
Reading bits in far too many ways - atesti
https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2018/09/27/reading-bits-in-far-too-many-ways-part-3/
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userbinator
Very important for things like video codecs, since this is an inherently
serial process and (as mentioned in the article) attempting to parallelise it
is not really possible nor gives much gain.

Also interesting to note that the ultra-naive "pull one bit at a time and
accumulate them until you have enough" method which often taught in CS courses
when they cover Huffman compression and the like is basically a useless dead-
end. In practice, no one decodes variable-length-codes that way because it is
far too slow.

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panic
This is part 3 of a series; part 1 was discussed here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16417490](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16417490)

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godelmachine
I seldom understand his posts. He goes way too deep into the nitty gritty
details, which is actually good.

However, its quite tough for me to apply his teaching to real life apps. I had
gone through his Twitter and LinkedIn and looks like he works in video game
industry.

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royjacobs
He works for RAD Game Tools, a developer of middleware for games. He also used
to be part of the demoscene group Farbrausch, responsible for 64k intros such
as FR-08 and the 96k first person shooter Kkrieger.

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jacobush
_Kkrieger_ was totally mind blowing, and for me the first painfully clear
demonstration between the difference between tech demo and product known and
used by the masses.

It was science fiction level technology. Wikipedia says development was
started in 2002, but I have (possibly completely wrong) recollections of
seeing some kind of (non playable, 320x200 resolution) demo way earlier than
that.

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royjacobs
Your recollection doesn't seem accurate, sorry :)

Btw, it might be interesting to know that AAA games also use plenty of
procedurally generated assets through tools like Speedtree and Substance, but
they are typically generated offline instead of application startup.

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jacobush
You don't happen to know any user rooster from scenemusic.net? There are a
couple of souls I only communicated with messages on that server and it would
be nice to be in touch again.

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royjacobs
I don't, sorry.

