Writing

You might’ve seen over the course of the past couple of months since the Halo Infinite release some news and rumors about upcoming game modes in the game. I wondered how those folks got their hands on the new experience and just assumed that it’s typical data mining in game files to look for new assets.

If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you probably already know that I spend inordinate amounts of time on reverse engineering the Halo Infinite API.

Last year I was upgrading my computer’s power supply unit (PSU) in an effort to prepare for the GeForce RTX 3090. It so happened that I swapped PSU manufacturers as well while I was at it.

Incremental changes for better GPU performance.

If you’ve been following my blog, you know that I’ve been fiddling quite a bit with the Halo Infinite API. To the point where I started writing my own wrapper for it.

I like reading papers on arXiv, but I like discovering them more through Andrej Karpathy’s arxiv-sanity-lite. The little challenge with the latter is that there is no way to get those papers in a RSS feed, that I can then hook up to an RSS reader, like feedly or NetNewsWire if you’re on a MacOS machine.

Back in January I mentioned that I managed to continue the tradition of beating Halo on Legendary with the release of Infinite. At the end of that post I also mentioned that I was contemplating whether I want to do a Legendary, All Skulls On (also known as LASO) playthrough.

After four months of waiting, I finally got my hands on a Steam Deck! I am particularly excited to get to use this device a bit more because it’s basically the cleanest version of “Gaming on Linux” that you can imagine.

We need to talk about Windows priorities as a product. And I am saying this as someone who wants Windows to succeed - it’s a great OS that, despite it’s naysayers, is still one of the best when it comes to backwards compatibility and richness of functionality. I mean, I can literally run a game written for Windows 95 on Windows 11 without major issues.

One of the things that I am diving much deeper (pun intended) into lately is deep learning. And with deep learning, one of the things that can help you the most when it comes to having the right hardware locally is a beefy Graphics Processing Unit (GPU).

Getting visibility into your match performance outside the game.

Making sure you have the right tokens to make Halo API web requests.

How I managed to learn the about the Halo Infinite web API endpoints.

What better way to spend the couple of remaining vacation days than by diving into the new Halo campaign. Ever since I got an Xbox, Halo was a staple of my gaming collection. The first Halo I ever played was Halo 3: ODST, and it completely changed my perception of first-person video games.

Getting to know a hidden data and insights pipeline.