vanderZwan

> Most people complain about the rules in Germany, but I like them. It means someone, or a group of people, sat down and thought about that specific thing and decided on a standard for everyone. When you have to do something, you don't feel lost, because you can just look it up. You don't have to find someone who knows.

Somewhere in the afterlife, Max Weber proudly sheds a tear of happiness while whispering "this guy gets it", hahaha (of course his whole philosophy depends on the rules being as fair as possible, and also that they are enforced uniformly and fairly, but let's not get too lost in the weeds here).

Anyway, lovely article and congrats on finding a place where you feel home!

The author mentions various categories grew or shrank, but always in percentages. Since the list also grew from 2300 to 2800 words that feels like it might distort things a bit: in absolute word count, a category that shrank by 1% lost fewer words than a category that grew by 1% would have gained, no?

Having said that, the categories that shrank all did so by a big enough percentage to also shrink in absolute number of words, so at least that isn't a problem.

Oh like that. I was thinking of situations where "reference" just directly links to the API keyword index, e.g. the P5 docs[0], putting a redundant extra page between that would annoy me too.

[0] https://processing.org/reference

I'm genuinely confused about what one would expect under "reference" that isn't effectively API-shaped (in the context of software). Like, I've never consciously thought of this before but I can't remember a time that they haven't effectively been synonyms in my mind when I'm navigatig documentation.

You know, I see that Cem Yuksel is one of the authors, and he is one of those names that keeps popping up in the weirdest places whenever I look up something random that involves graphics and the maths behind it (especially when splines are involved). 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?

EDIT: I remember now that the first time I came across his work was over 15 years ago when I was trying to interpolate between two vector shapes, and always had to deal with twists between them. I ended up reading a paper by him showing the fix for Catmull-Rom splines[0]. Ever since I've sounded like mad-man for complaining that 3b1b should have used "centripetal parameterization" for manim, haha, because it also often has these twists when interpolating.

[0] https://www.cemyuksel.com/research/catmullrom_param/

As I said in the other comment: jsgist, precisely because it's so bare-bones. The data is stored either in a shareable URL parameter, or in a gist if you give it access to you GH account. Everything else is a minimal PWA in a static html file that makes hosting of it super-cheap, so I don't have to worry about greggman pulling it down.

Anyway, the main uses case I see for these playground sites are:

1) small hand-crafted replications of suspected browser CSS bugs or the like, and testing possible workarounds. That often involves sending them to other members in the team (because I use Linux and Android, two colleagues in the team use Windows, and two using Apple products)

2) trying out some idea for how to make a particular component. Which is effectively almost the same as above, since that needs to be tested across browsers.

So I don't need bells and whistles beyond a simple text editor with code folding. That might not apply to everyone else.

Also, the exact same line of thought applies to js benchmarking sites, which is why I use jsbenchit (which is jsgist but for benchmarks). It also seems to be one of the few benchmarking sites without spurious de-opts of JS code, or noise from GCs triggered by the website itself in the middle of a benchmarking run.

[0] https://jsgist.org/, https://github.com/greggman/jsgist/

[1] https://jsbenchit.org/, https://github.com/greggman/jsbenchit/

This is why I switched to jsgist[0] years ago and haven't looked back since. It's very sparse, but it has also avoided feature creep as a result, and since the output is stored as a gist on my GH account I don't have to worry about losing it if the site ever goes down either.

(also, the sister site jsbenchit[1] has been one of the more reliable microbenchmarking tools among the various sites I've tried - most end up triggering deopts or introducing "noise" in a way that makes the output less reliable)

[0] https://jsgist.org/

[1] https://jsbenchit.org/

> The constant 4th wall breaking is just bad

IMO Ron Gilbert's biggest weakness as a writer is mainly that he has a tendency to use fourth wall breaking for everything, including the final plot twist in most of his games. It was there in his originally planned ending for The Secret of Monkey Island. That ending sort of came back as the actual ending of Monkey Island 2. Then Monkey Island 3, which didn't involve Gilbert, soft-retconned the previous game's ending, then three games later Ron Gilbert came back for Return to Monkey Island and basically retconned everything to use the original ending he planned for the first game!

And I think the main problem with it is that it tends to make the writing feel like the author doesn't dare to admit that they love the world that they created. It's kind of like how some teenagers discover sarcasm and use it everywhere because it makes them feel more "mature" than younger kids who don't understand it yet, without realizing it actually makes it very obvious to everyone else that they are masking their insecurities by acting "edgy".

To me, Gilbert's tendency for 4th wall breaking often ends up feeling similar, like the story is trying to be self-deprecating to mask insecurities about its own writing (and also, it just feels like a total cop-out to avoid writing a ending that ties all the absurd plot threads together into a satisfying pay-off).

Thimbleweed Park had that problem for me, and it kind of soured me on the ending.

Now, I don't want to suggest that the meta stuff is inherently bad. In fact, the ending of Return to Monkey Island actually was pretty satisfying to me. Mainly because of Elaine. At some point there is a very blatantly fourth-wall breaking dialogue you have with her, but unlike other times it feels more like an honest reflection on nostalgia for old adventure series, its stale tropes, how that represents growing older and having to accept that things change or be stunted forever. And it comes back at the ending in a way that makes it very clear that the implied message is "yeah it's all make-belief nonsense, it has flaws, and it's also fine to admit that you love it anyway". You're Guybrush Threepwood with a loving wife who keeps you grounded despite yourself, and the fourth wall breaking doesn't take that away. It's meta but it's sincere meta.

So I guess Gilbert's a fine writer as long as he manages to keep the fourth wall breaking grounded in sincerity. Return to Monkey Island came out five years after Thimbleweed Park, so maybe Thimbleweed Park 2 will have a similar nuance to it. I hope it does.

I never heard of the Seiler interpolation algorithm mentioned in the paper before, but the way it uses extra additions and subtractions up-front to turn six interpolations into only three reminds me a bit of the Karatsuba algorithm for multiplication[0]. I wonder if that was an inspiration for it?

Also makes me wonder if this will have uses outside of graphics? Bézier curves are used in other contexts too, aren't they?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karatsuba_algorithm

This builds on that paper, apparently:

> Yuksel [2024] explained how Seiler interpolation can be used to evaluate polynomial curves, including B´ezier curves, and noted that GPU linear interpolation could be used for the initial linear interpolation steps, with the remaining interpolations done in shader code.

> In this paper, we present the details of evaluating Bézier curves using hardware-accelerated linear texture interpolation and show how to perform all interpolations on the hardware, using both the de Casteljau algorithm and Seiler interpolation. We also compare performance and accuracy against curves evaluated as polynomials in shader code.

I fail to understand why this should make the lack of US action on gun control any more justifiable.

Per your linked article:

> But then comes the adjustment the viral chart skips entirely: when Ritchie controls for population, expressing both figures as rates per 100,000 people, the picture shifts. "Gun deaths in the US are now slightly larger than European heat death rates," she wrote.

> I think this comparison is a bit silly," she wrote, "but sympathize with the overall sentiment." Fewer gun deaths in America would not make European heat deaths acceptable, or vice versa. What the data is actually showing, she argued, is something simpler: status quo bias. "Both places take the status quo as a given"—a high-mortality situation in one domain that each society would never accept in another.

> While this is an extremely quick verification, the construction presented in this fashion appears like a massive miracle. The polynomial {F} has degree seven, so a priori the Jacobian {\mathrm{det} DF} ought to be a polynomial in three variables of degree as large as {3 \times 6 = 18}, so the fact that all non-constant coefficients of this polynomial vanish looks like a massive cancellation involving {\binom{18+3}{3}-1 = 1329} coefficients, which is much larger than the {\binom{7+3}{3} = 120} degrees of freedom for a generic degree seven polynomial of three variables. So finding such a polynomial looks highly unlikely to be located by brute force.

Sounds like the most interesting part would be learning what approaches the LLM did use to see if that's reusable elsewhere. I'm guessing that's what the rest of the article is about? Because I also couldn't follow the maths any more.

So I remember having physics homework a quarter century ago at university where we had to use Excel to determine a static electric potential field, by defining all cells in the grid as "the average value of the four surrounding cells", except the edge cells and source/sink cells which would get actual concrete values.

I distinctly remember being amazed that it would just iterate until it reached equilibrium (maybe we had to change some setting somewhere first though, I never really used Excel before or after that). I think you could change a value mid-iteration, and the grid would just continue on with the previously calculated cell values, instead of start over from scratch. That's basically "weakly connected", isn't it?

(anyway, the real challenge is to find a practical use for Excel's hidden fractal powers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-Fa6HtvGtQ)

> On 7 May 2025, in Rome, the Italian Chamber of Deputies approved a new law to help people with obesity. This law is the first of its kind in the world. It shows that obesity is a medical condition that needs proper care and support, and is not just a result of poor choices.

So I totally agree that obesity is better classified as having serious medical and societal consequenes, and something that needs proper care and support rather than shaming, and hope that this law represents a step towards that. The only problem I have with "medical condition" as a blanket description is that this appears to let the food industry off the hook way too easily, really.

Having said that I find the choice of "show" confusing: a law doesn't prove anything beyond some ruling class reached some form of consensus on any given topic at some point in time, does it?

Wait, is that the same guy who co-authorer the Floyd-Rivest Algorithm? Hmm, looks like it[0]. Huh, neat.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floyd%E2%80%93Rivest_algorithm

Floyd-Steinberg and Atkinson are the "play Freebird!" of dithering algorithms.

Airport controllers (and similar positions for trains and metros) probably also suffer from this then

> The first Chrome and Firefox implementations did

I was about to say: I'm sure I've seen it work a t some point? I imagine it's a valuable thing to add for the web though. It would be really cool if you could use the same image source for thumbnail and full image, and the browser both just figures out how much to download based on pixel size and can resume previously partially downloaded images.

And yeah, the tiling isn't implemented anywhere yet, jxl doesn't really get enough funding for that. But it'll be really cool once it does since it also makes it really useful for giant images of geographic data. I don't know if it combines with streaming downloads as well, but it would be crazy cool if we effectively got OpenSeaDragon[0] support inside an image format

[0] https://openseadragon.github.io/

I wonder if you can do this in JPEG-XL. I know that that has actual animation support, but this would be a different thing.

Uh, there definitely is "hardware specific to processing language" for our species, they even have their own wiki pages[0][1].

And in general our brains differ significantly from that of a chimpansee. Human brains push neuron density to to absolute limit within the animal kingdom and have unique evolutionary adaptations that allow for it. As a result our species also has mental health disorders unique to us that seem to be cause by the neurons being pushed past that limit.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernicke%27s_area

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca%27s_area

They technically didn't say that they don't use programming languages, they said they're not a programmer. There's plenty of other people who use programming languages regularly, but not necessarily because they're into them.

Come on guys, the contribution of the research is that it made measurements of how the processing of multiple inputs is represented in EEGs, not whether or not we can handle multiple inputs. Stop acting snarky, it just shows you didn't read beyond the headline.

Your example is needlessly bleak, but in general: yes, we're a social species and being able to process multiple speech streams seems obviously pretty important in many social contexts involving more than two people.

It's fascinating how similar-yet-subtly-different the cursive writing is across Europe. I wonder if you could map them into something similar to language families (or type traditions, I suppose). Would there be any "language gradient" equivalents for cursive writing across the continent? Well, before the industrial revolution I guess, I'd expect that after that you'd see more singular influences of designers backed by the state pushing for standardization of education.

After searching a bit more I discovered the situation is similar in the Netherlands too: schools can choose between the two styles (or more like three publishers each with their own styles, really).

> Anthropic is not in the programming language market

Arguing that a product that sells itself as improving programmer productivity by writing the code for you has no stakes in "the programming language market" because it doesn't sell a programming language of its own is impressively shortsighted. Especially when the leader of a programming language has openly stated their dislike of vibecoding, critisized the industry, and the language project itself rejects PRs made with the product being sold.

Thanks for the in-depth reply, appreciate the elaboration on where you did and didn't use LLMs. Looking forward to reading the blog posts and other future updates!

Hey, that's the same one I was taught in the Netherlands in the late 80s! It seems to have been replaced with an English-style in recent decades though, is that the case in Germany as well?

Huh, I just indirectly learned from this article that the way I write a lower-case "t" in cursive is a Dutch way of doing so (edit: sollniss' comment implies it was a common style in Germany too). A quick search suggests it has been replaced with an English style of "t" in the last decades too.

I wonder if that makes my handwriting harder to read for anyone who isn't Dutch and over 40 years old.

Anyway, just bringing it up because you don't need to lift up your pen to write that kind of "t".

Search for "koordschrift" on https://primarium.info/countries/the-netherlands/ to find the illustration showing how I was taught to write it in the late 80s. It's the letter vaguely shaped like a pine tree.

So just my 2 cents: I also have an immediate "ick" reaction when I see the vibe-coded aesthetic of the website itself, expecting the worst, as well as serious ethical concerns about using LLMs at this point in history. Luckily in this case, it also was (somehow) immediately obvious to me that actual thought was put into the language, so I was willing to take a closer look to see if some genuine effort was put into it.

But be aware that a lot of people won't be willing to do that. Based on my experience in proglang chat servers and fora I'd say that most of the people with the niche interests most relevant to you (deep dives into non-standard ideas for proglang design & implementation) are in that subgroup. Especially the ones with inspiring ideas and knowledge to share.

Beyond expecting honesty about the usage of LLMs I'm not going to say anything about whether you should use them to develop your langoage or not, that's up to you. But I'd strongly advice for avoiding it in the presentation side of the language (website, whatever) at all costs, because it will get in the way of connecting with your potential audience more than it will help.

To give a point of comparison: you are undoubtedly aware of the issue that popular open source projects have with slop PRs? One problem is that it is so much harder to to see where the LLM output ends and where human effort starts. And the last part is where the actual conversation takes place! Having to filter for that is just exhausting and starts to feel disrespectful.

When I'm reading your language I want to read the part of it that is your language, not the LLM generated bits of it. The LLM aestetic and writing style of the website is an extra layer between me and your thoughts, and it's distracting the same way a chain smoker's body odor is distracting to non-smokers despite being oblivious to it themselves. If this is a language you're passionate about, and it looks like it, then I'd say it deserves better than that.