Daily Tech News 6 November 2023

• Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs so poorly. (Paavo)
  
  Culling and level of detail. Or rather, the lack of same. Or precisely, horrible defects in Unity that mean that in complex games the automatic handling of these issues simply breaks.
  
  And what that means is that if a complex structure would be drawn with 60,000 polygons when it's in the foreground, in Cities: Skylines 2 it is drawn with 60,000 polygons when it is in the background, and indeed drawn with 60,000 polygons when it is behind another object and not visible to the player at all.
  
  Which means that it will be fixed, with some improvements arriving already and a lot more in coming weeks. But that's because the game developer has taken over fixing things the game engine should handle for them.
  
  Most likely - this is speculation, but it makes sense - Unity has been promising fixes for these problems for months, and the fixes simply didn't arrive in time.
  
  
  

• Went to cancel my Adobe Creative Cloud account since I don't really have time to use it, and I have plenty of other software to take its place (mostly from Humble Bundle, which is a great place to save 90% by buying last year's version).
  
  They gave me a 50% discount.
  
  Which... Okay.
  
  
  
• A brain injury removed my ability to perceive time. (Salon)
  
  It was lupus.
  
  An Oliver Sacks tale except in this case the patient recovered and was able to tell it herself.
  
  
  
• Drunk grizzlies keep getting killed by trains in Montana. (Cowboy State Daily)
  
  Which has to be the Montana-est headline ever.
  
  
  
• Across the US, in red states and blue, in rich districts and poor, home-schooling is the fastest growing form of education. (WV News)

  Home schooling's surging popularity crosses every measurable line of politics, geography and demographics. The number of home-schooled kids has increased 373 percent over the past six years in the small city of Anderson, S.C.; it also increased 358 percent in a school district in the Bronx.

  This worries the usual suspects:

  "Policymakers should think, 'Wow - this is a lot of kids,'" said Elizabeth Bartholet, an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School and child welfare advocate. "We should worry about whether they're learning anything."

  You might want to look closer to home, Erzsebet.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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