Mike Bostock’s demonstration of turning a perfect #maze into a tree. Not quite #explorable-explanations because not interactive
denoising a random map with #cellular-automata #filters produces caves (though in my experience it slows down rather dramatically after a few steps, so it’s better to do the #algorithm at the right scale first and then expand the grid) #mapgen
Amanda Michaels’s (TiltingWindmills’s) #geomorphs for post-apocalyptic urban map design #mapgen
JDJarvis’s #geomorphs for dungeon map design #magpen
the original (?) #geomorphs page (for map design) #mapgen
André Roberge’s #maze #algorithm page
A Adonaac’s page on TinyKeepDev’s dungeon #mapgen #algorithms, with animations and #Lua code
munificent’s page on his roguelike dungeon #mapgen #algorithms, with #explorable-explanations. He first places random non-overlapping (rectangular) rooms, generates a #maze to fill the rest of the space, connects the rooms and mazes to form a spanning tree (plus a few extra connections), and then removes the dead ends as per Jamis Buck (as with Basem Nayfeh’s #cellular-automata approach). Nice animations with pastel colors and relief shading.
random dungeon #mapgen #algorithm page
Mike Bostock’s #maze #algorithm #explorable-explanations page, with color filling.
#munificent’s #mapgen business card: generates a roguelike dungeon in 1.3K (32 lines of 36 bytes). #smallisbeautiful
#munificent’s "Crafting Interpreters" #ebook
#munificent’s "Game Programming Patterns" #ebook
spambots pounding on the searchmysite.net #search-engine for some reason? marginalia.nu reports that they don’t seem to pay attention to the results
a six- or seven-dimensional hypercube. #animations
"Daedalus", a #maze generator
the #scanline-rendering #graphics #algorithm generates the pixels of a scene in order, published by Wylie, Romney, Evans, and Erdahl in 01967 and independently in 01969 and 01972, and used by Evans and Sutherland “ESIG” image generators to rasterize on the fly; the Nintendo DS does too, and so does Quake.
more about the #scanline-rendering #graphics #algorithm
why #Pascal is not my favorite programming language, by #Kernighan (“Why Pascal”)
Kernighan’s #Pascal critiques are outdated
a substantial part of #VMS is still written in #BLISS and MACRO-32, although new code is in C since the 01990s
the #Metamath proof databases like set.mm are bundled into the 17MB download. #formal-methods
Kevin Johansen has at least one song that isn’t snarky and sarcastic
an explanation of the #Zstd #compression #algorithm from RFC 8748, which is faster and compresses smaller than zlib, almost as fast as LZ4 (by the same author!)
Russian author "Lockhard" famous for writing about dragons and Chip and Dale. #fiction
silica-encapsulated chips going into parmigiano cheese rinds “to stop counterfeiting”
we’ve just crossed 1 terawatt of installed #photovoltaic #energy generation capacity due to 183 GW installed in 02021, with a doubling time a bit under three years. Tongwei says they’ll have a million tonnes of polysilicon production by 02027; currently 3 g per (peak?) watt is needed.
"Lockhard"’s #fiction
maybe we should be more willing to sweep distributed-systems complexity under the rug because our personal computers are already distributed systems
apparently the #Terra central bank sold US$3B of #Bitcoin to try to stop the collapse of #Terra/Luna
“homechemist” built a 2-nanometer spectral resolution #spectrometer using a DVD as the #diffraction grating and an old Canon DSLR
Chanda Sutta: when desire is desirable in #Buddhism #religion
use el.BoundingClientRect() to find the actual size of an #SVG element in #JS
#SVG arcs take arguments rx, ry, x-axis-rotation, large-arc-flag, sweep-flag, x, y. The sweep flag determines whether it’s clockwise or counter, the large-arc-flag whether it’s >180° or <180°.
coloring computers on paper, using NOR (or NAND) gates that eat and spit colors
The #ZIM library is in C++
#bicycle cantilever brake #mechanical workings
#Golang generics: when to use them?
alternative #ZIM reader that isn’t Kiwix
the #ZIM file format spec
tile-based #font fonts under mostly #CC licenses (31000 of them)
Ellen Ullman on demystifying code #CP4E
a command-line MediaWiki browser
Economist: “Tech #bubbles are bursting all over the place”. May 14th, 02022. Amazon's down by a third, Microsoft a fifth, since their peaks at the end of 02021. #economics #history
#bubbles commentary on the Economist
the S&P 500 P/E ratio going back to 01870, which is funny, since there wasn’t an S&P 500 then, taken from Shiller’s book Exuberance. The ratios stay between 10 and 20 years almost all the time until 01995, since when they’ve been mostly between 20 and 40 years except for a giant spike to 123 years in May 02009.
“Toward a Silicate-Based Molecular Nanotechnology”, Stephen L. Gillett, “Based in part on a presentation given at the Fifth Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology. Palo Alto, California, 8 Nov 1997.”
ngn’s free software (AGPLv3) implementation of #K, specifically K6, with built-in documentation. #smallisbeautiful
apparently people are reversing ciliary spasm and improving their #myopia through exercise?
more on #myopia
Noah Smith on "New Industrialism" and #artificial-scarcity in #USA due to #politics
Derek Thompson on #artificial-scarcity of doctors in #USA
#artificial-scarcity of #housing in #USA
collapse of #Terra Luna
#Finland’s leaders announce they want to join #NATO due to #Russia invading #Ukraine
anonymous #pastebin for #Markdown permitting forking with new URLs (which are bletcherous, but whatev)
a 17-instruction CLZ (count leading zeroes) #bit-twiddling #algorithm using table lookup in 100 bytes of ROM, beating the Hacker’s Delight alternatives (which don’t use tables)
Stanley Hordes maybe exaggerated the case for New Mexican #crypto-Jews, and then Judith Neulander showed that there probably weren’t any. But in any case they didn’t speak #Ladino. #history
But #conversos in #Texas are learning #Ladino, and some think their variety of Spanish is Ladino-influenced.
#Ladino is booming on Zoom during the pandemic
#search-engine (veneer over Google) to show the oldest surviving result on the web
#Mitto AG added a #backdoor to #encryption and leaked users’ location data, including that of a high-ranking US State Department official, to private investigation companies for years
some #bytebeat composition notes, with a final result in 255 bytes with a bassline, melody, and percussion. #music #smallisbeautiful
apparently the Centre for #Effective-Altruism is going to have a lot more funding available shortly, or already does, because some “Effective Altruists” have just gotten very rich
a nice outline of #automatic-differentiation in #Rust, with working implementations for forward and reverse mode
Tim O’Reilly’s #ebook on Frank Herbert and Dune, the only literary criticism I’ve found worth reading
#MIPS says their #RISC-V IP cores, the eVocore P8700 and I8500, are/will be the fastest
#PVS: #formal-methods in Common Lisp, now free software, by #Shankar
#SAL is another of #Shankar’s #formal-methods tools
another #bytebeat composition site
someone’s notes on learning the #PDF format #ISO-32000 with some Golang code
#GCC moved to #C++ starting in 02008 and that’s why it takes so much time and space to compile now
gordonDrogon and gtoal and jecel and others talking about #archival and #virtual-machines
more on #virtual-machines and #archival, focused on #Chifir
#Wirth’s page on #Wirth-RISC
Jeremiah Orians’s notes from talks on #bootstrapping or #unbootstrapping
how much #ammonia does #agriculture need per bushel of #corn? 3kg of hydrogen makes 17k of ammonia which makes 250 bushels of corn (56 lb. each, so 6350 kg; 3.5 kcal/g gives 370 MJ/bushel, so that’s 93 GJ), so the 142MJ in 1 kg of hydrogen has about 3% of the energy content of the resulting 31 GJ of corn. #fertilizer #economics #energy #food
“George Jetson” gets the #EROEI of industrial agriculture badly wrong: he quotes Pimentel as saying the EROEI of industrialized agriculture is about 0.25:1, but what Pimentel actually found was 1:0.25, four joules returned per joule spent. Consequently Jetson’s entire point about “The EROI of global food production” is wrong. #food #energy #agriculture
“#Energy Inputs in #Food Crop Production in Developing and Developed Nations,” Pimentel’s #EROEI #paper where he found about four joules returned per joule spent on industrialized #agriculture, #CC-BY, Energies 2009, 2(1), 1-24; https://doi.org/10.3390/en20100001
from “#Energy and the #Food System,” graph of Ontario #agriculture: grains and oilseeds mostly yield 30-90 GJ/hectare (I assume per year), but grain corn is up around 120, and switchgrass more like 170; fossil-fuel energy consumption is shown at the bottom as 10–20 GJ/ha.
“#Energy and the #Food System”, Jeremy Woods, Adrian Williams, John K. Hughes, Mairi Black, and Richard Murphy, Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2010 Sep 27; 365(1554): 2991–3006. doi:10.1098/rstb.2010.0172 #agriculture #fertilizer
commentary on Ciechanowski’s "Mechanical Watch" #explorable-explanations
Griffy says Dilbert is “a kind of childish, depleted shell of a once-vibrant medium.” #comics
"SF" is a systems variant of #BF that has “interrupts”, really subroutines. #smallisbeautiful
Black hole evaporation time and Schwarzschild radius #calculators
prebuilt #Coreboot (LinuxBIOS) images “with an easy installation process” for recentish Thinkpad T-series and X-series laptops
#Coreboot (LinuxBIOS) board status: which laptops work with it? Which mainboards?
“"CircuitPython" is an education friendly open source derivative of MicroPython.” #Python #embedded
my comment on #fertilizers #energy use in #agriculture, citing Woods et al. #food
how to contact Marin County Superior Court
Ted Galen Carpenter of Cato blames the invasion of #Ukraine by #Russia on #NATO expansion, pointing out that he warned of this in his book in 01994, and other people warned of it including Madeleine Albright, Strobe Talbott, George Kennan (01998), and Robert M. Gates. #history
"QSCM", a smooth blend of Scheme and C (a minimal Lisp that compiles to C) #smallisbeautiful #bootstrapping
using #PRISM, a probabilistic model checker, to model a task queue. #formal-methods
"QBE", a simple SSE compiler backend for amd64: 70% of LLVM in 10% of the code.
Freddie DeBoer’s attack on #meritocracy
Variant records (sum #types) as explained by Real World #OCaml
#OCaml uses the value restriction in the same way as SML to monomorphize mutable #types
Justin Meiners’s advocacy for #optimization, using the Nelder-Mead #algorithm in #JS and using drawn figure recognition as the example problem
apparently #limb-lengthening #enhancement #surgery is still being done and in this one guy’s case it cost (US?)$75k in 02022, at the clinic of Dr. Shahab Mahboubian in Burbank CA, including three months of physical therapy four times a week. A millimeter a day.
“A small collection of electronic circuits for the hobbyist or student. Site includes 100+ circuit diagrams with text descriptions, several electronic calculators, links to related sites, commercial kits and projects, newsgroups, and educational areas.” #electronics #circuit #hardware
#Scala has covariant and contravariant type parameters. #types
the marginalia.nu #search-engine may be abandoned.
“You take great pains to avoid null-valued objects,” said the master.
John Wilkins, whose “analytical language” #Borges eulogized, actually existed.
crawl the runtime JS heap for an object with the right properties for #web-scraping instead of matching the HTML with regexps
“#Gitee, #China’s answer to GitHub, to review all code by temporarily closing open-source projects to the public” #censorship #politics #human-rights
Karahan Tepe is 11k-13k years old and may be older than any other city or protocity, and its megaliths are 6500–8500 years older than the previously oldest ones at Ggantija in Malta. Necmi Karul of Istanbul University is the head archaeologist of Tas Tepeler, the region. #archaeology https://archive.ph/ER5d9
Kieran Healy writes (wrote?) his sociology papers in Pandoc with Emacs, R, and Marked, using knitr and .Rmd.
“How can we build this new Distributed Web?” #decentralization
“With "Storj" DCS (Decentralized Cloud Storage) files aren’t stored in centralized data centers— instead, they're encrypted, split into pieces, and distributed on a global cloud network.” Open-source. #decentralization
“Several types of #types”, “the convergence of two different paths, which started apart with different aims.” #history
“The Limits of Correctness”, Brian Cantwell Smith’s attack on #formal-methods in 01985, basically on the grounds (I’m skimming here) that the properties you can state formally aren’t the ones that will prevent unintentional nuclear war. #PDF #paper
