Sharlin

This is addressed in Perlin's improved noise function that uses a 5th degree polynomial ("smootherstep", t³·(10t·(6t-15)) in Horner's form) for interpolation which has everywhere continuous first and second derivatives.

It's also rather more difficult to implement in 3+d because the mapping to the simplex space is not exactly intuitive.

Back in the 00s: "It's really easy to box an AI, just put it in an airgapped machine and refuse to let it out"

2026: "Oops"

Both of those groups of people are crazy.

Most people likely have a natural aversion against having "team members" without agency or consciousness. Giving them artificial, acted personalities would be even more horrible. LLMs are tools and trying to elevate them to the same level as actual humans is nuts.

(Yes yes, we can't know whether it "feels like" something to exist as bursts of vast numbers of matrix multiplications, but at least it would be a rather strange existence.)

Clearly we use too many natural-language words in programming. Should switch to APL so that the commoners have absolutely no idea what's going on.

I love that the annual snow castle in Kemi, Finland, is included =D https://thecastlemap.com/castles/snowcastle-of-kemi/

Hilariously I also had a very similar idea just recently.

ECS is basically column storage, but extended to behavior, not just data.

Holy cum hoc ergo propter hoc, Batman!

If you plot the positive integers two-dimensionally in a square spiral arrangement, eg.

  5 4 3
  6 1 2
  7 8 9

I mean, outside of corporate (including governments, universities, etc large organizations because what’s the difference) the world has largely already abandoned MS. The vast majority of personal conputing on the planet happens on devices that don’t run Windows or other MS software.

Direction that's not Jewish?

Perhaps no precedent in hardware, but it's basically the same as the good old Sony CD autoplay rootkit fiasco. Except this one runs in mere userland AFAICS.

This explains so much.

Even in the article ChatGPT correctly speculates that the blurry background may reveal another message if you squint or view it at a distance (which, given how common similar illusions are, is not particularly impressive but still).

Still, they managed to Embrace&Extend the IRC protocol in a way that was annoying to anyone not using Comic Chat.

Microsoft SOP, especially back then.

It was absolutely not. It easily rivaled (and in many ways surpassed) the contemporary iPhones and was so far ahead of Androids it wasn’t even funny. It was such a fascinating combination of ahead-of-its-time touch UI/UX and power user friendliness.

It’s a real classic. An amazing article super worth reading (and re-reading if it’s been a while) and almost infinitely quotable.

Well, "load-bearing" is specifically an engineering term :D Actual engineering, not software "engineering".

Huh, TIL about `git commit —fixup`.

I'm not sure if you're being actively malicious or just a great example of how lies can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes, but your comment is a great example of what we're up against here.

If by "all snow would disappear forever from Earth" you meant "the Arctic could be seasonal-ice-free in the summer" by 2013, then, sure.

Something something salary depending on it.

Software "engineering" in particular has always been more than 50% cargo culting. Good engineering practices never matter when the alternative is just going through the motions of whatever rituals are in vogue.

Blogspam article with more ads than content.

I wonder how much all the textbooks that the author recommends would cost in total...

(2025)

The uncertainty principle says that the less well-defined the position, the more well-defined the velocity, and vice versa.

Yeah, but that’s like saying predicting next week’s lottery numbers, or the precise weather exactly one year from now, is a data problem. There’s no simulation that could answer those questions even in principle even if the universe were fully classical.

And hardness. Diamond is hard but exactly because of that you can shatter a diamond with any hammer.