Hacker News: robbies

New comment by robbies in "SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B"

robbies — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 01:03:09 +0000

Words do mean something, and you could have taken 5 minutes of research to make a reasonable counterclaim

Tesla has an insane PE ratio because it’s a casino stock (~350x). As a comparison, NVIDIA IS 40x. SpaceX Is projected to be 300-500x. These are fantasy, completely unrealizable valuations. Similar to Enron, and Enron was over 70x. Enron wasn’t some surprise either.

Typically when PE gets out of whack, market analyzers dig into what is happening because it’s usually chicanery. No longer. Everyone is along for the ride.

New comment by robbies in "SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B"

robbies — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:55:49 +0000

On point #2, they are trying to do that right now. If spacex is fast tracked into the indices, passive investors via index funds will be forced into buying.

New comment by robbies in "Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters"

robbies — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 18:07:41 +0000

100% this, it's fucking insane

New comment by robbies in "Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters"

robbies — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 18:06:17 +0000

Somehow he's flipping $1T SpaceX + $250B xAI (which is now apparently a pile of trash, according to Elon) into a $1.75T IPO because all of the insider investors think they can get away with it, and they are probably right

New comment by robbies in "The United States and Israel have launched a major attack on Iran"

robbies — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 22:14:26 +0000

> And that the result will be Iran becoming a democracy that fully joins the global community.

You can hope that (and I can hope that), but the powers that are driving this military action completely do not care about this outcome. Which makes it exceedingly difficult for me to think this will happen.

I know the US proxies keep blabbering about 'regime change', but there's zero intentionality behind the political work to do that. My guess is balkanization, which won't really go how the US/Israel wants it to go

New comment by robbies in "GLM-4.7-Flash"

robbies — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 18:39:34 +0000

What do you like to use instead? I’ve used the aider leaderboard a couple times, but it didn’t really stick with me

New comment by robbies in "The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe"

robbies — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 22:05:15 +0000

I know enough people at Apple who are at the mercy of the overlord design teams, and it sounds exactly like what you described

New comment by robbies in "How to Think About GPUs"

robbies — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 16:12:43 +0000

I’m being earnest: what is an appropriate level of computer architecture knowledge? SIMD is 50 years old.

From the resource intro: > Expected background: We’re going to assume you have a basic understanding of LLMs and the Transformer architecture but not necessarily how they operate at scale.

I suppose this doesn’t require any knowledge about how computers work, but core CPU functionality seems…reasonable?

New comment by robbies in "How to Think About GPUs"

robbies — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 15:50:47 +0000

As a real time rendering engineer, this is how it’s always been. NV obfuscates much of the info to prevent competitors from understanding changes between generations. Other vendors aren’t great at this either.

In games, you can get NDA disclosures about architectural details that are closer to those docs. But I’ve never really seen any vendor (besides Intel) disclose this stuff publicly

New comment by robbies in "Nvidia won, we all lost"

robbies — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 01:10:29 +0000

They “learned” this trick from their consumer days. Devs always had to reverse-engineer the hypothetical scaling from their fantasy numbers

New comment by robbies in "Black Triangles (2014)"

robbies — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 18:07:58 +0000

I appreciate this perspective, good points, thanks

New comment by robbies in "Black Triangles (2014)"

robbies — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 01:33:56 +0000

(New to comment thread) The article is about setting up all the core infrastructure to start bringing content into the engine, validated by the triangle.

Even tho the Vulkan tutorial might seem like work, it’s not actually preparing you to build anything significant on top of it. This just an overview of the API, not much of a building block.

New comment by robbies in "Researchers uncover on/off switch for breast cancer metastasis in mice"

robbies — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 02:52:04 +0000

Oh great, you’re piling onto the obtuse pile

New comment by robbies in "Meta releases Intermediate Graphics Library"

robbies — Sun, 09 Jul 2023 03:32:09 +0000

Don’t you think this is already happening for most AAA production tech? Most high performance real-time stuff does go top-down. Mid-core stuff or art tooling might be fine with bgfx (or this I guess).

New comment by robbies in "Metal shader converter and the missing device-scoped barrier"

robbies — Wed, 14 Jun 2023 18:02:57 +0000

That's an interesting idea. I wouldn't really call the Raster Block a 'queue' in most GPUs. The most queue like thing is the buffer used to store non-position exports from VS, but then those are interpolated before dropped off into PS. There's a lot of fixed function machinery to convert vertices into fragments (setup, cull, clip, rasterize, early Z/S).

And that's not even considering the vast differences between AMD and NV here. And then there are the mobile GPU constraints.

Still, would be fun to export more of the controls here. If you have access to a console devkit, some of these knobs are exposed.

New comment by robbies in "How Unreal Renders a Frame"

robbies — Fri, 27 Oct 2017 17:50:22 +0000

Oh interesting. TBH, I have zero knowledge on how to do any of this on the web side. All my experience is from working with traditional game engines on the native side.

New comment by robbies in "How Unreal Renders a Frame"

robbies — Thu, 26 Oct 2017 19:53:16 +0000

But now the industry is moving away from pure deferred, as it scales poorly with higher resolutions. 4K, high res mobile devices, VR...

New comment by robbies in "How Unreal Renders a Frame"

robbies — Thu, 26 Oct 2017 19:49:50 +0000

Modern game engines parcel out work via a job system, where functional tasks are dispatched to the cores in a system. This is opposed to the idea of 'one core/thread will own a task for the lifetime of the application, while checking in with a master core/thread'. Actually, most games have a hybrid model. Usually one thread/core is dedicated to rendering, another thread/core is dedicated to high priority tasks/jobs, and then the remaining resources are used by whatever jobs are left.

http://fabiensanglard.net/doom3_bfg/threading.php

New comment by robbies in "How Unreal Renders a Frame"

robbies — Thu, 26 Oct 2017 17:10:39 +0000

UE4 is not the most widely used game engine in the industry. That would be Unity by a wide margin.

If you are restricting to AAA, I’m not even sure if that holds. There are a good amount of big teams that use UE4, I think I’d go with Frostbite due to the sheer amount of titles that EA pushes out that are now based on Frostbite. It’s certainly more big games than UE4 is shipping. I’d probably put Ubisoft ahead of them too with their internal engines.

New comment by robbies in "Tesla's mass firings spread to SolarCity"

robbies — Wed, 25 Oct 2017 23:26:20 +0000

If there's more work to do than what the current employee set can do in 40 hrs/wk, then the team didn't hire enough employees. I realize that rare is the team that is fully staffed, but the employee shouldn't be obliged to make up the delta because management didn't hire appropriately.