WaterWaiver

If you end up buying some flux then I'd recommend you also buy and try a block of violinist rosin:

https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/315948528490

You break it up and then dab chunks onto your joint whilst soldering. Some will melt off and then burn. From there it acts just like any flux: reduces the metal oxides, makes the solder suddenly flow (behave) a lot better and provides some level of temporary oxygen shielding with its off-gassing products.

Pros:

• Cheap
• Doesn't smell awful
• Long working time (easy to use)
• Very simple ingredient (distilled pine tree sap) made by many manufacturers, so it will never go out of stock.
• Residues are non-conductive and can be safely left on your boards
• Residues are reasonably easy to clean (isopropyl & most board cleaners work; ethanol also works but tends to leave ugly white streaks)

Cons:

• Smoke is still harmful (smoke = incomplete combustion compounds)
• Residue is dark, unlike the transparent residue of many no-clean fluxes, so it can hamper inspectability for mass manufacture.
• Best handled with tweezers, otherwise your fingers end up feeling sticky (pine resin compounds are slightly sticky)
• Not Modern or youtube popular, so people will tell you that it's therefore bad or worse than other products.

I use it often, it's my favourite for both big joints and fixing smd work. Grab some and try it :) The worst you will be out of pocket is a few dollars.

I've had some issues with other flux products I've used because of their alcohol content boiling off & cooling my board whilst I'm trying to heat a region up to work on it. Solid rosin doesn't have that problem, you can dab it on whilst the iron is still covering some SMD joints (eg QFP pins) on your board and it will work instantly.

Walked to the next station and got on a different line there:

(It's vandalism I promise, same red stuff used for graffiti that has been partly washed off)

Doh. Got it now.

You had me excited that there was another 'gong I hadn't heard about, but I can't find Cottongong on a map. I am getting wooshed?

gets off train after long trip "Oh no, I'm in the Wrong Gong!"

It looks identical to me. Same size before clicking, same size after right clicking -> Open image in new tab.

GNOME 2 was fun and easy. It felt like they were trying to learn from the mistakes of Windows and Mac UIs.

Ooh thankyou for the link.

“We can leverage it [ray tracing] for things we haven’t been able to do in the past, which is giving accurate hit detection”

“So when you fire your weapon, the [hit] detection would be able to tell if you’re hitting a pixel that is leather sitting next to a pixel that is metal”

“Before ray tracing, we couldn’t distinguish between two pixels very easily, and we would pick one or the other because the materials were too complex. Ray tracing can do this on a per-pixel basis and showcase if you’re hitting metal or even something that’s fur. It makes the game more immersive, and you get that direct feedback as the player.”

It sounds like they're assigning materials based off the pixels of a texture map, rather than each mesh in a model being a different material. ie you paint materials onto a character rather than selecting chunks of the character and assigning them.

I suspect this either won't be noticeable at all to players or it will be a very minor improvement (at best). It's not something worth going for in exchange for losing compatibility with other GPUs. It will require a different work pipeline for the 3D modellers (they have to paint materials on now rather than assign them per-mesh), but that's neither here nor there, it might be easier for them or it might be hell-awful depending on the tooling.

This particular sentence upsets me:

Before ray tracing, we couldn’t distinguish between two pixels very easily

Uhuh. You're not selling me on your game company.

"Before" ray tracing, the technology that has been around for decades. That you could do on a CPU or GPU for this very material-sensing task without the players noticing for around 20 years. Interpolate UVs across the colliding triangle and sample a texture.

I suspect the "more immersion" and "direct feedback" are veils over the real reasoning:

During NVIDIA's big GeForce RTX 50 Series reveal, we learned that id has been working closely with the GeForce team on the game for several years (source)

With such a strong emphasis on RT and DLSS, it remains to be seen how these games will perform for AMD Radeon users

No-one sane implements Nvidia or AMD (or anyone else) exclusive libraries into their games unless they're paid to do it. A game dev that cares about its players will make their game run well on all brands and flavours of graphics card.

At the end of the day this hurts consumers. If your games work on all GPU brands competitively then you have more choice and card companies are better motivated to compete. Whatever amount of money Nvidia is paying the gamedevs to do this must be smaller than what they earn back from consumers buying more of their product instead of competitors.

really flashy guns and there is a very intricate damage system that runs at least partially on the GPU.

Short opinion: no, CPU's can do that fine (possibly better) and it's a tiny corner of game logic.

Long opinion: Intersecting projectile paths with geometry will not gain advantages being moved from CPU to GPU unless you're dealing with a ridiculous amount of projectiles every single frame. In most games this is less than 1% of CPU time and moving it to the GPU will probably reduce overall performance due to the latency costs (...but a lot of modern engines already have awful frame latency, so it might fit right in fine).

You would only do this if you have been told by higher ups that you have to OR if you have a really unusual and new game design (thousands of new projectile paths every frame? ie hundreds of thousands of bullets per second). Even detailed multi-layer enemy models with vital components is just a few extra traces, using a GPU to calc that would make the job harder for the engine dev for no gain.

Fun answer: checkout CNlohr's noeuclid. Sadly no windows build (I tried cross compiling but ended up in dependency hell), but still compiles and runs under Linux. Physics are on the GPU and world geometry is very non-traditional. https://github.com/cnlohr/noeuclid

Triangle is an amplifier and rectangle is a black box ("don't worry what's in here, we promise it's not gremlins").

I suspect that the box might be a biasing array for driving the two output transistors, but then I would also expect two wires to come out of it (one for each transistor) rather than a single combined wire.

Broadcom's datasheet for their version of the part seems to be more akin to what I'm thinking:

Could be either. You'd have to decap the chip to find out, the datasheet writers thought these details were not important.

I have no idea why two of the output pins are tied together. They're not using many of the pins on this package so maybe they thought "why not". I've also seen dual-optocouplers in this same 8 pin package where pins 6 & 7 are the outputs of the two separate couplers.

So many CMCs seem to be marketed based of visual appearance and hope. I guess maybe people already have a design that works, so they go for things that look like clones visually? Otherwise I don't get how anyone would choose their product when there are alternatives with actual specs.

Another gripe: When the only datasheet available is a combined one with tables and graphs listing the specs of dozens of part variants. But yours isn't on there. So you find two similar models in the list and mentally interpolate between the graphs whilst worrying whether or not this is a long-term supply item or some spares that a retailer is selling off from a custom order run.

I just realised how hard it would be to manufacture this thing.

Imagine having to bend those copper wires into that shape around an already-existing toroid ring. Or maybe they glue together a few pieces of ring?