Well, it’s physically impossible to capture more energy from burning hydrogen and oxygen than it takes to separate it. Combustion engines are only something like 30-40% efficient in ideal operating conditions.
Building a repairable car on the other hand is very much possible.
It’s a struggle even finding the manual these days if you don’t already know where it is / what it’s called. I was searching about an issue with my car recently and like 90% of the results are generic AI-generated “How to fix ______” with no actual information specific to the car I’m searching for.
Check out the benchmark I edited in to my original post. These are not user-provided strings in my case.
C++ already does that for short strings
I’ve already been discussing this. Maybe read the rest of the thread.
Also the case in the standard library
I think you’re missing the point of why. I built this to be a nearly drop in replacement for the standard string. If this wasn’t the case it would need to do even more processing and work to pass the strings to anything.
discontinued because it was against the standard.
Standards don’t matter for an internal type that’s not exposed to public APIs. I’m not trying to be exactly compatible with everything under the sun. There’s no undefined behavior here so it’s fine
I don’t use 256 bytes everywhere. I use a mix of 64, 128, and 256 byte strings depending on the specific use case.
In a hot path, having the data inline is much more important than saving a few hundred bytes. Cache efficiency plus eliminating heap allocations has huge performance benefits in a game engine that’s running frames as fast as possible.
22 characters is significantly less useful than 255 characters. I use this for resource name keys, asset file paths, and a few other scenarios. The max size is configurable, so I know that nothing I am going to store is ever going to require heap allocations (really bad to be doing every frame in a game engine).
I developed this specifically after benchmarking a simpler version and noticed a significant amount of time being spent in strlen(), and it had real benefits in my case.
Admittedly just storing a struct with a static buffer and separate size would have worked pretty much the same and eliminated the 255 char limitation, but it was fun to build.
One cool trick that can be used with circular buffers is to use memory mapping to map the same block of memory to 2 consecutive virtual address blocks. That way you can read the entire contents of the buffer as if it was just a regular linear buffer with an offset.
I came up with a kind of clever data type for storing short strings in a fixed size struct so they can be stored on the stack or inline without any allocations.
It’s always null-terminated so it can be passed directly as a C-style string, but it also stores the string length without using any additional data (Getting the length would normally have to iterate to find the end).
The trick is to store the number of unused bytes in the last character of the buffer. When the string is full, there are 0 unused bytes and the size byte overlaps the null terminator.
(Only works for strings < 256 chars excluding null byte)
Implementation in C++ here: https://github.com/frustra/strayphotons/blob/master/src/common/common/InlineString.hh
Edit: Since a couple people don’t seem to understand the performance impact of this vs regular std::string, here’s a demo: https://godbolt.org/z/34j7obnbs This generates 10000 strings like “Hello, World! 00001” via concatenation. The effect is huge in debug mode, but still has performance benefits with optimizations turned on:
With -O3 optimization
std::string: 0.949216ms
char[256] with strlen: 0.88104ms
char[256] without strlen: 0.684734ms
With no optimization:
std::string: 3.5501ms
char[256] with strlen: 0.885888ms
char[256] without strlen: 0.687733ms
(You may need to run it a few times to get sample numbers due to random server load on godbolt)
Changing the buffer size to 32 bytes has a negligible performance improvement over 256 bytes in this case, but might be slightly faster due to the whole string fitting in a cache line.
Have you heard of the concepts of Internet bandwidth and compression? This article isn’t talking about poor quality microphones or cameras. You could have the best camera and microphone in the world, but it won’t do you any good on dial-up, low speed “broadband”, or unreliable connection to the Internet.
they want them to be rich, happy and healthy so they keep coming back and spending more money.
See there’s the problem right there. They don’t need customers to be any of those things to suck every last cent out of them. Corporations would love nothing more than becoming a monopoly on human essentials like food, water, housing, etc… because people will go to great lengths to afford food whether they like it or not.
I think to a lot of people “political” means specifically picking sides between Republican/Democrat unfortunately, not talking about actual policy. That seems to be how they were using it here, considering they tried defending the claim by saying they’ve worked with Trump’s organization in the past.
I definitely agree though, people have every reason to get political (your version) these days, and it’s generally justified.
To me, the term evokes a feeling of an unmaintained mechanical machine that isn’t running right. Considering it seems to be meant as a derogatory term towards LLMs, I understand how it came about, though personally I can’t get over the similarity to “clunker” which is often used endearingly to refer to an old vehicle. I wish we had a term that was more associated with digital systems.
Didn’t The Crew shut down servers recently anyway? I thought that was the catalyst for Stop Killing Games
I’ve been working on my own game engine for years, and there’s all sorts of cool stuff it can do, but recently I’ve been expanding the scripting to be capable of streaming images to the GPU.
Today I got Doom running inside my engine as a hot-reloadable plugin script:
Video: https://wednesdayos.sw0.com/share/2025-12-13_00-25-14.mp4
The engine has real-time bounce lighting using a highly modified voxel cone tracing algorithm I developed (doesn’t require ray tracing hardware), which I’ve been able to get running even on my Steam Deck!
Video: https://wednesdayos.sw0.com/share/2025-03-21 23-50-29.mp4
The whole thing is open source here: https://github.com/frustra/strayphotons
I see, so you’re talking about ISPs splitting up service into multiple packages like a cable company. I guess multiplying an existing subscription counts as a new subscription 👍
Your ISP and Netflix already charge subscriptions, what other “part of the internet” is left to charge for? There’s several subscriptions for social media as well if you count blue checkmarks and the like.
The free market will decide it’s actually more profitable to shut down bus service entirely and pivot to helping ICE transport bus loads of “illegal immigrants”.
Those specs sound like HDMI 2 anyway. HDMI 2.1 can do 4K @ 144Hz with HDR. Or apparently even 10K @ 120Hz.
Legitimately it is a winning strategy: https://www.history.com/articles/us-invasion-of-panama-noriega