◈mtknn @mtknn@cybre.space

some more plotter experiments: this draws as a single continuous curve (i.e., the pen is never picked up)

reaction diffusion, with f = 0.022, k = 0.059

cooking tip: to convert ounces to grams in your head, simply multiply by 28.349523125

(and yes I'm aware there's an actual script variant Hershey font)

I love the Hershey fonts (http://paulbourke.net/dataformats/hershey/), so I thought: could I make a cursive version by just... not picking up the pen, and then blurring/smoothing the strokes

the result is a pseudo-font I'm calling 'machine cursive'.

I find these different kinds of "debug display" aesthetics fascinating

you can tell when a visualization has been created in opencv because it uses the Hershey simplex fonts (http://paulbourke.net/dataformats/hershey/)

for example, this video of tesla's autopilot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FITJg4KlMc&feature=emb_title

is a prime example of an opencv display, complete with Hershey fonts and rounded thick lines (because by default opencv draws thick lines with round endcaps and joins)

sometimes I look at the moon or the sun and try to convince myself to really believe (as opposed to merely believing in an intellectual sense) that it's a concrete physical object (as opposed to just an image or illusion or 'representation' hanging in the sky) and I don't think I've ever succeeded

"central planning is impossible because you'd have to solve a linear program with 12 million variables" sure is starting to feel a bit silly now that desktop GPUs are effectively supercomputers

(not that I'm in favor of central planning, but this line of argument is not nearly the slam dunk some people still think it is)

inside every random block of gpu memory lives a brutalist skyscraper

another view

a particularly attractive random slice of GPU memory

what's interesting is that the driver seems to want to give you the same memory block each time, so if you fill the memory with 0xFF, terminate the program and do other stuff for a while, if you run the program again and don't clear the memory you'll get a half-consumed block

if you allocate a 3d texture on gpu but never upload data into it, and then treat this unallocated texture as a volume and raymarch into it, you get some interesting results

it's hard to go wrong with bold color maps

mastodon is doing something funny to the gamma of these because they look quite different in the preview vs. if you click to look at full size

the algorithm "take a sphere and just subtract random other spheres out of it" produces surprisingly interesting structures

I enjoy the 'grainy' look of low-sample ray/path tracing, possibly because I have come to associate it with "real lighting is happening"

felt like time for a profile icon change

game idea: gun disassembly simulator 2020 VR

in this VR game you get to safely unload and disassemble accurate-to-life guns

you do not get to fire the guns

let me introduce to you the one mythical "(mostly) non-problematic corvid instagram/social media account" (because let's be honest, almost everyone who has a pet/captive corvid really shouldn't):
https://www.instagram.com/lokitheraven

pros:
* Loki is at a falconry center, so they have experience in bird care
* Loki is a rescue
* Loki is unclipped and free-flying
* ^ but they take reasonable precautions like having a radio transmitter on him
* Loki seems to be in excellent physical and feather condition

cons:
* Falconers tend to assume that all birds are like birds of prey, and they were caught off-guard by the behavioral differences between a raven and their other birds
* Some slightly weird ideas about "dominance"

thinking about building my own plotter so I can put a load-cell in there to tell how hard the pen is actually pressing down rather than my current half-assed solution of eyeballing it and crossing my fingers