danwills

6 ms·

31.
by danwills 8mo ago
Thanks for that! This is amazingly faithful to the original! And although aliasing is pretty-much my arch-enemy in life, here the aliasing and all the slightly-odd z-chatter stuff somehow adds to the charm!? Brilliant!
32.
by danwills 1y ago
Yeah that was my original interpretation of the title too! Perhaps something like: How did early humans understand their situation and what did they think the 'world' was like, and what did they think they should do with their liv
33.
by danwills 1y ago
I believe so, although the way I usually think about Solitons is like a single packet.. so just one cycle of a wave. Continuous sound could probably be thought of as a continuous stream of solitons (I think ppl call them phonons when it&#x2
34.
by danwills 1y ago
No probs, I've had a great deal of fun playing with it indeed! Hope you do too!
35.
by danwills 1y ago
Indeed! I rather like the idea that solitons are something like the simplest self-propagating 'things' in any medium/computation-reigeme, so gliders in Game-of-Life might qualify and in more complex/subtle systems they c
36.
by danwills 1y ago
I'm not an expert and have not yet worked with splats, however I understood that unlike super-sharp-edged triangles they can represent complicatedly-transparent 'soft' phenomena like fur or clouds or similar that would ordina
37.
by danwills 1y ago
I've been interested in continuous automata for a good while! I usually call it "Reaction Diffusion" (good old Turing!) but a lot of people hearing that might think I might just mean "Gray Scott", but I actually mea
38.
by danwills 1y ago
I want to know more about an intuitive take on how the Zeta function does what it does! I know it must relate somehow to finding (or perhaps excluding) all the composite numbers but I'd really love to get more of a feeling about what e
39.
by danwills 1y ago
I think that actually is a photo of Romanesco or at least a pretty good fake!
40.
by danwills 1y ago
One suprising thing that seems to work with video/footage (a shot) once you've watched it a few hundred times and can't really 'see' it naturally any more, is to 'flip' it (horizontal mirror (or negation))
41.
by danwills 1y ago
What a thoughtful comment! I concur that the chance of mirror-life 'evolving naturally' (or "in the wild" let's say) is basically zero, but then I imagined a future cell-printing machine that 'wild' humans
42.
by danwills 1y ago
I know it's not the same idea, but I think it's worth mentioning the adjacent concept of 'neural CA': https://www.neuralca.org/ https://google-research.github.io/self-organising-systems&#
43.
by danwills 1y ago
I recently swapped from adding strings together (just what I've always done) to f-strings and I'm not looking back! I even get to keep the idea of being able to read the vars in-place in the string which is certainly the last thin
44.
by danwills 1y ago
Yeah @srean gives the example of the different areas of strips at different lattitude, that's a good one - and I think if you imagine wrapping the unit square (2 values randomly between 0 and 1) to a sphere in a lat-long way, the whole
45.
by danwills 1y ago
I think it can be done that way yeah but in order to yield a uniform-density of points on the surface of the sphere there's some pre-correction (maybe a sqrt or something? I can't remember) that's needed before feeding the &#
46.
by danwills 1y ago
Here's a screenshot of what one of the KSE-based shaders I've been playing with usually looks like: https://photos.app.goo.gl/NnfjxUwR5ZuH4KkJ6 It's basically KSE but with hue-rotation happening in various-wa
47.
Ask HN: Help with GLSL Bi-Laplacian
1 points by danwills 1y ago|1 comments
48.
by danwills 1y ago
Agency is the ability to reach goals, even when there are obstacles. Given information such as stimuli, agency is the ability to act/react to that information in such a way as to move the agent closer to their goals. In the plant case,
49.
by danwills 1y ago
I think it's pretty clear that plants have agency, and maybe that can be regarded as a phenomena that is on the same spectrum as consciousness, just at a lower intensity (and maybe slower too)?
50.
by danwills 1y ago
That is very interesting I agree, and certainly any list of descriptions/identifiers must be countable, though I wonder if there's any validity in descriptions that describe things in aggregate? It's certainly a brain-bender
51.
by danwills 1y ago
> the mathematical universe, like our physical one, may be made up mostly of dark matter. “It seems now that most of the universe somehow consists of things that we can’t see,” Not heaps fond of relating invisible things in the mathemati
52.
by danwills 1y ago
I found this diagram: https://jbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/jbiol105/fi... It's fairly reminiscent of how limb growth looks during embryogenesis - and I think considering that is how other ver
53.
by danwills 1y ago
I think people often hear 'bioelectric' and think it means electricity (electron flux) but what Levin's work is about is a pattern of voltage gradients (that cells maintain using electrically-non-neutral chemicals) that store
54.
by danwills 1y ago
Worth noting, this is not an externally applied electric field but rather voltage potential gradients between the cells in the tissue, and it's mostly altered using chemicals that open and close gap junctions/pores between cells
55.
by danwills 1y ago
Yeah I had a similar thought back in the 90s and made a program to iterate through all possible images at a fairly low res, I left it running while I was at school and got home after many hours to find it had hardly got past the first row o
56.
by danwills 1y ago
Yeah awesome I totally agree that the potential seems to be there for universality in RD systems like the one I posted, and also that stability is going to be absolutely key to the idea working at all! Thankfully Gray-Scott and similar syst
57.
by danwills 1y ago
I've wondered that too! Uskate world has some features that are a bit like GOL gliders/spaceships, and I found some settings that I thought were a bit reminiscent of GOL on an extension I did to Gray Scott to add coupled 'his
58.
by danwills 1y ago
The mmb-paste thing is called the 'yank buffer' (and it was a vi/Emacs feature that pre-dates clipboard-based copy/paste) - I use it extensively too, and one important thing to know about it is that it only works on text
59.
by danwills 1y ago
Really cool! I love programming with nodes and this seems like an awesome start! One thing I didn't like much was when dragging a node that has an input connection, to the left: The shape of the connection snakes behind the node and ha
60.
by danwills 1y ago
Is a pixel not a pixel when it's in a different color space? (HSV, XYZ etc?)

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