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Agentlienon The strangest letter of the alphabet: The rise and fall of yogh

I always get confused around this and it seems to depend on specific keyboard and software. It seems to mostly be Alt, sometimes Alt Gr, and sometimes the Windows key. But I do remember using Meta to mean Alt when I was setting things up in Ubuntu maybe ten years ago.

Agentlienon The strangest letter of the alphabet: The rise and fall of yogh

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_key

But, the meta key already exists and on Windows it is the Windows key. We're going around in circles.

Agentlienon We bought the whole GPU, so we're damn well going to use the whole GPU

> it's usually more "cost efficient" to write normal fast-to-write code that isn't maximally effective, let the compiler do its magic, and call it good enough.

For the last six years my full time job has largely been optimizing games where most of the team has been working with this mindset. Sometimes someone spends a few days of just getting things done, followed by others building on top of it. This leads to systems which are not fast enough and take me weeks or even months to optimize.

We even got together at my last job and created a series of lectures on performance and best practices for everyone, including artists, to get ahead of this type of issues. It was apparently very appreciated, especially among the non technical staff who said it was valuable and they had no idea.

Agentlienon We bought the whole GPU, so we're damn well going to use the whole GPU

This is exactly what I've been doing when optimizing games for the switch.

Agentlienon We bought the whole GPU, so we're damn well going to use the whole GPU

It should definitely be possible already using CUDA or computer shaders. From a theoretical view computer graphics is signal processing but with a signal consisting of up to four color channels across two dimensions. This is the view taken in a lot of papers and practical implementations. After all, a lot of computer graphics is about applying filters (post-processing) such as color grading, anti-aliasing, etc. to this signal.

So, in a very real sense, signal processing is exactly what the GPU is built for and primarily used for.

Agentlienon Quicksort explained IKEA-style

Yes, this sounds great and very Ikea.

Agentlienon Quicksort explained IKEA-style

I understand where you're coming from. From the perspective of someone with no knowledge of Swedish that's a clear distinction.

From my perspective as a Swede, however, making it sound Swedish is the same as making it sound Ikea-ish. Because Ikea products all have names which are either Swedish words or typical Swedish names.

Agentlienon Quicksort explained IKEA-style

I think sort would be even better because it's less Swenglish. It's the base for sorting in Swedish (sortera) after all. Sört does really bother me since it sounds so wrong (almost like the u in blur). Sårt use closer to how Swedes would pronounce the English word sort, that's true.

At least they changed the first word to Kvick because it means the right thing and sounds about right. And it happens to be my family name.

Agentlienon Quicksort explained IKEA-style

This was actually a really neat refresher.

The name feels like such a near miss though... Kvick (beyond being my surname) does mean quick and I see they changed to it from kwick to make the title "more Swedish". Great! But sört? That's not a Swedish word and feels very "trying to seem Swedish without knowing any Swedish". That letter would be pronounced somewhat like the u in blur.

Meanwhile sort in Swedish is sortera. Sort itself does mean sort as in kind/type. So perhaps Kvick Sort would be the best version of the name?

Agentlienon Wind turbine blade transportation challenges

I at least know that there's a Norwegian chocolate bar called Kvikk and a Danish kitchen design company called Kvik.

In Dutch (which I happen to be fluent in) Kwiek is sometimes used in writing but I've never heard it spoken.

Agentlienon Wind turbine blade transportation challenges

My last name is Kvick (Swedish for quick) and I was delighted to see a variation on it used for something so cool as those diagrams. Please make it a thing.

Agentlienon Speeding up Unreal Editor launch by not spawning unused tooltips

I do agree that some of the defaults are quite bad. A great example of this is how even Unity themselves recommend an object workflow very different from what their engine naturally seems to suggest: You really shouldn't use tons of objects with update methods called directly by the engine. You need managers with update functions which iterate over all their subjects. Doing it the intuitive way easily becomes unsustainable and is horrendous for performance.

Agentlienon Speeding up Unreal Editor launch by not spawning unused tooltips

I have worked full time for five years with a combination of Unreal and Unity. I've also worked for five years with Frostbite and another five in various custom engines.

I absolutely love both Unreal and Unity. Unreal is amazing from a technical perspective and having worked with a talented team in Unreal the stuff we were able to make were mind-blowing given the resources we had.

Unity is way easier to work with if you aren't focused on high fidelity graphics. In fact, I've never tried any engine that felt as easy to work with as Unity. I would absolutely not call it a monster. Even with a fairly green team you can hit the ground running and get really productive with Unity.

Agentlienon Happy 100000th birthday, Debian

That's a great idea and I might steal it. I even know which song to play.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_I%27m_Sixty-Four

Agentlienon Ollama's new app

I use Msty all the time and I love it. It just works and it's got all features I want now, including generating alternate responses, swapping models mid-chat, editing both sent messages and responses, ...

I also tried LM Studio a few months back. The interface felt overly complex and I got weird error messages which made it look like I'd have to manually fix errors in the underlying python environment. Would have been fine if it was for work, but I just wanted to play around with LLMs in my spare time so I couldn't be bothered.

Agentlienon YouTube No Translation

Reminds me of when Amazon came to Sweden and had machine translated product names - including for movies and games.

A friend showed me that the latest game I had worked on was hilariously mistranslated. It's originally "Need For Speed: Payback" but got translated to "behöver du hastighet: återbetalning" which would be more like "do you need speed: reimbursement"

Agentlienon Basic Facts about GPUs

I wasn't expecting the strong CUDA/ML focus. My own work is primarily in graphics and performance in video games; while this is all familiar and useful it feels like a very different view of the hardware than mine.

Agentlienon Basic Facts about GPUs

This feels backwards to me when GPUs were created largely because graphics needed lots of parallel floating point operations, a big chunk of which are matrix multiplications.

When I think of matrix multiplication in graphics I primarily think of transforms between spaces: moving vertices from object space to camera space, transforming from camera space to screen space, ... This is a big part of the math done in regular rendering and needs to be done for every visible vertex in the scene - typically in the millions in modern games.

I suppose the difference here is that DLSS is a case where you primarily do large numbers of consecutive matrix multiplications with little other logic, since it's more ANN code than graphics code.

Agentlienon A Mysterious Website I Stumbled Upon

Try again, with some patience. You might find this bug more interesting than expected.

Agentlienon Is gravity just entropy rising? Long-shot idea gets another look

Interesting! Now, that sounds like a more unintuitive result to me. Can you give examples of symmetries for which it doesn't work?

Agentlienon Snorting the AGI with Claude Code

Of all the things I read at uni UML is the thing I've felt the least use for - even when designing new systems. I've had more use for things I never thought I'd need like Rayleigh scattering and processor design.

Agentlienon Is gravity just entropy rising? Long-shot idea gets another look

That actually sounds really intuitive to me. If you start with a uniform mass and then redistribute mass symmetrically it makes sense that the change in the two sides would cancel out.

Agentlienon Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API

I was never a big Star Trek fan, but here in Sweden growing up I watched episodes of The Next Generation, Voyager, and Deep Space Nine when they happened to be on. There definitely always seemed to be some Star Trek series running in a decent TV slot and everyone seemed aware of it - even if its popularity was eclipsed by that of Star Wars.

From friends and family in Belgium it seems it was somewhat bigger there.

Agentlienon Canyon.mid

At first I couldn't understand this sentiment; pc speaker always sounded so abrasive to me. Then I followed the link below and a wave of nostalgia washed over me.

Agentlienon Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API

While I found it surprising at first I don't think it should be. Star Trek really doesn't seem to be as big as it used to be.

Agentlienon Research suggests Big Bang may have taken place inside a black hole

I meant that the parent comment to mine was a good summary of the article.

However, the comment was worded as if it meant to highlight some difference between how the article summarized the paper and what the paper is actually saying. Since I couldn't see a difference between the above poster's summary and that in the article, I was curious what I was missing.

Agentlienon Research suggests Big Bang may have taken place inside a black hole

> What the paper actually proposes [...]

(Emphasis mine)

I haven't read the paper yet, but this sounds like a (good) summary of exactly what the article is saying. It makes me wonder what, if anything, you feel is different from the way you put it and the way it is explained in the article? As a layman they seem the same to me.

Agentlienon The Gentle Singularity

Sweden is a big country so I could definitely be wrong about how things look across it. However, in the greater Gothenburg area every Ica I've visited has it - that includes everything from big ones in the city and shopping malls to small ones in the suburbs 30km outside the city (where I live).

Agentlienon The Gentle Singularity

That's just self checkout. Some places, like Ica, have self scanning which works so much better. You just scan the bar code as you pick things up - which is just in one motion as you put things in your bag. No need to unpack as you pay.

Yes you do need to be a member to use the system, but that's a very small price to pay for the convenience and speed of avoiding all lines and stress of the regular checkout.

Agentlienon The Gentle Singularity

On a tangent: what about self scanning? Here in Sweden that is the norm. For the last ten years I've brought my own bags, packed everything like I want it as I grab it - with a quick blip from the scanner - and then checkout is no line, no cashier, no unpacking and packing things again. Just scanning my card and going through a brief screen to check that the summary looks right.

Instead of a guard there's a scanner by the exit gate where you scan your ticket. In my case just a small stub since the actual ticket is sent digitally.

I think it works so smoothly, much better than before this system was introduced. My recent experience buying groceries in Belgium was very similar.