AceJohnny2
Joined 15 years ago
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Recent submissions
Comment · 11 days ago
Comment · 13 days ago
About cloud rendering: In 2008 a college friend wrote his thesis on real-time realistic rendering of clouds: https://maverick.inria.fr/Publications/2008/BN08b/
You can see screenshots of that work in his thesis defense slides https://theses.hal.science/tel-00319974/file/defense.pdf
That's where I learned about the transference phase function (slide 24), which includes two spikes on the return angle that correspond to the relatively unknown Glory rainbow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glory_(optical_phenomenon)
I don't know if this method is what is used in video games today.
Incidentally, you may recognize his advisor Fabrice Neyret as someone very active in the Shadertoy community https://www.shadertoy.com/user/FabriceNeyret2
Comment · 14 days ago
And here we see demonstrated that nothing can solve paranoia.
Comment · 15 days ago
> cross-brand marketing for Apple's partner, Meta
Partner!? I don't see where you get that from the article, and Apple & Facebook have traditionally not been best of friends (see everything iOS implemented to limit Facebook's overreach).
I'm guessing they chose Muse because 1. It's not Chinese so it'll look good for Trump's AI cronies (Apple is in the administration's spotlight) and 2. It's fairly recent and thus on people's mind.
Comment · 18 days ago
Comment · 18 days ago
the whole point is no.
Comment · 22 days ago
That's a lot of allegations.
> the TOR mission was to allow spies to access the network and hide among all the other non-spy users
Tor is pretty clear about what their mission is, it's at the bottom of the Tor Project homepage https://www.torproject.org: "To advance human rights and freedoms by creating and deploying free and open source anonymity and privacy technologies, supporting their unrestricted availability and use, and furthering their scientific and popular understanding."
Claiming anything else is useless conspiracy thinking without evidence.
> It was and still is funded mostly by the US Naval Research Laboratory
The original idea came from the US Naval Research Laboratory, yes (as a way to mask the origin of messages to hide the command boat in a fleet), but the funding statement is patently false. In 2024, the majority of their government funding ($2.1M out of $2.5) came from the U.S. State Department Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, with the rest of the government money coming from even more innocuous sources. You can find this information on p41 of their IRS form: https://www.torproject.org/static/findoc/2023-2024-TheTorPro... also accessible from their Reports page at https://www.torproject.org/about/reports/
They also clarified that in this more readable post: https://forum.torproject.org/t/transparency-openness-and-our...
Certainly, you can speculate about the motivations of the U.S. State Department Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor and whether that's a front for more undercover objectives, but that front lines up pretty well with the US's (former?) foreign policy of undermining (unfriendly) dictatorial regimes, and Occam's Razor applies.
Ultimately though, the tools that Tor provides can absolutely be abused by bad actors, and ever since Silk Road, I've become convinced that the Tor network is overrun by a wretched hive of scum and villainy, where those morally defensible activities are utterly outnumbered by the criminal ones.
Comment · 23 days ago
The most [1] annoying difference to me is the Alt/Cmd vs Win/Alt key swaps. In this case, Mac has precedence, and Microsoft decided they would place their new Windows key to the left of Alt.
Also, 10 whippings for whomever at Apple decided to put the Fn/Globe key to the bottom left of laptop keyboards, and move Ctrl over. It's the first thing I swap on a Mac (used to use Karabiner, until macOS finally, years later, decided to implement the setting), and I always trip when using a colleague's laptop. These kids don't respect no traditions!
.. that rant over, I must recognize that Ctrl isn't used as much in GUI apps which prefer Cmd, and only us relatively few terminal junkies care.
[1] second most, perhaps, after swapping Delete & Backspace.
Comment · 25 days ago
I haven't any issues with them, and I've had them for years. In fact, they were the foundation of my smart home setup, and continue to be central.
They worked fine with the ConBee 2, and work fine with the ZBT-1 that replaced it.
That said, they're used within a relatively small area, and have direct connection to the coordinator. My one (major) annoyance with them is how hard it is to open the battery compartment, the plastic is too soft.
I've since added some Sonoff T+H sensors which are fine, though twice as big.
My one disappointment is the Arre (Thread) sensor, which has low resolution and bad battery life.
Comment · 27 days ago
(passed away on Sept 8th, obituary from Sept 30th)
Comment · 27 days ago
> Oh and Bill, at least back then, did not think much of Bitcoin.
Smart man!
Comment · 27 days ago
> It's just that Nvidia doesn't care much about Linux
Nvidia cares a lot about Linux. Just... on their terms.
Comment · 1 month ago
For one thing, because the parent you were responding to did not make that distinction, and it wasn't clear why you chose to make it. For another thing, limiting US defense space activity spending to just the Space Force budget is naive. All departments of the military operate space activities, and have not and will not hand all of that over to the Space Force (see also: military intelligence vs CIA). We can't know the exact budgetary amounts of each department, and then there's the NRO (National Reconnaissance Office, managing space-based spying), infamous for donating [1] its obsolete telescopes to NASA, which were of comparable performance to Hubble.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...
Comment · 1 month ago
Just to spell it out:
> in comparison
The total 2026 US Defense budget is 1.06 Trillion dollars, or ~1,060 Billion dollars. NASA's 2026 budget is 24.5 Billion dollars, or 2% as much as the defense budget.
You chose to single out the Space Force, which has the smallest budget of the 5 branches of the US military. For contrast, the Navy's budget alone is 235 Billion $, close to 10x NASA.
For further comparison, the R&D budget of a single private company, Apple, was $34B in 2025.
Comment · 1 month ago
> I would be wary of using it professionally
This is funny because so much Silicon CAD automation is written in TCL. I mean the most advanced technology in the world depends on TCL in its pipeline (also Excel VBasic!) (let's not talk about COBOL, that's in banking)
TCL is the original extension language, and in the very hidebound electronics CAD world, has a very long tail.
Availability of resources does not entail skill in leveraging them. I'm not sure classical eduction is the best way to learn that, but it's certainly better than nothing and a useful first step.