The purpose of these systems is disallowing people from using hardware and software not approved by Apple or Google. This is wrongly presented as being a security feature. Banks and government services are the main ones adopting it but Apple and Google are encouraging every service to use it.

Control over reCAPTCHA puts Google in a position where they can require having either iOS or a certified Android device to use an enormous amount of the web. Google defines certification requirements for Android which includes forcing bundling Google Chrome, etc. It's enormously anti-competitive.

desired workflow: a video embedded in [social media site] plays at 360p. I hit a button to capture one frame. I paste it into the post composer to comment on it. locally its rendered with the small version, and the server reconstructs the full res frame once submitted

So good! youtu.be/ldxFjLJ3rVY?...

About 3.5 years ago I did some experiment to improve the behavior of microfacet normals at glancing angles. Many surfaces become highly reflective even though having high roughness. Check the discussion in the thread. Here is my implementation reusing equations you already have:

There's a neat short paper from Eurographics this year that evaluates how well microfacet shading models actually predict measured reflectance. The answer is: not nearly as well as one would hope! (1/3) ssteinberg.xyz/2026_surface...

💭 filesystem feature that applies the way permissions work for zip files (=permissions for the root apply to all contained files) to regular directories. trying to change permissions of an item inside a directory with that feature enabled would be ineffective

Saros has a lot of great accessibility settings but this is above and beyond what most games do (and should do!!). You can change the color of all projectile types to any color of your preference. A++++++

Mikkelsen T. Space

I spent some time reverse-engineering Apple's Lossy texture format. It wasn't as simple as I originally thought, and some of the details surprised me. Check it out! www.ludicon.com/castano/blog...

imagine you have a video game asset for a lantern that consists of a lamp plus all the flies circling around it. it might actually look more correct to light each fly with the "home" light source only

literal carbon copy right down to their selected de-grifter being diagnosed for all of 5 minutes in her *thirties* and making it everyone else’s problem

computer A and B are connected to monitor M. when A makes a remote desktop connection to B, it should cause the monitor to switch input. that’s what I would call “smart”

💭 game engine that in parts of the screen with < 1/16 brightness uses textures that drop the four least significant color bits

Just in case that wasn't clear, here's what I mean. If you click and drag along the red arrow, instead of selecting the text "cornerstone technology", you get half the table of contents and all of the document from the top down to "technology".

Some reports say over 500 schools, 55 libraries, & 25 universities hit. You can debate the numbers, but hitting Sharif University & Beheshti is like hitting MIT & Stanford. I keep wondering: How would the scientific community respond differently if it was those universities? What’s the difference?

I returned to my structured editor roots a little bit and prototyped a scrollbar that shows the statement structure in method bodies. Also a document outline tree where statement structure is visible for larger methods. This way you can visually distinguish methods by their "shape".

it's hard to get surface-associated debug information out in the middle of format conversion, but I have a set of digit textures so I can do texture = digits[relevant_value%10] texture = digits[(relevant_value/10)%10] etc.

"There's actually not a negative integer, it's a normal integer with the negation operator applied" is one of those really stupid things I'm kind of annoyed we keep letting be part of the spec.

This is my trans agenda

I know I've been talking about this for over six months now, but I swear I'm working towards releasing the source 😅 - along with an explainer video and a blog post.

you’re in a dimly-lit basic block. in front of you are a few steps leading 6 feet below ESP. in the distance you see some signposts–

you should be able to right click into a terminal window and pick “Upon successful completion of <process name>…” and then choose a button you wish to be clicked for you

I'm almost there it's so pretty!! 😭 this is the first time I've made extensive use of complex numbers in shader code, which has been fun! it's an analytic 2D lighting system through piecewise conformal maps representing angular light/"sky" exposure, which means you get fully analytic penumbras!

programming language idea of the day: a macro that takes the spot of dlopen but takes the entire body of the library as a block void *handle = DLOPEN({ void fun(); }); void (*fun)() = dlsym(handle, "fun");

Thank you for your patience. Labyrinth.os will released to the world on April 10.

out now in Science: @loganjames.bsky.social collected pairs of sounds in 16 species where we *know* which sound is more attractive (to that species) he played them to ppl on themusiclab.org, asking, in each pair, which was nicer. humans agreed w other animals doi.org/10.1126/science.aea1202

Messing around with ntsc.rs (and added some other effects) #art

#badprogrammingadvice every python method you don't need can implicitly function as a bool, as functions are truthy and self.method = False shadows the method

UNESCO listed Golestan Palace (which predates the princeling and his grandfather's pretense to the throne) before and after US/Israeli liberation efforts

ASN: AS36352 Location: Buffalo, US Added: 2026-02-20T00:32 #shodansafari #infosec

I've been playing with the idea of using nitter as a frontend for my local twitter archive. instead of my own API I have to implement twitter's graphql one for this to work. first time I've touched nim code ever

strange thing I just realized: when all phi arguments in a loop header are defined outside of the loop and loop conditions are not influenced by side effects, then the number of iterations is at most the number of header predecessors

I'm finally writing up how Nanite Tessellation works. The first few blogs posts are up. More will be coming. graphicrants.blogspot.com/2026/02/nani...

was epstein uniquely responsible for evil or is he just the one obscenely wealthy person whose emails we're getting to read

I’m working from a huge Tokyo office this week

what an unfortunate day to be experiencing complex microarchitectual conditions

Assuming uniform weights and frequencies, and random colors and anisotropy directions, this is what an example gaboronoi diagram would look like.

Learned of a nasty DX9 gotcha I was previously unaware of: when using the Shader Model 2.0, the fog is still applied by the fixed-function pipeline, but with Shader Model 3.0, it's not! This "broke" rendering when I downgraded a few shaders from 3.0 to 2.0 for compatibility.

like i guess the strat would be to use these guys as human shields basically--blockade taiwan, put up the great fishing boat barrier, dare anyone to run it--and then if you do fire on the fishing boats, "that's an unprovoked attack on civilians how dare you!!!!"

Me reverse engineering: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!! Me engineering: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.

Subway Incident by 0b5vr 4KB Executable Graphics Appeared in Operator Digitalfest 2026 www.pouet.net/prod.php?whi... www.shadertoy.com/view/lcV3RW

2020s: AI "System Prompts" are lengthy, carefully constructed sets of expert rules about a particular domain, created by "prompt engineers". 1980s: AI "Expert Systems" were lengthy, carefully constructed sets of expert rules about a particular domain, created by "knowledge engineers".

Legit super excited about this work coming out. My amazing doctoral student @ben.graphics has been working on an idea to use physically based differentiable rendering (PBDR) to probe visual understanding. Here, we generate physically-grounded metamers for vision models. 1/4 arxiv.org/abs/2512.12307

For today's Eldritch 2 devlog, I wrote a bit about my in-game level editor and the process of building dungeon rooms. Including drawing navmesh by hand, for reasons! www.dphrygian.com/wordpress/?p...

what do you mean "the near-complete source code to Princess Maker 1 and 2 was quietly uploaded to GitHub a few months ago and nobody noticed" github.com/ritsuro/Prin... github.com/ritsuro/Prin...

As it turns out? Not all closures have the same design. It means they all don't perform the same under various usages, either! A quick dive into the performance differences of Closures in C, using an old Donald Knuth program. The Cost of a Closure in C | The Pasture | thephd.dev/the-cost-of-...