What is a former q3 champion doing these days? I'm genuinely curious. Since you are on hacker news I assume you do something with software. Any skills that you picked up back then that are useful today?
I’ll credit Quake for helping/exposing me to networking, filesystems, and shaders at a young age - one of the few games that truly encouraged (à la Quake Console) making modifications and setting booleans to configure settings. That was enough at the time to encourage me to teach myself JavaScript, PHP, and SQL - as I had some web projects in mind that I needed to execute on for the Quake clan I founded. This later became freelance, which later became a side gig through school. I was also grateful for the various sponsorships and earnings at the time so I could keep my equipment up to date and pay for storage.
Fast forward a bit, and I’ve mostly worked in SecEng at a number of great companies, most of them popular FinTech and FAANGs..I’m extremely fortunate and have been able to work at all my favorite companies. I’d like to think at minimum, Quake prepared me professionally be meticulous in my craft, study human pattern behaviors, and know when to take risk.
Lastly, I can (hopefully) better answer your question in a few years as I am just now working through switching careers completely to become a Motion Designer. There’s something extremely appealing to me to be able to work with 3D + Engineering, while still being able to solve problems AND feel creative at the same time.
..maybe this desire stems from Quake, maybe not. Either way, Quake has a permanent location in my heart.
I think early pc shooters (doom, quake, unreal, etc) had a whole legion of kids learn the basics of computing. typing commands in a console. Understanding latency, what servers meant. Installing mods and drivers. It was a fantastic, motivating introduction to system administration.
UT99 did it for me. The game had a built in IRC client. That exposed me to the community outside of the game itself. And then once I heard the game ran better under Linux… my fate was sealed.
Firmware is using cache as RAM (e.g. https://www.coreboot.org/images/6/6c/LBCar.pdf) to do early init, like DRAM training. I guess later things in the boot chain rely on DRAM being set up probably though.
Probably a OpenJDK Zero VM build. That's a configuration without JIT or template interpreter, but a "plain" C++ switch dispatch interpreter that requires no runtime code generation.
Sure, but neither javac (the Java to bytecode compiler) or HotSpot are doing that. The former tries to preserve as much as possible, and for the latter interprocedure analysis is too costly at run-time.
It is done, but for this case the problem is partial compilation. For this you'd need methods to be tagged as pure, but that assumption needs to propagate and it could be violated by a library being upgraded.
How solid does it run? Is it able to make use of all what is currently making the Mac Studio so interesting for LLMs? And does it handle all the power management as it should? These are honest questions, as I'm in the need of a new workstation and eying a Mac Studio even if I have never used any Apple products before (with the exception for the iPods).
You can also just run macOS and use Tart, Docker, or UDM and run VMs/containers for your services. Asahi isn't bad either, but for some people it's a bit more hassle to set it up and maintain versus macOS.
Not quite - what you said is true for a hypothetical "stage4" however there is a distinct difference between stage2 and stage3. While they are built from the same source code, and therefore have the same logic, they are lowered by different backends, meaning they will have potentially drastically different performance characteristics depending on the differences between the stage1 and stage2 backend, respectively.
