Hacker News: paavohtl

New comment by paavohtl in "Every GPU That Mattered"

paavohtl — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 09:15:21 +0000

I think pairing RX 5700 XT with Control as the "defining game" is an interesting choice, considering the facts 1. AMD cards were incapable of RT at the time and 2. Control was basically the first game with a good, comprehensive RT implementation that had a massive positive impact on the graphics.

New comment by paavohtl in "Zero-day CSS: CVE-2026-2441 exists in the wild"

paavohtl — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 17:41:11 +0000

Absolutely nothing in the announcement or other publicly available source implies that, to my knowledge. Might as well speculate if a random passer-by on the street is secretly a martian.

New comment by paavohtl in "Lightpanda migrate DOM implementation to Zig"

paavohtl — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 14:28:54 +0000

For Android specifically, by Q3 of last year more new lines of Rust were being added per week than new lines of C++: https://security.googleblog.com/2025/11/rust-in-android-move...

New comment by paavohtl in "Rust's Block Pattern"

paavohtl — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 09:38:05 +0000

At least in simple cases the compiler will just inline the closure, as if it never existed. There shouldn't be any measurable overhead.

1000 Days in 32:9

paavohtl — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 11:06:00 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.paavo.me/1000-days-in-32-by-9/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46253728

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by paavohtl in "'No One Lives Forever' turns 25 and you still can't buy it legitimately"

paavohtl — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 07:10:34 +0000

The source is only partially available; they released the source code of the game logic, but the engine was not included in the source release. You'd need to reverse engineer & remake the engine to make any major improvements to the game, such as porting it to new platforms.

New comment by paavohtl in "XSLT RIP"

paavohtl — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 08:59:20 +0000

And even that isn't enough; no browser supports WebGPU on all platforms out of the box. https://caniuse.com/webgpu

Chrome supports it on Windows and macOS, Linux users need to explicitly enable it. Firefox has only released it for Windows users, support on other platforms is behind a feature flag. And you need iOS 26 / macOS Tahoe for support in Safari. On mobile the situation should be a bit better in theory, though in my experience mobile device GPU drivers are so terrible they can't even handle WebGL2 without huge problems.

New comment by paavohtl in "XSLT RIP"

paavohtl — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 08:05:37 +0000

I know you're being sarcastic, but to be pedantic WebGPU (usually) uses canvas. Canvas is the element, WebGPU is one of the ways of rendering to a canvas, in addition to WebGL and CanvasRenderingContext2D.

New comment by paavohtl in "Affinity Studio now free"

paavohtl — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 17:42:38 +0000

Photoshop has had smart objects for quite literally 20 years - have they gained some important features recently? Smart filters have also been included since CS3 in 2007.

New comment by paavohtl in "Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework"

paavohtl — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 14:39:18 +0000

This is definitely corporate speak for "no guaranteed support, no planned further updates beyond critical security bugs, you are on your own".

New comment by paavohtl in "Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework"

paavohtl — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 14:37:58 +0000

I am worried about the future of native UI technologies on Windows. Traditionally at least the developers of operating systems have eaten their own dogfood and have at least tried to implement well-performing & visually consistent native applications to serve as an example to others. Windows 11 has largely done the opposite. Windows has had minimal but perfectly functional native email and calendar apps at least since Windows 10 (could have been in 8, never used that). Windows 11 originally shipped with those apps, but they were removed in a later update and replaced with laggy webview wrappers that take seconds to start.

New comment by paavohtl in "Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework"

paavohtl — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 14:14:50 +0000

The start menu is not a React Native app, but it's actually even worse. Only the recommended section (which is basically recently used files - plus probably advertisements in some scenarios) is. The rest of the start menu is WinUI, to my knowledge.

New comment by paavohtl in "What was Radiant AI, anyway?"

paavohtl — Sun, 08 Jun 2025 09:05:48 +0000

Interesting detail, thanks for letting me now. I had a look at the AI packages of all three visitors (Gelephor, Gellius Terentius, Trenus Duronius) and at least in the base game (without UOP) none of them carry skooma nor are scripted to find it. So even though the game implies they are skooma addicts via dialogue & environmental storytelling, from a purely technical POV they are not addicts. Getting stuck outside the shack checks out, though I don't think faction membership is the reason for that — they simply don't have the key to the door.

New comment by paavohtl in "What was Radiant AI, anyway?"

paavohtl — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 20:56:04 +0000

Thanks for reading!

It's an interesting anecdote, but from my understanding of the system that simply shouldn't be possible. Your house's interior cell isn't loaded into memory when you are outside in Megaton, so there's no way for the NPC to access your items. I think this fundamental limitation holds true for every version of the engine, from Morrowind to Starfield, but I'd be glad to be proven wrong with concrete evidence.

New comment by paavohtl in "What was Radiant AI, anyway?"

paavohtl — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 20:47:05 +0000

Some games in the Ultima series did, but Morrowind didn't, which is why Radiant AI was developed in the first place. The first chapter of the article is about that.

New comment by paavohtl in "What was Radiant AI, anyway?"

paavohtl — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 19:35:17 +0000

Radiant AI does work exactly like that. The game keeps the global cell-level pathfinding graph in memory at all times, and uses it to simulate NPC travel outside of the loaded area.

New comment by paavohtl in "What was Radiant AI, anyway?"

paavohtl — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 16:46:00 +0000

There's another quote which explains what they meant by "it's not scripted": it's not using their (text-based) scripting language, but the entire sequence is more or less 100% deterministic, using AI packages to control the behavior:

> The reason it’s AI and not scripting is because it uses goals and rules to determine how something is going to be accomplished.

> In the sense that it’s a sequence of events that happen in a particular order, you might consider it scripted, but the way you set up those events, and how the actors accomplish them, is not scripted.

New comment by paavohtl in "What was Radiant AI, anyway?"

paavohtl — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 16:18:44 +0000

Thanks for your kind words! Researching and writing this consumed most of my free time for about two weeks, but I think it was worth it.

New comment by paavohtl in "What was Radiant AI, anyway?"

paavohtl — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 16:14:17 +0000

Yes, I wrote the article. I wouldn't say the system in the release version is vastly different to the pre-release demo (there was only one to my knowledge, the E3 2005 one), as that just demonstrates a tightly scripted sequence of events, which one of the developers was open about even before Oblivion was released. Some things about the system definitely changed (such as disallowing NPCs to pickpocket from the player), but I don't think we have any evidence of whole systems or major behaviors that were actually implemented at some point and cut before release.

New comment by paavohtl in "What was Radiant AI, anyway?"

paavohtl — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 15:53:45 +0000

Radiant AI is in Oblivion and every game they've made since then. There's nothing to enable. The issue is primarily with the game content; it's used all over the place, but in the final game it's not very impactful.