Hacker News: darzu

New comment by darzu in "No Graphics API"

darzu — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 21:16:56 +0000

You should! And you might enjoy this video about making a CPU rasterizer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyJ-hdISgnw

Note that when the parent comment says "software rendering" they're referring to software (compute shaders) on the GPU.

New comment by darzu in "Autism should not be treated as a single condition"

darzu — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 19:53:43 +0000

RGB doesn't map to a single line, you're thinking just about the hue. RGB is a proper vector that addresses a whole 3D color space.

New comment by darzu in "Dumb Pipe"

darzu — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 21:11:00 +0000

Does anyone know if this tech (or Iroh) is suitable for real-time networking for games? Basically, once connection is established, what's the overhead on top of UDP in terms of latency and bandwidth?

Edit: after digging a little, Iroh uses QUIC which looks like a reliable, ordered protocol as opposed to the unreliable, unordered nature of UDP which is what many games need.

Now what I'd love to figure out is if there's a way to use their relay hopping and connection management but send/receive data through a dumb UDP pipe.

New comment by darzu in "Allianz Life says 'majority' of customers' personal data stolen in cyberattack"

darzu — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 20:45:36 +0000

Take a broader view of what "building secure systems" means. It's not just about the code being written by ICs but about the business incentives, tech choices of leadership, the individual ways execs are rewarded, legacy realities, interactions with other companies, and a million other things. Our institutions are a complex result of all of these forces. Taken as a whole, and looking at the empirical evidence of companies and agencies frequently leaking data, the conclusion "we cannot build secure systems" is well founded.

New comment by darzu in "Ambient Garden"

darzu — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 16:11:53 +0000

Everyone's talking about the music but I also love the dot rendering system you're using for terrain and plants! Very neat effect, simple but it's a nice style. I'd love to see a whole forest done like this, maybe a flowing river too.

New comment by darzu in "Lottie is an open format for animated vector graphics"

darzu — Sun, 25 May 2025 22:29:48 +0000

Steve put the nail in the coffin but the downfall started and was primarily caused by Macromedia being purchased by Adobe, IMHO. All the problems of Flash were solvable had it continued to been driven by a team and leadership that understood and cared about product quality. IMO this is one of the clearest cases of tech acquisition making the world worse.

New comment by darzu in "Morgan Stanley Follows Citi, BofA in Quitting Climate Group"

darzu — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 18:44:28 +0000

This is missing much, including that we've outsourced our manufacturing (and thus CO2 from manufacturing) but we still buy lots of stuff that requires intense manufacturing.

New comment by darzu in "What's Next for WebGPU"

darzu — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 19:17:20 +0000

I've used [0] to profile WebGPU code w/ Nvidia Nsight, but yes better tools built into Chrome would be very nice.

[0] https://frguthmann.github.io/posts/profiling_webgpu/

New comment by darzu in "One man's quest to restore the first-ever Air Force One"

darzu — Thu, 15 Aug 2024 22:30:21 +0000

Damn, I wish they had filmed this restoration and put it all on YouTube, that would have been an incredible channel. Like Tally Ho[0] but for a plane.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/@SampsonBoatCo

New comment by darzu in "Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?"

darzu — Fri, 05 Jul 2024 17:14:56 +0000

I've made https://sprig.land, a webgpu-based game engine and have plans to transpile the whole thing into a new visual scripting language I'm inventing but I'll eventually share it and do want to make games with it.

You might enjoy following https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@lisyarus, but he does ship games.

New comment by darzu in "Roblox has ported the entire front end JavaScript stack to Lua"

darzu — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 16:27:21 +0000

Roblox uses a heavily customized version of Lua, and in it they've fixed many of the pain points of Lua and JS. One example is their Lua allows value types/copy semantics, native number types like f32 / i32, and simd. These are important if you care about tracking performance carefully which I believe they do.

They use Lua heavily in Roblox so they've got a lot of tools and expertise in it, so I assume they see a lot of benefit to further standardizing their high level language.

I'm guessing they have some tooling to auto-translate typescript into Lua to massively speed up their porting. TypeScript has a very good compiler API for doing exactly this sort of thing and I've written a decent TypeScript <-> Python translation before.

New comment by darzu in "Apple unveils 'Passwords' manager app at WWDC 2024"

darzu — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 16:03:09 +0000

“Since” could mean yesterday.

But i would like to hear more details of the corruption if parent is willing to share. This is pretty much my worst nightmare scenario.

New comment by darzu in "Ubershaders: A Ridiculous Solution to an Impossible Problem (2017)"

darzu — Sat, 18 May 2024 16:45:39 +0000

Yup, the whole vertex and pixel stages I believe.

New comment by darzu in "Ubershaders: A Ridiculous Solution to an Impossible Problem (2017)"

darzu — Sat, 18 May 2024 14:49:16 +0000

Pretty sure these are very different phenomena both called "ubershaders". As far as I understand it, outside of Dolphin, when people say "ubershader" they mostly mean a large material shader that has branches and constants to handle all the material variants used in one game (e.g. wood door, metal shield, shiny forcefield). It's produced by the engine so it's under full control of the engine developers. This means instead of loading separate shaders for the wood door and metal shield you can just tweak pipeline parameters. It's a work around for the various overheads, like compilation, involved in creating specialized shaders.

But Dolphin's "Ubershader" is a different beast. It's about handling all the shader variants for _all_ Dolphin games (which are made in different engines) with one shader, and the variant parameters aren't passed as nice constants (data) but as shader programs (code) that need to be interpreted to be understood. It's more like a meta-shader that takes shaders as input and produces shaders as opposed to a "normal" ubershader which takes configuration to specialize it at runtime.

I think that's right anyway. I haven't worked directly with ubershaders in either variety and my knowledge comes from building my own hobby engine and 3D pipelines.

New comment by darzu in "TIS-100: Tessellated Intelligence System"

darzu — Sat, 27 Apr 2024 17:50:29 +0000

I've tried many but never gotten into any Zachtronics games for one simple reason: they are all puzzle games.

For me the motivation just never materializes. Contrast this to 100s of hours w/ each of Factorio, Satsifactory, and DSP amongst others.

New comment by darzu in "Epic says Apple will reinstate developer account"

darzu — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 18:52:48 +0000

Yikes I hate that Thierry is using "#freefortnite". You can be completely on board with the DMA but still see Epic's behavior as entirely profit motivated and "freeing Fortnite" should not be any official's priority. Epic is not some oppressed minority that needs saving.

New comment by darzu in "WebKit switching to Skia for 2d graphics rendering"

darzu — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 21:34:38 +0000

Upcoming there's also Vello[0][1] by Raph Levien, who has a bunch of experience w/ font rendering at Google. He's also working on a Rust UI library[2] and has a great talk on compute shaders[3].

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmW_RbTyj8c

1: https://github.com/linebender/vello

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVUTZlNCb8U

3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZRn_jNZjbw

New comment by darzu in "SSDs have become fast, except in the cloud"

darzu — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 19:14:17 +0000

probably this one: https://gist.github.com/hellerbarde/2843375

New comment by darzu in "I designed a cube that balances itself on a corner"

darzu — Sun, 11 Feb 2024 19:45:39 +0000

Amazing. Now it just needs a nice wood enclosure and matching induction charging pedestal. Kickstarter please take my money!

New comment by darzu in "The Game Awards raises an old question: What does indie mean?"

darzu — Thu, 04 Jan 2024 20:33:44 +0000

Most indie games have a publisher and publishers have a lot of control.