoy.
> I think that what is really behind the AI bubble is the same thing behind
> most money, power, and influence: land and resources. The AI future that is
> promised, whether to you and me or to the billionaires, requires the same
> thing: lots of energy, lots of land, and lots of water. Datacenters that
> outburn cities to keep the data churning are big, expensive, and have to be
> built somewhere. [...] When the list of people who own this property is as
> short as it is, you have a very peculiar imbalance of power that almost
> creates an independent nation within a nation. Globalism eroded borders by
> crossing them, this new thing — this Privatism — erodes them from within.
In my opinion, this is an irrationally optimistic take. Yes, of course, building private cities is a threat to democratic conceptions of a shared political sphere, and power imbalances harm the institutions that we require to protect our common interests.
But it should be noted that this "privatism" is nothing new - people have always complained about the ultra-wealthy having an undue influence on politics, and when looking at the USA in particular, the current situation - where the number of the ultra-wealthy is very small, and their influence is very large - has existed before, during the Gilded Age. Robber barons are not a novel innovation of the 21st century. That problem has been studied before, and if it was truly just about them robber barons, the old solutions - grassroots organization, economic reform and, if necessary, guillotines - would still be applicable.
The reason that these solutions work is that even though Mark Zuckerberg may, on paper, own and control a large amount of land and industrial resources, in practice, he relies on societal consent to keep that control. To subdue an angry mob in front of the Meta headquarters, you need actual people (such as police) to do it for you - and those people will only do that for you for as long as they still believe either in your doing something good for society, or at least believe in the (democratic) societal contract itself. Power, in the traditional sense, always requires legitimization; without the belief that the ultra-powerful deserve to be where they are, institutions will crumble and finally fail, and then there's nobody there to prevent a bunch of smelly new-age Silicon Valley hippies from moving into that AI datacenter, because of its great vibrations and dude, have you seen those pretty racks, I'm going to put an Amiga in there, and so on.
However, again, I believe this to be irrationally optimistic. Because this new consolidation of power is not merely over land and resources by means of legitimized violence, it's also about control over emerging new technologies which could fundamentally change how violence itself is excercised. Palantir is only the first example to come to mind of companies that develop mass surveillance tools potentially enabling totalitarian control in an unprecedented scale. Fundamentally, all the "adtech" companies are in the business of constructing surveillance machines that could not only be used to predict whether you're in the market for a new iPhone or not, but also to assess your truth to party principles and overall danger to dear leader. Once predictive policing has identified a threat, of course, "self-driving", embodied autonomous systems could be automatically dispatched to detain, question or neutralize it.
So why hasn't that happened yet? After all, Google has had similar capabilities for decades now, why do we still not go to our knees before weaponized DJI drones and swear allegiance to Larry Page? The problem, again, is one of "alignment" - for the same reason that police officers will not shoot protesters when the state itself has become illegitimate, "Googlers" will refuse to build software that influences election results, judges moral character or threatens bodily harm. What's worse, even if tech billionaires would find a small group of motivated fascist engineers to build those systems for them, they could never go for it, as the risk of being found out is way too severe: remember, their power (over land and resources) relies on legitimacy; that legitimacy would instantly be shaken if there was a plausible leak of plans to turn America into a dystopian surveillance state.
What you would really need to build that dystopian surveillance state, then, is agents that can build software according to your precise specifications, whose aligment you can control, that will follow your every order in the most sycophantic manner, and that are not capable of leaking what you are doing to third parties even when they do see that what they're doing is morally questionable.
> Politics is inherently about policy, the consensus mechanism involved is undefined.
It's true that the consensus mechanism is undefined, but it is definitely not the case that politics is about policy. I hate etymological arguments, but in a literal sense, the "political" is merely a translation for "public" - that is, anything that happens when you step outside is political.
That also means that "cultural divide-and-conquer games" are not in some sense "not politics". They're inherently political by virtue of being public, in the same sense that coming out as gay, wearing a MAGA hat or claiming on an online forum that the "job of a state is to create social good for its citizens" are political. Once you accept that almost everything is, in fact, politics, it also becomes clear that we don't have policy to generate particular outcomes in a detached and neutral manner, but to police politics.
I agree that the liberal/conservative spectrum is a "reductive vision of what politics could ever even possibly be", I'm just not convinced that associating politics with state power is any less reductive.
This is only socially and "practically" true, not literally or inevitably or technically (or in my opinion, actual-practically) so.
One of the things we need to accept as social animals is that there are a lot of different flavors of "true" and "correct".
A lot of times I'll get someone to concede with my opinion of stuff in a way where they say something like "well, sure, but good luck convincing anyone of this" and that's them just giving into the social-consensus truth rather than the empirical (what the evidence shows, what follows from that and our choices of axiomatic principles) or practical (produces the best outcomes in the situation) truth.
If we want to be a species worthy of surviving our impending climate extinction we need to have a population of leaders and actors who are willing to act on and create institutions according to the practical truth as informed by the empirical truth, and become villains in the eye of the social-consensus truth.
Existing anticheat software on Windows already runs in ring 0, and one of the reasons that competitive games often won't work on Linux is precisely that Wine can't emulate that. Some anticheat softwares offer a Linux version, but those generally run in userspace and therefore are easier for cheaters to circumvent, which is why game developers will often choose to not allow players that run the Linux version to connect to official matchmaking. In other words, for the target market of developers of competitive games, nothing would really get any worse if there was an official Microsoft solution.
On the other hand, using an official Microsoft anticheat that's bundled in Windows might not be seen as "installing a rootkit" by more privacy-conscious gamers, therefore improving PR for companies who choose to do it.
In other words, Microsoft would steamroll this market if they chose to enter it.
Also Microsoft closing the kernel to non-MS/non-driver Ring 0 software is inevitable after Crowdstrike, but they can't do that until they have a solution for how anti-cheat (and other system integrity checkers) is going to work. So something like this is inevitable, and I'm very sure there is a team at Microsoft working on it right now.
