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blt

5,139 karma · joined May 2, 2012

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blt··on Solving Factorio Quality
Factorio in a nutshell!
blt··on How our vibe coded website looks like a designer made it
Oof, an unbanked turn right after the first drop. Claude must be a big fan of lateral g's.
blt··on Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell
Codd wept.
blt··on Toyota is taking the Corolla electric
I agree. How do you feel about the Slate truck?

Nit: electric power steering is still rack and pinion. The old system is hydraulic vs electric.

blt··on Intrusive linked lists (2019)
Another benefit the article doesn't mention: these intrusive lists seem a good soft defense against use-after-free bugs in C. The node struct knows about all containers to which it belongs, so writing the "destructor" is very local. With the pointer array equivalent, one can only identify the arrays that point to the object by understanding the surrounding codebase.

(Disclaimer: I am not speaking from experience here. My C background is mostly static allocation.)

blt··on OpenAI Jalapeño: Better than Nvidia Blackwell
It can't come soon enough that AI workloads get their own specialized hardware to free up the general-purpose devices for general-purpose usage again.
blt··on Just brute force your embeddings
Nothing new under the sun, the same thing has been happening since the "big data" keyword became popular in the 2010s.
blt··on The AI Aesthetic
Yep, same with code, the models are always verbose by default. Conincidentally, the output is charge per token.

Another one is a table of contents in something short.

blt··on The growing vigilante movement to knock out Flock surveillance cameras
Why is the company called Flock? Because the oligarchy and their police/government/tech enforcers view citizens as sheep. It's so flagrant, a sci-fi author couldn't come up with something more on the nose.
blt··on DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16
Without any concrete description of the AI techniques used, one can't help but wonder if they have labeled something like nonlinear model-predictive control as "AI".
blt··on Software rendering in 500 lines of bare C++
This is a great comment. As someone who is familiar with R^3 geometry but not projection or clipping, I feel like I could almost implement it from your comment alone.

Can you explain more about clipping before/after the divide by w operation? Is this about avoiding coordinates with w = 0? Otherwise all the geometric ideas seem to make sense in both the world/view-space frustum and the ±1 box.

blt··on Ghost Cut – Or why Cut and Paste is broken everywhere
It's really natural!

- make a bunch of edits

- decide I don't like all of them

- copy the part I want to keep

- undo a bunch

- paste the good part

This is copy, not cut, but it wouldn't work if the clipboard state was part of the undo system.

blt··on Korg PS-3300 is back
I'm not a synth designer or analog IC engineer, but from my limited knowledge:

Most polyphonic synths use individual chips for the main building blocks such as voltage-controlled oscillators, filters, and amplifiers, such as https://www.cabintechglobal.com/as3350-smt. Those are simple analog circuits, but the specific designs that work for synths are not really useful for anything else, so they are a boutique and expensive (relative to complexity) chip. Using those: N chips per voice x 49 keys x 3 voices per key = 147*N expensive chips.

There are also some "whole synth on a chip" available like https://www.cabintechglobal.com/as3394-smt at ~$10 each. So best case is ~$1.5k in chips alone for the core of this synth. Some other support circuits are still needed. Then $$$ for big PCBs and a big, noise-free linear power supply.

But even if we could drive the electronics costs down, that doesn't affect the per-unit cost of front panel controls, keybed, or the wood cabinet. Nor the per-unit cost of manufacturing labor, packaging, logistics. Nor the per-project cost of R&D and manufacturing tooling. All of these scale with size and complexity.

So it's no different from other specialized goods - the price gap relative to the "good enough" baseline will always be more than the performance gap suggests because the specialized version inherently sells fewer #units and cannot activate the same economies of scale.

blt··on Corners Don't Look Like That: Regarding Screenspace Ambient Occlusion (2012)
Great point. I've taken so many grey-blob photos of forests.

Any course on landscape photography will teach that landscapes should (usually) have a foreground, middle ground, and background. It seems kind of too obvious and too restrictive at the same time. But most of the time when I take a landscape photo and feel dissatisfied, it either breaks this rule or has very bad lighting.

blt··on Korg PS-3300 is back
Probably some of both, but 11k is extremely reasonable for this. If I understand correctly, it has 3x complete subtractive synths per key (not just 3 oscillators into 1 filter) x 49 keys. A typical analog polyphonic synth has maybe 8 voices.

The comparison is more like bulldozer vs. car than BMW vs. Toyota - entirely new capabilities are unlocked

blt··on Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now
yep, developers from 10 or even 5 years ago would have considered it a hilarious joke
blt··on What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
imo this was the single worst problem with SO, people always searching for the XY problem in every question instead of taking it at face value
blt··on The kids with phones are alright
github's original tagline was "Social Coding".
blt··on Show HN: 18 Words
UI does not register quick taps on iphone 15p duckduckgo browser
blt··on Show HN: Microsoft releases Flint, a visualization language for AI agents
Seaborn is already a nice high level semantic plotting interface. I suppose it doesn't target HTML output in a web app, but its main API is very declarative, one big function call with detailed kwargs. A port to JS seems possible
blt··on Drone Physics
One can predict forces involved in landing for specific hardware using machine learning, e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.08027.
blt··on There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days
They both work great. The MUSIC in Facing Worlds is amazing! I wasn't old enough to fully appreciate good electronic music back then :)
blt··on There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days
There was a spirited debate about Quake III Arena versus Unreal Tournament. Both were praised, but UT had more creativity in game modes (Assault, Domination) and weapons, better bot AI, and more polished sound/art assets. Reading the Gamespot reviews (below) is fun.

Each had standout maps that made you want to own both, such as Q3A's Longest Yard and UT's Facing Worlds. I ended up playing more hours of UT because I had slow internet and its bots were better.

Point being: Q3A was great, but in 1999 it became clear that id Software had lost their head start over other FPS developers. They were still elite, but in the early-mid 90s they were alone at the top.

https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/quake-iii-arena-review/1900...

https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/unreal-tournament-review/19...

blt··on Building a robotics research setup that lives next to my desk
ROS sucks, good move. Too complicated
blt··on Kirkland Roundabouts
I have a conspiracy theory that these unnecessary projects to replace intersections with roundabouts in small/midsize towns are driven by kickbacks from the contractor to the city council.
blt··on GLM-5.2 is the new leading open weights model on Artificial Analysis
There's only one GLM in my heart: the one that includes vec3.hpp
blt··on Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
Not relative to its available resources. For example, there's still no option to penalize intersections. I'm still getting absurd side-street routes and unprotected lefts/crossings to save 1 minute on a 20-minute trip.
blt··on Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity
For me, it's hard to imagine him giving up the printed newspaper strip's connection to the physical world. Calvin and Hobbes is filled with references to the basic elements of physical reality: dirt, rocks, water, snow, speed, collisions, temperature, light, sound. Webcomics exist in a world of pure information.
blt··on What every coder should know about Gamma Correction
I wonder why we use something polynomial-based instead of something exponential-based like the decibel scale?
blt··on Zig Structs of Arrays (2024)
After that build-up, I was hoping to see a toy implementation of a method or two for `MultiArrayList`.
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