@litherum@masto.ai
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litherum

@litherum@masto.ai

Realtime 3D development and game-adjacent development

I run https://botsin.space/@differentthingsbot

I used to be a new romantic
Though nothing's new about my views
They're rather plain old-fashioned, really
And dangerous

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litherum, to random
@litherum@masto.ai avatar

You’d think that the first thing your advisors would tell you when you run for president is maybe dont tell people that worms are eating your brain?

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/08/us/rfk-jr-brain-health-memory-loss.html

I can’t make this stuff up

litherum, to random
@litherum@masto.ai avatar

Thought experiment: imagine if Google decided not to go with Vulkan on Android devices, and instead either decided to double down on OpenGL, or decided to invent their own modern GPU API

litherum,
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@tojiro Pretty sure I disagree on that one, lol

Vulkan suuuuuuuucks

Google could have done better

litherum,
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@tojiro I heard an analogy recently that I will repurpose for this discussion:

Vulkan is like, if you asked Khronos to build you a birdhouse, and they show up and dump a bunch of lumber and nails and a few hammers on the ground, point at the pile, and say “there’s a birdhouse in there somewhere”

litherum,
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@tojiro last i've heard, the jury is still out whether the ferrari is actually faster than d3d12 (or, for that matter, d3d11)

litherum,
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@tojiro

D3D11 : D3D12 :: OpenGL : what khronos should have pursued

they could have even called it OpenGL 5!

litherum,
@litherum@masto.ai avatar

@tojiro well, OpenGL reinvented itself between versions 2 and 3

I don’t fault Microsoft at all for their naming - the only thing I fault them for was the messaging after 12 was released that 11 wasn’t going anywhere and it would be fine to stay on 11. That messaging was obviously wrong, as evidenced by the version number, but also a bunch of 12-specific features (ray tracing, mesh shaders, sampler feedback, etc.)

litherum,
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@tojiro https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/Deprecation “In the case of OpenGL version 3.1, almost all of the functionality deprecated in 3.0 was removed.”

litherum, to random
@litherum@masto.ai avatar

Watching The Verge’s super cut of Apple’s iPad event, my thoughts:

  1. I, like, don’t understand why they made the neural engine 60x faster. Like, which iPad apps use the neural engine rather than the GPU? If I were the product designer, I would nix the ANE completely and use that die space for a better GPU (which apps actually use)

1/2

litherum,
@litherum@masto.ai avatar
  1. I, like, don’t understand why any professional would use an iPad Pro rather than a Mac. They even use the same chips! Trying to make the iPad better than the Mac for productivity seems entirely futile. At this point, an iPad with a keyboard and trackpad seems like a late Soviet knockoff of a real computer. If it were up to me, I would stop adding pro features to iPads and would spend the engineering effort adding pro features to Macs instead. I’d let the iPad focus on education and kids.

2/2

litherum, to random
@litherum@masto.ai avatar

https://medium.com/@anastasia.bizyayeva/every-map-of-china-is-wrong-bc2bce145db2

This is super fascinating. After reading it, I have a few thoughts:

  • China clearly picked a different tradeoff than anyone else between international business concerns and national security concerns
  • I wonder if their intentional obfuscation extends to the entire world map, or just China
  • if it’s public info how to map to GCJ-02, then it’s not hard to map from GCJ-02
  • therefore, If the goal is to hide stuff from foreign governments, it clearly is ineffective
litherum, to random
@litherum@masto.ai avatar

So, like…

Are the protesters at Columbia in the tents harming anyone? Are the tents blocking people from going where they need to go? If not, I think Columbia should just leave them be.

Suspend the ones saying antisemitic things, yes, but if people just want to set up tents in the middle of a quad …. Go right ahead?

And if the students are asking you to divest yourself from companies making a profit from war … maybe that’s a good idea and actually do it???

litherum, to random
@litherum@masto.ai avatar

The feature I most want from HLSL is malloc()

😂

litherum,
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@raph HLSL doesn’t, that’s why I want it :>

litherum,
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@dneto @raph I think if there were 1THz sequential computers, the first thing people would do is hook them up together and write parallel cluster programs

litherum, to random
@litherum@masto.ai avatar

I just realized that Objective-C exceptions won't release objects alive on the stack, even when ARC is enabled, which ... really limits exceptions' usefulness

It seems like the only time any Objective-C code should ever throw an exception is when the only sensible thing the process could do is to immediately exit

zachleat, (edited ) to opensource
@zachleat@zachleat.com avatar

Had someone open two identical issues on GitHub. When I closed one of them as a duplicate, they replied “Thanks for nothing, Zach”

litherum,
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@zachleat better than “thanks for nothing, asshole” 😅

litherum, to random
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In my opinion, the WebKit blog post https://webkit.org/blog/15269/help-us-invent-masonry-layouts-for-css-grid-level-3/ is particularly poorly written, for 2 reasons:

  1. It's not focused or concise
  2. It's written in a manipulative way

The description of grid and its features (which takes up 2/3 of the post) should be its own post - because it's so detailed, it detracts from the purpose of the post, which is (ostensibly) to ask for developer feedback

1/3

litherum,
@litherum@masto.ai avatar

The section "The Debate" doesn't appear to ask for honest feedback, as it immediately states the WebKit's team position on the issue. It says "At first glance, defining Masonry with a new display type might make a lot of sense" which seems too opinionated for an honest request for feedback. Putting "but with significant limitations" in italics with a bright green comment "where only one repeating width is allowed" also seems manipulative.

2/3

litherum,
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And "we believe [our position] is worth the many benefits to be had" is clearly argumentative, not impartial.

3/3

litherum, to random
@litherum@masto.ai avatar

my favorite javascript-ism is "switch (true)"

litherum,
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@tojiro

In C, switch turns into a jump table. But in JavaScript, there's no such thing as a jump table (the language is much too high level for that). So, in a switch, each case: is an expression that gets evaluated in order.

So, instead of:
if (foo()) { ... }
else if (bar()) { ... }
else if (baz()) { ... }
else if (quux()) { ... }

you can do
switch (true) {
case foo(): ...
case bar(): ...
case baz(): ...
case quux(): ...
}

litherum, to random
@litherum@masto.ai avatar

Is the Berkeley packet filter Turing-complete?

litherum,
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Looks like yes

“eBPF bytecode has recently become a target of higher-level languages. LLVM added eBPF support in 2014, and GCC followed in 2019. Both toolkits allow compiling C and other supported languages to eBPF.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Packet_Filter

I don’t understand why this is a good idea

litherum,
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I should make a list of things that are Turing complete but shouldn’t be

  • fonts
  • Berkeley packet filter
  • maybe ICC profiles
  • ACPI
  • (arguably) webpages
  • most build systems
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