danwills

While I acknowledge that this is meant to be framed in the context where the message is fully compressed, I think particularly when the medium is language (usually pretty compressable), then actually anti-aliasing the transfer of information is still 100% relevant! After all, AA is really about making better use of the information that you actually transmit. Compressed or otherwise, 1000 bits of aliasy garbage is not in any way the same as 1000 bits of perfectly antialiased signal.

I like to think of this idea of transfer of information (via words, let's say) from speaker/writer to listener/reader, as actually a fairly normal signal processing situation. One where the constructor of the message during it's 'rasterisation' from continuous thoughts to discrete words, can do the job well (ie: band-limit and 'antialias' the message, fully considering the target sampling domain), or badly (ignore the target domain and just speak/write from the source context, leading to 'aliasing' in the listener's received message).

I know this isn't how many people think about words, but I think the idea of antialiasing is relevant and something that people should think more about (including with respect to AI-generated text).

I just learned that one can get the mods here (lemmings 2 actually even used a real tracker called OctaMED!):

https://www.camanis.net/lemmings/music.php

Such a classic sound! Reminds me of the similarly brilliant Star Control II soundtrack (which was also tracker music)!

Same here! However a friend had an Amiga and the music there was sample-based like a demoscene 'tracker' (but in a proprietary format), so it also had that lovely sample-based aspect ;) I still listen to extracted/covered versions of some of those to this day!

I like this idea too and would love to see someone have a crack at it! But I think reaction-diffusion would be a nicer type of automaton/solver to use since it can just look a lot nicer and less aliasy (I have a huge soft spot for GOL of course, but it's so discrete and aliasy when you can see individual cells! And even all the cell-transitions are essentially instant too!)

Reaction-diffusion can definitely do complex life-like behaviour and plenty of other fascinating things! (Rob Munafo's Uskate-World being a great example!) And here's a YT vid of an experimental RD sim that I made a while back to illustrate:

https://youtu.be/W6sO8ZkgU9s?si=gGeZwX0ueYOFiKiD

Ah yes you're so right, a 'distributed' synchronisation method could work great!

I love the idea of mechanical sensing too! Would be cool if somehow the 3-neighbour 'grow' rule could somehow involve budding off a cell from the (or one of the?) 'parents' and transitions from 1 to 0 (cell death) could actually involve the disassembly of something! : )

Since GOL doesn't consider the self-cell, there are 9 possible values for the 'total' (0 to 8), and since there's both Birth and Survival, that's 18 bits in total, so 2^18 which comes to 262,144 possible rules! That is a LOT more than I thought there were! Cool! - makes me want to explore them again more thoroughly.

Cool! This is about an interactive display but initially I thought someone might have managed to make GOL into a physical automaton! Cells could physically sense neighbouring cell states and change their own states.. might still need a global clock to get coherent GOL behaviour but I think that would be fascinating! Also GOL (2,3/3) is only one out of about 1024 possible 2d totalistic CA rules, some of the others have interesting behaviours too and would be fun to be able to explore in the real world :)

I think that that might be an aspect of the reproductive fitness of the 'hive' (or meta-organism) of all humans, rather than the genes in any individual or population.

I agree individual humans mostly seem to behave more like single-celled micro-organisms and it's a stretch to call it a collective-organism, but it's also not impossible to see the relevant analogous aspects though I think! (like, the internet could be one example?)

It's an interesting question whether the human species (or life-as-a-whole?) viewed as a single-system will be able to reproduce itself. Sounds like the question only makes sense when talking about settling elsewhere than Earth.. Mmm, reminds me of the Fermi Paradox. Will we make it through this!?!

I'm reminded of this section of a Douglas Adams quote:

"Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again."

I like how this is not even specific to life nor genes, and it's not hard to add to it the idea of happening-again in ways that make the thing better-or-worse at happening again.

Personally I think this applies to all coherently-causal systems.. still trying to figure out whether to believe QM is fully causal or not! (Currently seems like it might be a mixture?)

I agree with your sentiment but myself I'm not convinced that either politics or corruption are actually (in reality) one-dimensional as you're suggesting, despite fairly widely reported trends towards world-wide political polarisation, and various different groups/parties/companies trying to appear as if they don't harbour corruption in a black-and-white way (how ridiculous!?) these things affect all systems to varying (nonzero) degrees.

I think there are actually still plenty of other dimensions/axes/structures one can think and argue/discuss about even if not many people (or politicians) actually do!

Authoritarianism surely sucks on so many levels though, I will echo that for sure!

I am partial to this speed-is-life sentiment, and it made me think of this beautiful and wonderfully poignant demoscene production by Farbrausch and Haujobb: "Time Index". It is made in the memory of a friend of theirs that died.

The softsynth soundtrack includes lyrics and one of them is "we slow down" which I always interpreted as a kind of demoscener's lament since making things go fast is sorta the whole point!

https://youtu.be/fngv1dCFrdo?si=tR-1uQ4vKIPLHZu3

I am not arguing for either side of the fastness debate, while I certainly adore fast computers I don't like the mental image of our computers all blazing away doing stuff mainly humans care about, while the the world 'outside' is steadily getting hotter and more polluted.

I think there's utility in structures/patterns that can self-heal when damaged, but my imagination initially goes to usage in games and unusual UI.

I've played with reaction-diffusion quite a bit, which is an adjacent idea, and there can be some fun in trying to delete all the solitons - which can be an interesting challenge when they behave like like rapidly-replicating gliders!: https://www.mrob.com/pub/comp/xmorphia/F180/F180-k530.html.

My kids enjoyed that as a semi-game like challenge in an RD I made in Android app 'Shader-Editor' on phone, and I reckon something similar but using Neural-CA could be really fun!

Particularly if animated/dynamic (moving) patterns could be developed - like 'The Powder Toy' (et al) but less discrete and more continuous - and far less aliasing!

How about a Terraria-like crafting game, crossed with Powder Toy and using NeuralCA, Reaction-Diffusion and other continuous automata like fluid Sims too! Sounds like it could be fun!?

Ah thanks for letting me know! I had not set it to public. It's public now though! Glad you enjoyed it!

Wow this is too much fun for simple sum-of-cosines but I shouldn't be surprised (have played with FFT a bit, and I know of Reimann Zeta Function.. sines are amazing!)

I doubled the angle so that it doesn't drift to the side any more.. and put it back to 7-symmetry, but left it with the coloring I added (now adjustable via consts):

https://www.shadertoy.com/view/7Xl3Ws

And a small tweak:

https://www.shadertoy.com/view/73lGDs

If you squint with it on fullscreen on that last one there's a wonderful mixture of things feeling like they are rotating vs flowing inward-and-outward from 'centers' (like it's ambiguous whether it's curl or divergence somehow for my eyes/brain at least!).

Hooray for sines and cosines and shaders and thanks for motivating me to play!

Ah silly me, you put the sources in the comment!! Thanks for that I will have a read for sure!

It struck me as looking a bit like a demoscene plasma effect but with a radial/angular aspect! (also reminds me of cymatics diagrams a bit!)

I experimented with non-integer symmetries and it seemed not to introduce discontinuities, and I made it produce an RGB value for fun too:

https://www.shadertoy.com/view/7XsGWs

Thanks! Perfect match as far as I can see, nice one! How did you learn/know how to do this?

The code was really interesting to read and tinker with! I made a version where the symmetry (7 originally) can be other numbers, and that was fascinating to see!

ShaderToy forever!!

Ah thanks for correcting me! Guess I glossed-over it earlier on in the article, apologies!

Only partway through the article but it was a small shock when the word 'rodent' turned up unexpectedly:

"...later, if the rodent reenters that place, the cell will fire"

Totally fair and normal of course I just had been imagining human or generic neurons/dendrites up to that point. The test species wasn't mentioned earlier as far as I can see!

Spot on! So much silly engineering would be needed to make this even slightly make sense for normal Linux 'users' and even then, if you can be root then there is no limit!? root can do anything as any user, right? And it's definitely expected that the system admin (ie yourself for your own computer!) can become root!!

I'm glad I'm on a source distribution (Gentoo, even though it does require patience) so I could in-theory edit/patch out the nasty bits before they even become binaries if anything like this ever does go ahead! (Seems unlikely to really work for Linux users anyway really though, for many of the reasons you suggested!)

Ah wow that is awesome, thankyou for clarifying that! Today I learned there's another native fruit with a similar name, but you're right it's a totally different species! Good to know!

I wondered, since quandong sounds like an Aboriginal word, whether it might be similar to what happened with the word 'sapote' in South American fruits. I have heard that it means 'soft fruit' and hardly any of them are even related species!: White Sapote (ice-cream fruit, it's amazing, related to citrus) Black Sapote: might not quite live up to the name chocolate-pudding-fruit, but a perfectly ripe one is still delightful imo, related to persimmon) I haven't tried Mamey Sapote yet or any others.. something to look forward to! :)

I'm envious of that volcanic soil! Quite clay-y in the Adelaide Hills.. I have had a white Sapote in the ground for years and it's still less than 1m tall :/ don't know if it will ever fruit.. should care for the soil better I'm guessing, that might get it going :)

Wow! I have not heard about that! A 40m tal! Quandong!? Crikey! Tallest I've seen is about 10m. I guess they usually don't get that big in SA.

Must have been ideal conditions for it in your case and maybe it happened to be a particularly vigorous/fast-growing variant!? I have heard that it can be hard to get the seeds to germinate (sounds like it was working without troubles on your property!) I'd actually be kinda happy if it took over most of the grass at my place though I reckon! :)

I agree eucalypts are unusual, I also find them beautiful, especially ones with smooth light bark like Ghost Gum and Citriodora, which has light pinky-orange bark! Such a presence!). I've never seen a Rainbow Gum but would love to one day!

I live in South Australia and I was surprised to hear about all Eucalypts having 'leaf dimorphism' (that is what I searched for, then learned that it's usually known as 'heteroblasty') I have of course seen it many times in-the-wild, but it is not universal to all Eucalypts.

Banksia, Grevillea and Hakea are also very beautiful Australian native trees/shrubs imo, but they are a different group: Proteaceae. And there's a fascinating fruiting small tree called 'Quandong' that's in the Sandalwood family (still seems bit related to eucalypts or maybe Wattle (Acacia) when looking at it in real life though).

On many Linux desktop environments it is the default - or can be configured: To hold the Windows Key ('meta') and left-mouse-drag a window around from _anywhere inside the window_! No need to get the mouse into the 'title bar'!

Additionally, meta+middle-mouse-drag allows one to resize a window from anywhere in the whole window!! (it chooses the closest corner when the drag starts) and this, being able to resize a window without needing to put the mouse in a usually-very-thin window border, is extremely liberating in my opinion! To the point where I really miss it on sub-windows where the app is handling resizing/etc itself!

There's a Windows app I used to use that supports the same kind of thing for Windows (different key I think), no idea if there's one for Mac I'm afraid - or whether it can be configured to work that way, but there probably is one so it would be worth investigating if this sounds useful to you I'd say!

When there's physical access to the device it's nearly impossible to make any system unhackable I think, at least with current tech. In this case it's a deliberately injected (twice!) hardware fault, and requires intervention at the hardware-level to reproduce the privilege escalation.

Yeah Apple does have "secure enclave" on some devices, and maybe in many cases it would wipe itself before you got in, but maybe that just means a more careful-hand is needed? (Again, physical access and extreme care/caution when debugging/investigating the chip should work eventually I think!) - I am not a hardware hacker, just have read about it quite a bit!

Having played a bit with Discrete FFT (with FFTW on 2D images in a Shake plugin we made at work ages ago) makes the DCT coefficients make so much more sense! I really wonder whether the frequency-decomposition could happen at multiple scale levels though? Sounds slightly like wavelets and maybe that's how jpeg2000 works?.. Yeah I looked it up, uses DWT so it kinda sounds like it! Shame it hasn't taken off so far!? Or maybe there's an even better way?

I just put on a Venetian Snares album (Rossz Csillag Alatt Született) and thought I'd come back here to say the same as you have!

I'd also add: It's like Aaron's whole career is slightly resting atop Amen Break, at least as far back as (first I heard and still my favorite) The Chocolate Wheelchair Album! Amazing detailed work with Amen and similar samples that's for sure!

This worked in Opera on my (Android) phone, but on both Firefox and Chrome on Linux it seemed to not animate the rotation, and the rotation slider didn't seem to do anything either, so it was not showing off the real beauty of the MRS Fractal. I still think it's awesome but I wanted to check it out on a bigger screen and haven't been able to yet.

Very cool! Reminds me a bit of some formulas that are available in UltraFractal (and Visions of Chaos by the looks) called 'ducky' or 'ducks' fractals, here's a blogpost about them from Softology:

https://softologyblog.wordpress.com/2011/04/05/ducks-fractal...

I really like how Ducks fractals produce detail across the whole image (a pet favourite feature in fractal renderings), but I find that Ducks huge abundance of symmetries made them a bit less natural feeling, and have less variety than say, the cloudy 'inside' of a Nova-family fractal when relaxation is turned up.

Thanks heaps! I very much love the 'old-school' jungle/uk-hardcore sound and didn't know about these more recent Suburban Base releases, and your other reccs were also great too! Amen break went soooo far!

My particular favourite is in demoscene tracker music where Amen also went all over the place (and sampling more generally too!)

I'm not sure if the below is actual Amen-break (need to ask BrothomStates probably!) but it's certainly in the spirit of it and this is definitely near or at the top of my favourite demos ever, I just find it so damned cool! "The Day the Earth was Born" by TPOLM:

https://youtu.be/rt8cOLZHQ4c?si=Y323k8qog3Tv8uou

The ratio of computer minutes per programmer-minute has indeed gone to an amazing number nowadays! I work in VFX (at RSP) and this fact is vividly illustrated for me all the time by the millions of thread-hours we go through on the renderfarm each week!

Despite all the astounding developments in AI/ML though, I still think there's still a critical need for the application of human/biological imagination and creativity. Sure the amount of leverage between thoughts and CPU cycles can be utterly giant now, but it doesn't seem to diminish the need (where performance or correctness/less-bugs are needed) for a full understanding of what the computer actually gets up to in the end.

For what it's worth, we do have an ML department at RSP and they are doing great! But I'm not sure we'd get very far if we tried to vibe-code the underlying pipeline, as it really requires full understanding of many interlocking pieces.

Agree, but can't we just include both average _and_ mean? And maybe min/max while we're at it? Seems like that could give a much clearer picture (without even needing a graph!?)