Friday, March 19
Daily News Stuff 18 March 2021
Stop Turtle Time Edition
Choco has a brand new opening too, in honour of her endless wars to end the Ender menace. She was a bit late starting so the opening loops a few times; skip ahead to the five minute mark once you seen enough of it.
It's worth staying for a couple of minutes from that point and watching her trip back from the Ender Farm to HoloTown. I didn't know you could do that in Minecraft. Oh, and check out her level when she starts. And her inventory. Not only has she been busy, she hasn't died in a very long time.
Disclaimer: May induce vertigo or motion sickness. Really. Took me a moment to figure out what the hell was going on with the perspective.
Stop Turtle Time Edition
Tech News
- Radeon 6700 XT is here and how it does depends on which review you read. (Tom's Hardware)
Or perhaps more significantly, on which game you are interested in. Performance ranges from slightly behind the 3060 Ti on certain titles to faster than the 3080 on others.
I suspect this is because AMD reduced memory bandwidth and compensated with a very large (96MB) on-chip cache, and some games are happier about that than others. Driver updates will likely improve things going forward, but for now it's worth checking for benchmarks for your favourite games, because that makes the difference between whether this is a good card for you, or a great one.
Of course you have to be able to get it first.
- HP spilled the beans on Intel's upcoming Ice Lake server parts. (Tom's Hardware)
They will go up to 40 cores. This makes perfect sense, because of the way cores are arranged in Intel's server parts. They use an X x X+1 grid - 3x4, 4x5, 5x6 - with two of the grid locations reserved for I/O rather than cores.
So 3x4 gives 10 cores, 4x5 gives 18 cores, and 5x6 gives 28 cores - the current top of the line. Next stop is 6x9, which equals 42.
- AMD's upcoming Van Gogh APU has 256-bit DDR5 support unless it doesn't. (Tom's Hardware)
The information comes from a Linux kernel boot log, which includes these details:
It's possible, the article notes, that this is just the Linux kernel misidentifying four channel DDR5 as 4x64 bits rather than 4x32 bits - DDR5 has 32-bit channels.[ 99.984978] [drm] Detected VRAM RAM=1024M, BAR=1024M
[ 99.984981] [drm] RAM width 256bits DDR5
[ 99.985223] [drm] amdgpu: 1024M of VRAM memory ready
[ 99.985233] [drm] amdgpu: 3072M of GTT memory ready.
But given that this is expected to be a Zen 2 + RDNA 2 part, it's also possible that AMD really is shipping a high-end IGPU with support for 256 bits of DDR5, because they already are. That's exactly what's found in the current Xbox and Playstation lineups.
Well, almost exactly; they use GDDR6 and the Xbox has a 320-bit bus, but they are both Zen 2 + RDNA 2 designs. Simply remove the custom logic designed for either partner and ship a die built with only AMD's standard bits and you'll have the fastest PC APU ever made and it won't even be close.
- Is building SMB directly into the Linux kernel entirely a good idea? (Phoronix)
I seem to recall there having been problems with this before.
- YouTube does not, in fact, have your back. (TorrentFreak)
Though I can see that getting warned of garbage copyright strikes before a video goes live is better than having your entire channel deleted without warning afterwards.
- What the hell is that squiggle-looking thing? (Shapecatcher)
Shapecatcher is Shazam for Unicode. Draw a squiggle and it will find the closest matches. Currently it doesn't handle kanji, but does do a lot of the really weird and rare glyphs.
Let's see... Alchemical symbol for urine? Well, sure, I guess.
Ender Genocide Video of the Day
Choco has a brand new opening too, in honour of her endless wars to end the Ender menace. She was a bit late starting so the opening loops a few times; skip ahead to the five minute mark once you seen enough of it.
It's worth staying for a couple of minutes from that point and watching her trip back from the Ender Farm to HoloTown. I didn't know you could do that in Minecraft. Oh, and check out her level when she starts. And her inventory. Not only has she been busy, she hasn't died in a very long time.
Disclaimer: May induce vertigo or motion sickness. Really. Took me a moment to figure out what the hell was going on with the perspective.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
12:35 AM
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1
"6x9, which equals 42" It does, in base 13.
Posted by: Rick C at Friday, March 19 2021 01:27 AM (eqaFC)
2
"I didn't know you coulddothat in Minecraft."
[aside: possible bug report: I copy-pasted this and it ate the spaces around the italicized word "do". Not sure if you can do anything about it, but I'd never seen it before. While I'm at it, is there any way to make the editor unselect pasted text automatically?]
You can farm nearly everything in Minecraft, and ender pearls are popular for Youtubers for obvious reasons. (I discovered something new recently, via Hermitcraft: you can throw one into a water column with an open trapdoor over it, and then close the trapdoor. Hook the trapdoor up to a redstone button, and it becomes a one-use instant summon: if anyone pushes the button, you'll get popped there. Was abused hilariously several months ago, when a team of the Hermitcrafters created one for emergency meetings, and then a rival team found it and spent several hours carefully moving the pearls elsewhere into an obsidian room with dispensers holding lava buckets in the ceiling.
[aside: possible bug report: I copy-pasted this and it ate the spaces around the italicized word "do". Not sure if you can do anything about it, but I'd never seen it before. While I'm at it, is there any way to make the editor unselect pasted text automatically?]
You can farm nearly everything in Minecraft, and ender pearls are popular for Youtubers for obvious reasons. (I discovered something new recently, via Hermitcraft: you can throw one into a water column with an open trapdoor over it, and then close the trapdoor. Hook the trapdoor up to a redstone button, and it becomes a one-use instant summon: if anyone pushes the button, you'll get popped there. Was abused hilariously several months ago, when a team of the Hermitcrafters created one for emergency meetings, and then a rival team found it and spent several hours carefully moving the pearls elsewhere into an obsidian room with dispensers holding lava buckets in the ceiling.
Posted by: Rick C at Friday, March 19 2021 01:37 AM (eqaFC)
3
There's some impressive low-level emergent behavior in recent versions of Minecraft. Some time ago, they changed the game so that furnaces will hold the XP for smelted items until you remove the item. Create a furnace that's auto-fed charcoal and kelp--both farmable items. Once the output of the furnace is full it will stop accepting new stuff, but it will hold a pile of XP. Build a bunch of them in a row, put a button on each one, build a room around it, and sell access. Boom! You've just created a repair station for mending tools (which, if they're in your hotbar, will grab XP to repair themselves). People come in, push the button while holding a damaged mending tool, and move over to the next one until all their tools/armor are at full health. Profit!
Posted by: Rick C at Friday, March 19 2021 01:42 AM (eqaFC)
4
I has some vague idea they had an Enderman farm, though I hadn't seen it before. I was thinking more of the dizzying perspective changes where she appears to climb up a ladder to the bottom of the world and then through a floating pool of water.
When she tossed the Ender Pearl up the staircase I thought she had flipped gravity somehow, but rewatching it now I can see she just rotated the view while trying to orient herself.
When she tossed the Ender Pearl up the staircase I thought she had flipped gravity somehow, but rewatching it now I can see she just rotated the view while trying to orient herself.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, March 19 2021 01:52 AM (PiXy!)
5
And yeah, the emergent behaviour of Minecraft is definitely one the big draws. Though that also means that sometimes your favourite trick stp[s working when there's an new release - the HoloJP iron and gold farms both broke when they updated the server.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, March 19 2021 01:57 AM (PiXy!)
6
*had
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, March 19 2021 01:57 AM (PiXy!)
7
Yeah, some of the Minecraft devs absolutely hate iron farms and go out of their way to break them. It's happened at least twice I know of. Breaking iron farms is a major part of the two large villager changes they did.
Posted by: Rick C at Friday, March 19 2021 06:41 AM (eqaFC)
8
But yeah, it does look weird. My first thought was maybe it was to keep mobs from falling down the shaft, although the ladder should do that on its own. But also, if that were the case, the water would be on the top block.
Having just tried it out in 1.16.5, it's--as I figured--a waterlogged block. I would've thought the water would fall like it does in open space, but apparently not--the ladder below the waterlogged block acts like it would have in older versions of Minecraft.. Putting the waterlogged block at the top, though, is a bad idea. The game acts really weird. It's hard to get into the tunnel from the top, and when you do, you get bounced up by bouyancy, and then sink. But if you hit S to go down, or W to go up, either way the game makes you move up. You can hit shift to sink, but then you freeze as soon as you get below the water. Very jarring at first.
As far as reorienting, at least while climbing the ladder, I do that all the time, myself. If you do it while you're climbing you're facing the right way when you get to the top. Also: facing in a direction you're not moving can have hilarious consequences if people are watching you. A long time ago, I was playing Descent 2 in college. I was going down a square-cross-section tunnel that rotated in one direction, like the risers in old-fashioned wrought-iron porch fences. Because I thought it was funny, I was rotating the opposite direction from the tunnel--that is, it was going clockwise and I was going counter-clockwise. Someone walked by me, asked, "Is that Doom?" and immediately urped, clapped his hands over his mouth, and ran out of the room.
Having just tried it out in 1.16.5, it's--as I figured--a waterlogged block. I would've thought the water would fall like it does in open space, but apparently not--the ladder below the waterlogged block acts like it would have in older versions of Minecraft.. Putting the waterlogged block at the top, though, is a bad idea. The game acts really weird. It's hard to get into the tunnel from the top, and when you do, you get bounced up by bouyancy, and then sink. But if you hit S to go down, or W to go up, either way the game makes you move up. You can hit shift to sink, but then you freeze as soon as you get below the water. Very jarring at first.
As far as reorienting, at least while climbing the ladder, I do that all the time, myself. If you do it while you're climbing you're facing the right way when you get to the top. Also: facing in a direction you're not moving can have hilarious consequences if people are watching you. A long time ago, I was playing Descent 2 in college. I was going down a square-cross-section tunnel that rotated in one direction, like the risers in old-fashioned wrought-iron porch fences. Because I thought it was funny, I was rotating the opposite direction from the tunnel--that is, it was going clockwise and I was going counter-clockwise. Someone walked by me, asked, "Is that Doom?" and immediately urped, clapped his hands over his mouth, and ran out of the room.
Posted by: Rick C at Friday, March 19 2021 07:11 AM (eqaFC)
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