danwills

16 ms·

211.
by danwills 4y ago
Actually there's a worm/larva that can eat styrofoam, not sure whether this is a great link, but: https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/beetle-larvae-can...
212.
by danwills 4y ago
I'm not sure that it's an unreasonable thing for humans (or more generally: communal conscious agents) to work this way. Indeed we should probably just accept it for now and make use of the phenomena as the article suggests by con
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by danwills 4y ago
Yeah, good point! I hadn't thought about that until you mentioned it but totally agree. I'd suggest something like `num_enabled_bits` or `enabled_bits_count` might have made things a bit clearer?
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by danwills 4y ago
Exactly! I use fnmatch a lot to translate glob strings to regexes (in a VFX company, I'm a developer for a Houdini and in-house software pipeline). Being able to provide solid globbing options to users in any scenario that is 'pat
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by danwills 4y ago
I found this fascinating! I have no ability to vet the paper for science I'm afraid, but on an intuitive level, and especially given all the different biological sensing and animal-cleverness results that have been reported in recent y
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by danwills 4y ago
Yeah I expected a matte finish as well, but i'm not very sure why.. maybe that aspect could even clinch the deal for some use-cases though? Would like to see what it's like for sure!
217.
by danwills 4y ago
It's a 'neural cellular automata', there are several video tutorials about it on Alexander Mordvintsev's YouTube. I was re-watching one of them last night after maybe a 1.5 month gap and I was astounded how much better I
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by danwills 4y ago
The article mentions that antimatter is explicitly excluded to keep the diagram/model simpler. It sounded like it would be basically another whole copy of the same shape, bit I have no idea how it would be connected, which would be int
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by danwills 5y ago
Not sure whether it's any consolation but the drivers do work when there's no internet connection (like on our intranet at work). Presumably this means it shouldn't be hard to prevent them phoning home even when there is a co
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by danwills 5y ago
I work at a VFX company where all production is done in Linux and many of my colleagues prefer a Wacom. It's especially important for texture artists who actually have to paint textures. I mainly use Houdini and edit code so I don&#x27
221.
by danwills 5y ago
Not sure why they just seemed to stop at IFS as the generating-formula.. I guess finding coefficients for it must be easier? Now (as sibling comment noted) neural-nets have totally owned this type of thing, but I reckon that there would now
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by danwills 5y ago
A second reading confirms that this is not really about universality or class-4, just anything with any similarity to GOL (in the discrete CA realm), a worthy list in it's own right!
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by danwills 5y ago
I'm not sure whether this list is only for CA's, but I'm gunning for 'U-Skate World' (a specific set of coefficients on the Gray-Scott reaction diffusion) to one day hopefully have a chance at being shown to be tur
224.
by danwills 5y ago
Also 'Wowbagger The Infinitely Prolonged' from "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy": "After a period of total boredom, especially on Sunday afternoons, he decided to insult everyone in the entire universe in
225.
Extremely-detailed 2d fractals, continued(ultraiterator.blogspot.com)
2 points by danwills 5y ago|0 comments
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by danwills 5y ago
Agree it's an exaggeration, but still seems fascinating - that photons with the right energies go straight through, as if the matter wasn't there?! Does sound quite dark-matter-ish, but as someone else pointed out, the temperature
227.
by danwills 5y ago
I thought this was very interesting as a real-world-events kind of account of some of the things around Turing and other people at the time. I didn't know there were these hardware luminaries so nearby. The accepted division between ha
228.
by danwills 5y ago
Yeah and what about awk!? Partially joking, but not totally, and I can appreciate why people might say this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5725291 (I pasted the HN link because the original seems to be down)
229.
by danwills 5y ago
It's called 'monkey patching' and python does make it particularly easy, simply: class.methodName = newMethod .. kinda thing, future callers now get your method instead of the original. This does seem a fair bit easier than o
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by danwills 5y ago
Why not "if they have the skills then it seems logical that they should get the job"? There are gender-neutral ways of using English, and I think we should try to use them.
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by danwills 5y ago
Is this perhaps too focused on the individual which might not lead to the optimum for the zoomed-out / group (population-level) case? This reminds me of a meta-system-transition where simplified versions of individual (previously indep
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by danwills 5y ago
I think that we agree about the 'random-seed' type of procedural generation, however a word document is hardly even generated by an algorithm at all! It's usually generated entirely by the author (perhaps with semi-code-like
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by danwills 5y ago
It sounds like there's more than one sense of what "procedural generation" means - to me it means basically generation by algorithm (or some kind of automated setup) rather than by hand or 'manual' generation (like
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by danwills 5y ago
I agree it's utterly astounding what can be done with 'analytic' (ie 'vector' vs 'rasterized') SDFs, (and different ray-intersection/marching methods too) and what IQ does and how much he shares the a
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by danwills 5y ago
I think the most common approach to convert SDF to polygons is called 'marching cubes' and it yields triangles and quads, but I guess you can always 'convex' (halve) the quads afterwards to get 100% triangles. It will mo
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by danwills 5y ago
Thanks for the reminder, love to re-watch this every now and again! So funny! Does ayone know of any similar-calibre sequels or similar vids?
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by danwills 5y ago
Indeed that does seem incredibly difficult, my imagination goes to a cloud of poly-bots, perhaps powered by surface-based laser(s) and solar, such that they could be made to gradually approach the target orbit, attach to the object, and any
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by danwills 5y ago
Say there is a planet out there, might it have a protective effect from things hitting earth, similar to how Jupiter is said to help reduce the chances of things hitting earth? Maybe it's too far away, but multi-body dynamics is compli
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by danwills 5y ago
I'd be keen to try to implement this to make a new 'egg' geometry generator in Houdini. Has anyone read the paper and understood it enough to implement the new formula?
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by danwills 5y ago
Wow! I haven't uncontrollably cried with laughter like that for so long, KenM is my new hero. Thank you so much for the recommendation!

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