With the legal battles surrounding the "Prediction Market" betting sites being ruled as "futures trading" rather than gambling, I wonder how much of the gambling world will start rebranding themselves as such before people realize the futures and swap markets are just gambling.

One of my favorite old school rendering tricks is the abusing mip maps for fades and Fresnel. At this point perhaps most famously done in Mario Sunshine for the ocean water sparkles. blog.mecheye.net/2018/03/deco...

Melon Husk has announced he has plans on building his own chip fabrication facility to produce 2nm chips; Terafab. I have no doubt they'll build out some giant facilities... but, uh... literally only ASML is currently capable of building machines that can make chips at that size.

Valve changed Counter-Strike 2's reload system so that you don't keep the unused bullets that are in your magazine, but instead loose them entirely. Years ago someone I knew argued that CS was _not_ a "true" tactical shooter because of the way they handled ammo.

One thing about this whole DLSS 5 debacle that I kind of feel like a lot of people are missing: It was shown at the start of the Nvidia GTC 2026 keynote. The GTC keynote is mainly a way for Nvidia to show off to investors and executives. And that group _loves_ generative AI.

Valve has changed their time frame for the Steam Machine from "later this year" to "soon". I guess that means it'll ship in about 5 years, or be officially cancelled in 10.

Corridor Crew have gotten a lot of flack over the last few years for their AI exploration videos. Most of them have been explorations of existing tools... which each have had various levels of ethics behind their creation. But their latest video seems really good. www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Plo...

So, the US Supreme Court ruled you couldn't sue a President for anything falling under their "core constitutional duties". So if the President does something that they rule he doesn't have the constitutional power to do, does that mean you can sue him for it?

So Microsoft announced the codename for the next Xbox console. From here on I'm going to refer to it as the Xbox Too. Not two, too. As in "This is an Xbox ... too". www.youtube.com/shorts/3xy9E...

The Macbook Neo is fascinating for one very simple reason. It's using a A18 Pro SOC instead of an M chip. I think this is the first time we're seeing MacOS running on an A series SOC.

@dark1x.bsky.social In your video on Nvidia Pulsar there's one thing I don't think you ever directly talk about. VRR flicker. You did make a comment about the double flash existing to help with refresh changes, but that seems to be about it. But does Pulsar have any VRR flickering problems?

Fuck Kansas.

I kind of love how OLED TVs and monitors have gone about solving the technology‘s brightness limitations. … Modern OLED TVs and monitors work a bit more like LCD panels than many people might expect. LCDs have a white backlight, color filters, and the LCD part to block light at each subpixel.

Apropos of nothing in particular, did you know Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will be 39 in 2028?

Thinking about how the ending of Stranger Things disappointed so many, how much people hated Game of Thrones, and how dumb the ending of Lost was. Has there been a long running well loved TV show with an ending that people actually liked?

This is a great video to send anyone who still thinks humans can only see 60hz. There are some minor pedantic things I could nit pick about it, but it does a really good job showing clear examples of why it's not remotely true. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sb_7...

CEOs explaining the benefits of AI for increasing profit the same thing as South Park gnomes explaining stealing underwear.

What are some of your favorite short lived music groups you feel like no one else seems to know about? Ones that you feel came out hitting strong, and then disappeared into obscurity?

I’ve been using Perforce for over 20 years, and having used many other version control systems over the years, its still the best. But it still sucks in some really silly ways.

LTT WAN Show talked briefly about some scummy thing Best Buy was doing on their website. The short version is they're showing a "Comparable Value" for some items to make them seem like they're a great deal, and sometimes they're products that aren't even actually on sale.

Let's do this. www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9...

RIP Sally

At this point what the below images are are easily recognized by almost anyone who dabble in making games or 3D graphics in general. The now ubiquitous Normal Map. First described in 1998, and showed up in games around 2000 with Citizen Kabuto and Halo in 2001. Except...

It's kind of amazing how unique the Luigi Mansion games are. Nintendo has made a lot of very unique games over the many decades, and nearly all of them someone has made games clearly inspired by the unique gameplay elements they offer. But not Luigi's Mansion. Zero clones.

I just realized billionaire CEOs are all convinced LLMs are months from reaching AGI because they seem so lifelike to them. • Highly confident about things they know nothing about • When confronted about being wrong just double down • Feel no remorse for causing the suffering of others

Time for some 2019 era style dead-bird posting to distract you from 2026. What is the best Disney animated movie that no one remembers? What is the worst? It has to be a Disney Animation Studio film released into theaters, no straight to home video / streaming.

Unmasking via AI, what they think they're getting vs what they actually get:

Breaking News: Nvidia announces the new 2080 Super Duper.

CES this year has been entertaining. 2026 is apparently the year that 100% Rec.2020 TVs finally come out... for commercial displays... LG finally shows moves towards true RGB stripe OLED, dropping the white subpixel, while Hisense starts adding yellow _and_ teal.

LG Display announced they have a 27" 4k true RGB stripe OLED with a 240hz and FHD 480hz mode similar to their current WOLED 4k panels. news.lgdisplay.com/en/2025/12/l...

Ah, the Xmas tradition of figuring out who sent the latest package of unwrapped and unlabeled gifts to you based on the subtle differences in how people choose to write the name on the shipping address. Is it to just me? Just to my wife? Just me but my full name? To my wife and I? To the family?

I got the first post about direct lighting material occlusion up on my blog. On this one I go over the commonly used micro-occlusion approach and its limitations, and I start digging into micro-shadowing as an improvement. irradiance.ca/posts/micros...

Family drama, comedy, turn-based fantastical battles with your exes, skating, and cooking tasty dishes! Thirsty Suitors is 50% off on Steam. Here’s an overview. If you played it, please leave a review! store.steampowered.com/app/1617220/...

My iPhone finally forced an update to the latest iOS with Liquid Glass UI elements. And I've spent the last few days finding all the ways to turn that shit off so I can actually read anything and use my device efficiently again.

Over 4 years ago I wrote an article about trying to solve the texture seam you often get in shader generated UVs. Especially in things like equirectangular UVs, though any kind of discontinuity will cause them. bgolus.medium.com/distinctive-...

The world today is spending an awful lot of money to try and make sand think, and trying to avoid making man think.

Steam Cube

I watch @smartereveryday.bsky.social ’s video on the nuclear power plant and there was one offhand comment by someone who works there about how “nuclear radiation” (specifically Cherenkov radiation) is blue, but “everyone thinks it’s green”.

Fun Fact: We do not know how to tell someone’s gender from DNA. There are strong _correlations_, but it’s far less strong than you may think. The Olympics tried this, and had to stop because it was “unreliable”… www.federalregister.gov/documents/20...

A neighbor of mine has extremely bright LED light bars all the way around his roofline. He changes the colors daily and often has it animating or flashing all day and night. And I do mean daily. He hasn’t turned it off since he installed it about a year ago. Except for one night. Halloween

So, I run Windows 11 Pro on my home system. Why? Originally because I know people who work at Microsoft so I can get it for super cheap, but these days it’s so I can more easily avoid things like the forced Microsoft Account login and AI features they keep forcing on Home users.

On a completely different tack, a small rant. This fucked up “iNtErSeX pEoPlE aRe aLl eItHeR mAlE oR fEmAlE oNlY” bullshit that empty-headed chucklefucks come out with ignores a huge part of the human side of living this - and that is WE OFTEN DON’T KNOW WHICH OURSELVES in whatever manner of-

People always make fun of one particular company for their terrible console naming. I man, first they added a silly number, then they called the next release “One”, then they added an X to denote its an upgrade to the existing console. Sony is so weird. Wait, was who you were thinking?

There was a thread by @nanoraptor.danamania.com a few days ago about weird body traits that I didn’t respond to mostly because my weird body things are fairly mundane things like my thumbs are thicker at the knuckle than the base, I have squared ribs, and hazel eyes. But there is one other thing…

So it works now! If you have Bakery, can you try getting the latest github patch and using it? Add "Bakery Light Filter" component to an object to make it act like stained glass 😋 (video from RTPreview for fanciness, but it looks the same when baked) #gamedev

The iPhone Air looks nice, but I'm waiting for next year's iPhone Land, which is 2 cm inches thick and has a week long battery life, has brick textured sides, and the camera "bump" is concave rather than convex.

First WiFi was just for wireless local networking. Now it's also for allowing your phone to figure out where it is when GPS doesn't work. And for other devices to track your phone. Then to track your body just by how it interferes with the radio waves. Now: www.tomshardware.com/maker-stem/r...

BMW showed off their first real Neue Klass platform based production vehicle, the 2027 iX3. Certainly some really interesting stuff, but... uh... did they miss the memo about piano black touch sensitive controls being universally hated?

A bunch of SSDs are apparently failing after a recent Windows patch. Microsoft says it’s not them, and their metrics aren’t showing any abnormal increases in hardware failures. Phison, a component manufacturer commonly used in many of the drives that are failing, say they can’t repro any issue.

One of my favorite facts about the current Hollywood trend of claiming movies have "no CGI" is at one time the movie with the most CGI shots of any movie was a romantic comedy, because they digitally replaced the sky and background in every single shot in the movie.