This showcases a demo of megatextures running on n64 hardware. A “megatexture” for the n64 is really just a normal sized textured by modern standards but with that you can do some prebaked scenes that look like they don’t belong on the n64.

https://github.com/lambertjamesd/n64brew2023

Barbara Blackburn is often cited as the fastest typist in history. She even appears in the Guinness Book of World Records! She must be legit right? Well, maybe not. I was supposed to make a video about the new typing speed world record, and instead got pulled into a Barbara Blackburn rabbit hole that I can’t seem to escape. TL;DR She’s not that fast.

Two boxers. No flicker? How is this possible? The MMC2 Mapper chip: Explained

How to draw too many sprites by making one a background, then how to smoothly animate it by side scrolling.

Modern video encoding standards such as H.264 are a marvel of hidden complexity. But with hidden complexity comes hidden security risk. Decoding video in practice means interacting with dedicated hardware accelerators and the proprietary, privileged software components used to drive them. The video decoder ecosystem is obscure, opaque, diverse, highly privileged, largely untested, and highly exposed—a dangerous combination.

We introduce and evaluate H26FORGE, domain-specific infrastructure for analyzing, generating, and manipulating syntactically correct but semantically spec-non-compliant video files. Using H26FORGE, we uncover insecurity in depth across the video decoder ecosystem, including kernel memory corruption bugs in iOS, memory corruption bugs in Firefox and VLC for Windows, and video accelerator and application processor kernel memory bugs in multiple Android devices.

https://github.com/h26forge/h26forge

The world’s strongest magnet is a million times stronger than Earth’s magnetic field.

A tour of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory and its 45 Tesla magnet.

The p-adic numbers are bizarre alternative number systems that are extremely useful in number theory. They arise by changing our notion of what it means for a number to be large. As a real number, 1 billion is huge. But as a 10-adic number, it is tiny!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-adic_number

Veritasium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRaq4aYPzCc

The JPEG algorithm is rather complex and in this video, we break down the core parts of the algorithm, specifically color spaces, YCbCr, chroma subsampling, the discrete cosine transform, quantization, and lossless encoding. The majority of the focus is on the mathematical and signal processing insights that lead to advancements in image compression and the big themes in compression as a whole that we can take away from it.

A new kind of computer architecture that’s more elegant than 1s and 0s, being based directly on Mathematics.

Recap of a lot of work, optimizing and rewriting code to squeeze out performance on limited hardware.

source: HN

Making hard drives out of pings, tetris, and covid tests.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio

Making a meat berry.

Intro to porting games between platforms, then also a deep walkthrough of a custom allocator libary.

In this 2019 GDC session, Subset Games co-founder Matthew Davis details the Into the Breach design process from early drafts to the final balancing decisions. Davis dives into years of cut content and iteration to show how Subset Games approached the difficult design challenges of making Into the Breach.

One hour.

NCAA rules prohibit dunking with less than 20 minutes until tip, and Rohleder’s dunk came with 19:58 showing on the clock.

https://www.espn.com/mens-college-basketball/recap?gameId=400546928

Bit strings, error correcting, and coloring the corners of higher dimensional cubes.

We introduce the problem of perpetual view generation—long-range generation of novel views corresponding to an arbitrarily long camera trajectory given a single image. This is a challenging problem that goes far beyond the capabilities of current view synthesis methods, which work for a limited range of viewpoints and quickly degenerate when presented with a large camera motion. Methods designed for video generation also have limited ability to produce long video sequences and are often agnostic to scene geometry. We take a hybrid approach that integrates both geometry and image synthesis in an iterative render, refine, and repeat framework, allowing for long-range generation that cover large distances after hundreds of frames. Our approach can be trained from a set of monocular video sequences without any manual annotation. We propose a dataset of aerial footage of natural coastal scenes, and compare our method with recent view synthesis and conditional video generation baselines, showing that it can generate plausible scenes for much longer time horizons over large camera trajectories compared to existing methods.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.09855

https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/infinite_nature

source: HN

1963 Chrysler Turbine: Ultimate Edition. It’s the amazing car Jay’s lusted after since he was 14 years old, and today’s episode is packed with all kinds of amazing footage! We’ve got a book review, a road test, and Chrysler’s original promotional video.

Open a padlock (or probably any keyed lock) by taking a picture of the sliders inside, then cutting a key.

The video shows this in real time and is five minutes long. Open sesame!

That may be over selling it, but cool anyway.