Shurimal

Leslie Fish is still writing music. Plus her old works from 1980-s (eg It's Sister Jenny's Turn to Throw the Bomb and Firestorm) are as relevant now as they were 40 years ago.

Should, yes.

We lost a summer-long experiment back in the uni. Everyone knew someone should come in at least one time in an evening to check whether the mission-critical timer actually works. But no-one bothered to do it. Was a lot of head scratching before the heads of the experiment figured out why the data was all out of whack.

Then there's this book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/766056.High_Speed_Digital_Design

Forget about the neighborhood; the whole city's omae wa mou shindeiru along with the suburbs.

1999 Aliens vs. Predaror had:

• actual 3D waves. The mesh for the water surface was actually transformed and reacted to your character moving through it creating waves—you could slosh the whole small pools around by running around in them. No shader trickery there.
• explosion fireballs that were 3D and freaking reacted to the environment. Throw a grenade on the floor, the fireball is hemispherical. Throw in into a ventilation shaft, you get a pillar of fire shooting out from the opening. It was absolutely mind-blowing!
• physics engine that allowed physics-enabled objects to be thrown around, bouncing from the walls etc. In 1999. Bizarrely, the objects couldn't rotate so they always retained the same orientation. It saw use in level design where you could destroy the supports of some stone blocks and let them fall down to block some large pipes.
• flame thrower flame reflected from the walls. You could shoot around a corner or set yourself on fire in confined spaces with it.
• no apparent limit for texture resolution. I remember people modding it with 1k and 2k textures (originals were like 64x64 or 128x128). In 2002.

In flight sim world "photo realistic" meant actual aerophotos as textures for the ground.

Looked passable...

...From 30000 ft altitude. From 1000 ft it was laughably horrible🙃

It is my opinion that we reached peak graphics 6 or 7 years ago when GTX1080 was king. Why?

1. Games from that era look gorgeous (eg Shadow of Tomb Raider), yet were well optimized to run high/ultra at FHD on RX570.
2. We didn't need to rely on fakery like DLSS and frame generation to get playable frame rates. If anything, people used to supersample for the ultimate picture quality. Even upping the rendering scale to 1.25 made everything so crisp.
3. MSAA and SMAA antialiasing look better, but somehow even TAA from that era doesn't seem as blurry. Today, might as well use FXAA.

Graphics today seem ass-backward to me: render at 60...70% scale to have good framerates, FX are often rendered at even lower resolution, slap on overly blurry TAA to hide the jaggies, then use some upsample trickery to get to the native resolution. And it's still blurry, so squirt some sharpening and noise on top to create an illusion of detail. And still runs like crap, so throw in frame interpolation to get the illusion of higher frame rate.

I think it's high time we should be able to run non-raytracing graphics at 4k native and raytracing at 2.5k native on 500€ MSRP GPU-s with no trickery involved.

Winamp hasn't changed, but Foobar2000 and its plugins have only got better over the years.

How’s that for a business model: give the customer what they want?

They're doing just that, alright.

But people buying the products are not the customers of these big publicly traded companies.

Yup. It happens. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzG-qji05Lc

"Xitter". It pronounces almost like "Shitter".

One thing I've learned about stainless steel is it's stain less, not stain proof. It will rust in humid environments, it'll just do it slower than carbon steel.