1,337 karma · joined October 16, 2018
I make code things that draw things. I try hard not to build on top of quicksand. Not a big fan of jerks.
https://www.rezmason.net
I'd say what you and the others did was research, not implementation. Your results were solutions to the same problem, not variations of the same recipe. What you did is important but separate from what's concerned me.
A recipe of Chlumský's— the msdfgen utility— is widely used, but only has one producer. I'm just saying that that's a liability. Like, imagine if HarfBuzz was the only text shaper, and was maintained by one person.
The project I'm most known for is basically an MSDF shader with a bloom pass. It serves my needs 100%, though if I expand to support arbitrary text, I may reach for Slug.
The one issue with MSDF I want to raise is, it seems everybody uses the same msdfgen texture creation program from Viktor Chlumský's master's thesis 11 years ago. I wish there were other implementations. Who ever heard of a graphics technique that was only ever programmed once, and then used everywhere without substantial iteration? We need to de-XKCD-2347 MSDFs for everyone's sake, including and especially Chlumský.
I wonder if a SWF was ever hosted on the apple.com domain.
Cone cell activation is complicated. Displays with three well chosen primaries are economical and effective, but they aren't intended to produce every perceivable color. And our chromaticity diagrams, that pointy splotch that's often used to compare display gamuts, is based on a "standard observer" that is a simplified model for human perception.
An ideal pixel would be able to emit any kind of electromagnetic radiation of any intensity, kind of fun to think about but unrealistic and impractical.
What additional primaries mathematically do is expand a gamut from a triangle to a convex polygon. While ten or a hundred primaries would be bonkers, I bet we could fit a quadrilateral or a pentagon to the perceivable gamut in ways that'd see some gains.
Does anyone else besides me suspect X11 will outlive visionOS?
The flight simulator / magic carpet easter egg in Microsoft Excel 97 used that same shaded-colormap palette trick, plus some dithering:
https://rezmason.github.io/excel_97_egg https://rezmason.github.io/excel_97_egg/about.html
I'm impressed by your sprite pipeline and gibs animations. Your attention to detail and navigation of constraints have really paid off, I can't wait to play this sometime
Let's be clear what this means, "Meta is going to require" something. They'll require it to continue to do something, which is namely to be a bad company, running bad services, without pivoting to something else.
Of course, no one requires Meta to continue to be Meta. We'd protect people by requiring companies like Meta to request PII outright, because then the user is explicitly prompted to decide whether using Meta's services is worth surrendering their privacy. And if consumer sentiment and market forces mean anything anymore, that will incentivize Meta to replace their bad services with better ones, ones that don't cause them tricky liability issues.
In other words, forcing operating systems to demand PII from users from the get-go, regardless of the quality of that signal, and to broadcast that to any website, is not, as you put it, "the way to do it with the least impact on privacy and anonymity possible", etc etc. The "way to do it" is to phase out this rotten era of surveillance apparatus disguised as social media companies.
Sorry for being irate, it just feels like so many people these days arrive too quickly (for my taste) at conclusions without testing certain popular assumptions about the inevitability of tech oligarchy.
Here's my vector reproduction of the logo for MacAddict's and Guy Kawasaki's "EvangeList", circa 1997 :
I want to be free to read, write, run, and share code, now and in the future. Relying on centralized services to do it for me (by extracting knowledge from countless other people) is certainly not a resilient strategy.
Always remember, folks: the best feature request is a pull request ;)
The GLSL I originally posted is from the "cursed mode" of my side project, and I use it to produce a data URI of every frame, 15 times per second, as a twisted homage to old hardware. (No, I didn't use AI :P )
https://github.com/Rezmason/excel_97_egg
That said, is `pow(vec4(2),-vec4(2,4,6,0))` really so bad? I figured it'd be replaced with `vec4(0.25, 0.0625, 0.015625, 1.0)`.
precision highp float;
uniform vec2 size;
uniform sampler2D src,tab;
void main(){
vec4 a=(gl_FragCoord-.5)*3.,i=vec4(0,1,2,0)+a.y*size.x+a.x,y=floor(i/size.x),x=i-y*size.x;
#define s(n)texture2D(src,vec2(x[n],y[n])/size)[0]
#define e(n)texture2D(tab,vec2(a[n],0))[0]
a=vec4(s(0),s(1),s(2),0)*255.*pow(vec4(2),-vec4(2,4,6,0)),a=fract(a).wxyz+floor(a)/64.,gl_FragColor=vec4(e(0),e(1),e(2),e(3));
}I've been researching the way classic Macs quantize colors to limited palettes:
https://rezmason.net/retrospectrum/color-cube
This cube is the "inverse table" used to map colors to a palette. The animated regions are tints and shades of pure red, green, and blue. Ideally, this cube would be a voronoi diagram, but that would be prohibitively expensive for Macs of the late eighties. Instead, they mapped the palette colors to indices into the table, and expanded the regions assigned to those colors via a simultaneous flood fill, like if you clicked the Paint Bucket tool with multiple colors in multiple places at the same time. Except in 3D.
https://github.com/mattdesl/webgl-lines
https://hundredrabbits.itch.io/verreciel
PS— I still play Retro, and dream of resuscitating it :)
We really should have a broader conversation about the practical applications of this stuff.
Regardless, this is a great writeup for changes I wish to never see in ordinary UI.