jesse__

Strongly agree. It's like saying using a knife to prepare dinner is immoral because some people stab other people. I'm highly skeptical of AI, but that particular argument makes the whole article fall pretty flat to me.

Great, thanks for adding some nuance!

Hey, thanks for the kind words! Yeah it was on the front page not too long ago, which felt great

Cool, thanks for the response and good luck with your project!

I cackled when I read this

This is the most grounded and plausible-sounding ai take I've seen. Please keep saying stuff like this.

> A low level concurrent and parallel ‘functional’ language

I'm not particularly familiar with array based languages, but are you inspired by them at all? Seems like a similar concept.

What're your goals for the language? It would be cool to see a parallel execution model unify SIMD, multithreading and gpu. I bet people with a lot of money would be interested if you could apply it to ML

> The core idea is that if a model’s weights or training artifacts could enable catastrophic harm, you should treat them like top-tier secrets and secure them accordingly.

My read here is that you're implying that if an attacker has access to, for example, weight data, they can invariably find a way to exploit it.

If that's a correct assumption, I think you're playing an unwinnable game, since attackers always have indirect access through inference of the model. It feels like locking down weights/training data/etc is the ai version of security through obfuscation.

Just my 2c, for what it's worth

I've been working on a voxel engine in my spare time for 10 years, this year. I wrote everything from scratch, from the memory allocators, font rasterizer and a programing language all the way to collision detection, renderer and gameplay code. It's been a journey!

https://github.com/scallyw4g/bonsai

https://github.com/scallyw4g/poof

There's a great deal to be said for setting an aesthetic expectation.

Take Minecraft, for example. The most successful game of all time along many axies, and it looks .. a certain way. It's definitely not realistic. It's not even pretty in a lot of cases. But it's consistent, and people have pushed it to the limit and created some truly beautiful artwork.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think visual fidelity can be a selling feature, but art-style and consistency is much more important.

What a fantastic read. I loved this game when I was a kid.

As you pointed out, the idea that a systems language requires some high level of complexity is just straight-up wrong, and demonstrably so (see, C).

The best programmers I know of have basically all abandoned C++ in favor of either languages they made, or just use plain C

Great, we can agree on those :)

> the people who made your HashMap type are much better equipped to optimize ...

Who's to say I'm not the one making the hashtable? There are plenty of real-world reasons the standard library hashtable may be either inaccessible or unsuitable.

Furthermore, the idea that "oh, honey, it's too hard, smart people did it for you" is insufferable and needs to die. When I'm the one making something, I have dramatically more information about the problem I'm trying to solve than the author of a hashtable library, and am therefore much better equipped to make design decision tradeoffs.

Please stop perpetuating the idea that 'just use a library' is unilaterally the best option. Sometimes, it's not.

Interestingly they do not cite calculating a signed distance to the surface of the shape as an approach to doing AA, as described in the Valve paper [1]. I suppose this is more targeted at offline baking, but given they're suggesting iterating every curve at every pixel, I'm not sure why you wouldn't.

[1] https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/2007/SIGGRAPH2007...

I'd put money on that the best way is actually to draw a quad, or single triangle, and draw the circle as a SDF in the fragment shader

When I think about it, it makes a lot of sense

Location: Remote, Canada

Technologies : C, C++, SIMD, OpenGL, WebGL, WASM, JS, TS

Interests : systems programming, compilers, 2D & 3D graphics, performance

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Hello, my name is Jesse.

I describe myself as a competent generalist, and a lifelong learner. I'm frequently working on something I've never done before. I've worked at every level of the stack, from cycle-shaving hot loops that saturate instruction pipelines to the frontend of large web applications. My most recent professional experience has been about a year at a semiconductor startup; I wrote prototypes for an ISA, compiler, a cycle simulator and visual debugger.

In terms of hard technical skills, I can quickly become productive in nearly any language, and at any level of the stack. I'm comfortable working in heavily multithreaded/async soft-realtime environments where performance is a key acceptance criteria. I have a good understanding of modern hardware architectures, including GPUs, from main memory to registers and instruction pipelines. I have working knowledge of interpreters, dynamic language runtimes and garbage collectors. I'm convinced I can learn nearly anything (albeit some things more quickly than others), given an appropriate problem domain to apply it to.

In terms of business value, I can take hand-wavy visions of new products and turn them into working prototype(s), quickly. I'm comfortable refining those raw materials and delivering real value to customers, internal or external. I have a track record of successfully identifying 80/20 solutions and love the feeling of making tools that make peoples lives better.

In my personal life, I enjoy travelling, surfing, climbing, backcountry skiing, snowmobiling, pirates, and attending raves. I like the phrase "have strong opinions, weakly held".

If I was born to do one thing in this world, it's program computers.

Jesse

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https://scallywag.software

https://scallywag.software/resume.html

https://github.com/scallyw4g

jesse@scallywag.software

I mean, sure. I was just pointing out to the commentor that sometimes "getting stuff done" isn't the point.

I have a 10-year-old side project that I've dumped tens of thousands of hours into. "Ship the game" was an explicit non-goal of the project for the vast majority of that time.

Sometimes, the journey is the destination.

I love doing this type of formatting with source code. It'll be nice when people start writing linters that format code like this

Go look at profiles for programs which have been written with performance in mind. Operating systems, databases, game engines, web servers, some compilers, video/audio/3d editing packages come to mind. I 100% guarantee these programs do not spend the majority of their runtimes in a tiny section of code. What you said is nearly-unilaterally untrue, at least for programs that care about real performance.

Whups, yes, my bad. Must have been tired when I wrote that.

Thanks for those!

I believe the grand vision for Tarkov was for basically the whole world to be outside/dungeon. Kinda sad they didn't have the technical skill to pull off open world. That would have been an interesting gaming experience.

I came for spherical cows. I left with spherical cows

I think you might be describing smoothmin?

https://iquilezles.org/articles/smin/

f*g is good to mask one SDF by another. I use it all the time in my little voxel engine.

There's a bit to unpack here.

There are two things one might care about when computing an SDF .. the isosurface, or the SDF itself.

If you only care about the isosurface (ie. where the function is 0), you can do any ridiculous operations you can think of, and it'll work just fine. Add, sub, multiply, exp .. whatever you want. Voxel engines do this trick a lot. Then it becomes more of a density field, as apposed to a distance field.

If you care about having a correct SDF, for something like raymarching, then you have to be somewhat more careful. Adding two SDFs does not result in a valid SDF, but taking the min or max of two SDFs does. Additionally, computing an analytical derivative of an SDF breaks if you add them, but you can use the analytical derivative if you take a min or max. Same applies for smooth min/max.

I owe iq so much; a living legend. Inigo, if you happen to ever read this, thanks so much for all the work you've published. Your Youtube videos (not to mention shadertoy) sparked an interest in graphics I never knew I had.

For anyone that's unfamiliar, his Youtube videos are extremely well put together, and well worth the handful of hours to watch.

https://www.youtube.com/c/InigoQuilez