dahart

I haven’t done any font editing but is this true in general? Sounds like some kind of application-defined constraint. You’re talking about quadratic splines with the shared approximating point between interpolating points, and probably quadratic Bézier, not B-splines, I would guess. Quadratic Bézier would do this if the application decides to constrain all tangents to be smooth, which is a choice, not a property of the spline. Quadratic B-splines do not in general have this property; you can move any of the control points and have local control of the curve that doesn’t extend beyond the two neighboring control points. The difference is that B-splines don’t have interpolating control points in general - the curve only approximates all the control points, and you have to use phantom points or duplicated points to ensure the curve touches them.

> the author makes no attempt to compare his solution to other splines like B-splines or Catmull-Rom

I’d argue that talking about Bézier is absolutely sufficient in this context; B-splines and Catmull-Rom splines and a few other types are all piecewise polynomial splines (cubic specifically, at least in the case of Catmull-Rom). You can convert B-splines and Catmull-Rom splines to Bézier directly and analytically; therefore B-splines and Catmull-Rom splines cannot do anything beyond what Bézier curves can do. There are some minor usability / interface / intuition differences, but there is no difference in mathematical control.

Yeah exactly. There’s an implicit assumption here that everything scales together in perfect proportion. This is a large and limiting and unnecessary assumption that undermines the argument somewhat. Maybe giant humans could exist with stockier legs…

> True for Scientific American today

Right, that’s what I was implying. However, I looked again and the article does mention elephants and dinosaurs.

> for if his height be increased inordinately he will fall and be crushed under his own weight

> scaled-up wooden houses would not support their own roofs

Hmmm this argument fails to mention giraffes, elephants or dinosaurs. (Edit: ooops it does mention elephants and dinosaurs) But clearly, land animals with bones can be quite a bit larger than humans. Similarly the houses comment ignores that large multi-story wooden buildings that support their own roofs exist, and already existed in Galileo’s time.

There might be reasons today’s evolution of human anatomy can’t get any larger than 9 feet tall, but this argument about physics and bones and square vs cube growth rates is pretty unconvincing. The argument skips right past the idea of “giants” that are only 1.5x or 2x or 3x taller, rather than 10x or 100x taller. Sure animals cannot be “inordinately” bigger, but that does not explain why they can’t be twice as big.

So Raph, how do you draw these things? I’m not sure exactly where I’d start given an equation of the curvature or tangent (I assume?) angle. The pen tool link talks about “auto points”, giving the impression that it’s a sort of Bezier subdivision with some constraints, is that accurate? And your article mentions you’ve since fixed some things in the math - so this is a bit different from the pen tool, not using auto points?

Playing with your demo, I see the curve lock shape in certain configurations and stop moving even when I’m dragging one of the control points around. Is this a temporary or numerical stability issue, or is this a property of hyperbezier curves? For example if I arrange the control points in a square with P0 bottom left, C1 bottom right, C2 top left, P3 top right, and then drag C1 to the right, the shape locks up quickly. Eyeballing, it’s maybe when the length of P0C1 is ~1.5 times the length of C2P3? Moving C1 further right and up/down, there’s a huge area where moving C1 doesn’t affect the shape of the curve.

I was slightly curious about the P/C naming as well - is this a Hermite-like idea where P[03] are points and C[12] are similar to tangent vectors? Why not use P[0123]?

Probably one really obvious thing worth mentioning - Beziers are indeed very versatile, but it has to be said that one of the reasons they’re so popular is because the math is so simple, right? Decomposable into linear steps, integer exponents, with a couple multiplies of only your parameter you can evaluate them with a matrix multiply. They’re trivial to draw. Add in the controllability and intuitiveness and simplicity of computing other properties of the curve (such as finding roots & inflections & bounding boxes, splitting curves, etc.), and it makes sense they’re very popular. Hyperbeziers look interesting, and I don’t have intuition on their uses yet, but I assume their rendering involves heavier math than Beziers - since the curvature & angle equations have a divide & square root? Can they be split or subdivided easily?

You’ve been in search of a better curve for a long time. I’m wondering how you think about and where you stand on subdividing curves like Bezier vs finding a more perfect interpolation. Obviously there are tradeoffs, but are you aiming at problems that can’t be solved in practice using subdivision/approximation? I’d also be curious to hear your thoughts on hyperbeziers vs NURBS.

> early IBM computers shipped with pretty simple, magnetically driven dynamic speakers

Yes the PC & donkey.bas were monophonic design, but the PCjr shipped with 3-channel polyphonic sound plus a noise generator. It might have been capable of doing the sounds in this port of donkey that took “some liberties”. ;)

I remember some sound demos on the PC that emulated polyphonic sound by fast/audible switching between notes in a chord. Hey it seemed cool at the time. :P I just looked and couldn’t find any quickly enough but bumped into examples of even better true polyphony on the PC achieved by assembly hacking.

If by processing cores you mean Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs), keep in mind that each SM is 128 threads, so 16 SMs is 2k threads - or 2048 single precision math ops per cycle. The 32 core avx512-enabled CPU is 512 math ops per cycle, if you have one FMA unit per core (or 1k ops/cycle if you have 2 FMA units/core).

Note that modern NVIDA GPUs like the 5090 are actually more like 170 SMs on a chip, or 21,760 flop/cycle, or ~20-40x more ops/cycle than your example CPU.

Put GDDR6 vs DDR5 memory on top of that, and it’s easy to see why the GPU can churn through math so fast … as long as it’s GPU-y. For stuff the GPU does well, the CPU typically can’t compete, the GPU is often more than 10x faster. But GPU-y tasks are a subset, and there are CPU-y things the GPU can’t compete on, despite (or even because of) the thread count discrepancy.

I never considered using my tinnitus as a perfect pitch reference. I’m pretty sure my tone changes over time, so it might not work for me, but I’m at least going to try.

I love mynoise, and Neuormodulator masks my tinnitus, but the T is usually worse when I turn off Neuromodulator. The one that has worked for me is White Burst Noise (https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/whiteBurstsNoiseGenerator....). I’m surprised Stephane didn’t mention it, but the first time I heard it, the response was immediate and very strong - during the silent phase, my tinnitus volume would audibly drop, to nearly gone. That was the first thing that gave me real hope I might be able to get rid of it.

Well, it’s not gone, and White Bursts aren’t as effective as they used to be, but “ignoring” the tinnitus does work okay-ish. The trick for me is to focus intensely on other sounds, to listen carefully to quiet things and try to hear them past the tinnitus.

> it’s nasty … add fecal matter … you really think when you poop it just lands neatly in the bowl and nothing goes in the air?

Mine does, but I like to aim in the bowl. You’re not pooing in handstand pose, are you? No, wait, you’re right - just think - if you can smell it, you’re putting anus molecules directly in your nose. ;)

In all seriousness, thinking poop is in the air and getting on your phone is FUD. That’s not happening in detectable or meaningful amounts. If poop was in the air enough to get on your phone, then your phone would be the last of your worries, it would be everywhere, you’d already be breathing it, it would be on your face and clothes, it would be escaping the bathroom, and everyone everywhere would be sick. That’s not happening.

Touching bathroom surfaces is a bigger concern by orders of magnitude, and personal hygiene is much bigger than that by more orders of magnitude - the only thing you need to worry about in practice is what you touch and whether you wash your hands, and you can alleviate the majority of issues touching things by grabbing one square of TP to touch things with…

> from ontological knowledge (naming and categorising)

The example clearly is discussing naming and not categorizing, which is precisely why Feynman’s anecdote is not fully applicable to the Linnaeus system.

> They have unity

I agree. That doesn’t mean the naming system can’t be improved, it just means unity is a goal and might be harder to achieve than before. This is what I meant about goals and agreement. If the new system were better enough, and unity was sought in advance, achieving unity might not be too difficult. It has happened before…

Yeah there is a little bit of irony versus the common narratives, though if you ask Google what type of economy these two countries are, it will tell you the Netherlands is a “social market economy” and China is a “socialist market economy” (and an example of “state capitalism”), at least since 1978 (~50 years). There is a difference between social and socialist in those terms, but both countries are still summarized as market economies…

> If there were another labelling system, it would have the same problems and would only serve to split the humans into multiple ways of doing the same thing.

If that were true, then you’re saying Linnaeus has the same problems as before it, and it only split people up? Maybe we should go back to the previous names? Of course the system could be improved and solve some problems, the relevant questions aren’t whether it’s possible, they’re about goals, scale, and agreement.

Feynman’s quote is cute but doesn’t seem completely relevant to a hierarchical taxonomic naming system that in fact does tell you something about what a bird is from the name, no?

> You mean ethnicity

I meant race. We’re only talking about skin color here.

“Today, race refers to a group sharing some outward physical characteristics and some commonalities of culture and history. Ethnicity refers to markers acquired from the group with which one shares cultural, traditional, and familial bonds.”

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/difference-between-r...

Race does exist (as does racism, unfortunately), and Wikipedia does have a page on race, as does any dictionary you choose. It would be a fair point that people should be sensitive to which word they choose based on context, and race is sometimes not the right word, but in this case it is the better choice, and the distinction in this context between race and ethnicity isn’t super relevant.

Yes, true! Though cranking saturation doesn’t brighten colors (much… at least it’s not supposed to), and maybe interestingly, light brown isn’t quite orange. There might some asymmetry in color names.

So it might not be that surprising that dark skin people turn orange when sat is cranked, but perhaps slightly surprising that light skin people do.

Anyway, I suspect it’s computationally easier to turn everyone orange than brown. Plus, given that brown skin is already a category, orange could be useful terminology/category.

> What colors are we? The short answer is maybe something like “brown” and the long answer is very, very long.

Pete Shirley (author of Ray Tracing In One Weekend) is also a part time color scientist, and he clued me into the fact that if you crank the saturation to 100% of pictures of people of any race, the skin color comes out orange. I think I heard that some face detectors may work on this principle, but I don’t remember where I heard that.

> at least have some kind of idea about your intended output.

Isn’t that what a prompt literally is?

I think you’ve made incorrect assumptions, you’re wrong about some things here. Nobody said small waste should not be fixed, they said it wouldn’t move the needle.

“We should stop waste” is a tautology. Nobody here has disagreed with that, and I don’t think you understand that yet. The only thing that matters is what the waste actually is, whether everyone agrees it’s waste, and what to do to fix it.

I honestly hoped for a more substantive discussion, and some real examples, but as you wish, I’m fine stopping here, even though giving up turns this conversation into somewhat of a waste.

> nor have I given that impression, to find individual examples of government waste and specifically fix those

Yes, you did. You gave that impression when you said OP was right to point out the list of specific items.

People weren’t disagreeing that small items exist, they were pointing out that worrying about them doesn’t fix very much waste, which is true. So they were also right.

If you aren’t going to come up with true examples, and you aren’t interested in what’s true, what’s broken or how to actually fix the problem, what value is your opinion, right or wrong? If you don’t care what’s true, then why should anyone else care if you’re right about something? And why would I think you’re right when you refuse to bring any actual evidence?

I’m trying to invite you to do more than repeat yourself, and provide some more thoughtful ideas on how to improve government efficiency, and how to evaluate inefficiency. I do work for a company, and my company wastes some money. All companies do. As others pointed out, it’s not possible to avoid some amount of “waste”. This is why it’s important to understand the waste. Without understanding, you have nothing and can’t fix it.

Then we can have a discussion about how to fix it. You can’t even start with a discussion about fixes until you have nailed down the exact problem… obviously. It would help immensely to find some factually valid examples.

If we had congress enact a law to ban studying goat yoga with federal funds, what would we achieve? We would have spent several million dollars to battle a problem that does not exist. We would waste money.

FWIW your language about “waste” is coming off as being pretty naive. Your conception of the problem is too vague to be actionable. That’s why we need real examples. As I mentioned above, you seem to be focused purely on spending while completely ignoring any ROI.

You’re also failing to prioritize, as many people here are trying to point out. Fixing the small line items before the big ones would be a massive waste of tax dollars. We can’t fix the small ones until we fix the big ones.

The list Musk & @bilsbie forwarded is not actually a list of waste in the sense you’re talking about, it’s a politically motivated statement about our country’s goals. The actual intent behind that list and the many many such lists started by Proxmire and amplified by Fox News and Republicans over the years is to cut science funding. They have said so explicitly. It’s trying to sow public mistrust, and convey the idea that we need different goals, not that certain line items are inefficient.

It seems to be working, you clearly don’t trust that funds are scrutinized properly. But do you actually know how the funds are allocated, and what processes currently exist to minimize and prevent waste?

What need is there? What small-potato line items are wasteful?

It’s hard to have any serious discussion if you don’t care what’s true and simply have unsupported opinions. How do you actually know the government is wasting money? Do you have any first hand knowledge? How do you propose to fix the waste if you don’t know where it is exactly?

If you don’t care about those specific items, then why are you defending them as representing the broader point? They are not true, therefore they do not support your broader point. If you care about the government wasting money, you should care about whether the examples are true or not, and you should reject misleading and bad faith claims because they will cause people to label you as a political shill, and more importantly they might impede fixing any real actual spending waste.

If you want to reduce waste, it’s critically important that the list of waste be factually accurate. Otherwise, you’re adding to the waste and not reducing it. If you can’t make an honest and true list of waste, it calls into question whether there is any such waste, it directly challenges your broader point.

The list @bilsbie provided is a list that Elon Musk retweeted, and Elon Musk has at this point earned a reputation as a fabulist when it comes to government spending and efficiency, he has lost nearly all good will and has done damage and caused additional government waste without fixing any problems.

> Wasn’t one of those goat yoga? […] should the government sponsor such “scientific” research?

The government DID NOT sponsor goat yoga. It’s a fabricated false claim.

There is a 50+ year history of bogus political attacks on science funding, which is why I keep bringing up the Golden Goose Awards. The fact is, science funding is not wasting money. Unless there’s dishonesty involved, there are no small science grants you can point at that demonstrate government waste, you’re looking in the wrong place.

We do need to care about waste, but we need to care about the big waste first. The war in Iran has wasted more money this week than @bilsbie’s entire list (even if they were true, which they aren’t).

You’re digging in your heels only because people here are trying to point out facts that you assume are challenging your broader point, and not because you believe the items are true? Why not actually find out if they’re true or not?

I have personally looked at each one of the items in @bilsbie’s list, as you can plainly see above. I totally recommend that you take some time to do the same, instead of just thinking it’s believable. You’ll either have real ammo for the thread, or more understanding of why people here are protesting. Either way you win, you get more real factual information.

By aligning yourself with these “specific items”, and by assuming that protest of them somehow makes them more believable, you’ve made it quite a bit harder to get your own general point across in this thread, speaking of waste.

> I support science funding

Yes! Me too. See, we agree on a lot of things. I just wanted to make sure it’s clear that doing science necessarily involves some failure, and it’s not possible to invest in science without expecting some of the grants to not work out. There’s no such thing as 100% efficiency when it comes to investment. Some waste will happen. The grants I would call waste are the ones that involve grift or scientific dishonesty, and not the grants that go to silly sounding things.

Science funding in the US is under fairly intense budget pressure, BTW. Many many (probably most) academics complain about the lack of funding. The people who tend to make lists like @bilsbie’s often seem to be somewhat ignorant of the process of applying for funding and how much scrutiny goes into every grant.

> it’s worth pointing out that supporting funding for science isn’t necessarily the same thing as funding other academic pursuits.

Great, let’s start there. Take all the science grants out of @bilsbie’s list, and let’s discuss the non-science academic funding that’s wasteful. Three of the seven items were complaining about science funding, and the other four items were non-academic. So what would that be? What “other” academic pursuits would you put on the list of waste?

You did defend the specific items, you said so explicitly, you used the word “specific” in your previous comment, your first sentence said you are now “more convinced the OP was right to point out those specific items”. These specific items completely undermine your point, don’t you see that? Lies and exaggeration do not help make your case, they do damage to your cause, they suggest the problem isn’t real because you can’t come up with true examples. If there’s a real problem that matters, surely you can come up with something that’s true, and not a Gish Gallop of bad faith slop.

Please - if there are valid, good faith examples “like” the list @bilsbie wrote, why don’t you list them and provide sources?

Now, given that I agree with you that the government wastes money, your question why am I arguing with you is a good question, and it’s a question that you should think harder about; why do I agree with the existence of waste but disagree with your examples? You do realize that nodoby wants the government to waste money, right? Well maybe nobody but some of the contractors getting no-bid contracts. The fact that most people agree with you and I on the basic premise means you don’t need to prove that point, and what we need to do is: 1- decide what our goals are, 2- gather true, factual, and accurate information about what waste is occurring, and 3- elect officials that will do the right thing and enact policy that increases our efficiency.

Now again, science funding in the US runs a pretty decent return on investment, economists seem to agree. If you disagree with that, then please provide some sources or analysis. And that includes ALL science funding, whether it sounds silly, whether it fails to produce results, and whether it’s inefficient or even wasteful. The country is getting back more money than it spends on science R&D, therefore it’s difficult to make the case that any one grant is “waste” when it’s part of a portfolio that is performing well and giving returns.

Science funding runs on the very same investment concepts that venture capital does, and sure enough venture capitalists ‘waste’ money on bad investments literally all the time. That is the nature of investment, it comes with risk and it involves failure.

Did you read about the Golden Goose Awards yet?

That’s pure straw man. There isn’t anyone against the working class in this thread, and there is anti-intellectualism in this thread. I don’t doubt there are some academics who are jerks, but you’re incorrectly assuming something about all academics (not to mention all working class) that simply isn’t true.

> your understanding is not required

Whoa, how quickly have we forgotten how the AI is trained?

> You get a fancy house […] society to labor just to support your class and its lifestyle.

Wait, how much money do you think math teachers make? Do you know how much money AI engineers make in comparison? Why the animus and insecurity toward education? You are making math teachers sound far more rich and powerful than they actually are.

> Understanding never was the goal

Hard disagree

I don’t want my tax dollars wasted. We do agree on that, right? The government does waste some money. We agree on that too, right?

I’m open to hearing why you think @bilsbie’s list is valid. I’m skeptical, and I’ll offer some reasons why, but please convince me, I will listen. Is there a credible source for the claim that money is being spent studying the effects of yoga on goats? I’ve looked a bunch already, and the consensus seems clear that the claim is simply not true.

The empty buildings claim seems mis-stated. The actual wording from the Office of Management and Budget is “empty or underutilized” (emphasis mine). The US government’s real estate portfolio is well over a trillion dollars in holdings, and half a trillion in yearly spending, so this “underutilized” concern amounts to in the neighborhood of less than one half of one percent of spending. If that’s true, I’m absolutely amazed it’s that efficient! Corporate real estate isn’t that efficient. The government manages almost a million military and civilian buildings. Hundreds of buildings come and go every single day. Is it possible this “empty or underutilized” claim is temporary and sometimes unavoidable due to move in/out times, shuffling, and planning? Does it count if the figure includes buildings that are listed for sale and not selling? What about buildings that are held as investment and sell for more than they would have if they’d sold the moment they went empty? There are literally hundreds of thousands of people managing the country’s real estate portfolio. Do you know what they need to do to get from the presumably 99.6% utilization to guaranteed 100% utilization at all times?

The smoking claim is real but dramatized for political effect - it’s simply an anti-smoking campaign & survey. Do you know the healthcare costs of smoking in the US? A quick google says direct economic costs in 2018 were ~$240 billion, with Medicare and Medicaid covering more than half of that. That’s taxpayer money, money you’re paying to cover the predictable effects of other people’s poor life choices, and that cost is literally fifty thousand times larger than the anti-smoking campaign @bilsbie complained about - five hundred of your dollars of medical care for every single penny of hipster music whatever.

If the ‘hipster’ anti-smoking campaign was covered purely by taxes on the sale of cigarettes, would that make it okay for you?

The $281 billion “managed to misplace” claim is a mis-characterization. This is the amount of money that didn’t have all proper paperwork, it was not all lost or misplaced. It is “payments that did not meet statutory or administrative criteria”.

The music and cows claim appears to be false. Google mentions the University of Leicester (not in the US) had a “Moosic Study” in 2001 (BTW, come on, that’s funny), and the University of Wisconsin Madison did some trials in 1930 that did not cost $1M.

The fish alcohol claim also appears to be false, an exaggerated carry over of a report from 1975 by Senator William Proxmire, who was the creator of the “Golden Fleece Awards”. Have you read the history of the Golden Goose Awards? It’s seriously worth the 2 minutes. https://www.goldengooseaward.org/history

The broad point above by @bilsbie is wrong. Fake made up items completely undermine the point’s credibility, and science spending in the U.S. provides a return on investment, it’s not losing money. That is pure political propaganda and not truth. Your new items have a touch more validity than top comment, but you’re making vast assumptions and stating opinions not shared by all, and not accounting for the economic costs of the alternatives you’re suggesting.

Are you not aware that science research has a positive return on investment to the economy? Consider reviewing https://www.goldengooseaward.org/

Making fun of science that politicians, wanna be politicians, and conservative media don’t remotely understand in order to deflect and hide actual economic problems they cause is a favorite pastime, but is almost always misleading.

The goat yoga thing isn’t true, it’s pure viral talking point made up nonsense. (And none of the points are made in good faith.) Don’t believe everything you read on the internet, especially if Elon Musk retweets it.

> Is he like one of those “experts know he’s a big deal in his niche but non-experts never heard about him” kind of guys?

Depends on what you mean. Is Bezier famous enough, or are we talking Stephen Hawking or Billie Eilish famous? Only time will tell, and it’s too early to say. All the experts that non-experts have heard of started out being unknown.

Cem’s already very well known in the computer graphics community, at Siggraph for example. He’s doing active research and advising and graduating many students. He’s published quite a few papers on curve/hair rendering and simulation physics, with a tendency toward real-time & game applications. So most active graphics students and profs know of him, and outside academic graphics, a lot of game programmers have heard of him.

Maybe in 50 years, you’ll hear Yuksel curves as often as Bézier curves.