Does anyone know of any code laying around the net that distributes points on a mesh in a blue noise distribution?
A student intern i work with is looking for this. It's tempting to write it, but im also kinda swamped :X
@aeva seems like an unnecessarily mean-spirited dunk on academics, yeesh, but regardless, I don't quite get it -- how does appending "we present" achieve your (I presume) goal of avoiding academic writing? there's no shortage of verbose and inscrutable papers that start off that way.
@julian@aeva tangentially, this reminds me that last week on a whim I pushed a chunk of one of my papers through an LLM asking it to rephrase it in the style of a gamedev blogger (and then also in the style of James Joyce, and of a historic European explorer). Amusing results, but also not a particularly effective solution!
@aeva publishing failures is an idea not without merits, but realistically if the only thing you change is (somehow) removing the incentive to publish mostly things that work well / better, many of the other issues you mentioned would be worsened. The space of "stuff that was a wrong/foolish/flawed idea" is quite large, making it even easier to flood the literature with half-assed, poorly written, unnecessary papers to dig through. Careful what you wish for.
There's a lot of obfuscation in scientific papers, especially when it comes to mathematification. A good one is when there is an algorithm with a magic number in it, so they just call it a "variable," and then they're like in all our examples we set this variable to SOME_VALUE. This is because arbitrary numbers are considered bad practice, but if it's a variable we've tuned then it was a scientific process.
@nervous_jesse I mean, probably better to acknowledge it's an empirically chosen parameter value that seems to work, than to claim it's the one true perfect magic number that shall not be questioned. But yeah, it's still magic numbers at the end of the day.
Suppose you have a cellular space like a grid or a quad tree or such. Each cell intersecting a shape (say, a triangle) records relative surface feature (say, a plane) that might be useful for recovering or extrapolating a nearest point on surface. Maybe a cell stores an authoritative surface feature, or maybe it can have several, doesn't really matter for this post.
Then, empty neighbors use that data to generate their own (non-overlapping) relative surface features.
@demofox@aeva also more or less describes the mesh to SDF construction algorithm in my Github (shamelessly stolen from my PhD supervisor, I just added the cmdline interface)
Consensually, through voluntary agreement, or by yourself, without coercive interference.
I’m sure that sounds like a cop-out to a lot of people, but it’s based on a principle of humility: we can’t possibly know what solutions people will pursue, negotiate, and adapt to the ever-evolving problems we face in the world.
Some anarchists have invested a lot of work in figuring out how we might organize ourselves if free—federations of councils and the like—and that work is valuable. Some people might adopt some of those solutions some of the time. But it’s not for me or anyone else to prejudge or insist upon any particular solution.
We’ll do it together, in free cooperation, by talking to each other, persuading each other, inducing each other, or by leaving each other alone.
@HeavenlyPossum I have no background in any of this, so excuse my dumb questions: isn't there a prisoner's dilemma-like element here? Aren't you at the mercy of any single person (or group) who decides they hate all your bothersome negotiating and simply takes up arms to force their will? If they decide they're the state now, aren't you (and your society) powerless, since you cannot coerce/force them to stop? It all seems to collapse upon contact with any disagreeable person(s).
If Biden loses—or, more likely, if Trump coups his way into power—I fully expect that a lot of liberals will devote more of their energy into yelling at people online for not voting hard enough than in resisting the fascism they keep warning us is imminent.
@HeavenlyPossum leftist preemptively ineffectually scolding liberals for hypothetically ineffectually scolding leftists? A few more rounds of this back and forth and we'll surely have the whole thing solved! 😀
@nholzschuch@antoinechambertloir@jaztrophysicist my French isn't great, but yeah, the 'normal' way people would simulate something like this would be solving Navier-Stokes throughout the liquid volume, using a geometric surface representation that can deform and change topology )like particles or a mesh or signed distance field). The physics would be, as you said, Navier-Stokes (pressure, viscosity, advection) with surface tension on the surface.
@nholzschuch@antoinechambertloir@jaztrophysicist if the liquid really is non-Newtonian (e.g., nonlinear viscosity coefficient, elastic forces, etc.), then those additional forces would also be incorporated into the Navier-Stokes solver.