HN user

gavanwoolery

5,515 karma

Note: I never, ever downvote. So if you got downvoted in one of my threads, it wasn't me. :)

http://www.voxelquest.com

http://www.twitter.com/gavanw [currently deactivated]

Posts28
Comments1,281
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www.voxelquest.com 7y ago

Revolve

gavanwoolery
2pts0
www.youtube.com 8y ago

InstaSaber transforms a piece of paper using AI

gavanwoolery
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www.designbetter.co 8y ago

Design Systems Handbook

gavanwoolery
6pts1
yosefk.com 9y ago

Fun Won't Get It Done

gavanwoolery
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doodle.notch.net 10y ago

Distorted Mandlebox

gavanwoolery
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www.voxelquest.com 10y ago

How Does Voxel Quest Work Now?

gavanwoolery
317pts88
docs.google.com 11y ago

Breakdown of Steam Sales by Keyword

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www.engadget.com 11y ago

Oculus Offering $10M Towards Indie Game Development

gavanwoolery
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blog.marekrosa.org 11y ago

Space Engineer's Marek Rosa Starts $10m Fund for AI Research

gavanwoolery
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www.kickstarter.com 11y ago

Voxelnauts: A VR MMO Inspired by “Ready Player One”

gavanwoolery
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news.ycombinator.com 11y ago

Thank You HN, Voxel Quest Is Funded

gavanwoolery
220pts65
www.voxelquest.com 11y ago

My Isometric Voxel Engine: One Year Later

gavanwoolery
362pts84
www.kickstarter.com 11y ago

Voxel Quest Is on Kickstarter, AMA :)

gavanwoolery
11pts1
www.cartoonbrew.com 12y ago

Pixar's Ed Catmull and others alleged participants in wage-fixing scandal

gavanwoolery
2pts0
www.voxelquest.com 12y ago

Show HN: My Isometric Voxel Engine 6 Months Later

gavanwoolery
435pts132
www.voxelquest.com 12y ago

Show HN: My Isometric GPU-Powered Voxel Engine

gavanwoolery
203pts76
www.gavanw.com 12y ago

A Pure Javascript UI Rendered with Voxels

gavanwoolery
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www.gavanw.com 13y ago

WebGL Voxel Text

gavanwoolery
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techcrunch.com 13y ago

Tiptop Speakers Launches On Kickstarter

gavanwoolery
9pts11
www.gavanw.com 13y ago

I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream

gavanwoolery
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news.ycombinator.com 13y ago

Honor Aaron Swartz's life, not his death

gavanwoolery
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en.wikipedia.org 13y ago

Jack Tramiel, Creator of the Commodore

gavanwoolery
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news.ycombinator.com 13y ago

Ask HN: Crowd funding with equity, good or bad idea?

gavanwoolery
4pts1
www.pixel.io 13y ago

HotSort - New Contender For Fastest GPU Sorting

gavanwoolery
1pts0
www.flipcode.com 13y ago

FlipCode is back, after 7 years

gavanwoolery
98pts12
atomontage.com 14y ago

Voxel Engine Atomontage Procedural Rock Generation

gavanwoolery
4pts1
twitpic.com 14y ago

Procrastination: 0, Me: 1

gavanwoolery
4pts2
altdevblogaday.org 15y ago

The Difference Between a Degree and an Education

gavanwoolery
2pts0

1) aesthetic is more novel than polygons, which are currently much more widespread (note: novel does not necessarily equate to "better" looking).

2) The finite limitations "leave more to the imagination" - in the same way that low resolution pixel art might, vs a high resolution vector image.

3) A very minor factor, but worth noting: not only are voxels visually novel, but they are technologically novel - in order to make a competitive voxel engine, you typically are not using an off-the-shelf engine like Unreal or Unity (though you can, and there are many voxel pluggins for these engines). Thus programmers are drawn to them (IMO) - they are an easy way to visually show off your technical know-how, just as you might many other effects in the demo scene.

4) A false sense of nostalgia - voxel engines never were very widespread, and the closest thing in the early days tended to be height-map driven rather than volumetric (the earliest notable exception being Voxlap). But the "nostalgia" exists, just as it does with synthwave (most of which does not fully mirror any music of the 80s/90s).

5) Voxels are point-based volumetric representation and thus are much easier to use for procedural generation (vs describing a surface, which is much harder). Though voxels are often wrapped on the surface with polygons, this is trivial (vs, say, describing the polygonization of a metaball without using voxels).

I enabled screentime/parental controls on my iPhone and gave control of the passcode to my wife.

At first I could not wrangle it to block the things I wanted (was this an intentional move by Apple or just poor design?). What I ultimately settled for was disabling downloads of new apps, then deleting every single social media app, game, web browser, and other distraction from my phone.

Yes, that is right, my iPhone has no web browser capability (why not just buy a dumb phone? Because I often use services like maps, music, etc).

Is the problem me? Do I just not have self control? No - I decided its not. These products were carefully designed around the metric of "engagement" - whereas I had no choice over my design.

I also blocked other distractions in my desktop / work area via the hosts file. I would like to do it at the router level but use of VPN makes this impossible, unfortunately.

This is what it has come to, which...is ridiculous, in my opinion.

April 16, 1992 - Ultima 7 is released

September 1992 - Origin Systems acquired by EA for $35m

March 15, 1994 - Ultima 8 released

...

I will credit Garriott and Molyneux as being some of the most [overly] ambitious game designers, and this is not at all a bad thing in my opinion. Not everything they did worked, but when it did, they created history. And even when it did not work, at least they attempted to break new ground.

I should correct that slightly because no one ever cites facts or quotes in isolation - usually they are in the context of a broader argument or hypothesis. But there have been a few cases, here Google will probably serve you better than my feeble memory. One (rather controversial) example I can think of is James Damore. His hypothesis may have been wrong (I will leave that up to the reader), but he at least did seem to earnestly back it up with data and research papers (and even though there is some debate there, at least a few experts have publicly agreed that the science he cited was well-established).

Note: I am not defending Damore's position, only stating that it was a great example of the "yellow/blue dress" when it comes to orthodox speech. People seemed to be pretty fiercely divided on whether or not his memo warranted being fired.

You are absolutely correct - perceiving censorship does not equate to being censored.

That said (IMO), there is a lot of abusive behavior on all sides - so the question becomes, is the treatment equal? It may just serve as a litmus test, at worst a false positive, to consider which side thinks they are being censored more. :)

Someone else on HN (I cannot recall who), stated something along the lines of (paraphrasing):

"Centralized power can be abused in the hands of the government or the private sector [via monopolies]"

Whether or not you agree, I thought this was an elegant way of phrasing it. The cure, IMO, is to ensure that both ultimately answer to the people, although I have no idea how that is practically enforced.

I would not say it is "unfounded" - but rather that censorship is ill-defined, at least in the public eye.

We have come up with words that are easier to swallow like "deplatforming" and "fact checking." Censorship occurs in many forms, and not all of it is directly blocking access to speech (IMO).

There is a common misconception that censorship can only occur at the public (government) level, but not the private level. As per Wikipedia:

"Censorship can be conducted by governments, private institutions, and other controlling bodies."

There is also the issue of orthodox views and orthodox privilege (as per Paul Graham's explanation). Many conservative views are not orthodox to the point where you can be canceled for merely quoting someone else or citing facts (yes, both have happened in the past). So there is some form of self-censorship (this is related to "social cooling" IIRC).

I think it all boils down to this: which side supports censorship and which side condemns it? There you will find your answer on who is more adversely affected by censorship.

Note: this is not a left or right issue, historically speaking. For example, look back to McCarthyism.

Crony Beliefs 5 years ago

In the absence of hard, irrefutable and all-encompassing proof, everything is just religion.

I gotta say, rowing had zero appeal for me until I got into HIIT (F45).

Even though I have been using it for three years, I would still say it is the most punishing/rewarding piece of equipment at my gym, and probably the only one that is still capable of leaving me (literally) breathless.

I've been thinking about getting a rowing machine for home just for some quick two-minute bursts of cardio to break up my sitting, so this might be a worthwhile purchase when I can budget it in. Also my wife has been looking to buy a Peloton so maybe I can convince her to get this instead. :)

Jukebox 6 years ago

This is really great work. :) On a slightly tangential note, I understand why they chose an audio representation over symbolic, but I think that training the latter is more useful (commercially speaking). Would love to be able to get a track rolling quickly just selecting an instrument set and tweaking some AI parameters and then hand-tune it from there (yes, this greatly detracts from the "art" of it but sometimes I just want to see results quickly). Of course, to do this effectively, you would also have to analyze on an audio level (at least per instrument) so that the usage and timing of instruments could be better understood.

I have a graveyard filled to the brim with side projects, and just ONE project that I keep coming back to (I have been working on it for 20 years). Its getting to the point where I do fewer side projects because I understand there is only one that is worth working on. In the past decade, I only had two smaller side projects.

The secret for me is to work on the hardest, most interesting problems. This is not good business advice - mind that. But you are probably doing side projects to get away from the boredom of the thing that actually earns you money.

Master of Orion 6 years ago

Master of Orion was notable in that it was the first game I remember with "meaningful" NPC interactions. Even though interactions were quite limited (make/break alliances, espionage, trade, etc), early alliances could determine the final outcome of the game. But more importantly, it felt emotionally compelling. I found myself getting angry at certain factions when they spied/voted/etc against me. They also took the time to illustrate dispositions IIRC, so you could see when a race was happy or angry with you.

A bit of self-promo, but for those interested I also am using a variation of this algorithm powered by compute shaders. See https://twitter.com/voxelquest. If you scroll down a bit, you can even see versions using the maps from Comanche shown in this demo. :)

(Also, thank you @s-macke, your github page taught me the fundamentals of the algorithm - previously I had only seen Ken Silverman's post on wave surfing, which was not nearly as clear).

I respectfully disagree -- something that is 10 times more efficient costs 10 times less energy (theoretically). When the end user suffers a server outage due to load, when they run out of battery ten times quicker, all of these things matter. When you have to pay for ten servers to run your product instead of one, this cost gets passed on to the end user.

I was forced to use a monitor at 30 fps for a few days due to a bad display setup. It made me realize how important 60 fps is. Even worse, try using an OS running in a VM for an extended period of time...

There are plenty of things that are 'good enough', but once users get used to something better they will never go back (if they have the choice, at least).

Cyc 7 years ago

I immediately recognized the headline even though its been 15 years since I last read up on Cyc.

I still think the potential of lambda calculus in knowledge representation and logical deduction is high and under-represented in research.

Just theorizing, but I think a large part of the problem is the difficulty in interfacing this knowledge base with manual, human entry. Another pitfall is the difficulty in determining strange or unanticipated logical outcomes, and developing a framework to catch or validate these.

The author has done a really good overview here, however (perhaps by virtue of the example being too simple), the resulting code looks much less readable than the original code. Which I guess goes to say, there are probably situations where it is appropriate to use stuff like this and situations where it could be easily abused?

I was mostly sedentary until about 1.5 years ago.

I have tried almost every form of exercise, but the only thing that has truly hooked me so far is circuit/interval training (for both cardio and resistance). I have done almost 400 sessions so far, almost without fail at 5 days per week (which is the real testament to how addicting it is).

Actually I find the cardio classes to be more interesting and challenging than the resistance / weight lifting classes. Although the focus is cardio, they do not neglect training your muscles, they just tend to rely more on body weight than barbells (burpees, jump squats, sprawls, etc) with the occasionally machine thrown in (rowers, bikes).

I have not lost much weight (that requires a better diet) or gained a huge amount of muscle but my body feels way more tuned. The classes are pretty intense and burning 1000 calories/hour is common. My heart rate used to max out at 180 and my resting heart rate was 80-90. Now my max heart rate is 160 and my resting gets as low as 50. I used to struggle to do 50 push-ups now I can do 100 without much struggle.

The real benefit though is that I feel healthy and less afraid of things like heart disease.

Competition is generally good, but competing standards are bad, especially when they have no real advantages over each other. Imagine if every platform had its own incompatible version of C (ok, yes there are incompatibilities but they are not there by intention).

If you want to win me over as a developer, do it the right way. Provider superior tooling and win a customer base with superior implementation.

Neat, dont have time to dive in the source right now but whats the trick? Light probes? Edit: Ah, nevermind its one click away:

"Illumination technique used here is:

Realtime direct shadowmapping with time blended lighmaps for global illumination on: walls, ceiling and floor.

For furniture we use spherical harmonics L2 with spatial and time blending for ambient light.

Reflections made with time blended box projected cubemaps for image based lighting on physically based materials.

Post processing done with color grading by LUT (lookup tables) and vignette."

That's fair, but we are diving into subjective territory. Lets say (hypothetically) that half of the employees support ICE. Who decides then whether or not the contract is maintained? (Unlikely scenario in this case, but I am more interested in the general precedent than this specific scenario, so just playing devil's advocate)

Also, lets say you are the CEO who proposes that you should NOT work with ICE, but all of your employees believe you should. In that case, it is obviously not as simple as just listening to what your employees want.

I agree, I think its not an apples-to-apples comparison, and that is slightly intentional. I want to highlight the same decision to be made under a less frictional commodity to ask the question: where does one draw the line on what they supply? There are some obvious lines probably. You would not want to be a gun manufacturer that sold guns directly to drug cartels, for example.

For the record (if it matters) I am very pro-immigration and pro-immigrant rights, but I don't think denying chef services to ICE will actually do anything - let me explain.

Lets look at this from another perspective (couldn't hurt, right?). I am a company that sells paper.

Some companies might use this paper for very bad things (printing out patents?).

Do I comb through all my clients and determine what they are using the paper for? Doesn't seem to make sense, and worse yet, it seems like an entirely subjective process. Who says which companies are "good" and which are "bad" ?

When I stop selling paper to an entity, they will just find another paper provider. I have not really done anything meaningful aside from signalled my intentions, which I could do more effectively in other ways (lobbying, etc).

I've been programming for a quarter of a century.

It has taken me a long time to realize that "dumb code" is the best.

Dumb code is easy to read.

Dumb code is concise and to the point, not attempting to address theoretical problems (necessarily).

Dumb code does not overthink the problem.

Dumb code helps you sympathize with the machine.

Dumb code has no weird blackbox behavior.

etc...

As with most positions of power, I am certain there is some abuse, although in some cases it can also be mutual attraction (probably more rare). I recall in my college that students "frequently hooked up" with their TAs, (whether or not this was a myth, I do not know).

I think this is generally true (the distinction between innate and conscious bias). Still, I am curious what kind of experiment might be able to reveal such innate biases (perhaps if an applicant worked remotely and their name and sex were hidden, but that is not easy to setup in many circumstances).