Linkblog/2025/02/18
Slang, Dither on Playdate, LLM use Ethical?, x86 on NES, Terry Games, TF2 Open Source.
Slang - The Slang Shading Language and Compiler
A Khronos group supported high level shader language, with the intent to be converted to any language you want, with a lot of modern niceties like LSP integration and such.
Also, from this slideshow:
The entire Source 2 HLSL codebase is now Slang.
That’s crazy.
Some chatter on the FNA Creators Club discord points to Slang maybe having some oddities with regards to SDL3 GPU however.
Katelyn Gadd mentioned “yeah iirc slang is opinionated about layout and wants to do it for you”.
Which is interesting, given I’ve been writing some SDL3 GPU code, and you have explicit control over each layout(...) that slots into a shader, I would assume everything would work like that, but supposedly not?
Aras Pranckevičius - Surface-Stable Fractal Dither on Playdate
The new approach to 3D dithering, on the playdate.
Suzanne on the playdate looking so nice.
Porting runevision/Dither3D to my work in progress ‘engine’ would be dope.
Hoping to create a space that isn’t my linkblog to discuss said engine, will for sure reference it from linkblog entires though once they’re created.
Nicole T. - Can I ethically use LLMs?
Nicole brings up some great points on the ethics of LLMs, to summarize,
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LLMs […] use a lot of energy.
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The training data for LLMs has largely been lifted without the consent of the people who generated that data.
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There’s a lot of LLM usage that is just trying to replace people in entire jobs. I mean, it feels like all of it.
All of the above is to be considered, and yet, I use them because they are useful to boosting my productivity and answering questions faster than StackOverflow / GitHub issues / etc.
Maybe the answer is no, but the entire industry is currently revolving around these tools, both from people making things, and people making things that use these tools (like, my current job).
decrazyo/nes86 - x86 emulation on the NES
NES86 is an IBM PC emulator for the NES. The goal of this project is to emulate an Intel 8086 processor and supporting PC hardware well enough to run the Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset (ELKS), including a shell and utilities. It should be possible to run other x86 software as long as it doesn’t require more than a simple serial terminal.
Woah.
Terry Cavanagh - Out Now: Terry’s Other Games
Basically, it’s a big messy personal collection of stuff I’ve made over the last twenty years.
Love seeing these sorts of releases, old projects usually scattered around the web being cleaned up and bolted together into one single release making them accessible.
Reminds me of Edmund McMillen’s ‘The Basement Collection’.
As of this commit, TF2 is open source, extremely cool to see.
While its not as cool as id Software releasing old engines under the GPL (during the days that John Carmack seemingly made them to do before they were bought out), at least its a company in the modern day still considering making source available years after release a thing.
idTech5 please, then idTech6, then idTech7, then idTech8, please and thanks ZeniMax Media.