corysama

I'm the opposite. Between work and family, I don't get a lot of time to hole up in a cave with an IDE for fun. Prior to LLMs, it was a struggle to get much of anything done. So, I rarely tried. But, now I can get ideas fleshed out and even get code down in the small breaks I get to myself. Now I'm making progress where I wasn't before.

Sometimes I'm not interested in the inner workings of a technology, I just want a one-off tool. Ex: No interest in web tech. But, vibe-coded a tool to scrape and cross-reference a couple of online reports. Now I have the info I need for other projects.

Sometimes I know exactly what I want and it's quicker to hand-hold the AI through making it for me. Ex: Put together yet another SIMD math lib recently. SIMD intrisics are an obnoxious API. But, a non-SIMD implementation is easy to verify and many SIMD implementations are easy to validate vs. the non-SIMD reference. It's just a huge amount of obtuse code.

Sometimes I don't know exactly what I want and it's great to have a always-online partner to bounce questions off of, do rapid-prototyping for me, do code reviews for me. AIs aren't perfect. But, being instant, patient and often right makes them a huge improvement over online forums.

Lua was specifically designed to be a configuration language https://www.lua.org/history.html

Lots of people start out with a non-programmable config format. But, as their situation becomes more complicated, they end up shoehorning in programmable-ish features until they realize they are running straight into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule and decide to do it properly.

Classic SSAO is very similar to performing an "unsharp mask" based on the depth buffer. This has been proposed "a simple and efficient method to enhance the perceptual quality of images that contain depth information" in the paper "Image Enhancement by Unsharp Masking the Depth Buffer" which came out a year after SSAO was published by Crytek.

https://www.uni-konstanz.de/mmsp/pubsys/publishedFiles/LuCoD...

Anyone know if there’s still a community around https://github.com/snabbco/snabb ? This seems like something they would appreciate.

Besides that, first use case that comes to mind is that gamedev likes Lua but iOS does not like LuaJit in JIT mode.

This is a very important paragraph from quern's article

There are few to no side-effects to melatonin use in adults (there is uncertainty about the risks & benefits in children & adolescents28), and it is not addictive or habit-forming like caffeine is. The usual dose for a night is 0.5-3 mg and I take 1.5mg [29]; my dose is highly likely to be too high. High doses may well be responsible for why some people try melatonin and report that it does nothing or hurts them, since in one study, the best dose for old people was 10x smaller (0.1mg or 0.3mg) and for one blind person, 0.5mg [30 31 32] . Zhdanova et al 1996 found 0.3mg & 1.0mg to affect sleep onset similarly. A study of delayed-release melatonin found with their high dose of 4mg (but not 0.4mg) elevated melatonin levels 10 hours after bedtime ( Gooneratne et al 2011) - potentially interfering with waking time.

It is difficult to find doses as small as 1mg sublingual (dissolve under the tongue) in my area. Everyone is trying to sell you 5-30mg chewables. And, I expect everyone is buying them under the assumption that more is better. But, here it explicitly is not.

The way melatonin works well for me is to wait until I'm already settled into bed and should be asleep, but I'm not. Do a couple body scans to relax for real. Try to think about something mindless. Then if I'm still awake, pop 1mg under my tongue. I'll usually wake in the morning with half of it drooled on my pillow :P

I’m not a scholar of the fall of SGI. But, I’m sure it has been documented in detail.

AFAICT, SGI was a textbook Innovator’s Dilemma case with an expensive enterprise product that’s hard to give up in the face of cheap, low-margin competition.

His Behind the Scenes video for LOVE is one of my favorite developer vids ever.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f90R2taD1WQ

Back in the late-90s/early 2000s boom it was not a secret that enterprise corps pushed universities to teach Java because they wanted easily-replaceable widget engineers engineering easily-replaceable widgets.

On the opposite side, startups building on difficult languages like Haskell, Elixir, Erlang have a built-in bias towards hiring a team that can get a lot more done with a lot less people. Great for startups. Terrible for enterprise.

I recommend https://gamemath.com/book/ as a good starting point.

Old 3D engine guy here. I highly encourage folks to make a 3D engine for fun and learning. Shipping a game with it would be a cherry on top. Come join us in r/graphicsprograming, r/gameenginedevs and the graphics programming discord.

But, if you made a mesh you wouldn’t be able to represent fuzzy objects. That’s one of the major advantages of both splats and this printing technique.

The original paper that kicked off the movement a few years ago used Gaussian blobs because gaussians are differentiable and the tech to analyze a scene requires the tech used for rendering to be differentiable.

https://learnopencv.com/3d-gaussian-splatting/

The primary focus of this product is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_26262 AKA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_safety for road vehicles. That means review from independent assessors who will demand finely detailed analysis and documentation of the entire system and the entire development process.

I always liked the advice "Abstract for replacement. Not for reuse."

If you have code that is reusable, you'll want it to have a nice interface. But, you don't need an abstraction on top of a nice interface. Just use it.

For abstraction, what you need to focus on is "What is most likely to change in the future?" You want to put in abstractions that will make those changes low-cost.

Ex: At work there was a small debate about which C++ JSON parser to use with no stand-out winner for our framework's needs. So, we picked one and I put a thin layer over it for everyone to use. We have since then swapped out the parser and swapped it back over the years of a hundred devs using it in our framework and no one noticed the swaps.

“Making of BAR” documentary

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5F36yViPz7w

Only tangentially related. But, I still have not forgiven Unity for the floating point footgun in https://docs.unity3d.com/6000.4/Documentation/ScriptReferenc...

The operation is finished when the progress float reaches 1.0 and isDone is called. If you set allowSceneActivation to false, progress is halted at 0.9 until it is set to true.

So, I needed to have my UI do other stuff until both this and something else was ready. Obvious thing to do would be to check this for "AsyncOperation.progress >= 0.9" and also check the other thing. Right?

Except AsyncOperation.progress is a float, 0.9 is a double and 0.9f < 0.9. Progress is not halted at 0.9. It never reaches 0.9. It's halted at 0.9f! Just a few million ulps short!

If you want to play with software rendering, here's probably the shortest code that will get an ARGB8888 2D array from main memory to the screen efficiently for all platforms using SDL2 in C https://gist.github.com/CoryBloyd/6725bb78323bb1157ff8d4175d... you'll need to do the translation from a 320x200x8-bit palletized framebuffer to ARGB yourself ;)

If you want to get inspired by what can be done with palletized framebuffers check out http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/ (click Show Options) and the GDC presentation by the artist https://youtu.be/aMcJ1Jvtef0

With that you can fire up https://github.com/mriale/PyDPainter for that classic Deluxe Paint IIe vibe. Or, https://www.aseprite.org/ for something more modern.

Then there’s the opposite situation. I knew the guys who ported NBA Jam: TE from arcade to PC (by hand-translating assembly!). Apparently the arcade CPU had bitwise addressing. And, because pretty much all of the data was aligned to bytes, the arcade programmers liked to stuff 3 bits of extra parameter data into the low bits of pointers.

We are currently at real-time video generation that can be converted to splats or meshes.

https://research.nvidia.com/labs/sil/projects/lyra2/

So, https://shader-slang.org/ then :)

You asked for it…

https://github.com/fathyb/carbonyl

The paradox is usually presented as:

The People: Hey local government! The roads are so packed with cars they are useless. Fix it!

The Government: We hear you and just finished a huge road expansion project. The roads now have 2x the capacity! Enjoy the new fast roads!

The People: The roads are just as slow as before because they are packed with 2X as many cars now!

So, the paradox is that greatly increasing the capacity of the roads led to the roads being just as slow as before. Maybe even slower. This is because there previously were lots of potential uses of the roads that people did not enact because it would not have been worth the hassle. But, now with 2X the capacity, those uses become viable. So, more people find more uses of the roads up until it gets right back to the limit of everyone patience.

Apply this to coding and you can predict: Coding is much faster and easier now. So, why are all my coders still so busy?

Generating MIDI sequences

https://www.muse.art/home

"Approved for Exams" make more sense when you take into account the history of the Ti family of calculators.

Why are they still able to sell what is effectively a 30 year old computer for as much or more today than when it came out? Because they managed to get the family informally standardized as "The calculator every teacher in America understands well enough to manage students who use it. Therefore pretty much everything else that could be as or more advanced is effect banned."

It was an amazing piece of kit when it first came out. No doubt you could make something 100x better and 10x cheaper today if someone really tried. But, they would fail commercially because you can't design-in 30 years of legacy in the US school system.

If you were to approximately age sync the red and yellow lines on that chart, by moving their start dates to the same point, the red line is higher.

Like this: https://imgur.com/a/d7stXVN

Hey, buddy! Can I bum a command line arg list off ya?

Dynamic occlusion culling is pretty common these days now that the GPU can do its own filtering of the draw list. I think it goes like:

Start with a list of objects that were visible last frame. Assume they are visible this frame. Go ahead and draw them.

Then, for the list of things that were Not visible last frame, draw bounding box queries to build a conservative list of objects that might actually not be occluded this frame. This is expected to be a short list.

Take that short list and draw the probably-newly-visible objects.

Have queries attached to all of those draws so you end up with a conservative list of all of the actually-visible objects from this frame.

This obviously has problems with camera cuts. But, it works pretty well in general with no preprocessing. Just the assumption that the scene contents aren’t dramatically changing every frame at 60 FPS.

There technically was one experiment early on to trick Stable Diffusion into generating spectrograms that could be converted into audio. And, it worked surprisingly well.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230314190913/https://www.riffu...

https://huggingface.co/riffusion/riffusion-model-v1

But, I'd expect everything in the past 3 years to diffuse the audio waveform directly.

If you can run RetroArch at 240 Hz on an OLED in "game mode", you can use CRT Beam Simulation to get pretty close to the CRT feel for motion https://blurbusters.com/crt-simulation-in-a-gpu-shader-looks...

If you have an HDR TV, preferably OLED, and miss the CRT look, check out the RetroTink 4K https://www.retrotink.com/

The ozone report was specifically about space walks. The gunpowder report was about moon walks.

Presumably, moonwalks would also have some ozone like the space walk did. But, maybe the burning-moon-dust gunpowder smell was a lot stronger than the vacuumed-metal/paint ozone smell.