elcritch

Reminds me of the old "book the meeting on Feb 31" trick to avoid an unwanted meeting.

It's a negative feedback loop too. There used to be people out doing things so when folks got bored they'd go find them.

Now entertainment and social media sort of fill that gap (not really) but enough that there's less people out. Less people out mean it's less entertaining, so less people go out etc.

Paper == citations

> if we finally had an accessible consumer-accessible way to turn a network of computers on a network into a supercomputer

There's plenty of devices operating in giant supercomputer networks accessible for cheap to consumers! Unfortunately the consumers in question are spam farms, bot networks, ddos rings, and other mostly criminal types.

It would be cool if similar networks could be used for good instead. Earning credits providing compute that could redeem for spurts of fast parallel compute.

Power usage used to be more negligible back in the @home projects heydays. They had some cool screensavers too.

That's been my thinking lately. The SOTA models are good enough that they "solve" coding but still need directing. The product is still important. Products are human too, and need human attention (still).

Maybe that'll change in the future, but while AI can make awesome images without a good "director" they're pretty cookie-cutter and bland.

I've only dabbled with 3code. The author of 3code is pretty active, so he may take suggestions. I'd agree that copy/paste is important for a good agent workflow.

More than that, China funds polarization and disinformation projects in the west. Recently they've been seemingly funding anti-AI rhetoric in the US (1). There's allegations they're funding pro-Palestine protests in the UK (2).

Makes sense to sow discord among your rivals. The US certainly does the same.

1: https://www.axios.com/2026/08/28/china-ai-data-center-backla... 2: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/08/13/china-funding-pr...

There's https://3code.capocasa.dev/ which is written in Nim and focuses on token efficiency.

Unfortunately I can see Apple eventually getting onboard too. As in "Sorry your device is no longer secure for using passkeys. Please update to a newer device!" Nice little incentive to boost flagging iphone sells.

Yes exactly academics and researchers not dealing with the real world should not decide policy.

Academics and researchers are prone to groupthink and monocultures. To quote a form of Sayre’s law “Academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low.”.

Researcher’s policies might be disastrous for society or industry yet they’ll often be insulated from any consequences, even just to their reputations.

Much of that money is also derived from government spending itself, e.g. union dues.

That’s a situation ripe for corruption.

What gets me is why these prions seem to be primarily brain related. Just coincidence or is it something in the nature of mammalian brain biology that leads to prions?

Technically speaking proteins are nanomachines.

How will this affect those of us relying on those projects? It's not just those companies but also the customers of those companies.

Definitely negative karma points for Cloudflare.

Yeah if I allow it my sleep schedule shifts about 45 minutes a day. Eventually it'll "flip" my day after a month or so instead of going to bed late now I'm getting up early. However it also feels like not all the biological rhythms follow it.

> The causality is also bidirectional, because whatever ADHD does could cause light exposure behavioral changes, which could leave a circadian phenotype.

This seems the most likely given my own experience with ADHD and sleep issues. Good sleep alleviates some of the worse aspects of ADHD. Conversely bad sleep exacerbates ADHD symptoms which can also worsen sleep, etc.

My 23andme profile says I have genes associated with delayed sleep. ADHD (and autism) really seem like they're driven by a cluster of multiple genes with many overlapping between people with the condition(s), but not all.

One rationale for that is how surprisingly prevalent ADHD is across many societies, which only makes sense to me if there's multiple genes which combine and which together confer various advantages to societies as a whole (if not to the individuals). One of the gene sets seem to be sleep issues. It makes sense in a pop-psychology level evolutionary biology where the "creative" types also tend to stay up later which might give them more focus time, or perhaps for story tellers / poets recounting tribal history, etc.

I hope this area gets more research. These things are highly inheritable among families.

Melatonin lately (about 500 mcg) has helped me get better sleep and hopefully to help with the sleep drift.

However, it's almost like I'm so conditioned to being groggy in the mornings that I still find it hard to get up even if I feel fairly refreshed.

Hopefully its not bought just to be turned into apartments and the tunnels sealed off with concrete.

I'm curious how much unsafe this uses? Are these ports making idiomatic code or just using unsafe all over. There doesn't seem to be anything in the readme.

Exactly! It’s not forbidden, just very unlikely and would be very strange.

It’d likely involve exponentially more energy as well. It’d be a good sci-if plot point if FTL communications required machines the size of Jupyter to get a few milliseconds of prescience.

Wowzers!

This also reaffirms my (wishful) thinking that if there’s a way to do FTL communication it’ll be something with an absurdly tiny factor like 2^-182 with a slight asymmetry in a probability somewhere.

Then you’re not violating FTL, just gaining a very slight chance that you might know something FTL – probably.

Let’s check where much of the ownership and money come from. From the LA Times:

> The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday granted Paramount Skydance’s request to allow Middle Eastern royal families to hold a substantial stake in a merged Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery.

> Foreign investors, including the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi, are slated to indirectly own nearly 50% of the equity in David Ellison’s proposed mega-studio. That will give them a hefty stake in CBS, CNN, Comedy Central, HBO and two historic Hollywood film studios.

So foreign “adversaries” literally own enormous stakes in these companies and have been cleared by the FCC. Yet only possible pro-Israel influence by Ellison gets called out?

1: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/20... 2: https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2026/04/15/qatar_is...

Shameless plug: I've wanted the same thing forever. QT is good but the licensing is a pain. So I've been working on my own BSD-3 one: https://github.com/elcritch/merenda

Even with LLMs a good is a lot of work, but using Cocoa/OpenStep basis has been great.

I'm half tempted to add a TCL interpreter with bindings to it just for fun.

> One thing I found was that it was tough to get small text to look good with some fonts.

Same here. For scaling from medium to large fonts the MSDFs were good. However at smaller "normal" font sizes they just didn't tend to look good even with larger MSDF sizes.

Plus for font rendering the GPU overhead was too large to be worthwhile for normal GUI apps. Font atlas'es are pretty small, and most fonts for GUIs are statically sized.

However I did find MSDF are fantastic for rendering complex SVG paths with lots of benefits [1]! You can use a 64x64 SVG star and scale it up fullscreen with reasonable loss in quality [2] (or use 128x128 for almost lossless images).

I use them as the core of my GUI library to render complex SVG paths for icons and such and compose individual paths on the GPU.

You can use them to implement fair chunks of Lottie animation as well [3]. Though I never got enough into the Lottie work to go beyond basic demos, but you could easily scale MSDFs, add shadows, feathering, outlines, etc at 100+ FPS.

1: https://forum.nim-lang.org/t/14062#85314

2: https://github.com/elcritch/figdraw#msdf-bitmap-based-sdf-re...

3: https://github.com/elcritch/lotty

Nothing makes them more "worthy" of empathy. It's that I have somewhat more of a personal connection to them. During my studies the Arab Christians on the campus in Tel Aviv were some of the most peaceful and kind people I met over there and it influenced me greatly.

They also happen to be caught between a rock and a hard place where both the Israelis and the Muslim Palestinians both oppress them. Quoting from [1]:

    I am a Christian by religion, born in Nazareth, Israel to 
    Arabic-speaking Christian parents and brought up in Kufur Yasief, 
    the hiding place of Josephus Flavius
    
    Persecution for Christians in Israel and Palestine is not on the 
    scale it is in Egypt, but it is there nonetheless. It must be added 
    that there is a growing number of Jewish-background, and Russian
    Christians in Israel, who suffer more persecution from the 
    Jewish state and people. 
    ...
    Christian Arabs in Israel/Palestine live in a climate of fear 
    and therefore hypocrisy. Pressure on Arabic-speaking Christians 
    to tow the Muslim Arab nationalist line is so great, that we are even
    afraid of complaining about injustices against us.
    We suffer:
    • At the hands of Jews, because we are seen as:
     o Arabs: and so enemies, and primitive.
     o Christian: and so gentiles. WE are often blamed, by association, 
           for the European holocaust.
    • At the hands of Muslims because we are Christian, and "infidels." 
         We are often punished for “western” bias towards Israel.

1: https://christianpersecutionreview.org.uk/storage/2019/09/Is... 2: https://anglicanjournal.com/arab-christians-among-middle-eas... 3: https://www.newarab.com/news/palestinian-christians-defiant-... 4: https://jcfa.org/article/palestinian-crimes-against-christia...

I don't consider myself a "Christian Zionist".

I'm a Zionist only in the sense that I believe both the Jews and Arabs (Palestinians) have/had a right to states in their respective majority areas because of secular reasons after studying the history of both sides; not on religious or theological grounds.

It's partly what led me to convert to Eastern Orthodoxy which doesn't believe in "Christian Zionism" as a form of end-of-days prophecy. The level of crazy I saw in Evangelical churches and groups during my time there could become absurd.

Yes partly; around 2015/2016 according to the Egyptian government and more recently a surge in hamas-linked terrorist groups in the Sinai.

https://www.reuters.com/article/world/egypt-court-seeks-deat... https://www.arab-reform.net/publication/the-egyptian-armys-c...

It's more complicated of course:

https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2024/02/27/why-e...

Inverse compression.