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Epic Showcases Gorgeous Ray Tracing Unreal Engine 4 Demo Running on a Single RTX 2080Ti GPU

During yesterday’s ‘State of Unreal’ keynote at the Game Developers Conference 2019, Epic Games showcased a gorgeous ray tracing demo titled ‘Troll’. Running on a single GeForce RTX 2080Ti graphics card and made with the Unreal Engine 4.22, Troll was developed with no custom plugins or code by Goodbye Kansas and Deep Forest Films.

‘Troll’ was visually inspired by the works of Swedish painter and illustrator John Bauer, who is famous for his illustrations of Swedish folklore and fairy tales anthology ‘Among Gnomes and Trolls’. Epic’s 3Lateral took care of 3D and 4D facial scanning.

“Troll’ from Goodbye Kansas and Deep Forest Films | GDC 2019 | Unreal Engine (1m33s)

Somewhere around 4 years ago, I had a coworker named Vic.

At first blush, Vic was a charming man. He was a Brit and was originally hired on as a temp worker to pick up a few tickets while the rest of the team was busy with a major project. Vic seemed to have a good attitude (IMO probably the biggest thing with a new hire), and was eager to learn.

We ended up hiring Vic full time and as the project was winding down I started spending time on him trying to get him trained up and more useful. I quickly realized that training this guy was going to be a goddamn expedition. I had to train him on switching directories in a command window. I was literally starting from zero with him.

I would spend hours sitting beside him teaching him super basic stuff that many non-IT users probably know. After quite a few sessions, it became clear to me that this guy had some sort of learning disability. He was practically untrainable. I would try train him on something and he would take notes on whatever we were doing, but the next day we would be back at square one.

At one point I had assigned him a simple task that should have taken an hour or two to complete. I gave him two weeks to do it. Every day I would ask how is XX coming along? "Oh, good", he would say followed by some frantic clicking. I would tell him if he has any questions, I'm right here.

Finally the two weeks were up and I asked for the completed whatever it was. He had nothing. He had literally nothing to show. I lost it on him. "What the hell have you been doing for the last two weeks? You had literally one thing to do that should have taken a couple hours and you have nothing. I was right there and you asked nothing. What the hell, man?"

That was the last straw for me. This guy was fucking useless. Worse than useless. He would actively fuck stuff up and I would have to fix it. I told management that he was garbage and needed to go and a couple months later he was gone.

That should be the end of the story, but unfortunately that is just the beginning. After being let go, he contacted the team to see if anyone would be willing to give him a reference. The 3 of us politely told him that no, we didn't feel comfortable providing a reference. For a couple months, he would call us every few weeks asking for us to give us a reference we would always refuse. He decided to use one of my coworkers as a reference anyways, which was a little awkward when they called her. She had to politely refuse.

We went a couple years without hearing or thinking about him, until about a month ago when he emails my coworker asking why she won't give him a reference. He also sends her a message on Facebook asking the same. My coworker goes to our manager and HR about this, and together they draft up a reply basically saying I don't feel comfortable providing a reference and furhter inquiries can be made directly to HR.

Well he didn't like that. Since then he has been sending increasingly crazy emails. Here is the most recent:

Mr [corporate legal counsel],

Good Morning.

Finally, I got your attention.

Listen, do not tell me what you are going to do.

ACTION speaks louder than 'empty' words.

Go ahead and take your steps.

Let's head over Queens Bench, we will escalate this matter.

Don't forget now, file for harassment and to top it off, get a restraining order.

Keep smiling and have and good day.

Good Luck :)

[crazy Vic],

What a nutbar... This guy seems to think he is entitled to a good reference. He was not good with computers. He sucked at learning. He was/is not IT material. I don't see what his end game is. Does he expect that after enough harassment we'll all of a sudden be all like "Oh, sorry, yea you actually are a good worker; I'd love to give a reference..."

Fucking guy...

AMD Ryzen 3000 CPUs Get Early BIOS Support in X370 & X470 Motherboards, Next-Gen Zen 2 Based Family Internally Codenamed as Valhalla

Also, the creator of the Ryzen DRAM calculator has listed down some new features that might be coming in the Ryzen 3000 processors with one confirming that the Ryzen 3000 series processors would indeed ship with CCD (Compute Core Design, a new name for CCX), support a maximum of 32 threads which confirms 16 core parts, following is the full list of features which were found:

1) New memory controller with partial error correction for nonECC memory
2) Desktop processor with two (2 CCD) chiplets on board, 32 threads maximum
3) New MBIST (Memory built-in self-test)
4) Core watchdog – is a fail/safe function used to reset a system in case the microprocessor gets lost due to address or data errors
5) XFR – at the moment I do not see anything special about it, the algorithm and limits have been updated. Scalar Controll come back with new processors.
6) Updated core control has a symmetric configuration of the active cores . In 2CCD configurations, each chiplet has its own RAM channel in order to minimize latency to memory access. 1 channel on 8 cores will be a bottleneck if you use the system in the default state.

Have you heard of any feature like this? Does it even matter?

If you are buying 8 GB or 16+ GB DRAM modules, do they need to be ECC?

Can somebody remind me why we should believe anything he says about the "Russia" bullshit?

No, we're not even close to "Peak Chutzpah"

I like to take a moment to thank all the people that work hard to keep this site up and running.

For many of us, this website is like a second home. There are a lot of people that work hard to keep this site up and running with new content for us to talk about. These people are not being paid, yet do fantastic work.

I'd like to thank The Mighty Buzzard for a lot of the stuff he (presumably ;) ) does behind the scenes that none of us ever hear about or see. The editors do fantastic work by editing stories so they look consistant. This takes a lot of time. These people donate significant amounts of time for us. Take a moment and thank them:

martyb
janrinok
CoolHand
takyon
NotSanguine
charon
Fnord666
chromas
mrpg
FatPhil
cmn32480

I'm sorry if I forgot anyone! It wasn't intentional and I appreaciate whatever you do too!

Pence hosts openly gay Irish prime minister and his partner for breakfast

Vice President Pence hosted the openly gay prime minister of Ireland and his partner for breakfast at the Naval Observatory Thursday.

Leo Varadkar, who is in the U.S. for an annual meeting with U.S. officials ahead of St. Patrick's Day, shared photos of the event on Twitter.

[...] Although Pence has hosted Varadkar before, this is the first time the vice president has hosted the partner of an openly gay world leader.

gay men > lone woman

Join Us for a Tom's Hardware AMA with Intel Optane

1. What even is it?
2. Why does it suck?
3. Can I have some for free?

Comma.ai founder George Hotz wants to free humanity from the AI simulation

What keeps George Hotz, the enigmatic hacker and founder of self-driving startup Comma.ai, up at night is not whether his autonomous car company will be successful or what other entrepreneurial venture he might embark on next. No, instead, Hotz says he’s tortured by the possibility that all of us are in an advanced simulation observed by either an omnipotent extraterrestrial or supernatural being, or an artificial intelligence far beyond the realm of human conception and understanding.

“There’s no evidence this is not true,” an animated Hotz told a crowd at his SXSW talk on Friday, aptly titled “Jailbrealing the Simulation” and billed on the festival’s website as an exploration of whether breaking out of a simulated universe means we can “meet God” and kill him. “It’s easy to imagine things that are so much smarter than you and they could build a cage you wouldn’t even recognize.”

[...] It’s hard to know seriously to take Hotz sometimes; he strikes me as someone who often says something to get a reaction or to verbalize his inner monologue as a way of making sense of it. And he said as much onstage. “Do I actually believe it? Some days yes,” he said. “Sometimes I don’t know how I feel about something until I say it out loud.”

The crowd didn’t much care either way. During the Q&A, an audience member asked Hotz if he would consider partnering with transhumanists — people who believe in humanity’s eventual evolution by way of merging the body and mind with robotics and AI — to found his church. Hotz was rather ambivalent to the idea; perhaps he didn’t think people would take him at his word. But if he does a start a church, the sermon he gave at SXSW yesterday was delivered to a room of would-be believers.

Smoke weed everyday.

Related: George Hotz's Comma.Ai Cancels Comma One

Sometimes you randomly things of events from the past. This morning I was thinking about a girl I met at the wave pool when I was about 13-14. It's a slow day at work, so I'm sharing the story.

I was at the Wave Pool with my Dad and siblings. It was a pretty awesome wave pool with a water slide, hot tub, and rope swing to jump into the pool with. I've always been a skinny person, but at that age, I looked like one of those malnourished kids from Schindler's List. Bony, lanky, awkward. I was on the deck of the pool waiting in the little line to use the rope swing, and some girl comes up to me and says "My friend likes you" and points to some girl.

My preteen brain is like "OMG!! IT"S HAPPENING!! I'M GOING TO GET THE SEX!". Her friend and I walk over to her, and we end up in the Hot Tub holding hands. I assume we make awkward conversation for a while, but before too long, it was time to go. We both left at the same time.

I waited for her in the exit area of the pool. When she came out, I asked her for her phone number and she gave it to me. I felt really good and headed out to my dad's car. About 1/2 way home I realized that I didn't know her name. How was I supposed to call her without her name? "Uhh... Is there a girl around 14 that lives in this household?" I thought really hard about how I could call her, but couldn't come up with anything that wouldn't be super awkward (and let's face it, just calling a girl in itself was super scary). Needless to say, I never called her.

Sometimes I still think about her. Did she wait for my call that never came? Did she realize that we didn't know each other's names and that was a likely the reason I never called?

And that's the end of the story. That was the first time I held a girl's hand. It was a big milestone for me, and I never even knew her name.

Some say she's still waiting by the phone to this day...

Lenovo Unveils ThinkStation P520 & P920 ‘AI Workstations’: Xeon Plus Quadro RTX 6000

Ubuntu Linux based systems shipping with 10 or 24 cores, 128 GB or 384 GB of RAM.

Maybe that will be the new minimum in 15 years.