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gmiller123456

2,878 karma · joined June 15, 2016

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gmiller123456··on We Must Return to the Office to Use AI in Person
This guy is a straight shooter with upper management written all over him.
gmiller123456··on State of the Map 2026
Not yet, but I assume they will. They said they only ever show the official names designated by the country in question. Probably because a lot of countries disagree on borders as well as names and get really upset with people who get it wrong.
gmiller123456··on State of the Map 2026
Even though he can't tell others to follow them, they often choose to do so anyway. E.g. Google Maps displays the Gulf of America.
gmiller123456··on My favorite nonfiction books about cults, scams, and schemes
"Seductive Poison" is a good one. It's a story about the "Koolaid suicide" cult. It's one lady's story about how she got indoctrinated, abused, and ultimately escaped from Jonestown. It's told from her perspective, and really does a good job of showing how a seemingly reasonable person can get wrapped up in that.
gmiller123456··on 50k Boat Names
Ocean sailing leaves a lot of free time. Also the people who can afford to do it have a lot of free time. So I don't find it that surprising.
gmiller123456··on Atomic Clocks
The one we used is still active JU-55961 (area code 502), only difference is it plays an ad first. It had a little jingle used to memorize it, so I still remember it today. I searched the internet for that number, and apparently there were hundreds of these JU numbers for different services.
gmiller123456··on US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections
I'm surprised they'd even need to say that, let alone people who heard it were just learning it. I would imagine the overwhelming majority of cases don't involve forensic evidence. I've only had close involvement in a handful of cases that resulted in a conviction, but none involved forensic evidence. In one they took fingerprints (and the handle to our cash drawer, which they never returned), but that didn't result in a conviction.
gmiller123456··on Home alone: Remote work, isolation, and mental health
My experience is the exact opposite. I worked remotely for a good 10 years, after a buyout we returned to the office for a couple years, and returned to remote during 2020.

When working from home, when 5pm hits, the first thing I want to do is get out of the house. I do lots of group activities, hiking, kayaking, cycling, pool, trivia, photography, etc.

When I have to go in to the office, when 5pm hits, all I want to do is go home. Once I'm home, I'm much less likely to leave.

I understand I'm a sample size of one. And even though several of my who work from home friends feel the same way, it's obvious I never meet the people who stay at home. But I'm curiious as to whether the people staying at home would go out if they worked in an office. Seems like that'd make most sense if you're hanging out with people you work with, which I don't do much. But I doubt there's a good sample size of people who've switched back and forth.

gmiller123456··on Rendering the Sky, Sunsets, and Planets
I'm not sure if it was a deliberate omission or not, but it's worth pointing out in the Sunset model that the sky should not go black as soon as the Sun goes below the horizon as it does in the demo. The Sun will still be shining on the atmosphere above you, and in areas above your horizon for a considerable time after Sunset. There will still be a noticeable twilight (in Earth's atmosphere) until the Sun is 18 degrees below the horizon. It's probably not practical to implement using ray tracing, but there are common algorithms to model it.
gmiller123456··on Taking a Look at Compression Algorithms – Moncef Abboud
[Deleted]
gmiller123456··on US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional
Appeals court decisions generally only apply to their own jurisdiction. But they obviously hold a lot of weight when cited in others.
gmiller123456··on RSA and Python
One of the bigger hurdles in implementing RSA is having an algorithm which can multiply the large numbers in real time. If you try a niave multiplication algorithm, you might find you'll never get an answer. A lot of hardware now comes with special instructions which implement efficient algorithms for doing this.
gmiller123456··on Dune3d: A parametric 3D CAD application
I gave build123d a try about a year ago. I really wanted it to work, but it has a lot of issues, mainly in documentation. I'm going off memory here, and it's been a while, so maybe some of these have been fixed. One of the biggest issues is one of the fundamental classes (I want to say "Part") is not documented at all. And it's essentially the most important class. I tried enumerating all of the methods on the class, but didn't make much progress. Fillets were promising, but it seems once you've got a complex edge from a few operations it quits working, or at least did for my part. You're supposed to be able to do something like b=Box(10,10,10), then access the width as b.width, but all of those properties were always zero.

OpenSCAD supposedly supports Python now (https://pythonscad.org/), but I was not able to get it to work at all. I've fallen back to just OpenSCAD, even though it has limitations, at least I'm familiar with them. I'm mostly just waiting for improvements to anything that'll make it better than OpenSCAD.

gmiller123456··on Every single board computer I tested in 2025
Budget boards start at $42? Not really sure what the criteria was for being included, but it looks like you can still get a RPi 2B for $25. And Orange Pis are available for under $20.
gmiller123456··on Graphics Programming Resources
No. With the old style you had to draw every pixel, and you'd have to develop primitives for drawing a point, a line, or a triangle. With a GPU you essentially give the GPU a bunch of data and tell it to draw points, lines, or triangles for you. You then create "shaders" which are functions that the GPU calls to ask where to position a vertex, or what color to make a pixel, with some "magic" that passes data between the two. It's best understood by looking at the code for the almighty gradient triangle: https://webgpufundamentals.org/webgpu/lessons/webgpu-inter-s...
gmiller123456··on Graphics Programming Resources
"Basic" is a relative term. Modern graphics GPUs do not work the same way memory mapped graphics do, and working with them is different at a fundamental level.

You are probably better off searching for old graphics programming books from the 90s. The code they have likely won't work, the the algorithms should be what you're looking for, and shouldn't be hard to adapt.

gmiller123456··on Fix your robots.txt or your site disappears from Google
Sounds like great news. Users will eventually figure out other search engines produce more relevant results and Google's dominance will fade. Hopefully they never "fix" it.
gmiller123456··on Drones that recharge directly on transmission lines
The Mythbusters also tried it in the "Free Energy" episode. They pretty much said extracting any useful amount of energy is not worth the effort.
gmiller123456··on CSS sucks because we don't bother learning it (2022)
> Width and height are meaningless for inline elements

Really not sure what you're trying to get at there, obviously any element that displays will have a width and height. Maybe you meant a user specified width/height, but the entire point of my post is an inline-block is an inline element with a specifiable width and height. And we've always had the IMG tag, which is also an inline element with a specifiable width and height. The obvious and intuitive choice would have been to not put artificial limits on inline elements.

gmiller123456··on CSS sucks because we don't bother learning it (2022)
What ever that "certain way" it's supposed to act, someone obviously wants it to act different if they set a height and width. Having to redefine the display time is a needless extra step that the user has to "just know" when the intention could easily be inferred.
gmiller123456··on CSS sucks because we don't bother learning it (2022)
No, we don't learn CSS because it sucks. I have given up on the idea that I will ever be able to remember all of the rules and exceptions.

Just one example most people already know. If I set a height or width on an inline element, it's ignored. So, obviously there is a limitation in the renderer that can't do it. But wait, make it inline-block and suddenly it works! So why the f*k didn't it just honor the width and height to begin with? It's quite literally a rule for the sake of having a rule.

I don't doubt there is some deep dark reason for why it is the way it is, like optimizations, or backwards compatability, but it doesn't matter to the end user. It's an implementation detail they shouldn't have to bother with.

gmiller123456··on One Formula That Demystifies 3D Graphics
It's a lot less about being discovered, or invented, and a lot more about the idea of using it at all. The Renaissance was a massive change in culture. Before that, art was a tool used in rituals or storytelling rather than something to be enjoyed on its own. There was more emphasis on reproducing things as they actually were than how they looked from a particular vantage point.
gmiller123456··on OpenSCAD is kinda neat
I really wish OpenSCAD had objects, so you could use something like box1.width rather than having to declare variables for such things.

I tried using Build123d, a Python library that lets you use all of the features of Python. And it's supposed to allow specifically things like box1.width, but it's always 0. Lots of other issues/bugs too, and severely lacking in ddocumentation.Maybe it'll get there some day.

gmiller123456··on OpenSCAD is kinda neat
Not sure about SDFs, but ray casting/tracing goes back a long way being used to design sundials thousands of years ago. A method of ray casting was published in the 1600s to show how to trace out the outline of the Moon on the Earth during a solar eclipse.
gmiller123456··on Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues
Don't forget the CloudStrike outage: One company had a bug that brought down almost everything. Who would have thought there are so many single points of failure across the entire Internet.
gmiller123456··on US axes website for reporting human rights abuses by US-armed foreign forces
Too bad you're getting down voted because you're correct that congress is where the problem is. They could stop most of what he's doing, but choose not to.

But "Every check and balance is working" is clearly wrong.

gmiller123456··on The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press
Youtube pays them per (ad) view, and also recommends the video to more people based on how many people click on it. So giving people another way to watch it will decrease their revenue and audience.
gmiller123456··on Things you can do with a Software Defined Radio (2024)
I depends on the orbit. The low Earth ones would usually be de-orbited and fall back to Earth. The geosychronous ones are usually just moved to a parking orbit out of the way to make room for more. If it's in a high but not very crowded orbit, they might just stop using it.
gmiller123456··on Japan sets record of nearly 100k people aged over 100
Rejecting bad data is part of what we should do to get people healthy. This isn't a controlled scientific study, it's just a news article about a government supplied statistic with a lot of unsubstantiated claims as to why.
gmiller123456··on Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage
The anti-satellite devices could be deployed in the same manner as the Starlink satellites. And they wouldn't need communications equipment, so they could be lighter and cheaper to launch. And you really wouldn't need to take them all out, just enough to make communication unreliable.

Starlink launches reduce costs by launching a bunch of satellites with similar orbits on the same vehicle, replacing one or a few satellites is going to cost a lot more per satellite. So just disrupting the network is a lot cheaper than fixing it.

Thought the cheapest is still probably paying an existing employee to break some stuff.

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