I can't reply to the person that replied to you, so

> You’re looking as a dev, but the reality is that a consumer cannot see technical debt.

The consumer can't _see_ technical debt, but they sure as heck can be impacted by it.

- Technical debt means the code base is harder to work with later. So fixes/enhancements take longer to make it into the code (and sometimes never can)

- This particular type of technical debt means the code by the game developers sets precedent, and the next developer may us it as an example. So the amount of code incorrectly using the api grows faster over time

> technical debt, and that has a cost that someone, somewhere is going to have to pay in some form

There is no reason anyone has to pay each and every iota of technical debt. Plenty of things with technical debt hit end of life and no one ever looks in that code again. I suspect most technical debt goes this way - in program, program never updates (or minor updates), then dies.

Your claim would require every piece of technical debt in anything ever (code, buildings, cars, anywhere) has to be removed before the thing goes end of life or goes into a mode where it never is changed. That seems ludicrous to me.

Does anyone talk about how technical debt often just gets thrown into the garbage so we can buy fancy new technical crap, and its what pays for most of yalls jobs.

You’re looking as a dev, but the reality is that a consumer cannot see technical debt. If the studio churns out a game, the vendor sprinkles on some optimizations, people play it and move on, then the tech debt just vaporizes into the void. It’s not real at that point.

> My understanding was it was optimized by reducing precision or something to a visibly apparent degree.

If only we had that sort of a control over rendering for every game ourselves - since projects like OptiScaler at least let us claw back control over sometimes proprietary upscaling and even framegen, but it's not quite enough: https://github.com/optiscaler/OptiScaler

I'd also mention Lossless Scaling here, though it still only works on upscaling and framegen and with worse methods, but at least works for most games out there: https://store.steampowered.com/app/993090/Lossless_Scaling/

I want to be able to freely toggle between different types of AA and SSAO and reflections and lighting and LOD systems and various shader effects (especially things like chromatic aberration or motion blur) and ray tracing and all that, instead of having to hope that the console port that's offered to me has those abilities in the graphics menu and that whoever is making the decisions hasn't decided that actually "low" graphics (that would at least run smoothly) would look too bad for the game's brand image or something.

AAAA isn't a real thing, it's a memey joke based on a press release by a microsoft studio that was closed before ever releasing a single game

The more money you throw at an effort, the more gets flushed out as waste, and the harder it is to maintain quality. Pretty universal across business.

AAA/AAAA just means "how much money was spent developing the game". High cost doesn't automatically equal high quality. In fact, it seems after a certain point to mean the opposite.

High price...

An app being able to see itself as the default browser sounds like such a dangerous API, especially if it can be done silently without the user realizing it.

A simple example would be that the function glGetString(GL_EXTENSIONS) crashes the original Quake engine and many licensees, because it's expecting no more than a 256 character string.

The driver looks to see if a known old game is calling it, and if it's one known to crash, it returns no more than 256 characters, and likely also puts all the _old_ extensions that the game is likely to know and react to in the string.

There are also all sorts of games that called APIs in a particular order or set particular options, because they represented a "fast path" at the time, and now they don't, but if you're that program, then yes they do.

Ultimately, this clutter is what let do the development of the Vulcan API, to stop games second-guessing graphics APIs which themselves second-guess the games.

To avoid doxxing myself: In a deep call stack it’s possible to end up sanitizing inputs multiple times and in different ways.

A frequent example I’ve encountered is web frameworks that have to keep checking for escaped text because they didn’t write it in horizontal layers where you know for sure that all inputs have been scrubbed when they reach this function but not that one. So the same functions get called with data that comes from your team and from customers. Reuse is tricky.

I don't think you are a corporate shill. I do think that you immediately going "clearly the tweet is wrong" without doing any research whatsoever was unwarranted, though. You also keep bringing up that it's 93 commits but all getting squashed you have to do is search for "cutlass" to find out what is going on. I think you're obligated to do at least that when you call it out for being wrong.