I once met a person that never drank water, only soft drinks. It’s not the unhealthiness of this that disturbed me, but the fact they did it without the requisite paperwork.

Unlike those disorganised people I have a formal waiver. I primarily drink steam and crushed glaciers.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Yes it looks like it’s adjusting the port length. (In plain english: some speaker boxes have an intentional hole in them, if you adjust the length of the pathway that sound takes to exit the box through this hole then you adjust how bassy it sounds).

    To add a hollow cavity into the plastic part would immensely complicate the design of the moulds (assuming you try and implement the cavity in the same style & orientation of what gluing that bit of wood in achieves). The plastic shells of this speaker look like they’ve been designed for two-part moulds, which is the cheapest and simplest way of designing a mould. Any internal cavities of the part would require bits of steel mould to be in the cavity during injection, those pieces then have to be removed somehow and that would be a nightmare. Two part moulds can just be clamped & separated over and over again without snagging on anything.

    For the walls of a speaker to reflect sound they need to have a density that is very different to the air inside the chamber. As it turns out basically anything fulfills this criteria, even cardboard makes fine speakers (just don’t get it wet or poke holes in it). Plastic vs MDF wouldn’t matter here acoustically, both are fine.

    Bits of particle board can easily be cut and glued by unskilled workers. For business reasons the injection moulding might be getting done at a different place to the final assembly, and the product manager who wants the speakers properly ported might only be in charge of the latter. IDK.

    glue applied likely by a machine

    I suspect this would be all human assembly. They’ll probably have motorised torque-limited screwdrivers and jigs to hold the parts on during assembly, but still human arms doing the work.

    In particular: stuffing the white polyester wadding in would be a PITA for an automated assembly machine. Humans are tolerant of variation and bits of wadding blowing away, pre-programmed movement robots are not.













  • Bleepingcomputer’s title and article are very misleading, the presentation did NOT reveal a backdoor into an ESP32. It looks like Bleepingcomputer completely misunderstood what was presented (EDIT: and tarlogic isn’t helping with the first sentence on their site).

    Instead the presentation was about using an ESP32 as a tool to attack other devices. Additionally they discovered some undocumented commands that you can send from the ESP32 processor to the ESP32 radio peripheral that let you take control of it and potentially send some extra forms of traffic that could be useful. They did NOT present anything about the ESP32 bluetooth radio being externally attackable.

    Another perspective that might help: imagine you have a cheap bluetooth chipset that is open source and well documented. That would give you more than what the presentation just found. Would Bleepingcomputer then be reporting it’s a backdoor threatening millions of devices?





  • If you end up buying some flux then I’d recommend you also buy and try a block of violinist rosin:

    https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/315948528490

    You break it up and then dab chunks onto your joint whilst soldering. Some will melt off and then burn. From there it acts just like any flux: reduces the metal oxides, makes the solder suddenly flow (behave) a lot better and provides some level of temporary oxygen shielding with its off-gassing products.

    Pros:

    • Cheap
    • Doesn’t smell awful
    • Long working time (easy to use)
    • Very simple ingredient (distilled pine tree sap) made by many manufacturers, so it will never go out of stock.
    • Residues are non-conductive and can be safely left on your boards
    • Residues are reasonably easy to clean (isopropyl & most board cleaners work; ethanol also works but tends to leave ugly white streaks)

    Cons:

    • Smoke is still harmful (smoke = incomplete combustion compounds)
    • Residue is dark, unlike the transparent residue of many no-clean fluxes, so it can hamper inspectability for mass manufacture.
    • Best handled with tweezers, otherwise your fingers end up feeling sticky (pine resin compounds are slightly sticky)
    • Not Modern or youtube popular, so people will tell you that it’s therefore bad or worse than other products.

    I use it often, it’s my favourite for both big joints and fixing smd work. Grab some and try it :) The worst you will be out of pocket is a few dollars.

    I’ve had some issues with other flux products I’ve used because of their alcohol content boiling off & cooling my board whilst I’m trying to heat a region up to work on it. Solid rosin doesn’t have that problem, you can dab it on whilst the iron is still covering some SMD joints (eg QFP pins) on your board and it will work instantly.



  • Ooh thankyou for the link.

    “We can leverage it [ray tracing] for things we haven’t been able to do in the past, which is giving accurate hit detection”

    “So when you fire your weapon, the [hit] detection would be able to tell if you’re hitting a pixel that is leather sitting next to a pixel that is metal”

    “Before ray tracing, we couldn’t distinguish between two pixels very easily, and we would pick one or the other because the materials were too complex. Ray tracing can do this on a per-pixel basis and showcase if you’re hitting metal or even something that’s fur. It makes the game more immersive, and you get that direct feedback as the player.”

    It sounds like they’re assigning materials based off the pixels of a texture map, rather than each mesh in a model being a different material. ie you paint materials onto a character rather than selecting chunks of the character and assigning them.

    I suspect this either won’t be noticeable at all to players or it will be a very minor improvement (at best). It’s not something worth going for in exchange for losing compatibility with other GPUs. It will require a different work pipeline for the 3D modellers (they have to paint materials on now rather than assign them per-mesh), but that’s neither here nor there, it might be easier for them or it might be hell-awful depending on the tooling.

    This particular sentence upsets me:

    Before ray tracing, we couldn’t distinguish between two pixels very easily

    Uhuh. You’re not selling me on your game company.

    “Before” ray tracing, the technology that has been around for decades. That you could do on a CPU or GPU for this very material-sensing task without the players noticing for around 20 years. Interpolate UVs across the colliding triangle and sample a texture.

    I suspect the “more immersion” and “direct feedback” are veils over the real reasoning:

    During NVIDIA’s big GeForce RTX 50 Series reveal, we learned that id has been working closely with the GeForce team on the game for several years (source)

    With such a strong emphasis on RT and DLSS, it remains to be seen how these games will perform for AMD Radeon users

    No-one sane implements Nvidia or AMD (or anyone else) exclusive libraries into their games unless they’re paid to do it. A game dev that cares about its players will make their game run well on all brands and flavours of graphics card.

    At the end of the day this hurts consumers. If your games work on all GPU brands competitively then you have more choice and card companies are better motivated to compete. Whatever amount of money Nvidia is paying the gamedevs to do this must be smaller than what they earn back from consumers buying more of their product instead of competitors.


  • really flashy guns and there is a very intricate damage system that runs at least partially on the GPU.

    Short opinion: no, CPU’s can do that fine (possibly better) and it’s a tiny corner of game logic.

    Long opinion: Intersecting projectile paths with geometry will not gain advantages being moved from CPU to GPU unless you’re dealing with a ridiculous amount of projectiles every single frame. In most games this is less than 1% of CPU time and moving it to the GPU will probably reduce overall performance due to the latency costs (…but a lot of modern engines already have awful frame latency, so it might fit right in fine).

    You would only do this if you have been told by higher ups that you have to OR if you have a really unusual and new game design (thousands of new projectile paths every frame? ie hundreds of thousands of bullets per second). Even detailed multi-layer enemy models with vital components is just a few extra traces, using a GPU to calc that would make the job harder for the engine dev for no gain.

    Fun answer: checkout CNlohr’s noeuclid. Sadly no windows build (I tried cross compiling but ended up in dependency hell), but still compiles and runs under Linux. Physics are on the GPU and world geometry is very non-traditional. https://github.com/cnlohr/noeuclid


  • Triangle is an amplifier and rectangle is a black box (“don’t worry what’s in here, we promise it’s not gremlins”).

    I suspect that the box might be a biasing array for driving the two output transistors, but then I would also expect two wires to come out of it (one for each transistor) rather than a single combined wire.

    Broadcom’s datasheet for their version of the part seems to be more akin to what I’m thinking:

    Could be either. You’d have to decap the chip to find out, the datasheet writers thought these details were not important.

    I have no idea why two of the output pins are tied together. They’re not using many of the pins on this package so maybe they thought “why not”. I’ve also seen dual-optocouplers in this same 8 pin package where pins 6 & 7 are the outputs of the two separate couplers.