In case you didn't notice, #WebGPU is most likely available in your browser now!

Cat vs Roomba. Cat: 0 Roomba: 1

New blog post: "Fifty Shades of OOP." Put in a surprising amount of research for this one! lesleylai.info/en/fifty_sha...

This week, we will start reading a new book: "Digital Signals Theory"! www.meetup.com/graphics-pro...

I am reluctant to watch this talk, and I am only watching it now as part of my research for a blog post. But it is actually really good, with (almost) no rants and a lot of historical deep dives. youtu.be/wo84LFzx5nI?...

The Graphics Replicability Stamp Initiative (GRSI, www.replicabilitystamp.org), a community-driven initiative to promote replicability in Graphics research, is seeking volunteers. More details in the 'Volunteering' section of the home page.

I have no word

Built a simple regex engine this week, and also threw together a visualizer site Visualizer website: miniregex.lesleylai.info Repo: codeberg.org/Lesley/minir...

This week, @jbakergraphics.bsky.social will be presenting on his post which explains an application of the inversion method of importance sampling, to generate random numbers that match a given probability density function (PDF). www.meetup.com/graphics-pro...

neugierig.org/software/blo... > apparently both "fetch" vs "pull" commands existed in Git and Mercurial. They agreed that one meant "download the changes" and the other meant "do that and also merge them", but they flipped the meanings! 🤯

Whose cat walks like this?

This makes me think: many generic data structures don’t actually require type-specific code and only need to be generic over data size (unless dealing with non-trivial types). Typical C++ or Rust's monomorphic implementation creates a lot of redundant code. danielchasehooper.com/posts/typech...

Next week, we will continue reading the PBRT book. Note that we change the meeting time to Friday (or Saturday, depending on your timezone) www.meetup.com/graphics-pro...

Just added a “microblog” section to my site for crossposting social media content. I’ve also imported some older posts from here and from old Twitter archived (before I deleted the account). Now I finally don't need to worry about platform decay. lesleylai.info/micro/

A nice intro for color science. It is useful even if you're not interested in CSS, and the same ideas apply to graphics programming as well css-tricks.com/color-everyt...

This article is clickbaity, and I am not sure I agree with the conclusion, but it is pretty informative. TIL one can have arbitrary HTML tags (even without js custom element) www.keithcirkel.co.uk/css-classes-... #webdev

I resonate with this article a lot. I started creating programs simply for the joy of making things, and maybe out of a bit of intellectual curiosity. www.jsbarretto.com/blog/softwar...

I just added another UBlock Origin filter for GitHub Copilot stuff in its UI. M$ keeps adding more of them, and they don't seem to respect their own "Show Copilot" setting once it's disabled. Unfortunately, I don't have a good CI solution for personal projects (yet) gist.github.com/LesleyLai/ae...

I don't even know which AdBlocker filter to use to block this now unless I want to block all warning banners. At least I am migrating away from this hell site now. I started using GitHub shortly after I started learning coding. It feels like the end of an era.

Good read. Quote: > O(n^2) is the sweet spot of badly scaling algorithms: fast enough to make it into production, but slow enough to make things fall down once it gets there. randomascii.wordpress.com/2021/02/16/a...

I am slowly moving my projects to Codeberg. For things that need CI/CD, I am using Codeberg as the main site that mirrors to private GitHub repositories. For future projects, I will probably only use GitHub for private repositories

This book reminds me of the never-finished "The Book of Shaders." A quick skim suggests that they cover similar materials. Definitely something for me to read later liu.diva-portal.org/smash/record...

Published my WebGPU Particle Life simulation online! Obviously it requires WebGPU support, and it's quite resource-demanding, so I've set the particle count to 64k for now. Also it probably doesn't work on mobile; will fix later. Enjoy: lisyarus.github.io/webgpu/parti...

"Why do people say that index out-of-bound and dangling pointers are big problems? It is easy for me to fix." True. But only after you spot them

Me: I'm thinking of writing an interactive blog post on barycentric coordinates. Then I came across this great page with interactive visuals. I guess that's one less blog post to write. observablehq.com/@infowantsto...

Common People (Black Mirror) is a great episode, especially considering what's going on around the world. Unfortunately, I can't finish it since I got too upset watching it. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_...

Next week, we will read "To Early-Z, or Not To Early-Z" www.meetup.com/graphics-pro...

I honestly feel sick watching where part of my field is going. This should be a shitpost. Why isn't this a shitpost. www.oreilly.com/library/view...

It is said that every blogger will write blog posts on how they create their blog. Well, here is another one 😅. I just wrote a little blog post on how I set up a self-hosted comment section for my blog: lesleylai.info/en/self-host...

Made some updates to my old grass renderer after reading a recent blog post on grass rendering. Clumping the grass with noise and adding specular highlights makes it look much better hexaquo.at/pages/grass-...

My @accuconf.bsky.social trip report is online and I'm afraid we have to talk about AI. mropert.github.io/2025/04/10/a...

Next week, we will continue to read "Physically Based Rendering" www.meetup.com/graphics-pro...

Next week, we will watch Implicit Surfaces & Independent Research by Matt Keeter www.meetup.com/graphics-pro...

Adopted a new cat. His name is Timo

- Open a potentially interesting blog post - See an irrelevant, ugly AI-generated banner image - Hit Ctrl-w

Next week, we are going to read "Radiometry, part 1: I got it backwards" www.meetup.com/graphics-pro...

This week, we will watch "Lerp smoothing is broken" by Freya Holmér www.meetup.com/graphics-pro...

Rust's `Result::is_ok_and()` method will consume `self`, so I need to add an additional `.as_ref()` if I want to use it. Does anyone know the motivation behind this design? #rust #rustlang

Dec 31st Dec 31st 2016 2024

Added the ability to watch the rays in my path tracer bounce around as an animation. I'm excited about this more from an education POV, I think it helps explain how path tracing works far more easily than I could describe in words

I’d appreciate it if tech writers use fewer words like "easy," "simple," and "straightforward." These terms provide no real information and can only make readers feel stupid when something doesn’t seem as easy as claimed

I spent a few hours creating an end-to-end testing driver for my C compiler project. Initially, I considered using Python but opted for Rust instead. It turned out to be surprisingly well-suited for this kind of "scripting" task. #pldev github.com/LesleyLai/mc...

i've seen too many tech talks/presos that suffer from a few totally fixable issues, and decided to write about it: gpfault.net/posts/gripes...

Next week, we are going to continue reading the PBRT book, this time covering 8.1 Sampling Theory. www.meetup.com/graphics-pro...

I often rely on Firefox's address bar search to look through my browser history. However, I noticed recently that history results were deprioritized, forcing me to search through the history manually instead. Disabling "suggestions" in the search settings resolved the issue. #enshittification

I hadn’t used my Windows machine in a while, and when I came back to it, I noticed that `git status` had become very slow. After some digging, I found that `git status` spends a huge amount of time on the submodule operation. I am still not sure whether submodule is the culprit, though. ☹️

Next week, we'll be reading two blog posts about blue noise by Alan Wolfe www.meetup.com/graphics-pro...

I feel like I've gained an understanding of the Pratt parsing a few times over the years, but I always need to look it up again after a while 😥. Few algorithms strike me as both difficult to grasp and elegant at the same time

A tale of overengineering: I implemented short-string optimization in a `StringBuffer` type. The catch? This project uses arena allocators for everything, so dangling pointers are usually not a concern. However, since the `StringBuffer` data might reside on the stack, I need to be extra careful.

Bitten by strict aliasing (I should know better rather than writing codes like this)