elcritch

> One thing I found was that it was tough to get small text to look good with some fonts.

Same here. For scaling from medium to large fonts the MSDFs were good. However at smaller "normal" font sizes they just didn't tend to look good even with larger MSDF sizes.

Plus for font rendering the GPU overhead was too large to be worthwhile for normal GUI apps. Font atlas'es are pretty small, and most fonts for GUIs are statically sized.

However I did find MSDF are fantastic for rendering complex SVG paths with lots of benefits [1]! You can use a 64x64 SVG star and scale it up fullscreen with reasonable loss in quality [2] (or use 128x128 for almost lossless images).

I use them as the core of my GUI library to render complex SVG paths for icons and such and compose individual paths on the GPU.

You can use them to implement fair chunks of Lottie animation as well [3]. Though I never got enough into the Lottie work to go beyond basic demos, but you could easily scale MSDFs, add shadows, feathering, outlines, etc at 100+ FPS.

1: https://forum.nim-lang.org/t/14062#85314

2: https://github.com/elcritch/figdraw#msdf-bitmap-based-sdf-re...

3: https://github.com/elcritch/lotty

Nothing makes them more "worthy" of empathy. It's that I have somewhat more of a personal connection to them. During my studies the Arab Christians on the campus in Tel Aviv were some of the most peaceful and kind people I met over there and it influenced me greatly.

They also happen to be caught between a rock and a hard place where both the Israelis and the Muslim Palestinians both oppress them. Quoting from [1]:

    I am a Christian by religion, born in Nazareth, Israel to 
    Arabic-speaking Christian parents and brought up in Kufur Yasief, 
    the hiding place of Josephus Flavius
    
    Persecution for Christians in Israel and Palestine is not on the 
    scale it is in Egypt, but it is there nonetheless. It must be added 
    that there is a growing number of Jewish-background, and Russian
    Christians in Israel, who suffer more persecution from the 
    Jewish state and people. 
    ...
    Christian Arabs in Israel/Palestine live in a climate of fear 
    and therefore hypocrisy. Pressure on Arabic-speaking Christians 
    to tow the Muslim Arab nationalist line is so great, that we are even
    afraid of complaining about injustices against us.
    We suffer:
    • At the hands of Jews, because we are seen as:
     o Arabs: and so enemies, and primitive.
     o Christian: and so gentiles. WE are often blamed, by association, 
           for the European holocaust.
    • At the hands of Muslims because we are Christian, and "infidels." 
         We are often punished for “western” bias towards Israel.

1: https://christianpersecutionreview.org.uk/storage/2019/09/Is... 2: https://anglicanjournal.com/arab-christians-among-middle-eas... 3: https://www.newarab.com/news/palestinian-christians-defiant-... 4: https://jcfa.org/article/palestinian-crimes-against-christia...

I don't consider myself a "Christian Zionist".

I'm a Zionist only in the sense that I believe both the Jews and Arabs (Palestinians) have/had a right to states in their respective majority areas because of secular reasons after studying the history of both sides; not on religious or theological grounds.

It's partly what led me to convert to Eastern Orthodoxy which doesn't believe in "Christian Zionism" as a form of end-of-days prophecy. The level of crazy I saw in Evangelical churches and groups during my time there could become absurd.

Yes partly; around 2015/2016 according to the Egyptian government and more recently a surge in hamas-linked terrorist groups in the Sinai.

https://www.reuters.com/article/world/egypt-court-seeks-deat... https://www.arab-reform.net/publication/the-egyptian-armys-c...

It's more complicated of course:

https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2024/02/27/why-e...

Inverse compression.

> Can't you draw a line and say, what happened in the past cannot be reversed, but we will not continue to expand settlements?

I did a study abroad in Israel in 2005 (not jewish, just for middle eastern studies) when Israel pulled out of Gaza and did essentially that. They forcibly removed settlers and left Gaza. As I recall most Israeli's thought it'd be good step toward peace.

Unfortunately Hamas took over Gaza shortly after and shot some 12k+ rockets into southern Israel over the next 20 years, and then launched Oct 7.

Unfortunately now there seems to be far less interest in Israel now in restricting settlers in the West Bank. I also feel for the Palestinians, particularly the Arab Christian communities, however extremists on both sides don't want peace.

It also looks similar to Mosul in Iraq before and after the ISIS and Iraq and coalition forces fought:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/07/15/world/middlee...

Urban warfare is brutal, especially when one side systematically digs in and uses IEDs and booby traps in civilian buildings.

If you put Luna on Max it's still cheaper than Sol, but can achieve similar results. Though slower and with more iterations. Still it barely nudges my subscription usage!

This approach got good with Sol. With 5.5 I'd break tasks up, record planning docs, etc.

Now with Sol I rarely bother. It's really good at remembering the salient details. Its also great at continuing a pattern I setup, like commit after finishing each feature block, etc.

Google used to not have any ads for many years while they got market share. Then only small ads off to the side. Eventually the ads moved inline and were half the results, etc.

AI summary seems like the same play, even if it hurts their current ad business some. After all why search for stuff when a chatbot can just tell you? Makes sense they'd view it as an existential crisis and push their AI.

Google will be well positioned when ads start being added to AI for most users.

Google isn't trying to sell you the best site. They're trying to sell you – ok well your click to the highest bidder.

> If they were in equal standards I truly think Chinese models would have long surpassed American ones.

Limitations often lead to creativity to overcome them. The Chinese AI labs have had to focus much more on efficiency so they got good at it. Meanwhile breaking new ground is often harder than replicating it. So even if they had matching compute it's not a given they'd be better.

Same here. The new macOS'es always seem to add more restrictions, more bloat, etc nowadays. I was thinking of upgrading the other day; glad I didn't.

Yes, it’s also the way human society processes new stuff, be it novel technologies and the philosophical ramifications or other topics. Call it distributed Bayesian processing.

Sure each 2-cent philosophical posts isn’t worth much on its own but add up many of them over time and we get something more than its parts.

Fascinating! Though how much of that would be due to a birds baseline metabolism? Wouldn’t be a fair comparison if that includes the birds basic energy costs of living.

vtebench is just what I've been wanting! Rune looks pretty cool too. Awesome to see people working on polishing things.

I've been building my own editor and gui toolkit, but modeled on Cocoa/OpenStep and similarly found tuning terminal performance involved more about tuning memory access and storage. That sounds somewhat similar to the experience in TFA.

Best explanation I’ve heard is that “coding is solved but software engineering hasn’t”.

Theres a reason American capital markets and tech go hand in hand after all. Just read the recent Mistral thread about the lack of capital in Europe and why Mistral seems largely third rate in the AI frontiers.

One thing I generally trust with Apple is that if they finally released a foldable screen that they've overcome those issues. Apple tends to let others release new tech while they tend to be more conservative until they've polished it.

Honestly it works. I've never been tempted by foldable phones, but this version piques my interest.

In particular being able to do "dual screen" or large screen. Then add the behind screen facetime camera. Suddenly it goes from "eh" to "oh". Small tweaks perhaps but it changes how i view the form factor.

Be careful of blind partnership. Both parties have been increasingly guilty of this in recent decades. The republican party internal dynamics are just the most recent.

Even then Trump has been loosing his grip on the republicans in congress. It's slight but there. IMHO thats for the best.

The UX of DNS would need to be swapped with the gTLD going first.

Perhaps more practical would be browsers noting the gTLD as an important piece of information. Perhaps a “Bank” tag for .bank urls.

We’d just end up in the same situation email has where only the big email providers can reliably send email.

The better solution is smarter LLM filters. Most of these scams are incredibly obvious and rely on human frailty. Essentially the elderly, exhausted parents, stressed students at finals, etc.

Alternatively Apple and Android should make it easier to set DNS and content filters but not be able to provide those services themselves.

Interesting, well too bad. Personally I find Nim more useful and productive than ever with LLMs.

Nitter uses Jester which seems dead for sure, but doing static binaries is easy. Personally I just forked Mummy to continue as MummyNG since I prefer threaded servers so things like JSON parsing doesn’t cause latency issues.

Though that being written over a year ago it’s either not a high priority or harder than it seems. I’ll be curious to see which. LLMs make it easier than ever for others to contribute or to fix up deps.

Cool to see such a notable Nim based project continue! It's unfortunate that X tries to block Nitter so often, but zedeus always seems to find a path around technical or now legal issues.

The code looks surprisingly easy to hack on: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/blob/master/src/nitter.nim

Congress is supposed to be the forum wherein this happens. It's intentionally a broader forum of people's representatives from the entire nation. If congress can't agree to a law then the federal government probably shouldn't be doing it, even if something is desirable.

Thanks for filling in how the metcal's work! The 13.56 mghz signal made me figure an impedance measurement. Though as you say that explains why metcals are so bulletproof.

Side note: I found Thermaltronics stations to not be much cheaper than Metcal ones. At least for the lower end stations. Gotta love capitalism.

> SMD disks were first using 11" platters, later 8"; and with a nominal speed of 3600 rpm, thus 60 rotations per second (although Fujitsu later deviated from the norm and had a few drives spinning even faster, at 3961rpm), it took a noticeable amount of power to spin these disks up (and a smaller one to keep them spinning, which one would notice when receiving the bill from the electricity company).

I wouldn't mind having a few of these to act as backup flywheel batteries. Maybe if civilization crashes these will make a comeback as dual use power & data storage devices. ;)

Metcal’s are amazing!

They use a high mghz signal to measure the tip temperature using impedance measurements IIRC. Then they control the tip temperature using a feedback control loop. Humans suck in comparison for heat control.

Trying to use a Hakko afterwards will make you want to curse in my humble opinion.

They’re really not too expensive on Amazon either.

Even for soldering larger 0.1” headers a microscope lets you inspect the joints for cold joints or micro cracks. Those will happen, especially when starting out!

If solar+battery were cheaper wouldn't the new AI data centers be opting to pay to build that rather than nuclear or LPG options?