Guzba

I want to say yes, but it depends on what you're actually doing as a final goal.

Detecting when a path is antagonistic to most GPU approaches takes time, as does preparing the data however it needs to be prepared on the CPU before being uploaded to the GPU. If you can just fill the whole thing on CPU in that time, you wasted your time even thinking about the GPU.

If you can identify a simple case quickly, it's probably totally a good idea to get the path done on the GPU unless you need to bring the pixels back to the CPU, maybe for writing to disk. The upload and then download can be way slower than just, again, filling on CPU.

If you're filling on GPU and then using on GPU (maybe as a web renderer or something), GPU is probably a big win. Except, this may not actually matter. If there is no need to re-render the path after the first time, it would be dumb to keep re-rendering on the GPU each frame / screen paint. Instead you'd want to put it into a texture. Well.... if you're only rendering once and putting into a texture, this whole conversation is maybe pointless? Then what is simple is probably the best idea. Anyway lots to 2d graphics that goes underappreciated!

SVG paths can be arbitrarily complex. This article really doesn't discuss any of the actual hard cases. For example, imagine the character S rotated 1 degree and added to the path on top of itself in a full rotation. This is one path composed of 360 shapes. These begin and end fill sections (winding order changes) coincide in the same pixels at arbitrary angles (and the order of the hits is not automatically sorted!) but the final color cannot be arrived at correctly if you do not process all of the shapes at the same time. If you do them one at a time, you'll blend tiny (perhaps rounded to zero) bits of color and end up with a mess that looks nothing like what it should. These are often called conflation artifacts IIRC.

There's way more to this than drawing circles and rectangles, and these hard cases are why much of path / vector graphics filling still ends up being better on CPU where you can accumulate, sort, etc which takes a lot of the work away. CPU does basically per-Y whereas this is GPU per-pixel so perhaps they're almost equal if the GPU has the square of a CPU power. Obv this isn't quite right but gives you an idea.

Video discussing path filling on CPU (super sampling and trapezoid): https://youtu.be/Did21OYIrGI?t=318 We don't talk about the complex cases but this at least may help explain the simple stuff on CPU for those curious.

I recently helped work on a new open source JPEG decoder in Nim. (Over here on GitHub: https://github.com/treeform/pixie/blob/master/src/pixie/file...)

This video was extremely helpful to understand the "why" of all the things the spec was trying to explain. It made a huge difference in us being able to get things working.

We talk a bit about JPEG and actually writing our decoder in Nim here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYwD7OynFcg

Overall, our concluding opinion is that JPEG has some extremely cool and really smart ideas for how to compress images but the binary file format itself has some very painful things in it (progressive and restart markers as a couple examples).

Could you provide the source code where this is supposed to be happening? I see the favicons being discussed, and the source clearly shows requests only made to domains: https://github.com/M66B/FairEmail/blob/master/app/src/main/j...

This is certainly not "shipping people's contact lists off to a third party". Is there somewhere else this is happening or are you mistaken?

I realize you are trying to help, but I find this to be a very depressing suggestion. "Make things worse". Fortunately I do not need to care about people captured by these anti-virus cartel members so I will not do this.

Ok I sent an email report explaining the issue with additional info. Let's see what happens.

Edit: Got a reply:

> Thank you for contacting CrowdStrike’s public AV scanner team! If you have not done so yet, please upload a sample of the file in question to Hybrid Analysis at https://www.hybrid-analysis.com/. Furthermore, please make sure that your request contains the SHA256 hash of the file.

I look forward to them no longer flagging one specific Nim binary produced just as an example.

It's interesting. How does one exactly address this? If anyone knows I'm genuinely curious since this seems horrible.

(Snark time) Is there someone that gets paid for protection? Maybe a "contribution" to security research efforts at one of these places? Or is there just an "I'm not a virus" flag Nim is forgetting to set.

> You can't take one snapshot in time and compare it when the two assets exhibit wildly different volatility characteristics.

I mean, you certainly can if you're taking the "buy and hold" approach, or hodl amongst the cool kids. It simply points out that buy and hold crypto is not guaranteed to be better than something like SPY, and the excess volatility is maybe not a good thing?

The highest possible returns != what investors actually achieve.

Pointing out that at the peak it was up higher than SPY, even though it is no longer up higher, and considering that a good thing seems very odd. It would also only relevant if you're able to know when things are at a top and bottom. Did you sell any bitcoin you owned when up 70% and, if so, have we reached a bottom when it is optimal to buy back in?

Hm, I get your point but you've never wanted to live somewhere for just a few years? Renting is great for many circumstances. Huge transaction fees and risks related to owning are not great if you're not looking to settle down longer-term. The idea this need is covered by a bunch of people owning just one property seems stretched. What is truly wrong with meeting a need more efficiently?

Here's an example of the Python produced by Genny: https://github.com/treeform/pixie-python/blob/master/src/pix...

That Python is the output from this file: https://github.com/treeform/pixie/blob/master/bindings/bindi...

This is very new stuff for us but we really like the idea that we can generate comfortable bindings for many languages and never have to worry about method signatures or comments or default values getting out of sync with the C / shared lib interface.

For those using Python, we just got our Python bindings for Pixie up onto pip. Repo here https://github.com/treeform/pixie-python

It's extremely fresh but our tests are working so consider giving it a try.

For those interested in Nim's meta-programming, we're generating those Python bindings for Pixie from our Nim code using https://github.com/treeform/genny here https://github.com/treeform/pixie/blob/master/bindings/bindi... More languages in the works.

SVG support has been really helpful for me to see a diverse and "real world" set of rendering results when working on Pixie. And for testing it's great to be able to grab huge sets of open source SVG files and check our results.

For example, I have a few "megatests" where I render entire icon sets or emoji sets such as https://raw.githubusercontent.com/treeform/pixie/master/test... and https://raw.githubusercontent.com/treeform/pixie/master/test...

Running these tests helps me feel more confident that changes I'm making are not breaking things.

Co-author here, I worked a bunch on the SIMD stuff in Pixie which I have really enjoyed. If anyone is curious about SIMD or anything else I'll be around.

This is not a big deal as you make it sound. Insurance is like 1k per year these days on a $300k house. If it was $500 five years ago, this $500 increase is nowhere near as substantial as the interest rate change relationship described above.

Isn't 'The ends justify the means' the argument of every villain ever? Unrelated to this Tesla stuff, it seems reasonable to observe that the means do actually matter.

I follow all of this reasoning and really don't disagree. I would just add that, while I don't want All of my money to be based on crypto, I do like that I could feasibly have Some of it. It seems like a richer or more dynamic future.

The PoW stuff, yeah, there is a reason it exists as you know but it is undeniably insane too. PoS is going to be interesting to see how it goes with Eth.

As a third dimension, I am very optimistic that we're on the order of 1 decade away from a huge change in energy, where solar is dirt cheap. If we see an S curve style shift to that mode of energy production, I think the PoW conversation changes a lot.

Sure, I agree with this.

I'm personally mixed on crypto but strongly dislike the glossing-over of its various fundamental properties by people taking intense absolute positions about what free people should be able to do. That can get me shaking my fist at the internet, though now I mostly realize these opinions are as irrelevant as mine is, and this is good.

To be fair, they paid for the TV but you didn't pay for the article.

I've never put a TV on my WiFi. That strikes me as an obviously bad idea. I guess people use the terrible built-in apps? It just seems like a series of poor choices to me. Crazy though that an expensive LG CX OLED would do that. I figured at least if you paid more for the TV it would show some tiny level of respect for the owner but clearly not.

I know the various streaming sticks people use instead show ads too probably if it isn't an Apple TV but at least it is somewhat quarantined. Pretty crazy how antagonistic things are getting.

Do you believe that distinction is on the same scale as the distinction I pointed out between comparing VISA and Bitcoin? Nothing is completely black and white, but I believe your distinction is into the pedantic territory whereas the other is fundamental. One can certainly pay for goods and services directly with Bitcoin.

This conversation never goes anywhere because it's apples and oranges. VISA connects other intermediaries. It isn't actually transferring money, its basically getting two parties to agree to a transfer with a huge pile of terms and fees. It's just not the same thing.

We should migrate Bitcoin to someone's DynamoDB table? Or did you not read the root comment?

Odd framing. No one "trusts" nuclear weapons to the government as opposed to having control themselves. "Pithy accounts" (money) represent to a fairly large degree an individual's autonomy / freedom / independence. Is it so bad to find it appealing that one may wish to assert more control over this given the choice?

I say this as someone who finds crypto to look like almost a complete scam but I can't dispute the appeal of the concept.

Who's database?

Counter argument: http://number-none.com/blow/john_carmack_on_inlined_code.htm...

You like the taste of internal combustion engines?

The growth in tech stocks has been pretty insane imo. It's so easy to be afraid though and call this another 2000, but we really don't know what the future holds.

I wish Europe had it's own set of exciting tech companies. That would be amazing. As a human living on this planet, the more things available to me, the better. Unfortunately, Europe doesn't seem to do much anymore. Google "European growth stocks". I want them back in the game.

I just used that as an expression, no special meaning intended.

Quick Google search, nearly top result. Committing the sin of just reading the headline but man this is not hard to find evidence: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-28/economist...

Or maybe? https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/economists-are-bad-at-p...

"All of the gains are from big tech". All of the gains are always from some companies and all of the losses are always from others. This is just how the pie got sliced 2020. I don't think it has any special meaning we can divine from it?

Economists are as effective as astrologists at predicting the future. For some reason otherwise smart people don't realize this? I think it's something about economists being associated with the university system.

I see this assured economic doom repeated so much without being questioned as anything but guaranteed I wonder where this incredible confidence is coming from? We have literally no idea what 2021 holds for us, in the same way we had no idea 2020 would be so uh unique.