I applaud the PSF for standing firmly on principles.

Shielding Chart xkcd.com/3158/

How dare she be so cute!

I'm experimenting with real-time volumetric shadows! it's based on the jump-flood algorithm, flooding three quantities at once - a traditional SDF, and two clearance cones at each point, one on each side of the depth sheet, to give the volumetric ray marcher extra information on how far it can jump

distributed systems in theory: we run our code across several networked machines so that a failure of one doesn’t break the system as a whole distributed systems in practice, apparently: hey it’s probably fine to put all our eggs in the us-east-1 basket right?

look I just think that maybe hosting half the internet in us-east-1 may not have been the smartest move

First images of comet #3I/ATLAS from Europe's Mars orbiters 😍 Observing the comet from 30 million km away, #ExoMars reveals the halo of gas and dust surrounding the comet's nucleus. Read more 👉 www.esa.int/Science_Expl... 🔭🧪

Closures in C - now with wording (but probably not enough examples) thephd.dev/_vendor/futu...

Feel like I was in a slump for a while, but I've finally resurfaced! Mostly been doing some sysadmin work, tidying up a lot of loose ends in how I had things set up. But I did get chance to do some DNS shenanigans, which is always fun :P

I mostly avoided the physically based rendering stuff once it started growing in popularity, because I was always drawn to stylized art styles but now that I've done a freelance gig with some PBR/HDR stuff, I am both 1. intrigued 2. horrified/amazed that classic/LDR rendering even works

Today's little bit of success: I have a Python script which runs some subprocesses, and wanted to a) wait for any of several subprocesses to exit, and b) know how long it took, in a way that's more reliable than bracketing things with Python-level time measurements.

(For those playing along at home, our word 'invent' comes from Latin invenire, "to come upon, find, discover" while our word 'discover' comes from Latin dis+cooperire, "to uncover, find, discover" which is to say they mean the same thing, just using different metaphors to express it).

YouTube served me up a video asking "is mathematics invented or discovered?" and as someone who knows the etymology of the word 'invent' that is kind of a funny question to ask.

digging through my code folder from the last couple years and happened upon a project simply titled "ohfuck" it's a 15-line script to delete a single Cohost post, from that time I accidentally made a post that broke the website so bad the delete button wouldn't render

Do you ever just think about how cool Earth is? There’s no filter on these!

conservationist have re-established so many species over the past thirty years that it is kind of ridiculous. "this animal was down to, like, six individuals and now there's hundreds of them" is a very common story and it's because humans decided to work their asses off

Turns out the CSS post-processing for my website depends on no less than six (!) of the NPM packages that were compromised earlier today. Fortunately I didn't update things today (and don't have any cryptocurrency for it to steal anyway), but yikes.

Did you know your MacBook has a sensor that knows the exact angle of the screen hinge? It’s not exposed as a public API, but I figured out a way to read it and make it sound like an old wooden door.

This is some of the hardest shit I've seen in my life

Today I learned that they've finished the fuck-off massive cavern for the Hyper-K neutrino detector! Still 3-ish years away from it being up and running, but I'm really looking forward to learning a bunch more about what the heck is going on with neutrinos! www.icrr.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/news/16770/

Tune 3: Still Picture is coming to SVT-AV1: https://gitlab.com/AOMediaCodec/SVT-AV1/-/merge_requests/2489#note_2704093242 Formerly Tune 4 in SVT-AV1-PSY. Thank you @juliobbv.bsky.social#note_2704093242!

ok i wrote it blog.radicaldream.land/dev-log-misc...

Been thinking lately about how people used to be precious about hosting images on their websites because the bandwidth was so expensive, and how that's barely a concern now for all but the largest websites. And wondering whether we're close to a similar tipping point with video.

"nine of the ingots – accounting for nearly a third of the hoard’s silver – were geochemically matched to silver minted in the Islamic Caliphate"

ya girl doin' astrophotography

joycon music joycon music joycon music

"PhD-level experts in your back pocket" is a completely nonsensical description of AI but a pretty good description of social media if you follow the right people

Well that was surprisingly easy (esp-homekit-sdk).

I was hoping to have a couple of new blog posts ready soon, but unfortunately got hit with a double-whammy of illness followed by computer issues (looks like filesystem corruption). So that might be delayed a while.

How brilliant is this www.weregildcalculator.com

Most cis people think being trans is something we DO, and therefore that transition—names, pronouns, presentation, hormones, surgery, etc.—is something we WANT. Trans people know being trans is something we ARE, and that transition is something we NEED. This difference is killing us.

TIL: Python has `match` statements now! docs.python.org/3/tutorial/c...

I made a very pretty mistake

Yes

spline tip!! prolong the life of your splines by regularly brushing them with premium proximity test bristles

hey guys, the UK online safety act is kicking in, so just a reminder that UK people can NOT use DMs without confirming their ID! please make sure to have other avenues for contact for commissions and such, thank you :)

It's paper day! The first science paper with data from @vrubinobs.bsky.social's survey camera, the mighty LSSTCam, is a VERY quick turnaround of Rubin's observations thus far of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS. ☄️ Chandler et al., submitted 🔭 A 🧵

New post! After my previous post about image compression, a few people asked me to try different encoder settings. So I went ahead and tested a couple of them :) www.rachelplusplus.me.uk/blog/2025/07...

One of those things that looks like it should be easy but is in fact some insanely arcane black magic bullshit.

You know, I can't quite put my finger on it, but I think there might be something wrong with my graph (correct version coming soon!)

Improving AVIF in Open Source via the Halide blog halide.cx/blog/improvi... I wanted to write this to explain some of what went into Tune 4/Tune IQ, & help outline some of my reasoning for starting Halide Compression in the first place. I hope you enjoy! #av1 #avif #encoding

For other UK folks who see this, there is indeed a petition on fighting this! (Has 700+ signatures at the current time of posting.) If you can't sign it, please pass it on. petition.parliament.uk/petitions/72...

The UK loves making people upload identity-equivalent data to random companies all the time. I'm sure there's no way any of that data will ever be compromised and used for fraud, no siree! Anyway, looks like my DMs here will be closed soon, if you want to get in touch please do so via my website

Introducing Iris-WebP, a better WebP encoder: halide.cx/iris/index.h... Iris offers up to >20% better compression than libwebp, and trades blows with libaom for AVIF. My goal is to build an image-first encoder ecosystem for the modern Web, so that new web image codecs aren't generally superfluous.

you may fascinate a woman by giving her a SOT-23thin-14 package quad opamp

Putting out a call for anyone on here who contributes to Wikipedia: I've found a page which cites an LLM-slop website, and want to help clean that up. So far I've made an account and mentioned it on the article's Talk page. Is there anything else that would be helpful to do?

So I got thinking about cache-friendly algorithms for matrix multiplication and such, and how they often follow a space-filling curve through their input data. And I remembered reading that Hilbert curves are better than Z-order curves, but I could never quite get my head around why.