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marmakoideon Exact, parallel 2D Delaunay triangulation for int32 coordinates

Not the author, but I assume that to make it work with 32 bits integer coordinates, some operation (like multiplications) need extension to 64 bits. If we want full hardware support on 64 bits CPUs, that's the limit.

marmakoideon Why is everyone trying to build a solid-state battery?

This is ridiculous, there are plenty of stars and most of them are red dwarfs with tidally locked rocks blasted by flares anyway

marmakoideon Brunost: The Nynorsk Programming Language

And with all the maths in balanced ternary

marmakoideon Printf-Tac-Toe

Having something Turing-complete is surprisingly easy, and it hides everywhere. The repository have a small document that explains how you can use printf() as a computer : it can performs additions, logical union and negation, which is enough.

It was unintentional, but Ken Thompson being Ken Thompson, can't be 100% sure.

marmakoideon Show HN: X86CSS – An x86 CPU emulator written in CSS

Don't look at the end destination, look at the journey to the destination

* Learn low-level details of a basic but real-world CPU

* Practice the brain gymnastic of programming an atypical Turing-complete computer

Your created new connections in your brain, put to use some of the old established connections. Having a machine spit-out the emulator would rob you of all that. Like, you can drive from A to B, but running for A to B can do you much good.

marmakoideon Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC

There are lots of C compilers (LCC, TCC, SDCC, an army of hobby projects C compilers) available as open-source.

I am curious about what results would be for something like a lexer + parser + abstract machine code generator generation for a made up language

marmakoideon Claim: GPT-5-pro can prove new interesting mathematics

It's stochastic monkeys, but enhanced with a really good bias towards coherent prose, built upon a gigantic corpus.

marmakoideon Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

Hot take : the whole LLM craze is fed by a delusion. LLM are good at mimicking human language, capturing some semantics on the way. With a large enough training set, the amount of semantic captured covers a large fraction of what the average human knows. This gives the illusion of intelligence, and the humans extrapolates on LLM capabilities, like actual coding. Because large amounts of code from textbooks and what not is on the training set, the illusion is convincing for people with shallow coding abilities.

And then, while the tech is not mature, running on delusion and sunken costs, it's actually used for production stuffs. Butlerian Jihad when

marmakoideon Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

The plan went from the AI being a force multiplier, to a resource hungry beast that have to be fed in the hope it's good enough to justify its hunger.

marmakoideon Differentiable Logic Cellular Automata

Self-plug here, but very related => Robustness and the Halting Problem for Multicellular Artificial Ontogeny (2011)

Cellular automata where the update rule is a perceptron coupled with a isotropic diffusion. The weights of the neural network are optimized so that the cellular automata can draw a picture, with self-healing (ie. rebuild the picture when perturbed).

Back then, auto-differentiation was not as accessible as it is now, so the weights where optimized with an Evolution Strategy. Of course, using gradient descent is likely to be way better.

marmakoideon Slouch: Posture panic in modern America

Regular Sunday 10 miles here, then I had the pleasure to experience plantar fasciitis. I love running, but the injuries can be really annoying

marmakoideon Slouch: Posture panic in modern America

I fixed my recurrent back pain with a 6 mn daily morning, ie. plank, side plank, reverse plank, 1mn 30 sec each.

Posture muscles are not very well known in the general public. Loss of strength due to aging and sedentary lifestyle makes standing, seating, etc uncomfortable.

marmakoideon JSON for Classic C++

Significantly faster compilation means less friction to iterate ideas, try things, which in the end lead to more polished results.

A nice interface is agreable, but maybe there are diminishing returns when you pay it with large compile time. I remember pondering about that when working with the Eigen math library, which is very nice but such a resource hog when you compile a project using it.

marmakoideon Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (October 2024)

https://github.com/marmakoide/pestacle

Be warned, zero documentation, because things are at larval stage and change often. Will include a couple of demos this week.

In the spirit, yes, but targeting different hardware, public, and environments.

* It runs on Linux, Mac, Windows. Bare metal on rp2040 and rp2350 is planned.

* It written in C, build with Make.

* It is meant to run on something like a Raspberry Pi, Latte Panda, etc

* A setup is a text file, no fancy UI.

* The plan for live parameter fiddling will be a web server. Web UI will be tailored to each setup, no one size fits all UI. Typically I pay someone to do the UI.

* For now, it's only video, no sound output

It will be used for several large interactive LED displays and object tracking systems. It's a way for me to factories all those projects I was contracted for.

marmakoideon Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (October 2024)

A nodal real-time video processing tool : put together pre-made "processing boxes" to generate interactive video. It runs on pretty much anything, uses a plugin architecture.

Say, plug a camera, and it will blend two videos streams using a silhouette detected on the camera, with various effects. It's very, very early, pre-alpha stuff, but it already was used for a demo by a customer.

GitHub pestacle, be warned, it's undocumented and larval stage

marmakoideon A solar gravitational lens will be humanity's most powerful telescope (2022)

It's not a way to boost a signal.

It's using the Sun as a (gravity) lens, with probes at the focal point to gather the image. Because it's a very large lens, that's allow to have a massive zoom on whatever object we are interested in.

marmakoideon Terence Tao on O1

I had the same experience with computational geometry.

Very good at giving a textbook answer ("give a Python/ Numpy function that returns the Voronoi diagram of set of 2d points").

Now, I ask for the Laguerre diagram, a variation that is not mentioned in textbooks, but very useful in practice. I can spend a lot of time spoon-feeding the answer, I just have the bullshiting student answers.

I tried other problems like numerical approximation, physics simulation, same experience.

I don't get the hype. Maybe it's good at giving variations of glue code ie. Stack Overflow meet autocomplete ? As a search tool it's bad because it's so confidently incorrect, you may be fooled by bad answers.

marmakoideon The first release candidate of FreeCAD 1.0 is out

Fixing the topological naming issue, in the mainline, what a game changer.

I am using Freecad for Actual Real Things. I learned to work around the topological naming issue, but it cost me time, and it can make parametric models quite brittle (ie. a minor change can break the model).

marmakoideon The first release candidate of FreeCAD 1.0 is out

I rage quitted OpenSCAD for FreeCAD :p

For real, because I am way more productive with FreeCAD. FreeCAD allows to work in term of topological features like surfaces, edges, etc which is, in practice, very cumbersome with OpenSCAD.

marmakoideon Starship survives reentry during fourth test flight

Yet one flap is going to be eternal in human memory

marmakoideon Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

That flap is already a legend, kept at it even mangled by hot plasma, crazy accelerations and pressures, spitting molten steel at the camera. What a role model, the little flap that could.

marmakoideon The CompCert C Compiler

That would break most C code handling hardware directly, like on MCUs

marmakoideon Most of Europe is glowing pink under the aurora

Ushaiha and the Falklands?

marmakoideon Most of Europe is glowing pink under the aurora

Wow, I just went outside (South West of France) to plug the car for charging before going to bed.

I noticed unusual, faint light patterns in the night sky, like long spikes coming from the North. It was not the Milky Way, we can see every clear night. Color was mostly gray slightly pink. Wondered what was that ... My first aurora !!!

marmakoideon Superfile – A fancy, pretty terminal file manager

A well-made TUIs is really ergonomic and clutter-free. It can be maintained to high standard by one person. It doesn't take a lot of efforts to make composable tools, ie pipes. It uses little resources even for fancy TUIs.

GUIs can be fine, but they are hard to get right, most are meh or just bad, and they are human resources sinks.

marmakoideon My Clients, the Liars

The whole read made me reframe Better Call Saul as a documentary.

marmakoideon 'Meditations' by Marcus Aurelius – Stoicism in Modern Language [video]

Ayn Rand is teenage fantasy you are supposed to grow out as soon as you start to engage into adult life, working, develop romantic relationships, etc.

marmakoideon Two classic radiosity books now free

You need to dice your scene in many well formed elements (it's tricky, lots of edge cases), and you are simulating diffuse light only. Point sampling achieve the same results without a complex preprocessing step.

marmakoideon M3 CPU cores have become more versatile

My Thinkpad 470s battery is close to its death (1h30 autonomy editing text, doing CAD or websurfing), after 5 years of heavy use.

marmakoideon CGA in 1024 colors – a new mode (2015)

I felt like an unknown genius using 256x256 unchained VGA : marginally faster sprites ! Sprite clipping using a 4 pixels out of screen border !